Empyrean Friendship

I think we are meant to spill over into each other, like wine from a carafe into a glass, like a fountain leaping over, falling towards, touching, and forever changing, the water below.

This spilling over is, I think, something we experience most often in this life when we are sharing suffering with each other, but I think that it is actually a taste of life before the Fall, or life as it is meant to be lived. It is Holy Friendship, and most people deeply desire to be a friend like that. Most of the time, we fail, I fail, but failure only shows more clearly the ideal--I hope.

We are meant to be like glass filled with liquid and light, open and with our own unique liquid. But like water that sits in a container for too long, if we do not share ourselves, we become bracken, stale, contaminated. My own experiences with people I suspected were hidden saints are always prism-memories of sparkling light, glass, color, liquid spirit pouring like blood, an openness and a promise of refreshment: the wine of Cana transformed by the action of the Lord. These people have become, instead of water held for washing hands, fine wine that warms the spirit and breaks down division and just pure uptight-ness in general. They seem unconcerned about the vessel emptying; they have some eternal source. Some of these people have been people who do not claim to be religious, but have been filled with rain, with something of God, with love.

My experiences with darkness--in myself, too-- have been stone-memories of simply hitting a wall. It is being a stone-jar person filled with unused water. It can happen from wounding, more easily healed; it can happen from arrogance, pride, security in abilities or eccentricities, and ends with petrified vessels. Some stone jars filled with brackish water are the most outwardly religious. Perhaps the piety can be taken in, like everything else, to only strengthen the concrete mixture of pride and complacency.

I am teaching Dante in the next few weeks, and perhaps these images rattling around in my brain come partly from him. Dante's Comedia is structured, in part, on the image of a city, perhaps a building upon St. Augustine's City of God and City of Man. The Inferno is a hard, stone, brittle megaron, a monstrosity of concentric circles filled with various forms of hellish liquids and fire and rock; the center of Hell is frozen, stone water. All cities must be held together by some sort of structure or meaning, but Hell is full of enmity and dissension...so it must be held together by hard stone, torturers, threats, envy, and horrible bureaucratic terms like 'constructive dismissal' and general sneaky stuff. It is the evil of particulars used for power, compartmentalized from principles, and the evil of principle as a stick to beat others, with no regard to the particular person.

When we move through Dante's Purgatory, and into Heaven, the opaqueness, the hardness, the forced, isolating 'comraderie' slowly gives way to light, the city of the heavens, in which one can see infinite distances, and the sense of openness and freedom becomes more and more intense, to culminate in the heavenly rose where the saints spill into each other in light, and love, and singing, so much so that they themselves are the structure of the city. It no longer needs hard substance to create community or infrastructure; it is structured by love and humility and simply the sight of God.

The freedom of love and encouragement and mercy and honesty is, simply, that we do not need to be structured, any longer; by loving the right way, with humility, we structure ourselves, we simply are part of the order of goodness, effortlessly. It is the meaning of St. Augustine's cry to "love God and then do what you will." It is the freedom symbolized by the light, openness, and fluidity, and results in profound and tremendous influence over others for good. But it is born, for us, through sorrow and suffering and humiliation and necessary discipline...and feasting and joy and through others who will pour themselves on our wounds.

We are meant, created, to spill over into each other in love, to bear one another's burdens as practice for a greater, more joyful bearing of one another in freedom. Suffering together, and best of all, suffering for what is good, for what is right, for the weakest among us, prepares us by asking us to pour ourselves out for the other.

I have had friendship made in almost an instant through a recognition in the furnace. This brings great joy, if we can stay in righteousness together, and not ourselves become a stone circle, an inner circle to keep out the world rather than a true intimacy. The best explanation of this is CS Lewis' lecture on the inner circle, given at a graduation. I've committed that sin, too--to take an opportunity of deep friendship, a pouring into one another and allow it to be turned into an inner circle of holier-than-those-jerks. Then destruction, opaqueness, the stone of hell, sets in and the friendship becomes destructive.

I have had friends who have poured themselves into my life and yet have kept their eyes--and mine--on continuing to ask for the wine, the grace, to be continually transformed, always aware that we're jerks a lot, too. Some of those friends are in Lander, some in Seattle, in Oregon, some on Orcas, New York, California, and other places. Just the thought of them sends the warmth of wine into my soul as we pack up the house and sell things only the way absent-minded academics can do it.

I have had the privilege of meeting friends in the furnace, friends like this, in Australia...even in this short time, and these are the eternal connections that will be well met again, I know, where nothing is more important than love, reaching across many boundaries, where boundaries are no longer needed.  

A Tea Room in Dural

Up north in Dural, one is just getting into the rural hill district; it is a mixture of older fruit and veggie farms, large estates, pretentious homes, and little village centers with nurseries, boutiques...and tea rooms. 

I kept driving by one when taking TJ to Redfield; I couldn't figure it out. It looked like a small nursery, but the little house said "Tea Room." Like those Australian things that don't always compute, I first ignored it and then started thinking about it.

One of the things I do love about Australian culture is "Morning Tea" or "Tea"--which is a Hobbit-like affair, a time of social refreshment--real refreshment, with biscuits (what Americans would call 'cookies'), scones (skawnes), fruit, small sandwiches (oh yes, cucumber), and cakes. And for Australians, chocolate...almost always chocolate. There seems to be a national love affair with chocolate. 

It was fun to have orientation at the schools and be treated to "Tea" with the other parents; here, "Would you like to have a tea?" is not a sort of attempt to feel more like one is in an Austen flick (which is fun anyway)--it is a ritual that has roots, deep roots, and is a normal part of life.

I found this info on the origins of this ritual online on "Tea Muse":

"...the most important time for tea was after the main meal of the day. In the mid-17th century, dinner was served at any time between 11 am and 12 noon and was a rich, heavy, alcoholic meal that lasted for anything up to 3 or 4 hours. Once all the food had been devoured, the men liked to stay at the table in the dining room and smoke, chat, and drink more wine, ale, brandy or port. (It was not uncommon for men to drink so much in those days that they ended up under the table in a drunken stupor!) So the ladies were expected to withdraw to a smaller closet or boudoir to talk more quietly, sew, brew tea, and generally behave in a more elegant way than their menfolk. When, at about 5 or 6 pm, the men eventually decided that they had had enough of their smoking, drinking, and loud conversation, they would join the ladies for tea in the drawing room or closet. Sometimes they also played cards or listened to some form of musical entertainment until a light supper was served and the guests then departed.

"Taking tea was always associated with elegant rooms set well away from the kitchen, with fine porcelain tea wares, silver spoons, sugar nippers, and kettles, with beautiful tables carved by craftsmen, and with the elegant manners of society ladies - as it was through the Victorian period and still is today. The brewing of the liquor was always the responsibility of the lady of the house (or gentleman if he lived alone), sometimes with the help of the eldest daughter, and was carried out in the room where the tea was to be served. Today of course we brew our tea in the kitchen but it is still the duty of the hostess to pour and serve it. Usually, the only food to be served to accompany the tea was very thin slices of bread and butter. That has developed, of course, into a more elaborate menu but bread, toast, muffins, tea-cakes, crumpets and other bread-like foods are still a very important part of a traditional tea. And, the most important time of day for drinking tea was in the late afternoon - in the early days at the end of the main meal, but (as we all now know) in the 19th century and today between lunch and dinner.

"And it really was more of a social event than a meal. Ladies did not go to afternoon tea gatherings to eat but to meet their friends, catch up on gossip, chat about the latest fashions and scandals, be seen in the right places among the right people and, in passing, to drink tea and nibble daintily on a small finger of bread and butter or a little sweet biscuit."

So, I've gone on little Tea Trips. Not drug trips, field trips, though I suppose if you drink enough tea it starts being a drug trip. I've been to the Queen Victoria Building, and back to my favorite 'inn' in downtown Sydney. And finally, I did stop at the strange conglomeration of plants and tea in Dural.

The surroundings were rural, and simple, with an 'invisible fence' van in the back, and parking down a grassy road. The plants were not arranged in barracks or quonset huts; efficiency and plant survival was not the organizing principle, but rather the delight of the eye. This is possible in this climate. I knew there was an artist at work here, and when I opened the door of the simple house, it was if there was another world created: beautifully painted black wood floors, tiered tea trays, gilded chairs in rich colors; huge mirrors set against the wall, flowers arranged expertly.

And it was full. There were tables full of Dural ladies. They didn't appear like ladies at first, because Australians place a great emphasis on not looking richer or better-dressed than others; casual dress seems to be a social statement about absolute equality. But if one looked closely, their hair was done really well, complete with that stripey stuff; nails were done in French manicures; their purses were well-made leather, and they spoke quietly, and laughed musically. They were not boisterous yahoos, anyway.

We sat and had tea, relaxing and talking alongside the tables of ladies, and just outside the banquet room which looked out across a green field. The meeting taking place in there was comprised of men and women, but it was such a calm affair that they almost looked as if they were just drinking tea and just looking kindly, intently, at each other without speech. It was so different from the energy of Power Breakfasts held in diners across America. I have found in Australia that there is a kind of reserve, a calmness in certain situations, less intensity, more a submissive unity within a group, a working together quietly. 

I had Bard's Tempest tea (my favorite along with Harney and Sons) and we shared a gluten-free orange cake with cream. As we paid with our yellow, blue, and orange bills, and gold dollar coins, I gushed at the lady behind the counter, who reluctantly admitted to being the artist behind this delightful beauty in Dural.

For me, the flowers and plants, fountains, quiet talk, and good tea was like a little slice of heaven. Another great memory to pack away, to take out and feel the warmth of in times of cacophony and stress: well, that is the point of "Tea," isn't it?

Saint JPII--Polka-Dancing Fool

Nota Bene: This is a long one because I found an essay that is worth massive quoting. :)

Here goes:

Saint John Paul II burst onto the international scene when I was ten, in 1978. I remember the furor, the collective world amazement, to this day; I still have a picture in my head of him out on the balcony...and all this is interesting, because I didn't even know what balcony it was, nor much about the Catholic Church. It was as if the Church suddenly burst in upon the world consciousness once again in the person of this handsome, young, Polish pope. 

Over the years, especially after becoming Catholic, I continued to just like this man, like so many billions of others...and I also heard criticisms. Sometimes I heard he wasn't even the real pope and was actually a syncretist-heretic; sometimes I heard he was well-meaning but steering the barque wrong; overall, whether misguided or not, I think everyone agreed that he opened his arms to the world and served all nations through a difficult and public death. 

His scandal, I found, was the scandal of of justice versus mercy, of 'eating with sinners'--perhaps to the point, for some, of blurring the line between what can appear to be evangelization and what can appear to be condoning what should not be condoned. It is perhaps, the same question the Jews faced when they found the supposed Messiah eating with tax collector-thieves and letting prostitutes wash His feet.Yet we know now what Christ was really about: do we know about this Pope?

Was he the rock-star, softy Polka Fool Pope who watered down the two-edged sword of Christianity to gain more shallow fans for Christ, or a scandal the way Christ was a scandal? 

I have always struggled with this--images flood me now of a man shot in the public square, a bent-over old man holding the hand of the Blessed Mother, the young Pope presiding over Assisi with witch doctors from Africa, the supposed poster-boy for Liberation Theology who surprised everyone by the smack-down of this movement gone wrong on an airport tarmac--images that seem to leave me with conflicted feelings. 

My first real introduction to the man himself was when I read Theology of the Body, a collection of Wednesday audiences. This was a man who had the humility of a phenomenology (not assuming immediate grasp of the essences of things) married with a strong, disciplined Thomism (rigorous discussion with the belief that reason can indeed come to essence, or truth). His writing on the body as a sign midwifed me into a love of semiotics, and showed me a loving, delightful order in the universe that is both mythological in the best sense, and yet also reasonable. He showed me a beautiful dynamic hierarchy, not a static, dead hierarchy, where the highest lends itself in servanthood to the lower; where God mirrors His own Trinitarian love in the poor and simple conjugal act, thus raising it to the level of Sacrament. 

I watched him, like everyone else, die a slow and difficult death. I could almost see the spirit in him dragging the body along. My beloved Uncle Andrea Freccia died of the same condition, and so I know therefore something about the suffering of a death, over years, where the muscles simply stop working...my uncle drowned, because he could no longer move fluids out of the lungs, and I imagine JPII died the same way, but in a room with a billion eyes on it. And he worked almost until he could no longer function. He was a sign of life in the years just after euthanasia was becoming more prevalent; he was a sign that suffering has meaning: the penultimate emblem his knocking on the door of St. Peter's on the 2000 Jubiliee, a pitiful, weak, old man who had no longer any worldly comeliness, but whose spirit in that act affirmed the life-beyond-biology that must be remembered...this Pope seemed to affirm the things a world of 'isms' would call foolish. He was not only supportive of the weakest of us, but also allowed himself to become an emblem of that weakness as he lost his vigor, his looks, even his ability to look at you in the eye on equal footing. He died as one of the pathetic, the weak, a person the princes of this world would deem useless. 

But how, how, do you match all this up with Assisi scandals, or the rot of pedophilia in the Church that was festering as he administered? His pontificate, perhaps, had a specific purpose, that the promise of hope must come before the Lord began to clean out the house; perhaps it was the dismantling of the fortress-mentality that allowed, in time, for the bats to be swept out. Perhaps he was one man with a certain mission, that the excoriation of the Lord's house has its time; perhaps he did indeed fail and did his penance through Parkinson's. 

Imperfect as he was, and would readily admit to being, I am sure, it is clear that he had a mission. But what was it? To re-popularize the Church? 

I do not think that was it. I think the clue to his mission lies in his Polish identity--I think this now after reading a wonderful essay, written in 2003, by Fr. Raymond Gawronski, SJ. His thesis is that John Paul II carried within him the spirit of Poland, and universalized it: and that the world needed a certain Polish spirit to bring hope and mercy, and to make the scandal of Christ real once again. Fr. Gawronski says, moreover, that JP II was not a Pope serving Polish interests; he was a Polish Pope who served the Church and through her, the world. He was the spark lit in Poland that was meant to set the world on fire; much like the spark lit in Jerusalem that was meant to set the world on fire.

Fr. Gawronski says:

"Poland has a history which in many ways has more in common with the colonized and marginalized countries of the Third World than with the colonizing and empire building traditions of the main European nations. And because of this history, Polish Catholics in Europe and America have much more in common with the oppressed than with ruling elites in state or in Church."

...and:

"And so, in a sense, if less technologically competitive the Slavs retained some of the advantages of a more “primitive” level. Strongly emotional natures and a love of expression - music, poetry, the arts - characterizes them, more than technological prowess. A striking love for and closeness to nature, combines with a cultural ideal of “childlikeness”, perhaps most famously portrayed in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.  Having had firsthand historical experience of slavery, both in ancient and modern times, a passion for freedom has tended to favor a certain tendency toward anarchism, and a distrust of too much order.  Largely peopled by farming villagers, a certain sense of human solidarity is strong."

Thus, Poland as a people are the part of the poor of the world--poor especially in terms of influence and technological prowess. The Polish people are made fun of throughout the world because they are 'migrant workers' and 'stupid' and 'simple' and 'How many Poles does it take to unscrew a lightbulb?' Thaddeus' grandmother changed "Kozinski" to "Kosens" to escape the soft persecution of Poles in '40s New York, for example.

The Poles have been the laughingstock of the nations, especially in the West. But why?

Fr. Gawronski:

"Though there is plenty of joy in Poland and the Polish soul, it is not a lighthearted spiritual culture. It has known more than its share of conquest, exile - and even worse, betrayal by perfidious allies and, alas, traitors within. One could go on at great length about the horrible destruction of WWII. But perhaps even worse was the treatment of Poland at the end of the War, by the world, and by the Church, where the nation was left to barely survive, its borders shifted 150 miles West, handed over to  deadly enemies, the Soviet regime, often pawns in a too diplomatic Vatican “Ostpolitik.”  Through those forty five years, it was the faith of the Poles, yes, tied to Rome in spite of any particular Roman lack of support or enthusiasm, that kept the Poles alive."

Also, Fr. Gawronski claims that the Polish nation, not being truly Western nor Eastern, did not follow the West into Enlightenment-ism and secularism...it remained a Catholic nation at heart, with a great devotion to the suffering of Christ, and to the Mother of God "torn and yet most whole." It also never completely gave in to Communism, but kept something alive that the Russians did not.

Thus, in some sense, though not perfect, Poland has been a crucified nation, a byword, abandoned by the West and abused by the Russians. It seems to be, according to Fr. Gawronski, because Poland has a childlike nature, easily victimized, easily oppressed, easily dismissed. They are like 'fools' in a wise world, Polka-dancing victims who follow the Cross. 

One source of the Polish Catholic heart is that, "During the Reformation, the Jesuits were very powerful in Poland, keeping her from going the way of Calvinism - or more likely, into a kind of pious religious indifferentism. Poland was a stranger to the religious wars so formative of modern Western Europe."

Edumund Campion himself studied and taught in Poland for many years, one of the Jesuits who both helped immunize Poland from religious wars and received an education in a thriving Catholic culture. 

But perhaps the greatest key to Poland's identity, and to John Paul II, whose motto was "Totus Tuus" ("All Yours," the cry of a son addressed to the Theotokos, the Mother of God), is this:

"In the 17th century...something unique had occurred: the King of Poland “betrothed” Poland to Mary as the Queen of the country. This happened in Lwow, at the time, a great Polish city, in a Ukrainian countryside.  Shortly thereafter, at the time of the Swedish invasion, at the other end of the country, Mary was crowned queen of Poland at  Czestochowa. And it was there that she is believed to have saved Poland from the invading Swedish forces and so entered into the national story.  The Polish tie to Catholicism was anchored in her devotion to Mary. Indeed, the earliest document we have in Polish is a hymn to the Mother of God armies would sing as they went into battle.

"...the Queen of Belgium or France might favor the Catholic Church and further its cause; Mary, the Mother of God was the Queen of Poland.  Contrast her for a second with other rulers - Catherine the Great comes to mind - and one sees quickly why the Poles had a revulsion against absolute rulers.

"It is a thick tangle, the web of Polish religion and nationalism.  Not everything about it has been noble.  But because the Faith was focused on the Cross, the spiritual struggle was intensified in a way which purified.

 "One key to untangling this web, I propose, is through understanding the consecration of the nation to Mary. For one thing, the Marian character of the faith spoke to the Slavic soul. St. Maximilian Kolbe, the martyr at Auschwitz, was emphatically Marian in his spirituality.  The feminine is strong in the Polish character, and this has led to differences with the West - e.g., the Pope’s allowing altar girls, a shocking thing to his conservative Western supporters. Poland does not have a strong male culture. Defeated in numerous wars and uprisings, male bonding is not geared to aggression as it is with other nations who have produced proud teams and armies. Rather, it is the women of Poland who kept the culture alive, nurturing their men who invariably were being killed or exiled at a young age. In return, the feminine was revered - motherhood a very high ideal in Poland. All this is contained “under Mary’s cloak.”

"Poland understood her sorrows, her sufferings, in terms of the sufferings of Pan Jezus, the “Lord Jesus.”  It is no coincidence that the peak of Polish popular devotion are the “Gorzkie Zale,” the “bitter sorrows,” Lenten devotions to the sufferings of Christ. It is Christ wounded that found resonance in the Polish heart, statues of Jezus Frasobliwy dotting the countryside. Mary, with scars on her cheeks, “torn and most whole,” was the Mother of the nation and her soul."

Thus, like a flower out of a long-tended tree, John Paul II perhaps, had a mission to re-assert the scandal of Christ and a Polish version of fatherhood, a fatherhood that deeply values and serves motherhood, the feminine reception of the weakest among us. The scandal of Christ is also the scandal of Mary, His mother. Fr. Gawronski: 

"As has often been observed, John Paul is very Polish, and, I would add, very fatherly.  It is perhaps that to which people respond, or react. Polish fatherhood would be different from others, in that it headed into great sorrow, powerlessness while retaining a patriarchal authority built into the very nature of things.  In his election a seed from the Polish nation had been selected - and to bear fruit, that seed must leave its home and must fall into the ground.  The hopes aroused among Poles by his election were tremendous: at last, the voiceless would have a voice; there would be someone in a position of earthly power who at the very least understood our hurts, our great injustices, and the little “bolaczki” which are the daily reminders of those who have no power, those hurts to which the powerless cling and with which they wound themselves as their only weapons in life’s battle.

"...he is of the flower of that first generation of the Polish nation’s survival and return to statehood. Poland survived in the face of all the forces which created the modern world as a place in which the Catholic Church was to be destroyed (in the words of Voltaire: “ecrasez l’Infame”).   And the Church, in the process, has been being purified - to emerge a “Servant Church” and, like her Lord, it is the “Suffering Servant” and John Paul II is His Vicar.

 "...Underneath all this, is a strong sense of identification with all victims of injustice, while he is also realistic enough - what Pole isn’t? - to know that victimhood alone is no guarantee of goodness. His strong insistence on an objective moral order points to this.  As a result he does not see the world from the point of view of those who are, and have always been, comfortable - with money, with power. Rather, he sees the world from the point of view of the have-nots.

"The ancient Polish kingdom became, over the centuries, spiritualized and was transformed into a kingdom of the heart, where Jesus is Lord.  St. Faustina Kowalska reported hearing Jesus tell her: “I have particularly fallen in love with Poland” and that He promises great things for Poland if Poland will remain faithful to Him; moreover, “from Poland will come a spark that will prepare the world for my Final Coming.” Jesus tells her these things in His  great mission to her, the message of mercy, and the fate of her message - initially rejected, then gradually rehabilitated as the Polish Church began to gain influence in Rome - mirrors and anticipates the influence of that church in the global Church.

"Of course, people are all sinners; weak, prone to corruption by power. What one can discern in John Paul II’s pontificate is a light, a spark, a vision of hope of justice, and a justice which opens to new perspectives, notably, a mercy earlier utopian movements singularly lacked.

"In effect, John Paul proposes a “liberation theology” founded on faith in God, formed by the Cross. The “preferential option for the poor” is something he has experienced as “God’s preferential option.” In him whose motto is “Totus Tuus” the Queenship of Mary as experienced by the Poles in a unique way is more deeply shared with the Church throughout the world, whose earthly center has been moving away from Western Europe, in a new “springtime for the Church.”

"Karol Wojtyla, the seed, fell into the earth and died. He ceased being the ideal Polish figure, and had to become, as John Paul II, a Pope for the entire world. He had to let his particular experience die, for there is no such thing as a “Polish Pope.” There is only one Pope, and that is the Vicar of Christ for His world. And yet even as His Master was incarnate in one time, one place, among one people, and He knew their hurts, their history, from inside - and rose above them, and challenged them to the point of total alienation - so JP II has had a most difficult mission. How to be a member of a victim nation who has happened to come to a pinnacle of power? How to govern, when one comes from a people who are always characterized as “ungovernable”? How to be a member of a “chosen people” and, dying to that, to be a man for everyone?"

So after reading Fr. Gawronski's essay, I am thinking of my original question: what is the proper tension between mercy and justice, between loving and receiving and forgiving others but yet not condoning sin? Was the Polka-dancing fool for Christ a clear sign of this tension? How does radical mercy and openness to the pain in the world address injustice, and heal it? What is the scandal of Christ who said, "I do not condemn you...go and sin no more..."--how do we resolve the eating with sinners in the light of God's justice?

I think in this of Michaelangelo's Pieta, or the image from The Passion of the Christ, where Mary holds her son. To those of us who have been victimized, the expression on Mary's face as she holds the Dead God, her son, is inexplicable and almost foreign. In Michaelanglo's portrait, the expression is one of sorrow, and this strange peace and beauty that holds within it no resentment--from her who had, besides the Father, the most right to resent, for revenge. In Gibson's portrait, Mary looks at us, calling us to something, but not to revenge. I saw this look in the writings of JPII, who could have grown out of the death of his family and the years of occupied Poland into a resentful man. It is perhaps a kind of Polish look at the West and Russia as well.

By not having resentment in the face of injustice, we are merciful...if we are indeed the victim of injustice, then, as Socrates said, the truly pitiful one in the scenario is the person committing the injustice...for it hurts the soul, and the soul is the highest part of us.

Thus, if one can see the situation from the point of view of the soul, one sees a person scarring themselves, committing spiritual suicide, while the person receiving the injustice becomes poor, the poor who God prefers: He has an opportunity for humility and penance and for becoming part of Christ's suffering on the Cross. Indeed, Christ was perpetually a victim of injustice, for just as He was 'not received by His own' (a serious injustice), every sin is also a terrible injustice to the gifts God has given us freely.

The victim of injustice has, then, like Christ, in the court of God the upper hand, the right to recourse. If this victim chooses not to resent, to take revenge, then he is actually having mercy upon the unjust person...and this is the deepest recourse, the deepest justice, because within it is carried hope for redemption. Revenge destroys this open door to new relationship, new life.

Does this mean that people should let others hurt them? No. Protection of the weak from injury is paramount. But when we happen to be victims, the way to life is that of non-resentment, non-revenge, of disciplining with pity and forgiveness, shedding a light on a path for the perpetrator, a path leading to God's forgiveness.

Christ ate with sinners and reached out to them because He loved them, just like any parent would reach out, attempt to rescue, where at all possible, a lost child, even one who has caused destruction. Mercy is also doing what one can, even at cost to oneself, to lovingly prevent a destructive person from causing more destruction. This is courage. The mercy, the reaching out, is the only condition upon which justice can be received and benefited from. Justice without mercy is like truth without charity (from Von Balthasar)--they can each become evil without their "furious opposites" (Chesterton). And I think the mercy and the charity must be the expression, especially of the victim, because truth and justice cannot be shaken, really. They exist, they are, they are reality. As one spiritual director told me once, "You do not need to convince that person that they are in the wrong way of life...they know it, deep inside, because we are all part of a natural law, because justice just--is."

Because we don't often live in accordance with reality, due to pride and fear and selfishness and wounding, formation becomes one of the major duties of the Church...thus, mercy without articulation of reality to those who are unjust is truly no mercy--and this includes some of the disciplinary issues within the Church Herself: liturgy, crimes of the clergy, questionable theology, etc.. Perhaps here is where JPII fell short in truth.

On the other hand, the very aggiornamento that JPII seemed to support, which required a new openness to the other and an attempt to dialogue amidst the huge sea changes in modern culture, may also have broken open the dehabilitating silence and covering over of mistakes. The pre-conciliar Church was no Eden, and matched the cultural 'sweeping under the rug' that seemed to characterize, to me, the years produced by the absolutes of the Enlightenment. I have also thought, as a convert, that huge and sometimes devastating shifts are like the refining fire: Do you really love the Church, even if you can't understand what is happening? Will you sit as Christ does, through a liturgy that seems to de-form rather than form? Will you fight for what is real, what is the essence of Christianity, even as the things that you were attached to and formed by are blown apart?

It seems to me that part of the papacy of JPII was a kind of winnowing; those who had no charity or mercy and were simply attached to being a remnant, an elite, or who were tempted to idolize a liturgy rather than worship Christ in humility fell off one side of the barque; those who were in it for an emotional fix or to promote their own relativistic, amoral ends, were in a sense, given free rein--to hang themselves.

Yet, in all this, JPII was one man, I believe, a flawed human being, who was called to live mercy, to challenge the Church once again to eat with sinners.

When a person lives like this, however imperfectly but with absolute dependence on Christ, he or she has then become a stumbling block, a crushing stone, and a doorway into redemption, all at the same time, for the unjust in this world.

It is thus the work of a Christ-fool to acknowledge the necessity of the prison, but then to go inside and wash the feet of the prisoners.

I believe this was--and is--the mission of John Paul II. To be a sign, a phenomena, of the eternal Pelican King, to show that the scandal of Christ is the way to redemption and that mercy is worth the risk of scandalizing some. I don't know how to answer the witch doctor-Assisi stuff, or the other problems...but this was one man in a huge institution with a mission. He was a sign, not the savior. The Savior, of course, who will clean the house, is Christ.

Babette's Feast on Good Friday

It might seem like a strange choice; while the kids went over to watch The Passion of the Christ at the invitation of some Campion students, I watched Babette's Feast.

This capped a day of liturgy at the cathedral in Parramatta, where Bishop Fisher celebrated. I was thinking of our friends Peter and Leone, sitting a few rows away with their new baby, new Catholics experiencing the Easter Triduum for the first time. I experienced the liturgy partly through what I thought they might be thinking about the much more physical, visceral experiences of the Catholic liturgy: standing and speaking through the passion in parts, having to physically shout "Crucify Him"; watching the bishop take off his alb, then, shoes, then socks, his skull cap, and then witnessing this barefoot, capless bishop prostrate himself in front of the cross; eating the Body and Blood of Christ. The liturgy, when I first entered the Church in 1997, seemed to overwhelm the senses in some way, and why this is necessary remains a mystery. It is just so rich.

I looked out the windows of the cathedral and watched the beautiful golden light playing off the eucalyptus trees, that special light that only comes in ocean climates, and I thought of Wyoming where there's almost no water in the air, where the light is so crystal it does not not play like this light...and I felt the sense of going back into the desert; the grand, high desert. It always seems allegorical to me, the desert to a Mediterranean sea-loving person, a visceral, liturgical experience of the aesetic life versus paradise.

Babette's Feast is set in Jutland, Denmark, in a kind of desert--on the severe hills near a cold, northern ocean. The hills and the cold remind me of Wyoming, but I imagine the ocean makes it all the colder. Hanging on in the wind is a small village of severe, simple thatched white cottages, and in one lives a minister and his two beautiful daughters. Each daughter lives a simple life of piety; the joy in their faces as they sing hymns in the tiny church is reflective of their deep desire for eternity, for the things that last.

 Each daughter is also brought into contact with a different, richer life--in a worldly sense.

The elder is visited by a young soldier of wealthy family who sees in her and her life a choice, a different choice from the world of defeat and victory, conquests on the battlefield and in the ballrooms and backroom meetings. But he rejects this otherworldly beauty. He tells her, "I will never return here" and vows to himself that he will become successful...and he does.

The younger is discovered by a famous French opera singer who falls in love with the purity and beauty of her voice and her person; she refuses to go along the path to "Paris at your feet" and stays in the desert.

Years pass, and the sisters, older women now, receive a refugee from the civil war in France named Babette. Babette serves them faithfully and simply for fourteen years, cooking ale bread and soup, living in an attic, and aiding the sisters in their works of charity. Babette tells them she has lost everything in Paris, including her husband and son, to the war. So, Babette is the first to come from the riches of the world into the desert of the spirit and choose to stay. It seems that suffering the loss of her family has ripped the mask off the the world and she can now recognize the road to real peace in the simple love of the sisters.

The film is allegorical, simply written and filmed, but each element is full of meaning; nothing is wasted, and the art of the film itself is an emblem of wealth in simplicity. The desert that is the village in Jutland is not a slam on joyless Puritan-types. The little congregation are devout and deeply committed to living a desert hermit's life away from the temptations to pride that lace the outside world. Yet sin and dissension live here too; it is not paradise but rather an allegory for the Christian walk, the carrying of the cross, the single-minded purity that is required: "Be more righteous than the Pharisees." The village, in the cold and wind, is the life and the road that is not yet Home, a refugee existence that awaits true paradise.

So the little devout group which Babette serves struggles with sin, but they are at least struggling, trying to love but not able to do it themselves. Babette remains among them, disguised as 'one whom seemed pitiful, disfigured, who had no comeliness to attract our eye.'

And then Babette wins the lottery. She asks the sisters if she can prepare "a good French meal" for their late father's anniversary celebration. Reluctantly, they agree, and then strange things begin to arrive, from giant turtles to tiny quails. The sisters begin to be fearful that they will be tempted to forsake the riches they search for in the aescetic life-- a closely guarded life that keeps the passions from controlling them.

Afraid of offending God, the little group decides that they will "eat as if not eating" and keep their mind on higher things as they suffer this intrusion of a French meal.

The young soldier who chose worldly success, providentially turns up at the meal; he is now a successful general who has been all over Europe, including Paris. He comes back to reckon with his choice as a young man to reject the spiritual life, the carrying of the cross. He is expecting, I think, pain and regret, because his life has become empty, empty as a real desert.

They sit down to a table resplendent with Limoge china and crystal and candles. They begin with turtle soup, move to blinis with caviar, then Babette's own creation of quail tart, each course punctuated with exquisite wine, like violins plucking gentle notes to spice and make magic with the cellos. As the dinner progresses and the wine flows, walls between people slowly come down and the joy of the food on the tongue turns the 'instrument that can cause so much destruction' into an instrument of forgiveness, love, and joy.

Babette, meanwhile, in truth one of the greatest chefs in the world, having spent all she had on this one meal for those she has loved and served selflessly for fourteen years, sits in the kitchen, wiping the sweat from her brow. She is the self-emptying, crucified artist who makes the physical magic of food into a spiritual love-fest.

At the end of the meal, the general stands and makes this speech:

“Mercy and truth,  my friends, have met together. Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.
Man, my friends, is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble.

“We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite.

“Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!”

In the allegory, the ascetic life has been kissed by the beauty of the artist, who works in mediums like food, and wine, and song--and it is a touch of paradise, a kind of foretaste. The little group sings in a circle under the stars, their souls freed and allowed to love more easily because the body is joyful. It is the proper relation between the spirit and the passions. 

Babette's Feast is often read as a criticism of severe asceticism, and there is a sense in which unrelenting Lent can begin to mar the soul, that the Feast is the point; but I do not think that is the only point of the movie. Rather, it is also a picture, a visceral one (you can almost taste the wine as you watch it, and feel the discipline of the cold climate) of where Good Friday and Easter meet, and that Easter comes through, from, Good Friday. 

For embodied souls marred by original sin, the desert is really the only way to understand the garden.  For us, the body, the senses, is the way to the soul; the lesson must be learned in this way and no other. 

And so, the Church has both desert hermits, bare monastic cells, and Michaelangelo. The liturgy is also visceral and we experience the asceticism of an empty tabernacle, only to be fed Babette's Feast in the Eucharist, as the Lord spends all He has to feed, really feed ( "This is my Body, this is my Blood, Amen") those He has served and loved from eternity. 

The Parting Glass

Well, this has to be a record for the shortest time living as an immigrant family in a country 8000 miles from home. Real life is stranger than fiction, once again. We plan to return to Orcas Island, by the end of May. I am keeping my inner eye focused on my memory of Patos and Sucia Islands, laying like whales in the blue. They are like old friends waiting to welcome us home; I am thinking of my rainbow rocks and the Laurel Lee bobbing in the swell, all to keep me and everyone else sane.

In realizing the situation we came into was not workable, we prayed and struggled and then resigned from Campion College. It is easy to second-guess such a major decision.

But nothing, nothing is wasted or meaningless, no matter how ridiculous it may seem; even the sound of God's laughter, the laughter of the Eternal Youth in the midst of our own horse-blinder stress, has meaning. 

Never before has the Litany of Humility seemed more real to me as when Audrey Assad sang it to me in the car this morning, as I wept for the loss and the apparent ridiculousness of the massive amount of work it took to accomplish this move, only to have it made so quickly and quite clearly not workable:

O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed,
From the desire of being loved,
From the desire of being extolled,
From the desire of being honored,
From the desire of being praised,
From the desire of being preferred to others,
From the desire of being consulted,
From the desire of being approved,
From the fear of being humiliated,
From the fear of being despised,
From the fear of suffering rebukes,
From the fear of being calumniated,
From the fear of being forgotten,
From the fear of being ridiculed,
From the fear of being wronged,
From the fear of being suspected,
Jesus deliver me.
That others may be loved more than I,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may be esteemed more than I ,

That, in the opinion of the world,
others may increase and I may decrease,
That others may be chosen and I set aside,
That others may be praised and I unnoticed,
That others may be preferred to me in everything,
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should,

Jesus grant me the grace to desire it.

This is the precious lesson I will have learned from Australia: to let go, let go of what others think of you, of any pretense to prestige or success in our own efforts, even in our own ability to read the signs or make decisions. Sometimes you do your best and it will simply be--not what you planned or desired, even if your desires and those of others are reasonable and even an attempt to be honest, open, good-willed. Perhaps it is an appropriate lesson from a country begun in many forms of opportunities for humility, a place that never had any pretense to "Elder Daughter of the Church" or "The Isle of Saints."  I therefore raise The Parting Glass to Australia.

I had a picture of God the other day, in the midst of the stress, and the loss of a kind of dream of serving this little liberal arts college in this youthful yet ancient land, of getting to know different kinds of Aussies, from Aboriginal people to Suits to Tradies, to all the friends that we will never know: this picture of God was different than my usual Old Man with Beard; He was young, streaking like Mercury across the sky, laughing and beckoning to me to rise from my curled position on my bed in the early hours of facing the unknown, to join in the dance. He was Zeus and Dionysus and Athena all at once, and He was, as CS Lewis says, "Not tame."

His dance, His infinite perspective, even His suffering and death is sometimes so full of energy, the energy of eternal youth, that it can crush us. He dances us around, as my sister said, "a bend in time" and shatters us. His declaration of love can break our hearts wide open. It is the nature of a love that is so great and good that it must transform, it must kill us to make us live again. It is the whirlwind that brought Job to his knees in humility and repentance. But it is a wild shattering that is good, and utterly selfless, not the shattering inflicted upon us by selfish desires or fear. It is that will that wants us to dance the way He dances, with reason, power, abandon, the dance only those with unshakeable faith and hope and love can dance--the dance of the saints. Especially in our moments of feeling dumb.

I am so far from that. I am brittle and shatter and refuse to be put back together. I am stiff-necked and fearful and suspicious and yet oh, how I want to dance like that--like the saints, with faith and confidence, to be tossed in the air by the Christ Child, to wait like a ball in the corner for Him to play with at His leisure.

I am trying so hard to deal with my high-strung, hyper-vigilant nature as the storm blows in my head; I am trying to relax as we step off an edge and get on a plane back home. How my many weak points rise up in revolution, carrying their signs and screaming obscenities. I can't get past them, my insecurities, but He can if I can just hang on, with the help of prayers, by the finger-nail edge of will.

I feel like we've lived here an equivalent of twenty years, in terms of the intense lessons we've learned, all of us. The spider house has become a sort of cartoon emblem for us. But for every single one of us, the lesson of humility underscores it all...the kids learned their weaknesses in the crucible of experiencing school; we were cared for and loved by the teachers and staff at their schools, but it was definitely an eye-opener for them. It was hard, yet they succeeded in ascending the peak and will I think be better, wiser people for their short time at Redfield and Tangara.

Other goods: We've met some stellar and delightful people--Angela, and Amitavo, and Stephen, Abe, Susanna, Geoff, and Liam, Marian, Jess, Fr. Luke, Peter, Mrs. Woodhead, Mr. Ramos, and on and on. We've had a chance to bask in the beautiful Australian ocean, see family...and most important, I suppose, I finally saw a wombat in the flesh and met the bird who sounds, as Thaddeus said, like a middle-aged woman tired of cleaning the house. I speak to them in their own language as I hang out laundry. I watched Thaddeus care for those around him, saw he has a deep care for the common good, saw him bring delight and depth and humor. He is a good man, I found, as I watched him work with my dad in making tremendously difficult decisions, the most Christian-leader one that of stepping away with courage from an untenable situation--and with all the charity and humility as he could muster when the time came.

Also, there were some amazing blessings--we found a couple of wonderful, wonderful doctors one of whom finally diagnosed me and the other Ana, who has mild Reynaud's Syndrome. These were no small deliverances, though we are still working through the process of figuring it all out. We finally had the delight of having Marylynne with us, and she and Thaddeus found a friendship and a delight in each other; we again felt the deep, deep blessing of supportive, honest, and unconditionally loving parents who cried with us and held out hope and let us borrow the wisdom of age.

I met, eternally, St. Mary MacKillop who is the patron saint of those who are abused--a fitting first saint, I think, for Australia...it seemed to be one of those experiences where a saint finds you...she showed up first in none other a place than Madame Tussaud's, right round the corner from Justin Bieber, as I walked around with Ana, trying to be cheerful but barely seeing anything in front of me. It was so odd to see a nun there that I looked her up...and she grabbed me, perhaps in hindsight, to tell me to seek the way of forgiveness, humility, and being deeply aware of any trouble or hurt I've caused, those knocked over by my lack of wit or unnecessary waves...to be profoundly aware of the effect I have on others, the life-giving and terrible responsibility of leadership and fathering and mothering in all areas of life, that our free will and those of others can truly, really, either harm or deliver others, that it is no game, that self-deception is to be pitied and borne with.

I found her shrine in Sydney and we visited her marble tomb and left the whole thing in her hands, to pray for us, for Campion, for Australia. Here are some of her words that seemed to fit us perfectly as we walked through the decisions of the last few weeks:

“Remember we are but travellers here.” (1866)
“We must teach more by example than by word.” (1867)
“Do all you can with the means at your disposal and calmly leave the rest to God.” (1891)
“Courage, courage, trust in God who helps you in all things”
“We feel our crosses hard at times, but our courage should rise with them.” (1882)
“Let God’s Spirit guide you in your choice.” (1898)

The main thing is: charity, charity, charity, and humility, humility, humility. Humility brings the possibility for the true sight of charity.

Thaddeus has his own lessons, as do I...little and big ones. So, we're on our way to see some last-minute things as we sell our car, furniture, shut down bank accounts and all that other stuff we just got together. It is almost enough to laugh at if it wasn't so much trouble all round to lots of people, not the least of whom are the faculty and students of Campion, and to my parents who must welcome us home to their home. As my dad said, "Well, I came home with a quarter in my pocket from Afghanistan. My dad met us at the airport and I told him, 'We're hungry, Dad.' He bought us lunch and took us home."

 We must appear like the Monopods on the Hermit's Island in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader who baked the potatoes and then buried them to save time, who, when the cat got into the dairy barn, moved all the milk out and left the cat in.

My memory of Australia is forever entwined with a nun who had piercing blue eyes, and middle-aged woman birds, 'no worries' and many other things...

"Fill to me the parting glass

And drink a health whate’er befalls
And gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all "

Believe in Your Calling

Ana has been struggling, as many teenagers do, with her identity. I remember reading somewhere that though all of us struggle from time to time, wondering where we fit and what our end is, teenagers often deal with major identity shifts or crises several times a day. To me, this explains a lot: from mood shifts to obsessive comparisions with others, to idealization of pop stars, actors, and the popular girl or the tough guy, to the sometimes painful levels of navel-gazing that is is self-absorption, not self-awareness. It is not necessarily calculating absorption, though;  it is more like a castaway who, floating on a piece of wood in the Atlantic, scans the the line where the ocean meets the sky, desperate for the sign of anything more substantial to hang on to--land or ship. 

This is often the cross of those teenage years: The awareness of themselves as a part of of a larger world crashes into the dream world that is childhood. It is like a death and birth, like the deaths and births that we all go through in different times and stages of life, until our final death and birth into a different order of things. 

Entering formal school for the first time as a young teenager--and a school with high standards and uniforms and the whole nine yards--has been yet another challenge to Ana's identity struggles. The picture of herself that she had painted in homeschooling, small-town Wyoming has been set next to a wider world, a more exacting and city-challenging world--a girls' prep school. What circle of hell is that, you wonder?

Okay, I know, that was really mean of us. 

But analagous to how God believes in us, I believe in Ana, in all my children--they are, with all their faults, ready and willing to take things on, to go Frodo, as I call it. So I have had hope as I walk through this new challenge with Ana, to help her in her shifting sea of daily identity crises and hormonal shifts--for girls are indeed like flowers, too--flowers, as I know well (being a florist of a kind) are the direct precursors to fruit, and they are often extremely delicate, sensitive to subtle changes in weather and nutrients--their beauty is essentially in the sensitivity of the part of the plant that can close itself at night and is easily bruised by the hand, even the oil of the fingers in some cases. It is their sensitivity that somehow, enables them to be fruit-bearers, signs of fruit; as if they are like receptors for the plant, those who must suffer this sensitivity will be a sign: They will flower or die for the sake of bearing fruit, for the sake of another life.

So add this sensitivity to normal teenage identity crisis, and you have a major cross--not only for the child, but also for parents and siblings. We bear with each other and it not just toleration; it is an opportunity to grow in love, to lay one's life down for the other, to become more Christ and less self...but laying one's life down for a moody teenager has been more often too hard for me, in my physical, spiritual, and moral weaknesses--remember, I'm a hormonally challenged middle-aged woman going through the opposite process: out of that sensitivity of physical fruit-bearing time into becoming a Really Cool Battle Axe. 

Hopefully, I will become a flower of sensitivity on a new plane, a fruit-bearing mother on a higher level, as the physical sign of this fades. And though I kind of like the Battle Axe state, perhaps it is within Ana's struggles with identity that I can again become loving. 

And sometimes the little details about a child's life come together to form an epiphany, a sudden realization that every hair on our head has been known from before, and when it would grow, when it would fall. 

So, I've been listening to different expressions of identity crisis every day in the car after school, as we drive through Cherrybrook, Castle Hill, Baulkham Hills, Winston Hills, and finally Old Toongabbie where we live. Some days I've just had enough; some part of me has been worried about her, deeply worried, because she, like me, tends to overthink, to dig too damn deep at all hours. I feel it with her, and remember it--but she is a sweeter, kinder soul, a shining and more innocent and truthful soul, a receptive and loving soul, than me. I could blow it all off more easily, or make sarcastic jokes to protect myself. Ana is not sarcastic; her large brown eyes are symbolic of a large soul, sometimes too open to the world around her. She's the kind of flower you'd like to keep in a greenhouse. Her downside is the same sensitivity that makes her beautiful. Her question, over and over, underneath there, underneath the "I don't have anything to offer that others don't have" or "How am I special?" or "Will I reach my dreams?" is simply: "Who am I? What is my special thing?"

Today, in the midst of some stress and suffering, I was tired, as we drove through the 8 am traffic up to Tangara School for Girls. Then in the midst of Sophie singing some pop song, the epiphany came. I saw the thick bushes which line the drop off/pick up parkinglot, bushes standing guard around quiet spaces covered in gum tree leaves, untrodden by the hundreds of girls coming to school. As Ana was moaning about something to do with school, I remembered St. Therese of Liseux who also did not like school, or felt so often like a fish out of water. Looking at the bushes by the classrooms, I said, "St. Therese would hide in the bushes near her school, Ana."

I thought of St. Therese, hiding in the bushes because she felt so inadequate or afraid of the girls in her school. I thought of how, in school, the comparisons with others becomes a means to identity, but also can be a distraction. I thought of St. Therese as she begged her father to let her come home; and I wondered what would have happened to her had she, like I did, tried to 'fit in' or 'play and win the game.' I played in high school and had some success, on some level. But at what cost? 

I turned to Ana and said, "You must believe in your calling. You, like St. Therese, have a calling to something--some purpose that no one else can articulate or fulfill. Your life has a reason, and you must believe in it."

The words were flowing out, almost from somewhere else, and her big eyes were totally focused on me; a moment where it is soul talking to soul with no distraction, no struggle with words. And like things of God, they are so simple that we wonder why it took so long to see it or know it--as if the pieces that are already there suddenly fit together.

I told her about St. Therese, who willed to leave the way of comparison with others, that way of gaining identity, but who instead struggled to find her place in a convent, who found her calling after struggling with herself, with the pettiness of herself and others, in little daily tasks and exchanges, who found the deepest, largest vocation in the small stuff of life, not in comparison with others. She knew she'd never win that game, and more importantly, had she tried to fit in with the world, or even the others in the convent, the identity of the Little Flower would probably have been segewayed into something quite different. She found that she was meant to be Love in the heart of the Church....a profound calling, a calling so profound that it can be found and done in the smallest of tasks and words. In that she became not a competitor with others, but a source of life for them.

I told Ana, "You must believe in your calling, that you indeed have a calling; that God cares about you that much...and I get frustrated with Him sometimes because He doesn't tell us directly. Dang."

"Mom, maybe if He just told us, we'd reject it."

Yes, I thought. So instead God creates deep desires in us--it is the activities and people and things that we love with a selfless love, the things we would rather be able to do with no pay, and would be happy to go on doing even if no one knew or cared. That is one clue...others are coming from adversity, from having to do things and suffer things that we don't like--these can also give us an understanding of what we do love, and helps us gain the virtue to attain it. 

As Ana opened the car door to go off to another day of school, I said, "It is no accident that you were named after St. Therese." Ana put her gentle hand on my shoulder and then was gone--hopefully not to hide in the bushes but to find herself by looking for God, for His calling, like a lover, across the deep waters inside her.

Finding one's calling is like Teresa of Avila's way of prayer--

"Teresa saw prayer as a garden made for God. We are the gardeners, and we must tend the plants and water them. God's job is to pull the weeds so the good seed can grow.She believed there are four ways to water the plants, or four stages of praying. With each stage, we do less and less of the work until we reach a place of perfect union with God where He becomes the Gardener"(www.christianbooks.com).

The calling is full-grown when we can't tell if God is doing it, or we are doing it, that it doesn't matter to us, any longer, if we are getting credit for it, but know well that the true joy of it, the success of it, comes from the Gardener. 

To get there?

 From Thomas a Kempis:

Sit thou down always in the lowest room and thou shalt be

the lowest. For the highest saints of God are least in their own

sight, and the more glorious they are, so much the lowlier are

they in themselves; full of grace and heavenly glory, they are

not desirous of vain-glory; resting on God and strong in His

might, they cannot be lifted up in any wise. And they who

ascribe unto God all the good which they have received, “seek not

glory one of another, but the glory which cometh from God only,”

and they desire that God shall be praised in Himself and in all

His Saints above all things, and they are always striving for

this very thing.

Thirst for excellence, but for the glory of God, and then it is a calling: and you have found an identity that was set for you from eternity, an identity that cannot be shaken or ripped from you, because it is also in God.

When Useless Meets Useful

This post has nothing to do with Australia, except perhaps a title--and the liberal arts, for which we are in Australia. The post rather comes from the rich landscape of Conversations with Dad. My parents are here visiting and my dad and I have had chances to spend hours talking.

Today he was reading to me from Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. The author, Michael Lewis, writes with clarity and delightful anecdote about the world economic crash-and-burns after 2008. We started out laughing from the belly about some of the anecdotes: the Greek monks from Mt. Athos who found a deed in their cellars to a worthless lake, and traded it shrewdly for government property, making a total of something like 2 billion dollars; the Ireland of the middle 2000s in which the Irish investment bankers decided to sell each other Ireland; the Ireland full of investors not willing to listen to anyone who warned them of the bubble and the insane bank loans; the Icelandic fishermen who left an industry that fed the nation and all became investment bankers, buying up pieces of Europe with bubble-money...not to mention what was going on in the Giant Speculation Bubble that was the U.S. Of course the U.S. did it all on a huge scale, like the food portions in Bob's Big Boy restaurants...a far cry from the 'moral people who can sustain a democracy' that De Tocqueville saw in his American travels, people one can still find in small towns in Minnesota and Wyoming, the people who are quietly footing part of the bill for the bust.

Ireland as a political entity, perhaps in an interesting flip on cultural stereotypes, was 'more honest' about the whole thing, Lewis claims. "In the U.S., the big shots got richer as the banks went down; in Ireland, the big shots went down with the banks."

Then we got serious, leaving the Asterix-level cultural funnies, and wondered about what would cause an economic world 'built on nothing firmer than people's expectations' or 'the belief that one can bring the future into the present.'

I have often, since childhood, looking out the window of our car as we passed through different countries, mysterious in their infrastructure, wondered how it all went together. It seemed overwhelming, inexplicable...as business and economics has always seemed to me. I prefer the things that are ascertainable to a single human--like a farm, or a gunmaker, or a florist, or a writer. I have a deep aversion to big systems that are too hard for one person, or one village, to understand, much less have any say about. I am a distributionist by nature, not by education.

Some old friends once assuaged some of my anxiety as I looked at the huge oil rigs off the coast of Santa Barbara, up close from a kayak. We were surfing the waves created by the huge things, but they frightened me. I was told, "A single person can't encompass, or understand, let alone make systems like this...it takes a community of some sort."

Yes, systems, large and small, are built by human community. The largeness might be fine if we weren't ignoring original sin. The systems built in smaller communities, at one time, could be held accountable by the aunts down the street, or the priest in the village church, or the mullah, or the families--to some extent. Sin, the hedging of morals, has always destroyed much of what was built by honest people over centuries. What happens when you have dishonest, shrewd monks? What happens when the 'respectable members of communities' are busily, quietly, wrestling money from the old people in the town?

And as the systems get larger, and less attached to real commodities (like fish or wheat or clothes spun for one's neighbors, or the things freely given by God to evil and good alike, the things God asked Adam to mix his sweat with as a prescriptive for his sin) the ability and temptation to hedge on one's moral accountability to the community becomes overwhelming. When Google is one of the wealthiest, largest companies in the world, our communities are built on nothing firmer than electrical currents traveling in the air, nothing more than people's virtual expectations making money...and how does a community of human beings hold each other accountable when that community (Google, for instance) is comprised of billions of people? It seems just too easy for one to imagine a back door through which an Enronesque thief or even a shadow-controller could easily slip.

I asked my dad, as we talked about the Ireland Bank Bust as an nuclear-bomb-level example of the Emperor's New Clothes, and the Icelandic fishermen-become-bankers, what the whole thing is built on..."What's the bottom of the food chain?" I asked, looking for the plankton of human economics.

"Wheat, oil, water..."

Basic things, but perhaps there is something more basic, I wondered. I thought of how the busts came from duplicity and greed; of how Ireland went from a healthy economy to a disaster in a matter of a couple of years; of how Greek doctors were all somehow making, for tax evasion purposes, twelve thousand euros a year and beauticians in Greece were taking higher pensions for 'dangerous occupation.' These countries had wheat, so to speak. They had a form of health for the common good, where culture can be built and that fruitful leisure can exist that made Troy a legend in the world of barbaric megarons, the culture that creates not only beauty but also invents good products and saves lives. What were they missing on a large scale, in the most important economic and political offices in Dublin and Athens? It seems to me that they were missing moral people, people who were both moral and who could think and speak well, who could see fearlessly the big and true picture.

Yes, the most important commodity in this post-bust world, in a world that is barreling towards giant systems, global systems that are harder and harder to hold accountable, are people who can be trusted, people who can think critically and philosophically see the ends of human activities, of human beings, and can articulate these ends. They are people whose rhetoric is honest and built on truth, and effective, people wise as serpents but with the heart for the common good. They are not neo-cons working towards American hegemony or Greek monks working towards a lavish meal in the back of the monastery, or investment bankers listening only to their own desires, and thinking a la Edward Bernays that greed somehow helps the economy.

They are not specialists at heart, but use specialties they gain to work for the common good. They are not modern dualists who think that the material world can be separated in a radical way morally, spiritually, or practically, from theological and philosophical truth, from the lessons in Austen and Dostoyevski.

The greatest commodity, the most useful element of the next few decades, is truly the generations of young people who are formed and educated to think liberally--which has, ironically, paradoxically, at its heart an end that is intransitive--where the end is not like 'the carpenter planes the wood' but rather 'the rose blooms.' When the human good is made an end, you get good humans--and they, in the end, are the most useful of all.