Tag Archives: Christ

September 17, 2012 · 11:40 am

Never As Good?

With some regularity, I have a habit of listening to song lyrics addressing one topic, and seeing how they could be re-interpreted to address another.  In the song “Never As Good As The First Time” for example, pop-jazz singer Sade croons about how nostalgia for the past, the good memories and thoughts of what might have been, always seems better than starting over again with second chances.  ”The rose we remember,” she sings, “the thorns we forget.”  I have always thought rather a nice turn of phrase.

Now, this is not merely an excuse for me to plant a song earworm in your head, gentle reader.  Rather, I would like you to consider whether in the present age, we increasingly look at the world around us as a series of compartmentalized experiences of either roses or thorns, when the truth is that both are essential parts of the whole.  This is true not only in the romantic, as this pop song points out, but also in the broader questions of life reflecting on society as a whole, and our role within it.

This weekend I had three separate, rather long conversations with three different friends in three different cities and time zones, about the question of living out one’s purpose in life. When one is no longer young but not old YET, as Mac and Katherine Barron like to put it on the “Catholic in a Small Town” podcast, certain doors are closed. It is almost guaranteed that if you are now over 30 and have never played tennis in years, you will not now be able to dethrone Roger Federer from the top of the heap. At the same time, you are not going to be toddling your way down the hallway on a Zimmer frame for many, many years yet, so to become despondent over this realization would be the height of self-obsession.

One thing which came to light during all three of these conversations was a common perspective of a sense of uncertainty about the future, as compared to what people experienced in the past. Grandfather started working for a certain company as a young man, and stayed there for decades until his retirement, when he received his gold watch and his pension. That world in many places is already long gone; those of us in Gen X or Gen Y will most likely never experience it.  Yet however much we may bemoan the death of some of the virtues which made Grandfather’s life seemingly more certain, we compartmentalize what he went through in the Depression and World War II.

This present life promises us only one absolute, unavoidable truth, and that is that there are always going to be barbarians at the gate. It may be illness, or heartbreak, or disappointment, but it will indeed come, with the ultimate reward of leaving this life entirely.  What has happened in the Western world is particular in the second half of the 20th century, is that a majority grew up not really knowing what it was like to be hungry and cold, stalked by disease, armies, or other predators.

This is why what we see going on in places like Ireland, Spain, or Greece is so shocking to many of us in the West, even though the kinds of misery we presently see are as nothing compared to what people in the Third World go through all the time, with no hope of relief.  It is also why the Third World in so many respects is much tougher than the First: for they expect disappointment, and while they hope they will make it through today, they have no illusions that they will be cheating suffering and death of their due.  We have grown too lazy in assuming that comfort is something we are entitled to, rather than privileged to receive.

Yesterday at mass Monsignor used the Gospel reading as a jumping-off point for the exploration of these ideas of uncertainty and suffering.  We are no doubt familiar with Christ’s rebuke of St. Peter who, shortly after declaring Jesus to be the Son of God, then takes Him aside to upbraid Him for talking about His forthcoming suffering and death.  Christ then turns on him and rebukes him in front of the other disciples, warning them that if they expected to be His followers, they were going to have to accept suffering.  In his homily, Monsignor pointed out that no one likes to talk about the experience of uncertainty and suffering, or ultimately death, but Christ tells us that it is in how we accept our trials that we prove our worth.

This was further echoed in the reading at Lauds this morning, for the great Jewish heroine Judith points out to her people in the midst of a terrible crisis that:

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God who, as he tested our ancestors, is now testing us. Remember how he treated Abraham, all the ordeals of Isaac and all that happened to Jacob. For as these ordeals were intended by him to search their hearts, so now this is not vengeance that God exacts against us, but a warning inflicted by the Lord on those who are near his heart.

Judith 8: 25-26, 27

Returning to Sade, who of course is speaking of romantic love in this song rather than about the overall purpose of one’s life, reflection on what might have been and what is “rightfully” ours is a deadly exercise.  Too many spend their lives trying to recapture a moment when everything seemed wonderful and new. Or they use the irritation of suffering and loss in their lives, in the mistaken belief that by so doing they are making some sort of pearl, when in reality they are merely creating an ulcer which will eventually perforate. The line between the formation of each of these is very slim, indeed.

There is of course nothing pleasant about experiencing pain, suffering, setbacks, and loss, but we will experience all of them. If you believe that you will have everything easy in your life from now on, you are exceedingly naive and ill-prepared for what lies ahead.  Better to stay focused on the task ahead, of using your gifts and abilities for the greater good of others, in recognition of and preparation for the life to come.  It may not always be as good as the first time one experiences that thrill of something good – a first dance, a first touchdown, a first job, a first apartment – but at least we will take the future as it comes, without staying stuck in the past.


Still from the video for “Never As Good As The First Time” by Sade

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June 3, 2012 · 5:01 pm

Gardens and Earthly Delights

At dinner last evening with a visiting priest friend, Father mentioned that he had parked a few blocks away from the restaurant, in a residential part of the neighborhood.  He noted the contrast between some of the grand old houses, and the very small ones located right alongside, and how people made an effort in this area to have their gardens look beautiful both for their own pleasure, and for other people to enjoy.  Even having lived in this neighborhood for many years, and a gardening aficionado of sorts, this observation is something that I can occasionally forget.

No doubt we have all had the sensation of reading a novel, or watching a television biography of some famous person, and seeing the exact moment when they forget what they ought to be doing and act out of selfishness and stupidity; we may even shake our heads because we can see what is coming.   Time and again we have seen people in history or heard of characters in fiction forgetting that they should always try to be grateful, and instead deciding to pursue material pleasures for which they have no real need.  And it is interesting to think about how many times a garden has factored into this equation.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve disobey what God told them to do, and both they and we their descendants pay the price.  They had everything they could have wanted, and they should have been grateful for it, but they were not content.  Yet it is by no means the only example from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Having been raised up from nothing, David had been faithful to God’s Will and had been rewarded for putting his trust in the Divine and not in man.  However one night while walking in the rooftop gardens of his palace, he saw Bathsheba, wife of Uriah, taking a bath at her home next door, and he decided that he wanted more than he was permitted to have.  The rest you probably know, or can read in this excerpt from the Second Book of the Prophet Samuel.  There is a similar circumstance involving a garden and a bath in the story of Susanna and the Elders, from the Book of the Prophet Daniel.

We also read in the First Book of Kings how King Ahab threw what can only be described as a childish hissy-fit, when his neighbor Naboth refused to sell his meager vineyard.  The King wanted to convert Naboth’s plot into a garden, probably for the worship of Baal.   Queen Jezebel, not unlike King David, manages to get Naboth killed so that her husband can claim the vineyard for himself, and doom thereafter falls upon the royal family.

The garden as a beautiful place where sin and selfishness can be pursued has fascinated artists throughout the centuries. In his endlessly absorbing masterwork, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) created a stunning triptych, or painting made up of three panels hinged together, representing the Garden of Eden on the left, a central panel with human beings romping about a garden in all sorts of excess, and a right panel depicting the torments of Hell earned through such excesses.  It is a powerful, unforgettable work, easily one of the most important Old Master paintings ever painted.

In a somewhat different vein, in the work of French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) we see a different kind of garden excess, though one which is not necessarily apparent at first viewing.  Rousseau is undoubtedly most famous for his “jungle” paintings, depicting lions, tigers, and other wild beasts crouching in the underbrush of a lush forest, or chasing and eating their prey.  Yet while the artist claimed that he drew his inspiration from having visited the lush jungles of Mexico, in truth he never left France: the exotic flora and animals that filled his work were taken from his observations at Parisian botanical gardens and taxidermy exhibitions.   Rousseau could not be content with just being himself, and instead of being honest decided to make himself into a supposedly more exotic figure.

These are just a few examples of how we human beings tend to indulge our own vanity in lying, gluttony, lust, violence, and so on, in order to get more than our fair share. Even as we acknowledge that this is the case however, let us not be despondent and assume, like those who believe that human beings are nothing more than the species du jour, that all of this is for naught.  For in another garden of course, located on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, Christ showed how to break that cycle of selfishness.

If you have never seen an olive tree at first hand, or walked through a grove of them in a garden, they are wonderful things, both hideous and lovely at the same time.  The older the olive tree gets, the more gnarled and lumpy it becomes, even as its silvery, elegant leaves have been used for centuries as symbols of peace and friendship, decorating buildings and works of art all over the world.  And the more established the olive is, the more capable it is of regenerating itself and producing fruit when the tree is damaged.  This longevity can be attested to in numerous examples around the world, where olive trees that have been carbon-dated or tree-ring-dated to be thousands of years old, and are still producing bumper crops of olives every year.  This is what a garden is meant to be, rather than a place to act out of greed and selfishness.

The pleasures of a garden are many at this time of year, just before the formal beginning of summer: we can spend the long days enjoying the scents, the colors, and the sounds of life around us.  Certainly, gardens can be a bad thing if they are misused, as a way of engaging in pride at the expense of others, or indulging our own whims and selfishness, as some of the forgoing examples have shown.  Yet in the end like the lives we have ourselves been given, they are not intrinsically evil places, but rather good things we are meant to enjoy and use properly.

Perhaps next time you are out toiling in your own garden, or visiting someone else’s, it may be helpful to stop and consider whether the real delight of the garden is not so much in the taking but rather, as pointed out at the beginning of this piece, in what it gives.


“The Garden of Earthly Delights” (Detail of Left Panel)
by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1490-1510)
The Prado, Madrid

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May 26, 2012 · 10:54 am

Waking Up At Home

This morning I woke up in the house I grew up in, to the sound of my parents having a discussion in the kitchen about whether they wanted toast or waffles for breakfast.  My sister and one of my brothers and I managed to come home for the Memorial Day holiday weekend, which is usually considered the unofficial start of summer here in the United States.  There are parades and ceremonies to honor America’s war dead, and most people at some point will be cooking outdoors or attending picnics and other such events.  Here at Chez Père for example, steaks wrapped in rosemary will be made on the barbecue this evening.

So as I lay there not quite awake but not quite asleep either, I thought about the fact that I was truly blessed to be able to have this experience – a kind of momentary return to childhood.  I have friends much younger than I am who have not been able to wake up in this way for years, because one or both of their parents have died, or the family home has been sold. Of course once I got up and got going, the reality of not being a child anymore came flooding back – the aches and pains of approaching middle age, the concerns of adulthood in checking the phone for messages, and so on.

No matter how old we get, most of us will always have that feeling of wanting to go home, where things are always safe and familiar.  I know people whose lifestyles at present are far more comfortable now than the circumstances they grew up in, who still enjoy going back home to see the people they love, but also to just relax and be themselves. Others have not had upbringings that evoke such feelings of comfort and familiarity. For those people, the idea of waking up in the house they grew up in would be more akin to waking up in a nightmare.

Perhaps because happy memories of a drowsy, holiday weekend back home are even rarer for these people, the thought of being able to wake up rested and content in a loving environment are the more cherished because they were infrequent. While Thomas Wolfe’s classic Depression-era novel “You Can’t Go Home Again” would suggest trying to return home to childhood dreams is a failure, the truth is that most of us love the chance to go home again. Even if it is only to a brief moment of childhood, or even if we are still living in the same town where we grew up, and our parents are just across the street.

No one, no matter how sophisticated, intellectual, and accomplished they may become, is immune from feeling as though they would like to have a return to some of the simpler aspects of being a child again. If you are one of these people, try to imagine not worrying about anything more in life than being stung by a bee when playing outside, or whether you will be having peanut butter and jelly or grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. Then tell me whether that is not preferable to worrying about finances, career, politics, health, romance, or other matters.

In Christianity we are aware of the importance of trying to keep some aspect of childhood in our lives no matter how old we get. In fact, Christ explicitly tells His Disciples that unless they become like children, they will not enter the Kingdom of God.  Yet regardless of whether or not you are a Christian, Jesus’ command – not a suggestion – to His followers is actually rather sound.

What are the qualities that we see in children that He is talking about, here? Perhaps we could list things like creativity, a sense of imagination and wonder, affection and tenderness toward others, a sense of fun, obedience and respect for one’s elders, asking for help when we need it and can’t manage by ourselves, etc.  True, a more jaundiced eye might look at children and see all sorts of bad things they often do, but then those are the people who see no value in jumping on your parents’ big bed in the morning .


“Four Poster” by Andrew Wyeth (1946)
Greeneville Museum of Art, Greeneville, South Carolina

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April 6, 2012 · 8:20 am

Good Friday

See, my servant shall prosper,
he shall be raised high and greatly exalted.

Even as many were amazed at him—
so marred was his look beyond human semblance
and his appearance beyond that of the sons of man—
so shall he startle many nations,
because of him kings shall stand speechless;
for those who have not been told shall see,
those who have not heard shall ponder it.

Who would believe what we have heard?
To whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

He grew up like a sapling before him,
like a shoot from the parched earth;
there was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him,
nor appearance that would attract us to him.

He was spurned and avoided by people,
a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity,
one of those from whom people hide their faces,
spurned, and we held him in no esteem.

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,
our sufferings that he endured,
while we thought of him as stricken,
as one smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our offenses,
crushed for our sins;
upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole,
by his stripes we were healed.

We had all gone astray like sheep,
each following his own way;
but the LORD laid upon him
the guilt of us all.

Though he was harshly treated, he submitted
and opened not his mouth;
like a lamb led to the slaughter
or a sheep before the shearers,
he was silent and opened not his mouth.

Oppressed and condemned, he was taken away,
and who would have thought any more of his destiny?

When he was cut off from the land of the living,
and smitten for the sin of his people,
a grave was assigned him among the wicked
and a burial place with evildoers,
though he had done no wrong
nor spoken any falsehood.

But the LORD was pleased
to crush him in infirmity.

If he gives his life as an offering for sin,
he shall see his descendants in a long life,
and the will of the LORD shall be accomplished through him.

Because of his affliction
he shall see the light in fullness of days;
through his suffering, my servant shall justify many,
and their guilt he shall bear.

Therefore I will give him his portion among the great,
and he shall divide the spoils with the mighty,
because he surrendered himself to death
and was counted among the wicked;
and he shall take away the sins of many,
and win pardon for their offenses.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12


The Pistoia Crucifix by Pietro Tacca (c. 1600-1616)
National Gallery of Art, Washington

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April 5, 2012 · 11:25 am

Law in the Balance

This is the last in my series of posts – though there will be a very simple post tomorrow – in which we have looked at the Passion Narrative in St. Mark’s Gospel in the context of broader social and cultural issues. I have tried to do my best to look at this text during Holy Week, the most sacred time of the year for Christians, and take some themes or ideas from it which I believe are worth the consideration of both my Christian and Non-Christian readers. On Monday we looked at the importance of studying symbolism in the creative spheres; on Tuesday we considered what it means to be naked; and yesterday we looked at the role of women in society.

Today we are going to look at something which is very much in the news these days, but then for that matter always seems to be in the news, and that is the rule of law. No, I am not going to discuss the constitutionality of Obamacare, or the HHS mandate.  I will leave that to those Constitutional law scholars who regularly argue before the Supreme Court, and thus actually know what they are talking about, rather than pay any attention to those who simply talk about it on television or in magazine articles.

Instead, my goal today is to make you a bit uncomfortable, if I can.

If we turn to what happened after Jesus’ Crucifixion in St. Mark’s account, which you can read here, we are told that after He had breathed His last on Friday afternoon, there was a very important question to be answered by His Jewish friends: was there time to take His body down and bury it before the Sabbath?

Joseph of Arimathea,
a distinguished member of the council,
who was himself awaiting the kingdom of God,
came and courageously went to Pilate
and asked for the body of Jesus.
Pilate was amazed that he was already dead.
He summoned the centurion
and asked him if Jesus had already died.
And when he learned of it from the centurion,
he gave the body to Joseph.
Having bought a linen cloth, he took him down,
wrapped him in the linen cloth,
and laid him in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock.

Before we get into a consideration of what Joseph did here, we need to take a step back and look at the issue of the law, for the law is inextricably linked with what St. Mark is describing.

It is hard for me to look at what St. Mark reports without thinking like a lawyer. The legal mind, as my readers are no doubt well-aware, differs somewhat from the rational mind, although it has its own, at times cruel, logic to it. The lawyer works within a closed universe, wherein certain types of proofs which might make a difference in an argument between one friend and another may not even be considered within the context of a legal argument. It is important to understand this, because such an alternate universe has its own rules and ways of working, which do not always correspond to what we may and may not do in our private lives.

While St. Mark tells us what he himself witnessed, or was told later by others, remember that so far as we know, he was not a lawyer.  And as a lawyer, I sometimes find reading the Bible – not just St. Mark’s Gospel – to be frustrating to the part of my brain that has been trained to think as a lawyer.  I know from experience that when I am trying to put together an argument for court, for example, in that universe I need to ask certain questions and obtain certain answers to those questions which may be completely separate from real life in all of its messiness, if I am to convince the court to rule the way I believe it ought to rule.  So even though St. Mark is writing an account of a legal process, he is writing it as a layman would write it, not as a lawyer would write it: he is trying to persuade the reader’s immortal soul, not the mind of a temporal judge.

That being said, keep in mind that Jesus went through proceedings in two separate legal universes, in order for Him to be executed.  He was first condemned by religious authority, and he was subsequently condemned by civil authority. Had He been arrested in a modern, Western legal system He would have had certain protections and rights; if He had been, as someone who knows his way around the appellate system I could cite an almost infinite list of grounds for appeal from His death sentence. Be that as it may, and whatever one thinks of the actions of those such as the Sanhedrin or Pontius Pilate, He was not simply chased down by a mob and lynched, vigilante-style.

Turning then to a deeper reflection on how the law applies to the events described by St. Mark, one of the things we can all recognize is that Jesus taught His Disciples that people in need come before the law, but the law must still be upheld whenever possible. He was routinely criticized, for example, for healing sick people on the Sabbath, because in the mind of the more literal of the religious leaders of His day, this was working on the Sabbath, which was prohibited by the Mosaic law.  Jesus rejected this interpretation, and took the view that it was more important to act, when you found yourself in a situation where someone needed your help, even if it meant working on the Sabbath.

Similarly, in parables such as the very familiar one of “The Good Samaritan”, Jesus challenged His listeners to consider which was more important: proscribed ritual or another in urgent, life-or-death need? The wounded Jewish traveler on the side of the road is not touched by the observant Jewish leaders, who do not want to become ritually unclean, and thereby become unable to serve God in the Temple. Instead, the traveler is aided by someone whom the Jews considered at best a heretic, and at worst an enemy, a resident from what is today the West Bank.  [N.B. Now THERE is an interesting geographical tidbit to chew on.]

At the same time however, in the Gospels Jesus repeatedly reminds His followers that they must follow the law, whether as promulgated by the religious authorities or by the civil authorities, so long as in so doing they do not lose sight of the big picture. A mistake often made by those on the left is looking at Jesus as some sort of early anarchist, forgetting that He commanded His followers to obey the rulings of the Pharisees on religious matters, and of course rendering unto Caesar what is properly Caesar’s under the civil codes. This fact suggests that one needs to find a way to balance out what is intrinsically good and what is unquestionably legal, what is beneficial and what is permissible.

In the passage quoted above about the actions taken by Joseph of Arimathea, the point is that this member of the Sanhedrin does BOTH. He rushes to provide a last act of compassion toward his friend Jesus, but he does so recognizing that the Mosaic law which he follows gives him a limited amount of time in which to act.  He also recognizes that he cannot simply take the body down, because he is legally required to consult the appropriate civil authority, i.e. Pilate himself, before he can do anything, even if Joseph personally believed that Jesus had been wrongly condemned.

That in itself must have been very difficult to do, as St. Mark observes.  Joseph could conceivably have been arrested by the Romans for seeking to encourage sedition, for example.  Once Pilate’s legal permission was obtained, can imagine that there must have been a flurry of activity on the part of Joseph and those who assisted him, to try to get Jesus buried before nightfall.  Though as it turned out, the fact that they could not complete all of the rituals normally mandated before a Jewish burial is in fact why the women come to the tomb at sunup on Sunday morning, so that they could finish what they and Joseph did not have time to do on Friday evening.

Joseph gives us a good example of the personal courage that anyone, be they Jew, Christian, or nothing in particular, ought to do when it comes to acting out of compassion in balance with legal authority.  The mere existence of a law cannot be an excuse for exercising the so-called “Nuremberg defense”, when it comes to how we treat one another. Just because something is perfectly legal, does not mean that we are excused from helping other people, or that we are free to harm them, when we are put in a legal position to do so.

At the same time, if we do not obey law and order when it acts to provide structure and avoid chaos, then we need to question ourselves as to whether we acting out of compassion for others, or whether we are really acting out of selfishness. A healthy and vibrant civilization is only possible when human beings voluntarily impose certain limits on how we interact with one another.  Yet it only survives if its members recognize that a balancing act, or indeed an outright change if the law proves to be unjust, is sometimes necessary.


“Joseph of Arimathea Seeking Out Pontius Pilate”
by James Tissot (c. 1886-1894)
Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York

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