A Submission on Submission

This post is my attempt to join in the discussion catalyzed by Rachel Held Evans' Let's Talk about Submission week. Visit http://rachelheldevans.com/ to join in the conversation and consider perspectives on mutual submission to another in response to the messages from the Epistles.

Here's my thoughts...

Submission conjures up some interesting images.

I think of writers busting their keyboards up with last minute copy as they scramble to sharpen a story ahead of a deadline.

I think of ultimate-fighters and wrestlers contorting their opponents' bodies into excruciating shapes until they tap out.

I think of Loki - in The Avengers - telling humanity that it only wants freedom from freedom, that absolute obedience to a higher source of authority is the true realization of freedom.

And the punster in me thinks of a submarine boat sent out on campaign in war - get it? sub mission?

The principle at play is some kind of yielding. Whether to a deadline or physical force, submission involves some level of deference, of letting go.

The idea of submission being mutual, then, is counter-intuitive. A writer couldn't submit their article mutually; a mixed martial-arts fighter couldn't get an opponent to tap out mutually; a villain couldn't demand mutual submission.

Mutual is not a natural modifier for the word submission, so how can the two be considered together? St. Paul's teachings come in the light of the Gospel of Christ, so submission gains a significant context.

Love.

In Christ, love is care for oneself and others that both gives and receives.

Sometimes, love can be exaggerated as love that must totally abandon all self-concern. However, we must love ourselves in order to truly share ourselves, following the example of Christ who allowed his hosts to treat him with hospitality, who allowed a woman to anoint his feet.

As usual, Christ manifests mysterious paradoxes to us and for us. We must let go of life in order to gain it. We must let go of ourselves in order to find ourselves. We must be served as well as serve.

In Christ, submission embodies the mutuality of true love. Christ, who is God, is love.

The greatest way to find love is to take the initiative in loving. When we give of ourselves selflessly and without condition, we open our hearts to mutuality. Others respond by filling us up with their love in kind. Such generosity and self-gift points the way to true relationship, to a two-way street of giving and receiving in which we can reflect our God, the Trinity who is Lover (Father), Beloved (Son), and the love shared between (Holy Spirit).

Mutual submission becomes possible when we meet one another on the common ground of unconditionality - care, attention, help, support, and compassion that is oriented toward emptying of self and filling up of another. In this way, the bonds we know through the mystical Body of Christ, like conduits running between each person and all their brothers and sisters, run feverishly with love.

Love enables us to give of ourselves while being filled up in kind. Sometimes, we can give more than others; other times, we may run close to empty and be in need of a big fill-up.

The Lord provides through our relationships, for His Holy Spirit - the love shared between us - dwells with us always.

Put it Down and Look Around

In the past few days, the links that appear in my feeds and inboxes all lead me to commentary on the saturation of technology and internet in daily life.

The Samsung Galaxy has been carpet-bombing us with propaganda to get us off our propaganda-driven Apple loyalties.

Rachel Held Evans tries to explain how we are in danger of becoming little more than the sum of our social media posts.

Then, my brother turns me on to an America article that argues pretty well that Apple is dangerously similar to religion, and even more damning than that, a dead-on commentary about the crooked angle Apple's newest commercials have taken.

That last article suggests that we're gonna look back on these Apple ads in particular as an example of how distracted we've gotten from what's important: "Apple’s consecrating the behavior [of staring on a screen], and even going on to say that their products, not the lives they serve, are 'what matters.'"

Let me back up a step or two. I am an Apple user, since buying my MacBook and iPod before starting college. And when my phone came up for upgrade earlier this year, dissatisfied with the messaging phone options from AT&T, I took the iPhone plunge, too, selling my iTouch so as not to limits the device depths into which I would wade.

The key to smart phones and mobile devices is moderation. Just like with sexual urges, drugs and alcohol, eating, and so many other things, the object, the action, at stake isn't bad, but our excessive (or sometimes overly minimal) use of it can lead us down a bad road.

Maps apps help us navigate and learn our way. Uber gets us a cab on the double. Yelp helps us find a good bite to eat. Laudate even gives Catholics all the goods on readings, prayers, and much more. The instant gratification is seriously dangerous, but moderate use gives us accessibility and the chance to do things we couldn't do before, or at least with greater ease and frequency.

The point of that last article I linked is that our usage of these devices - for example in these Apple commercials, for listening to music or taking photos and videos - can distract us from the presence of the moment. The mobile devices put great power into our hands, and it's not wrong for us to want to use it. It is troubling when our desire becomes fixation or addiction or compulsion. We're not so much choosing to do things on the device as we are simply just doing it.

The new Windows Phone commercials advertise its "reinvented zoom", a great new feature for those of us who have increasingly left our digital cameras in the drawer and opted to use our smart phone cameras more. But again, the challenge is to pick the times and places to bust it out rather than going on autopilot.

Anyone who's been to a concert or sporting event can attest to the proliferation of phones. I feel like people weren't this compulsory about photos and video before smart phones. We see spectacular photos and videos in the news, online, or in magazines, and we think there's no reason we can't join in. Even if we aren't as accomplished or artistically refined, we can become photographers and cameramen, but to what end?

Sometimes, we have a compulsion to take a photo or shoot a video, or sometimes we feel that we need a photo or video. Rather than experience that quintessential song live and absorb every ounce of the one-time moment, we watch through a screen of inches, trying to steady our hands and focus on our framing. Sure, we have a copy of the real deal to keep forever, but how does this impact the quality and longevity of that memory?

I worry about compulsion more than anything. At Mumford & Sons in the summer, I limited myself to two 30-second videos. On my email-linked apps, I turned off the little red numbers so that my compulsive phone-checking couldn't be entrenched by the satisfaction of having new e-mail. In notification center, I turned off alerts for everything except calls, texts, and calendar. I'm still wrestling with the phone-checking habit, a habit that's been around way before smart-phones, and even unlimited texts.

My hope is that my smart-phone habits can gravitate toward necessity and leisure and away from compulsion. I hope I just pull out my phone to check my maps app when I want to compare travel times and see when the next brown line train rolls in. I hope I check my email when I'm awaiting a particular reply from someone. I hope I check for calls and texts when I'm expecting a call or hoping to hear from someone.

The power we hold in our hands gives us great responsibility. It's up to us what to do with it. St. Paul says when he became a man he gave up childish things. We don't need to lose our childlike awe and wonder - take a picture of a pretty sky or sunset, shoot a fun selfie or two on location - but we do need to discover some degree of maturity in not only owning our freedom but choosing good, choosing presence to what's going on around us as the default rather than falling into tunnel-visioned stupor.

Use your connectivity to bolster relationships, organize yourself, maximize your time, and communicate better. Utilize the technology to make the good stuff happen then let's put our phones down and be with the world and be with others.

I Shall Oblige

What is a holy day of obligation? USCCB can give you an answer, and let me pitch in, too.

Holy days of obligations are special feasts that do not fall on Sundays that we are called to celebrate together. Sometimes it can be frustrating to have to get back to Mass a second time during the week, especially when it can be hard to get there on Sundays in the first place. Some of these special feasts have been translated to Sundays - Ascension and Epiphany sometimes - but this is less than ideal.

We go to these "extra" Masses to celebrate and reflect upon mysteries of our faith directly. Holy days of obligation allow the cycle of Sunday readings to continue uninterrupted and let us make a steady journey through the Scripture laid out for us by the carefully planned lectionary. It also gives specific space to these mysteries - All Saints, Immaculate Conception, etc. - to be considered and prayed over on their own.

Some of these causes for celebration do not come specifically from particular Scriptural narratives but from the understanding of faith that our Tradition affords us, so due reflection on them calls for a greater space than simply readings. Priests' homilies, the prayers of the Mass, and the petitions and personal prayers that follow help us focus on these great mysteries and reflect on the way they can especially illuminate our faith.

Another neat layer here is that the dating of many feasts in the Church come from Tradition that is based on careful considerations and deliberations, and, frankly, fascinating. The dating of Christmas and Easter in the early Church was a long, winding road (forgive the Wikipedia link); the 40 days of Easter before Ascension and 50 days before Pentecost draw milestones from Resurrection narratives, though Pentecost is also based in part on a pre-existing Jewish tradition; the dating of John the Baptist's and Jesus' feasts derive in part from reckoning the perfection of Jesus' life as a "perfect" 9-month pregnancy and John's gestation as one day askew - his birth is celebrated as being June 24, not June 25, though his mother is described as being in her sixth month when Mary visits with Jesus in her womb (one author's more thorough history here).

All are called to celebrate the Eucharist each Sunday, to do this in memory of Christ, as he asked - "this" meaning not just to receive Eucharist, but come together as a community, to be taken, blessed, broken, and shared, to become what we receive, to be sent forth to glorify God by our lives. However, not everyone is called to do this on a daily basis, to be a daily-Mass-goer.

The way to pray and worship for most rests, as usual, in the middle ground. You don't need to go every day, but you can't just go when you feel like it. Sundays are our memorialization of Christ's resurrection, in which we as baptized Christians celebrate the life, death, and rising of Jesus, in whose life, death, and rising we share. So we should all be doing that together and reveling communally in the awesomeness of all that.

While Sunday Eucharist fuels the heartbeat of our sacramental lives of faith, holy days add special depth. Sundays are like visits to your general physician who will give you the comprehensive check-up and can capably tend to any of your maladies; holy days are like specialists who can tend to specific ailings and parts of you.

Holy days call us to reflection upon more specific people and events - Mary, Mother of God, the Ascension of Christ, the communion of saints, the Immaculate Conception... Holy days give us the occasion, and with the help of the Mass, its prayers and readings, its priest and homily, and the community we share, the means by which we can reflect on the mysteries of faith.

Hold the Relish

In periodic news perusings, I found the headline on CNN's website - which is increasingly appearing in giant-fonted all caps - "VICTIM TO CASTRO: 'YOUR HELL IS JUST BEGINNING'".

I'm not even going to begin to imagine the "hell" that this man put these captive women through. He was ruled guilty of seriously heinous crimes (and immoral activities) and sentenced to a whopping term in jail. And rightfully so.

But our attitude toward these people is seriously skewed. These women have every right to vent their anger, frustration, and serious emotional damage in the wake of being liberated. But then what? What happens after our righteous indignation fizzles? These women must live their lives, and this dude will rot in prison.

All of them continue being people. All of them continue to be worthy of being dignified as humans and children of God through mercy and compassion, whether as free women attempting to recover as much as possible or as an indefinitely incarcerated criminal. What attitude do we have toward criminals, especially after our initial outrage fades?

It brings me back to 2011 when news broke that the US had gotten Osama bin Laden. President Obama strode out to a podium to proudly proclaim to the world that the infamous terrorist had been captured and killed, marking a serious milestone in America's war against terror.

How did so many people react? By swarming to huge crowds and cheering the death of another person. It's too nuanced to expect from a mob scene, but I would hope we could celebrate the righteous actions of America (though the morality is arguable) and the advance of freedom at the expense of terrorism. The Church rightfully came out to proclaim that Christians do not rejoice at the death of another - well said by our bishops.

It's an interesting double standard in our increasingly relativist world. People don't want to be held to an absolute, universal moral standard, or to hold others to it, yet there are certain things they can and will get riled up about to the point of mobbing and rioting to proclaim it.

We shouldn't delight in the harm done to another person. We might find peace in justice being done, but we have to withhold our desires to enjoy the trials of others too much. Schadenfreude is a dangerous thing. It is highly tempting to delight in the problems of others. I know I love to see USC and Michigan football struggle, to see players I don't like miss shots or strike out, but I have to try to fence off my delight so it supports the triumph of my team and doesn't relish the fall of others.

I'll always root by butt off for the Cubs, Bears, Bulls, Hawks, and Irish, but I'll be darned if I'll root actively against the White Sox and Cardinals, Packers and Vikings, Pacers and Heat, Red Wings and Blues, or USC and Michigan. It's not worth my energy to begin with. But additionally, true fandom (and love for that matter!) is cheering for your side and not against the other. Victory comes in the success of one side moreso than the failure of another (most of the time).

Such a distinction may be nitpicky; it may even be practically impossible. However, we follow the model of the one dude who did achieve perfection. And in Christ, we have the example of perfect freedom, perfect love, and perfect justice. Perfection may be beyond our grasp, but let's keep seeking it. And let's not delight in the shortcomings of others along the way!