Hip Hop Prophets

by Dave Gregory

In mid-April, I commenced the start of our semester’s third unit, on the prophets, with an SNL sketch starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, who plays an eager substitute teacher in a public high school classroom. Miranda stands before the class -- cocky as all get-out -- prepared (as many new teachers are) to transform the hearts and minds of his pupils with a single shattering lesson; donning four layers of clothing, inclusive of an unbuttoned flannel shirt and a corduroy sportcoat, he alights upon a backwards chair, introduces himself as Dale Sweeze: “You can call me ‘Dale,’ you can call me ‘Sweeze,’ but let’s take the ‘Mr.’ out of the picture.” Lin-Manuel points at Kenan Thompson as he delivers this line, to which the latter facepalms and groans, “Oh, man, not this guy…” The kindly though naive substitute proceeds to attempt to teach Shakespeare through hip-hop, but the teenagers see it coming.

“You like hip-hop? You like dope beats? Well what if I told you that the greatest rapper of all time isn’t 2Pac, isn’t Biggie, it’s actually…”

“Shakespeare,” replies Kenan, tilting back his head in lithe sarcasm.

“It’s actually Shakespeare!” affirms Lin-Manuel.

I wanted my freshpeople to know that I was going to attempt the not-unprecedented for this unit, and would quite possibly (read: most definitely) come off as a tool for doing so. Surely, they’d had whitey white boys like myself try such tomfoolery before. This would be an experiment that might go horribly, horribly wrong. I spent months listening to hip-hop, sifting around for those tracks most conducive to undertaking comparative analysis alongside the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic literature. I knew next to nothing about the stuff, and in order to seem somewhat educated on the material, I had to do some research. Rob’s recent post on Chance the Rapper got my juices flowing, and I present to you the fruits of some of my studying and teaching.¹

They say we N-I double G-E-R, we are
Much more, still we choose to ignore
The obvious, man this history don't acknowledge us
We were scholars long before colleges
They say we N-I double G-E-R, we are
Much more, but still we choose to ignore
The obvious, we are the slave and the master
What you lookin for? You the question and the answer

In his song “N.I.G.G.E.R. (The Slave and the Master),” Nas throws down some unsettling lyrics, rapping about the plight of the African American in contemporary society, a society in which the legacy of slavery has been constitutionally institutionalized² and its repercussions still deeply felt and experienced. The timbre of anger and hostility surrounding the n-word cannot help but manifest in this song, and I feel uncomfortable listening to it. Then again, I get the same feeling when I read the prophets.

As I’ve written before, the prophetic literature took shape during the period surrounding the Babylonian Exile, the single most devastating and formative historical event in ancient Israel’s/Judah’s history. Scribes, priests, and the literati of Israel penned the entirety of the Hebrew Bible during and after the Exile. While the history of this composition remains much-debated given its vast complexity, there is no doubt that while some of its content can be traced to periods before the Exile, the Hebrew Bible’s contextual surroundings of that cataclysmic event gave shape to the many books within it. We therefore cannot forget that every single word, every single iota and pen stroke within each and every book, came directly from the hand of someone who intimately knew enslavement and political subjugation.

On the whole, the prophets echo the sentiment of Nas. When we search for evidence of Israel and Judah throughout ancient Near Eastern literature, the texts left by Babylon and Persia mention these nations in passing. Not only does this speak to the relative insignificance of the biblical nations in the geopolitical sphere, but it directs us to one of the primary reasons for the basic existence of the Bible: Judeans penned the Bible as an act of political, cultural, and theological rebellion against surrounding powers. It takes mythology from its neighbors, and imbues ancient stories with newfound perspectives on the nature of God.

The prophets who wrote in Exile -- primarily Deutero-Isaiah (chapters 40-55) and Ezekiel -- preached for audiences who knew enslavement at the hands of the Babylonian Empire. As I explained in my last post, Deutero-Isaiah so forcefully argued for radical monotheism in order to imbue the enslaved with hope. Ezekiel, likewise, in his horrific vision of the resurrection of the dry bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14) posits his experience as nothing less than hope for the future. What has been decimated and stripped of flesh will one day be re-animated, literally in-spired with the breath of the divine. No wonder “Dem Bones,” the children’s sing-song anatomy lesson based on this paradigmatic text, has its roots in African slave spirituals. Enslavement permits few external liberties, though the interior freedom to respond with creativity can never be revoked.³

Taking up the mantle of the prophets, Nas addresses the modern enslaved, preaching to his listeners that the modern-day “N-I-double-G-E-R” is both “the question and the answer,” both “the slave and the master.” The very same paradoxical identity lay embedded within the heart of the ancient Judean, who found him- or herself in captivity, with no hope for salvation outside of their own individual person. The very fact of the Judeans’ existence remained in question, though it was nonetheless the very answer for their continuation as a people.

In the line that most catches my attention, Nas proclaims, “I spit Moses’ lost commandments like a gross sandwich out my mouth.” We tend to think of just the first Ten when we consider the Commandments, but there were -- and are -- 603 others; and while the vast majority of them are not so applicable to the 21st century, certain among them form the heart of the prophetic message.⁴ See that footnote for the most notable ones, which provide a sort of social safety net for those most likely to be forgotten and in profound lack of basic rights and necessities.

Time and time and time again, the prophets declare that the destruction of Judah and Israel is due to nothing more than the forgotten commandments, the fact that the kings⁵ of these tiny kingdoms had exploited the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant -- the anawim, the most vulnerable in society -- for the purposes of increasing the wealth and the power of the government and the Jerusalem Temple. Jesus flipped his lid, along with some tables, filled with this same anger. 2pac, Lauryn Hill, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, and many others do the same.

I do not laud the reckless condoning of misogyny and violence in a lot of hip-hop, but the Hebrew Bible doesn’t ignore the ugliness that infects a people whose backs are up against a wall, either. Jeremiah declares in verse 9 of chapter 19, “I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they will eat one another's flesh in the siege and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life will distress them." While this might be exaggerated symbolism, human beings in states of profound disenfranchisement have committed more bizarre atrocities than cannibalism. Psalm 137, whose composition took place during or soon after the Exile, goes like this, expressing the all-consuming rage that might possess the enslaved:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
     when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
     we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
     our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
     they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How can we sing the songs of the Lord
     while in a foreign land?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
     may my right hand forget its skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
     if I do not remember you,
     if I do not consider Jerusalem
     my highest joy.

Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
     on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
     “tear it down to its foundations!”
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
     happy is the one who repays you
     according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants
     and dashes them against the rocks. ⁶

When searching for a facet of our culture that hearkens to the prophetic culture, we need look nowhere else than American hip-hop, which can trace its lineage back to slave spirituals thru the Delta River blues thru jazz thru b-boys on the streets of Harlem. Enslavement and oppression birthed these musical genres, which gestated for decades in the womb of institutionalized marginalization. The prophets in slavery had nothing save memory of Judah to fuel their hope, and nothing save their songs of hope and redemption.⁷ And this is the beauty of art in any form: human hands and voices can create marvelous reminders and beacons of light in overwhelming darkness. And the prophets sung their art; when you see poetic verse in the Bible, it was originally musical. The prophets didn’t read from scrolls, they sang! Or maybe they rapped.

I’ll close with one of Tupac Shakur’s poems, “The Rose That Grew from Concrete”.

Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature's law is wrong it
learned to walk with out having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.

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1 My original game plan for this thing was to discuss three different prophets, but I quickly realized that doing so would require about 10 pages because I tend to ramble. So, please excuse the lack of detailed comparative analysis.^↩

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2 After all, when the amendments speak of “rights,” only free men possessed such rights. Women and slaves were not exactly in the minds of the founding fathers for being the recipients of such freedom.^↩

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3 For beautiful expositions of this notion, one need only look to Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, and Viktor Frankl. Man’s Search for Meaning is a must-read.^↩

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4 “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21)

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:9-10)

“When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings. When you beat your olive trees, do not strip what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.” (Deuteronomy 24:19-20)

“If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor.” (Deuteronomy 15:7)

“Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts. And this is the manner of the remission: every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it of a neighbor who is a member of the community, because the Lord’s remission has been proclaimed.” (Deuteronomy 15:1-2) ^↩

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5 The Kings were supremely messed up. David commits adultery and murders his cuckold; Solomon, despite his wisdom, maintains one thousand wives and concubines, which leads him to idolatry; Manasseh -- one of the final kings -- constructs idols in the Temple and immolates his own children. The Bible only maintains that Josiah, who ascended to the throne as a child, remained sinless; he was, however, too late to prevent destruction at the hands of foreign empires. We revere the kings, but in reality their whole purpose is to demonstrate the futility of earthly monarchy: “This will be the procedure of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and place them for himself in his chariots and among his horsemen and they will run before his chariots. He will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and of fifties, and some to do his plowing and to reap his harvest and to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will also take your daughters for perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and your vineyards and your olive groves and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your seed and of your vineyards and give to his officers and to his servants. He will also take your male servants and your female servants and your best young men and your donkeys and use them for his work.He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his servants.Then you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” (1 Samuel 8:11-18) When the Hebrews ask for a king because the judges failed so hard, God warns that they won’t like the end result. Human weakness destined the kings for abject failure.^↩

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6 See Matisyahu’s song “Jerusalem”, based on Psalm 137. He used to be an Orthodox Jew (he’s still Jewish, though has disassociated himself from Orthodox Judaism), and his reggae-style rap is filled with biblical and religious allusions. Wild stuff.^↩

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7 See Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” for a piece that very much rings of the prophets…”Won’t you help me sing another song of freedom, ‘cause all I ever have, redemption songs, redemption songs.”^↩

Inspiration: Bumper Stickers, Pep Talks, and the Breath of God

by Dan Masterton

I’m not much for bumper sticker wisdom, cliche slogans, or inspirational quotes. In fact, as a cheeky high schooler, my fellow officers in comedy/improv club were so tired of all that stuff on other clubs’ shirts that we made the back of ours simply say: “Inspirational Quote.” --Anonymous

Personally, I am more fired up by something with more context and depth. I’m always down for a good Remember the Titans or Hoosiers watch; tell me about a great podcast episode you listened to recently (like this great installment of NPR’s Hidden Brain on hookup culture); give me a good ten- or fifteen-minute TED talk (like this one on wrongful convictions); share with me a deep dive feature piece on a significant person or issue (like this Cardinal Cupich articulation on a consistent ethic of solidarity).

This past Sunday at Mass, listening to the readings got me thinking more on inspiration. With a newborn daughter at home with us now, with going back to work soon, with an apartment move coming up, with ongoing professional discernment as the school where I work phases itself out, the current is flowing with plenty of strength in the ol’ mind-stream these days. A few weeks ago, while chaperoning a pilgrimage to hike El Camino in Spain, I was waiting in line to ascend the stone staircase and hug the statue of St. James in his Santiago Cathedral. I was frustrated by my students’ loud talking and impatience, and as I tried to calm myself and relish this pilgrim moment and sought tranquility, I could hear a priest saying the words of institution to his small community in a nearby side chapel. The answer, as always, was and is prayer, especially through the Sacrament and Word at Mass.

The First Reading from Acts celebrates the preaching and healings wrought by the apostles through God, and this momentum continues into Samaria. With great excitement, the apostles head over there to follow up baptisms with laying on of hands so these people might also receive the Holy Spirit.

The Second Reading from 1 Peter challenges us to always be able to give a reason for our hope, and to do so with gentleness. The best answer is founded on Christ, who suffered for our sins and died for us, so that He might lead us to life in God, for the Risen Lord rose to new life in the Spirit.

The Gospel, a passage from John, shares part of Jesus’ Last Supper “Farewell Discourse.” Jesus announces that the Father will send an Advocate, a Spirit of Truth, to be with the disciples as Jesus offers them a glimpse of God’s mysterious unity and steadfast presence in Father, Son, and Spirit.

The motif of God’s spirit cut through my noise -- the mental inertia, the side-glances to a sleeping baby, the ushers and late-arriving crowd -- to draw me back to the book of Genesis. In the story of the garden, when God creates Adam, Genesis 2:7 says, “then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

The word spirit is rooted in the Latin word spirare, which means breath, or even life. Our understanding of spirit as a soul or life force resonates tightly with our literal breath, our physical life force. And what’s more, the idea of inspiration, drawing from these same roots, is to breathe life into someone. Inspiration isn’t just firing someone up to deliver a strong performance on stage or execute a play on the field or study hard for a test; inspiration, on a deeper level, in a fuller sense, is breathing life into someone. So when I think of inspiration, my heart hearkens back to God breathing first life into the first humans.

And as I took in these readings anew, and discovered the thematic unity lurking within, I found the constancy of God’s inspiration. The same God who inspired Adam and Eve into being inspires new life into the Risen Lord and into the resurrection of the faithful, inspires new life into Christ’s missionaries and followers, and inspires enduring fidelity and resolute love by this Holy Spirit.

Thinking of evolving new normals, with work and wife and daughter, with new apartment and environs, with professional transition, I found gratitude for God who inspires. Surely, he breathes life into us with the pithy wit of a good psalm or a punchy parable, yet He also breathed the life into us in our mothers’ wombs, breathes life into us in the joy of community, breathes life into us through the inspired Word, and inspires us in the foundational heartbeat of Eucharistic living.

Dancing at the Intersection of Faith and Culture

by Rob Goodale

One thing that’s really gotten under my skin lately is the strained relationship between culture and religion. As the entire world wanders aimlessly into a scorching wildfire of polarized “hot takes,” theology continues to find itself propped up as the enemy of academic rigor, democratic values, and scientific knowledge. We’re surrounded by a cacophony of voices that have placed intellect, democracy, and science on one side of an imaginary chasm, and religion on the other. Their implicit demand is to choose one side and leave the other behind. In many cases, I have witnessed the Church embrace this enmity in a misguided attempt to “fight the good fight,” which, okay, yeah, smug, sneering condescension is admittedly infuriating. But meeting hostility with hostility moves us even farther away from a solution, not to mention the fact that it compromises the very human community Christ lived, died, and rose to reconcile to the Father.

I am far from the first to criticize the angry back-and-forth shouting match. America’s favorite volunteer parish catechist Stephen Colbert has consistently brought outspoken opponents of religion onto his show in a demonstration of the possibility for dialogue. Centers at universities all over the world are devoted to bringing faith and culture into dialogue. Br. Guy Consolmagno, hero to Catholic school science teachers everywhere, continues to shout into the void about the ridiculousness of the false dichotomy between science and religion (and of course, so does his boss, Pope Francis). However, there’s someone else who belongs to this Dream Team, someone you might not expect: a charming dude from the South Side of Chicago whose grin is almost as permanent as his baseball cap: Chance the Rapper.

* * *

You might have heard of Chance the Rapper; he’s having pretty much the best year ever. About a year ago, he also released a mixtape called Coloring Book. Coloring Book features some people you might’ve heard of, like Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and Justin Bieber, and in that way it’s very similar to today’s pop music. At the same time, it also features The Chicago Children’s Choir, a banging horn section, and Gospel music superstar Kirk Franklin, and in this way it is unlike any music I had ever heard.

Since Coloring Book came out, Chance has been something of a cross between a superhero and that kid from your neighborhood that your mom says you should hang out with more often because she thinks he’d be a good influence on you. He won three Grammys. He performed at the White House and became a close family friend to the Obamas. He donated a million dollars to Chicago public schools. He became the most gif-worthy person in the world, and let me take a minute here to pick out three specific examples of his gif-worthiness:

When Beyonce snuck up behind him and gave him a hug, and he reacted the way we would all react if Beyonce snuck up behind you and gave you a hug.

When he threw out the first pitch at a White Sox game when it was raining and celebrated by busting a move.

When he danced backstage at the ESPYs with Steph Curry and made everybody in the whole world all smile at once.

It’s this magnetic, authentic joy that makes Chance such a big deal to me. In a world where seemingly every part of public life is as polarizing as it’s been in most of our lifetimes, where faith is increasingly used as a weapon to bring about dissension and separation, and where our celebrities are chewed up and spit out as fast as the news cycle can manage, Chance stands out.

* * *

The second most exciting thing about Chance the Rapper is that he talks about God in his music. Coloring Book isn’t Christian rap; its lyrics include a fair amount of profanity. The thing about it is, it’s such a beautifully human collection of music. The themes of the songs on Coloring Book range from mournful eulogies for loved ones who have died (“Summer Friends”) or from whom we’ve drifted apart (“Same Drugs”), to startlingly frank commentaries on luck and gratitude (“Blessings”). There’s an entire song about how much he misses dancing with his girlfriend at the roller rink (“Juke Jam”), and another about the bittersweet realization that, now that they are parents, they can’t live the same way they used to (“Smoke Break”). It also includes Chance saying things like this:

This for the kids of the King of all Kings ¹ 

I got the power, I could poke Lucifer with crucifix² 

Magnify, magnify, lift it on high ³ 

I speak of wondrous unfamiliar lessons from childhood, make you remember how to smile good⁴

Coloring Book’s lyrics are also full of shout outs to Space Jam and The Lion King, so you could probably say that it’s like Chance created it specifically to fulfill all of my wildest dreams. It’s perfect.⁵ But it’s the way he raps, and the way he creates music, and the way he generally carries himself, more than the words themselves, that make Chance such an important figure.

See, the most exciting thing about Chance the Rapper is Chancelor Bennett, the actual person. It’s his story, the story behind Coloring Book, and what it came to symbolize in my life, that powered me through last summer and helped my slay the comps dragon.

* * *

You can find more detailed versions of Chance’s life before, during, and after his meteoric rise to fame—I recommend this profile from GQ, which is excellent—but the crucial part, for me, is this: Chance got famous and moved to Los Angeles in 2014. In a couple of months of living “the life” in LA, he started to lose a lot of what mattered to him: his health, his family, and his faith. So he moved back to Chicago to rediscover the world that made him. The result is Coloring Book, which is changing the way pop culture critics are talking about rap music—and about Christianity.

“This record is so good, and it’s so moving, and warm, and joyful,” said Andy Greenwald, former television critic at Grantland and current host of The Ringer’s pop culture podcast, The Watch. “This dude makes religion sound fantastic. I listen to Chance talk about his life, and he loves being a Christian, and I’m like, ‘this sounds interesting,’ and that’s not a thing I ever thought I would say.”

Coloring Book has that effect on Greenwald and others precisely because Chance didn’t go out and try to write a Christian rap album; he’s just a dude who has a relationship with God and creates authentic art. “I never really set out to make anything that could pretend to be the gospel,” he said in an interview with Beats 1 Radio. “It’s just music from me as a Christian man.”

It’s the matter-of-factness with which Chance approaches his faith, and the effect it has on his art, that makes it so graceful and so joyful. He is not setting out to broadcast his own Christianity, but he doesn’t hide it, either; it is part of him, and so it is part of his music.

The pain in Chance’s life also worms its way into his music, but again, the effect of his faith is fascinating and poetic. While much of the world points to evil and declares that it must mean God doesn’t exist, and another part of the world wallpapers over suffering with bubblegum K-LOVE platitudes about God making everything okay, here we find something refreshingly real: a Christian person inviting God into the midst of his suffering, and processing how it all fits together by creating beautiful art.

“There is something about Chance's voice and manner that suggests joy,” writes GQ staff writer Zach Baron. “Sometimes joy shaded by real pain, or real sadness, or real loss, but, nevertheless: joy.” It’s in this willingness to hold all of these disparate things together—pain and joy and sadness and faith and family and fame and culture and religion—that we find not only Chance the Rapper, but also the aforementioned Pope Francis. They are both actively changing perceptions of religion, imbuing the intersection of faith and culture with radiant joy and dancing on the street corner.

Both of them are human, and they both seem to have a sense of all the good and bad that is wrapped up in their humanity. Neither is a savior, and neither tries to be. Both, however, choose to become icons of Christ, making love and hope and joy present in a world that desperately needs more of those things. In this way, they mirror Our Lady, who was the very first to, in the words of Cardinal Archbishop Timothy Dolan, “give God a human nature.”

This, it seems, is the way forward for the Church today: to authentically live as men and women of faith, radiating with joy and giving God a human nature, without fear of the world into which we bring Him.

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1 From “All We Got,” which is the best song.^↩

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2 From “Finish Line/Drown,” which is the best song.^↩

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3 From “How Great,” which is the best song.^↩

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4 From “Blessings (Reprise),” which is the best song.^↩

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5 It also, somehow, doesn’t include either of my favorite pieces of music from Chance, which would be “Sunday Candy” and his verse on Kanye’s “Ultralight Beam.”^↩

Open Letter to Cardinal Cupich

by Dan Masterton

* * *

Cardinal Cupich,

My name is Dan Masterton, and I am the Campus Minister at St. Benedict Preparatory School in the North Center neighborhood of Chicago. I didn’t go into work today... or yesterday... and I won’t go in tomorrow... I am home on paid paternity leave with my wife, Katherine, and our newborn daughter, Lucy Karen.

I’m sure in your many years ministering to so many people and families, you’ve met lots of children, and maybe even held your fair share of babies. But have you ever had the chance to really hold a baby? To just stare plaintively at the little face of a person so young? To just get to marvel at their searching gaze, their myriad wrinkles and skin rolls, their complete helplessness? And without the pressure of the next meeting or phone call bearing down on you?

If not, I’d enjoy bringing Lucy to meet you sometime. As I was relishing this very thing the other day, I felt a peace and simplicity I’ve only previously felt when praying the Liturgy of the Hours with the monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani. Staring deep into the gaze of this baby invites me into a monastic timelessness. Even as the whirr of traffic, the hubbub of the sidewalks, and the roar of the L continue around me, I have moments when I’m totally unaware of it all as I hold my resting baby daughter. (Additional feelings arise when she’s restive rather than resting.)

I have long felt a strong and clear call to marriage, to family life, and to fatherhood, and I have been especially excited for it ever since I married my wife, promising her earnestly that I am going to be a great dad. My gifts and personality correspond well to fatherhood, and my God-given easy-going way disposes me well to dealing with the anxieties that pregnancy brought and that parenthood brings. But there was something more that helped strengthen and solidify my peace and humble confidence in approaching fatherhood: I knew, that for at least twelve weeks, my full-time job would simply be learning how to be a dad.

Now, a lot of it is a how-to crash course, a whirlwind of repetition in the musts of baby care: diaper and clothing changes, soothing a baby, gently putting her down to bed, reading her cues, etc. It has been invaluable to keep pace with my wife in learning those necessary tasks. Additionally, my wife and I have identified “dad jobs”: dad burps her after feeds; dad swaddles her before bed (because he has learned to do it very well); dad does the baths. I love how these special moments are always mine to share with my daughter, and I get to practice and enjoy them regularly and repeatedly like it’s my job.

Most importantly, I’ve had the privilege of getting to realize my fatherhood immersively. Sure, I had the butterflies-in-the-stomach excitement at the positive pregnancy test, at the wonder of the ultrasounds, and at the sound of her heartbeat – but after each of those moments, I went back to work and spent the majority of my time on the job. Now with my daughter born, having the time and energy – physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually – to focus primarily and thoroughly on being a dad helps move me deeper. Fatherhood isn’t just a concept or the topic of small-talk when people greet me; being a dad is the evolution and development of my vocation as a husband and family man. Immersing in these first moments of fatherhood, and doing so temporarily free from splitting myself between the constituencies of work and home, makes this reality a cultivated, internalized thing, a part of me and my life and my identity and who I am.

So when people see the three of us or come to visit, and they ask about our leaves from work, I tell them that I have twelve weeks paid to spend with my family. And when they express their surprise or envy or delight, I tell them, “Thanks, Cardinal Cupich.”

So to you,
and everyone in our archdiocesan offices
and administration
who worked to make this privilege of working for the Church a reality,
from a father at home
with a beautiful baby daughter
and a wife who enjoys tackling parenthood together,

thank you.

God bless,
Dan Masterton

(father of Lucy)

The Freedom Conspiracy

by Jenny Klejeski

In the 8th grade literature class that I teach, we are reading Animal Farm by George Orwell. If you’re not familiar with it, Animal Farm is a satirical allegory for the Russian Revolution, criticizing socialism and warning of the corrupting influence of power. Before reading Animal Farm, we read a memoir of a girl living in China during the communist cultural revolution of the 1960s called Red Scarf Girl. Before that, we read The Giver, a dystopian novel about a seemingly perfect community with some dark secrets.

Sensing a theme?¹

In our introduction to Animal Farm, we watched this video on what the term “Orwellian” means. The video features one of the slogans from the totalitarian regime in Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

In our discussion of this maxim, my class talked about how it has shown to be true in the books we’ve read so far. Through censorship and revisionist history, those who are presently in power have the ability to control what people know of the past, which in turn affects the future.

It’s fairly easy for my students to recognize and understand this rather sinister idea within the context of totalitarian governments. They can see how freedom is threatened by propaganda, book burning, brainwashing, and other types of systematized coercion.

One thing that I want my students to understand in our study of these books is that this control is not limited to political dictatorships. In our American arrogance, I think we have a tendency to believe we’re immune to such control. We believe that with our freedom of speech, our ability to search the internet to find anything, our say in who our leaders are, our lack of censorship, our political diversity, that we are in total control of our present.² But really, how in control are we?

I’m not talking here about crazy conspiracy theories or #fakenews or other paranoia-inducing ideas. I simply mean that we are fed half-truths about the world at every turn. There are people and institutions and conventions that control the present. Celebrities, political platforms, news outlets, social media all tell us a very particular narrative about what it means to be human, what we need to be happy, successful, and loved. We are told who the “other” is and how they are worthy or unworthy of our attention.

By being created in God’s image and likeness, God gave us the greatest possible gift: the ability to love, made possible only through free will.³ To love is to freely give over, through an act of will, that which is at the heart of who we are as humans: our freedom. Freedom finds its fulfillment in self-gift; it’s a response to the truth of another. It is only in freedom that we can truly love and it is only in truth that we can be really free.

What happens, then, when we accept anything less than the truth? We inhibit our own ability to love.

While we pity the victims of brainwashing, surveillance, censorship, and totalitarianism because we see how their freedom is limited, we ourselves fail to recognize how we have prostituted our own freedom to love in truth. How tragic it is to think of how cheaply we give our freedom to the highest bidder—how we limit our ability to love through the lies that we take in about ourselves, about others, about the world.

Modern people are not unhappy because they want too much. On the contrary, it’s that they’ve settled for far less than what they are created for.⁴ And this settling is not merely a passive acceptance of lies, but actually contributes to the creation of further deception.⁵

In David Foster Wallace’s speech “This Is Water,”⁶ he asserts that everybody worships something. Our freedom lies in choosing what it is that we worship and he states that the argument for worshipping some sort of spiritual being outside of oneself is that anything else will “eat you alive.”

He states: “If you worship money and things, [...] then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. [...] Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

While Wallace isn’t coming from a strictly Christian point of view, his words still hold true. When we give over our freedom to anything less than the truth, we become slaves to the lie.

Christ said, “you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” In the encyclical Redemptor Hominis, Pope St. John Paul II states that these words of Christ contain both a requirement and a warning. The requirement is to accept truth as the condition for authentic freedom. The warning is “to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world.”

Before we pat ourselves on the back for being enlightened (be it regarding politics, religion, worldview, what have you), we ought to ask ourselves if that which we accept is true in relation to the fullness of truth revealed in Christ or if we are swallowing half-truths. Are we embracing the beautiful complexity of life or flattening the mystery? Let us seek to go about the world as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves. 

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1 My goal is for all my students to be wearing tin foil hats by the end of trimester... (kidding, of course)^↩

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2 Insight from Dan: In addition, the ability to create and craft an image via social media -- we can skew photos of ourselves and craft text to create and sustain the image we desire.^↩

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3 CCC §1730^↩

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4 Rob, our resident C.S. Lewis expert, points us to this quotation: “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”^↩

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5 “Oh, what a tangled web we weave….”^↩

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6 Yes, this is at least the third time this speech has been referenced on this blog. Do yourself a favor and listen to the whole thing if you haven’t yet.^↩

Published at Millennial Journal: How Single Catholics Can Approach Meeting People

Happy Thursday, all!

Today's post is a reflection I wrote for a discussion spurred by the editor of the Millennial Journal (view the Twitter feed of it here) about the challenges facing young people who desire to be faithful Catholics yet are seeking a romantic relationship and potentially marriage.

The inherent subjectivity of love means that no philosophy or style can be a one-size-fits-all approach that works for everyone. So as one seeks romantic love, spirituality demands attentiveness to the emotions. Awareness of one’s emotions can help attune the heart and soul to more deeply understand the will of God. As one navigates the treacherous waters of single life, how can a spiritually grounded approach help steer the ship?...

To continue reading my work as a guest contributor with reflections and concrete suggestions, visit the full article at Millennial Journal.

-Dan

May You Always Be Breaking Me

by Rob Goodale

Lord, I love you and need you.

May you always be breaking me,

and rebuilding me to better love and serve you.

Amen.

This was my foolish prayer as I began walking the Camino de Santiago on the Monday of Holy Week. Now, never in my wildest dreams did I ever think walking the Camino de Santiago during Holy Week was a thing I would ever get to do, and I am filled to the brim with gratitude for being blessed with such an opportunity. I’m just saying, perhaps I should have been more careful with what I wished for.

Carrying a twenty-pound pack while walking 73 miles in five days would give anyone achy feet and tired legs, no matter their inner disposition. But the blisters and bruises weren’t the most difficult obstacles I faced during my experience as a peregrino. God answered my prayer, as he does every day: my five days in Spain were a consistent experience of being broken and rebuilt on a regular, perhaps hourly basis.

It has taken me a long time—and a lot of brokenness—to start to glimpse the beauty in the breaking. My abiding sense at the end of this Holy Week pilgrimage was that, paradoxically, we cannot hope to be made whole unless we are also willing to be broken.

* * *

My prayer for brokenness is not a request to have suffering inflicted upon me. At least I don’t think it is; I don’t think God does that sort of thing.¹ This is something I cannot hope to understand fully, but I ask for it nonetheless. I extend an invitation to grace, a request to be shaken up by being overwhelmingly flooded with the Love of a God whose ways are not my ways, to have my heart of stone be smashed to smithereens.

This was my experience of Holy Week.

Two experiences stand out in particular as moments of being broken. One was at Igrexa de San Xoán de Furelos, a tiny little parish church on the outskirts of one of the main towns along the way. We passed the church on a little after lunchtime on Wednesday—our third day, the toughest and longest of the week. I was tired, cranky, and in a hurry to be finished walking, but one of the other peregrinos in our group asked if he could go inside the church. Begrudgingly, I dragged myself through the door behind him, and then abruptly stopped, mouth hanging open.

Hanging on the wall on one side of the little chapel was a crucifix unlike any I had ever seen before: the corpus of Christ hung lifeless off of the wood of the cross, dangling by only one hand. Eventually, I managed to move out of the doorway and onto my knees, all the while transfixed by the image across from me.



The starkness of the image on the wall sent shivers down my spine. Here was not merely a piece of religious artwork, nor even a moving symbol of God’s boundless love for us. No, this was a hauntingly graphic representation of a hauntingly graphic public execution. A man truly died a grotesque and horrific death, a man who also happens to be the Word Made Flesh. Jesus’ death is not a heroic act of valor; it is a humiliating degradation of humanity, with every shred of honor and dignity stripped away.

Staring at this crucifix on the Wednesday of Holy Week, I found myself uncomfortably aware at the irony of the final days of Jesus’ earthly life. The events of the Triduum are certainly sensational, but not in the way anyone would expect. They are not acts of grandeur; they are noteworthy because of their smallness. Jesus shares a meal with his friends, in which he washes their feet and promises to remain with them after death under the humble auspices of bread and wine. Jesus struggles in prayer with feelings of fear and loneliness. He dies a gruesome and horrific death, publicly executed as a treasonous criminal. And then he rises from the dead, not with a parade or a festival, but in secret.

Again and again, I find myself struck by how simple these actions are. I look for big things, but God, it would seem, looks for small things. The Triduum, as the culmination of Jesus’ earthly presence, implore us to see as God sees, which is profoundly new. God’s ways are unfamiliar and jarring; the notions we’ve spent our entire lives embedding in our minds and hearts are dislodged. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “grace must wound before it can heal.”

The second moment from my time as a peregrino that has lingered in my memory took place on our last day in Spain. After celebrating the Easter Vigil at the cathedral in Santiago, we took a bus on Easter Sunday to Finisterra, on the western coast. We found ourselves in a little alcove, where grassy dunes gave way to brilliant white sand and sparkling blue-green water. Perhaps because it was Easter, or perhaps because it was “only” 70 degrees, the beach was empty.

I once again found myself staring, mouth agape, at an unexpectedly jarring sight. This tiny little slice of reality was brimming with peace, and I sat down in the sand, grinning from ear to ear and marveling at the overwhelming beauty that had been entrusted to me, a beauty that breaks my heart in an entirely new way. Even now, I can’t help but smile: Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed, and how lucky am I to have been entrusted with this precious secret. Jesus lives, and I get to know. Glory be to God.



We are the only people on a magnificent beach at the end of the world. 

It’s warm, the sun is shining, and Jesus is risen.

Amen, alleluia.

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1 For a deeper exploration of the problem with the whole “everything happens for a reason” thing, and the way such a claim attributes suffering to God, go read chapter one of Doing the Truth in Love, by Michael Himes. ^↩