Thursday, August 24, 2017

Totall(it)y Awesome


by Dan Masterton

Did you guys hear there was an eclipse this week!?

I say that in jest, but in all seriousness, I love astronomy. The skies have long intrigued me, and as a college freshman, I quite excitedly chose astronomy and cosmology1 to satisfy my college requirement of two science courses.2 I was pumped for the eclipse, even if I felt sort of hipster-y, since I and my fellow nerds were into this scene way before it was cool.

I decided to go the viewing party at the park in town, where I figured there’d be a little crowd of gawkers, as the library was offering crafts, DIY stations to create safe viewing techniques, and even live music by a local group. When I got there around 11am, my stroller-wheeling self was overwhelmed by activity.

There was a huge crowd3 -- people of all ages, tons of kids, families, young adults, and elderly residents alike. People were quite confidently wearing their goofy eclipse-viewing glasses, as if they’d just walked out of an early 90s 3-D movie; people were wielding quite the array of outlandish apparatuses, including one dad who had a cardboard tube suitable for rolling a carpet connected to some sort of tripod and box; and when I figured it’d be more low-key to make a pinhole projector than to fashion a box to wear on my head, people were wearing boxes on their heads. That whole scene added to the frustration of the persistent cloud cover that brought out my snarky side.
Back to my hipster-y feel from before, rolling onto this scene felt like I was walking past one of those on-trend bars or restaurants. You know the ones... It looks cool. There’s an attractive, intangible vibe coming off it. It’s crowded and only getting more crowded-er. People are talking about it and making plans to come. But few people, if anyone, can clearly articulate what exactly is cool about it.

The eclipse just had that X-factor that can’t be easily pinned down. The way this non-technological, non-media event rallied people shows that we need to more openly embrace natural opportunities to be laid bare, to have something of magnitude leave us raw and vulnerable, to make space to simply appreciate existence, because these things compel us as humans. (see below) GHW Bush; WGN/Skilling; that guy) Like I’ve mentioned in the past, we just aren’t willing to let go of our personal autonomy over what we’re willing to pay attention to, and we sustain an unreasonably high bar, or at least a stubbornly subjective and individualized bar, for when we’ll allow ourselves to care about something.

Ultimately, it’s wildly frustrating to figure out what will motivate, captivate, and allure people. In other words, what will go viral and won’t and why?! Humans and our attention spans are so fickle, especially as our proliferating connectivity gives us so many options that are always accessible without interruption.4 Yet, here on August 21, 2017, something about a solar eclipse captured the imagination of a huge amount of people.

On the surface, it caters comfortably to our social media obsession. It’s easily photographable. We shoot our amateur videos to post and send; we can take pictures of the places we view it from; we can take selfies in our goofy glasses or with our rickety viewing kits. And that’s actually cool on some level because it hypes something natural and scientific and organic.

But that was all fairly predictable. Zooming out further, a solar eclipse is simply something huge, something big, something grand. It’s the deep-view perspective from our huge planet looking toward our massive home star as our giant rocky moon comes between us for a good show. A solar eclipse is visual and palpable. We can see the shadow, we can fall into shade and unusual midday darkness and feel the short-lived cool of the temperature drop.

Most of all, a solar eclipse is rare. It gives us that scarce and uncommon thing we crave; we gain the ability to own or experience something in a moment that not everyone gets to have, and we delight in that privileged moment.

The oomph of the eclipse comes in appreciating that rare moment not so much as something collected and possessed but as something to behold and marinade in. To me, science is the language of Creation, the way we discern God’s elegant hand animating our world. We can see it in the complexity and efficiency of the body, in the breathtaking landscapes of the earth, and across the universe -- from the destruction in supernovae and black holes, the enigmatic origins in the big bang and inflation, the discovery of exoplanets and solar systems, and our quest to discover the “Goldilocks planet” that is just right for human-like life.

In learning the ins and outs of astronomy, my jaw metaphorically hit the floor in learning about eclipses. The moon orbits the earth. The earth orbits the sun. Orbits are elliptical, so they’re not precise circles. The planets have perihelions and aphelions, the moon has a perigee and apogee. Basically, there’s a lot of complicated movement, shape, and size as everything hurtles yet somehow retains surprising elegance and order.

Lunar eclipses are definitely neat, but the earth is way bigger than the sun and easily blocks the sun’s light as it eclipses the moon periodically. On the other hand, solar eclipses are wild. The moon is tiny, astronomically speaking. The sun is MUCH larger. Yet, as these orbits spin on, moments of total eclipse happen because of an amazing ratio: the ratio of the size of the sun to its distance to the earth is almost exactly equal to the ratio of the size of the moon to its distance to the earth. And because of this, we can experience “totality,” a short window for certain locations on earth where the moon covers the sun almost exactly. Not because it’s larger than the sun and not in a partial way because it’s smaller than the sun, but because it’s an almost perfect, exact match.

SO COOL
I’m not one to argue proofs of God, though there’s great merit in such lines of thinking, especially for those who think well in that way. Instead, I draw a powerful correlation between such elegant beauty and the benevolent, loving Creation of our Creator God. It’s especially beautiful because eclipses are not part of our sustenance. The sun’s size and distance is just right for our earthly existence, but a solar eclipse doesn’t hugely affect us. It’s not so long that it adversely affects our life here; it’s not so short that it can’t be experienced and enjoyed for its beauty. It’s just right to be savored without fear.

And it’s in this gentle and moderate, yet immense and cosmically grand, beauty that I see God, and hope you can, too. Beyond the wild spectacle of huge crowds with funny glasses and boxes on their heads, this cosmic moment reflects the suffusive love of our Creator God, the love that made us in His image and became Incarnate for our liberation, of our Creator. And that’s the larger miracle.


1 Note: astronomy not astrology, the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial bodies interpreted as having an influence on human affairs and the natural world; cosmology, not cosmetology, the professional skill or practice of beautifying the face, hair, and skin.↩


2 Big tip of the cap to Prof. Peter Garnavich, who was way overqualified to be teaching a 100-level class to a bunch of Arts & Letters and Business bimbos. My four friends and I greatly appreciated it and sustain a clandestine cult-like following of him to this day.↩


3 Estimates had it at around 4,000 people. This after, a few weeks ago, the three of us watched Field of Dreams for summer movie nights in the same park with about 75 other people.↩


4 When was the last time you went a day without using anything connected to the internet? For me, I think it was my last trip in Europe in Spring 2014. Yikes. ↩

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Monday, August 21, 2017

The Slow, Painful Death of Martyrs

by Jenny Klejeski


Without sacrifice there is no love.   –St. Maximilian Kolbe

I think anyone who was raised in a Christian tradition must have, at some point or another, day dreamed about being martyred. Perhaps this was my own macabre pastime, but I’m guessing others shared in this activity. How could we not? We’re told these stories of heroic virtue: the early Christians fed to the lions, Joan of Arc burnt at the stake, Isaac Jogues hacked to death by a tomahawk, and maybe when we were older, Agatha whose breasts were cut off. They’re hero stories–they’re meant to inspire courage. It’s not for nothing that we keep telling these stories over and over again (even ones with dubious historical credibility). And just as we do when we hear any hero story (Christian or secular), we ask ourselves the question, “what would I have done in that situation?”

This is not a bad question to ask per se, but doesn’t it miss the point of these stories?

The feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe (which we celebrated a week ago), always reminds me of a homily I heard several years ago on his feast day. The gist of the homily was this: Maximilian Kolbe would not have been able to sacrifice his life for the other man in Auschwitz had he not been practicing it his whole life. In other words, we tend to think of the heroic sacrifice of Maximilian Kolbe (and other martyrs) as grand, isolated events, when in reality, they are simply the logical culmination of a life of sacrifice.

This, I believe, is much more convicting than the idea that martyrs simply made one major decision for Christ at the very end of their lives. It shifts the question from the entertaining, day-dream hypothetical “if I were faced with death by [lethal injection/firing squad/burning at the stake/beheading/gladiatorial games/etc.] for the sake of Christ, would I accept it?” about which we probably concoct a heart-wrenching scene, and to which we will probably answer ‘yes,’ depending on how pious we’re feeling on a given day. Perhaps we share the sentiment of Flannery O’Connor’s unnamed girl in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost:” “She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”

Instead, the real, much more mundane (and yet somehow more gut-wrenching) question that the actual lives of the martyrs should prompt us to think on is “what am I doing right now to die for Christ?” If a martyr is a witness for Christ, how am I dying so as to witness to Christ? This is where real martyrdom lies. It is a movement away from an individualized spirituality and pride-masked-as-sacrifice. It is continual death to self. Slowly and painfully chipping away my wants and whims so as to be filled with self-effacing, self-emptying love. And as we practice self-denial in the small, everyday matters, we find ourselves more ready and able to say an obedient ‘yes’ when the stakes are higher.

Christopher Nolan’s latest movie Dunkirk explores this very idea. The film recounts the events that took place in the French village of Dunkirk during the Second World War when the British army, surrounded by the Germans, attempted to evacuate their troops. Nolan’s take on this event is fascinating because he chooses not simply to give an historical tribute to the affair, but rather to create a character-focused masterpiece.

The story takes place through three different perspectives: the battle in the sky, in the sea, and on the beach. Nolan creates a sense of suspenseful waiting and eerie monotony by having scarce dialogue as troops on the beach helplessly await rescue. These long stretches of monotony are harshly interrupted by violent outbursts of bombs, torpedoes, and machine gun fire.

Nolan’s portrayal of the event is much less about an historical event and much more about the choices that lie within every human heart. Yes, there are certainly great acts of heroic self-sacrifice (martyrdoms of a sort), but the majority of the characters are incapable of actually doing anything. They’re trapped in Dunkirk, waiting—hoping—to be rescued by some external force. And other characters, who are in the midst of making heroic choices, are given every reason and every opportunity to turn back. There is a great drama to even the most mundane moments of the film as you see the characters make choices out of great selfishness or out of great love, and these choices impact their capacity for heroism.

In some ways, this is what we all face. We’re all in need of an external, transcendent salvation and we all have choices to make in the interim. We can choose what is self-serving or what is self-emptying. And while we may crave to perform a grand, heroic act, it’s probably not what we’re called to at this moment. I’m willing to be burned at the stake, yes, but somehow emptying the dishwasher without recognition seems impossible. Probably because the latter is real. In For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann warns against the temptation to oversimplify the drama of our redemption to one moment:
“The fight of the new Adam against the old Adam is a long and painful one, and what a naive oversimplification it is to think, as some do, that the ‘salvation’ they experience in revivals and ‘decisions for Christ,’ and which result in moral righteousness, soberness and warm philanthropy, is the whole of salvation, is what God meant when He gave His Son for the life of the world. The one true sadness is ‘that of not being a saint,’ and how often the ‘moral’ Christians are precisely those who never feel, never experience this sadness, because of their own ‘experience of salvation,’ the feeling of ‘being saved’ fills them with self-satisfaction; and whoever has been ‘satisfied’ has already received his reward and cannot thirst and hunger for that total transformation and transfiguration of life which alone makes ‘saints’” (79, emphasis mine).
If we desire the crown of sainthood, we can’t wait to be thrown to the lions or asked at gunpoint if we believe in Christ. It begins today. Wherever we are, whomever we’re with, however silently and unseen. Mary’s glorious Assumption required her quiet fiat. Let us ask her intercession to spare us from the ‘one true sadness:’ that of not being a saint.

A version of this post first appeared under the same title on I Smile, Of Course in 2016.
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Thursday, August 17, 2017

Pay Attention

by Dan Masterton

We don’t value the opportunities we have to communicate with other people.

This is true of many everyday interactions, and it becomes increasingly clear when someone steps up in front of a large group. Frequently, a person goes up with no outline, no notes, no hard plan for what they’ll say and how. Instead, they riff and improvise, feeling it out as they go.

I imagine this was less prevalent when people relied on phone calls, written letters, and face-to-face meetings. In today’s world, the centrality of social media and the ease of texting have made our communication almost entirely informal, colloquial, and sporadic. The discipline that it takes to carefully craft a message, to put in work with planning steps, drafts, and multiple iterations, seems to be fading, and with it, eloquence and creativity fade, too.

When delivering a message -- or, really, when communicating in any way -- technology should not become a crutch, but rather an aid; technology should not be a shortcut, but rather a supplement. I don’t want you to read me slides or to project an obligatory, visually uninteresting powerpoint. I don’t want you to send me an email that doesn’t have a salutation and signature, that is lacking punctuation, that has spelling and syntax errors. I don’t want you to deliver a first draft when it’s time for your final copy.

Take the time to use technology to aid and strengthen your message. Slides should have bullets that capture the main points of your talk and selected quotes that need to be read and reread to underscore their importance. The slides’ format, style, and appearance should utilize font, layout, graphics, images, and video clips to strengthen the delivery of your message. And their content should be clean and carefully arranged.

And perhaps most importantly: most of us shouldn’t be giving speeches off the top of our heads. While there’s something relatable and natural about a speaker who doesn’t use a script, the amount of people who can effectively speak in that fashion is small. Referring to notes or an outline intermittently, or even confidently reading prepared remarks, isn’t a sign of weakness but a sign of your preparation.

Then, when you’ve delivered your message, take it easy with the “let me know” statements. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. Let me know if you have any questions. Let me know if you need anything. With so many ways to contact each other -- face-to-face, phone calls, texts, emails, social media -- we should stop relying so much on passivity and use our communication networks to be proactive. I’ll never forget a young woman sharing her depression and feelings of disconnection to fellow Kairos retreat alums; knowing the onslaught of passive offers that would follow, our chaplain challenged students to explicitly reach out to her in the days following the meeting, and many did. Follow-up with people personally rather than waiting for follow-up to come to you.


I think this whole ball of wax comes down how we don’t really value others’ time and attention. We detest when others waste our time, but then we perpetuate lazy norms in ourselves that wastes theirs. For whatever reason, as listeners and consumers, we’ve become terrible audiences. The benefit of the doubt that used to be all-but-guaranteed to someone who is talking to us, let alone who is also an authority figure, seems to have evaporated. Instead, we assume that we need not give our undivided attention, often feeling it instead has to be earned. We check out easily and not-so-covertly dick around on our phones or “work” on our laptops.

A simple challenge is the Golden Rule turn-around -- is the indifference or inattentiveness you pay to the speaker what you’d want from them if you were the one speaking? It’s frustrating to be the one to break the norm of distracting oneself in boredom; it takes one person going against the grain to start turning the tide back to dignified attention.

But our technology, social media, and connectivity make it more complicated than this. I think we’re getting dangerously high thresholds for what we consider engaging or interesting.

When I scroll Twitter, I might spend ten minutes and scroll through or past hundreds of tweets while only stopping to look at a few closely, to blow up an image or click through to an article that I may or may not fully read. When I watch TV, I can choose from dozens of channels, a huge array of Netflix offerings, or the bajillion things in the OnDemand menu. When I listen to music, I have my iTunes stash, Spotify streams and playlists, or any song I can ever imagine via Google and YouTube. We can endlessly curate anything and everything that we could want to consume. We are virtually unlimited in our control.

As a result, I think we struggle when put in a position where we’re “made” to pay attention to someone or something -- a presentation at a work conference, a demonstration on a plane by flight attendants, or even the Word and Sacrament of our Mass. We have become so used to complete curation of our consumption that we feel imposed upon if we’re not in a position of control. Even if we choose to go to Mass, a droll lector or a droning preacher or a traditional choir hymn that don’t fit our personal taste likely will not grab us.

I am not here to eviscerate social media and technology, which I love and use and struggle doggedly to moderate. I have long felt that my call in ministry is to call attention to the tensions and invite those with whom I work to confront that friction. So here we have it: amazing and virtually endless accessibility to communication and information and the need to value one’s own as well as others’ time and attention.

Utilize technology as an aid and complement. Value your interactions with others. Pay attention generously.
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Monday, August 14, 2017

Exceedingly Uncomfy

by Rob Goodale

Fascinating, isn’t it, the way God dwells where I am least comfortable? This is the thought that slithers into my temporal lobe as we shuffle into the chapel, if you can call this space a chapel. I’m grumpy for no reason. Prior to genuflecting, I scan the barn-esque hall in search of a tabernacle and come up empty. At least now I have a reason, condescending and petty though it may be. At least there is an altar. I bow and sit down.

I have spent all day in a foreign place with foreign people, sometimes making disjointed attempts at small talk but mostly just thinking about how much I prefer the places and people I already know. I have been polite, but in the sort of way that a waiter politely asks if there is anything else they can do for you after you’ve already signed the check and there is a crowd by the front door that is circling above your table and quickly descending into madness.

I do not feel like I have enough to do. I am then asked to do something, which just makes me crosser, obviously. I discover that I seem determined to have a miserable time, and this discovery just makes me miserable-er.

The most idiotic thing of it is, I’m fully aware that in just a blink of an eye, these will be my people and this will be my place and everything will be just fine. I know this. Of course I know this; I’ve done this before -- I seem to have done it a lot over the past few years. Perhaps this is part of the problem: seeing as how there is no exit date, there’s an air of uncomfortable authenticity in finally settling into a place for real.

The faces of strangers will become the faces of loved ones; they always do. But getting there is exceedingly uncomfy. It requires jagged and unpolished things like stifled laughter at dirty jokes and interminable shared silences and contagious pits of despair brought on by unspeakable sorrow and exasperated rants about kids long on potential but short on anything of actual value -- these most human of interactions are what get you from strangers to loved ones.

I know this, but for the moment it’s tucked away in the third-to-last file cabinet of my cerebral archives. I’m busy being annoyed by the lack of pews in this church. The priest walks in carrying his companion, tucks Him into the monstrance, and kneels. I kneel, too -- tabernacle or not, I’m not grumpy enough to ignore the Holy One.


The chairs do have kneelers, at least. The rows are too close together for me to fold myself into a prayerful position with anything resembling elegance. I try to scootch my knees forward enough to sit on my feet, which is my favorite prayer posture, in imitation of the wise teenage elder, Bernadette Soubirous. (I do not know if the real-life Bernadette ever once knelt this way, but her statue at the Grotto does, which is good enough for me.) This is not good either, and suddenly my feet are asleep. I stare at the Tiny Circle of Unexpected Grace, fuming about how stupid it is that a parish would build a new church and apparently forget to leave space in the budget for pews or a tabernacle, and certain that he would agree with me.

And then he speaks to me, piercing the haze of grumpiness and discomfort: This is where I am. I make no conditions or demands about which direction the sanctuary faces or what kind of flooring is underfoot. I do not complain about how the stained glass windows look like pages torn from a coloring book for ages three through five. I simply stay here with you, waiting for you in the tabernacle in the hallway, in the midst of your precious and delicate uncomfyness. I am in the faces of strangers who determined to welcome you into their world without ever having met you. I am in the conversations and in the silence. I am here with the hardwood floors and the Hobby Lobby cross on the wall. I am in you, you insufferable grump.

I dwell in those places you won’t go on your own, because you’re too scared or proud or distracted. I take you by the hand and bring you there, so that you can be more like the man We designed you to be. I chip away at your armor and your ego and clear a path for other people to see you and love you, and for you to see and love them. Because that’s what it’s all about, of course. You know this, too. All that will be left is my love.

I sit back and smile, because it’s good sometimes to let Him have the last word.
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Thursday, August 10, 2017

My Take on Takes

by Dan Masterton

Growing up, I played just about every sport I could get my hands on. I loved and love sports for what they taught me as well as what they continue to teach me. In addition to the physical, athletic challenge and growth I experience, sports also taught me and teach me work ethic, teamwork, strategy, healthy competition, balancing preparation and instinct, and, as a huge fan off the field, to stay informed.

As a kid, I learned how to read tables from the sports section’s team schedules and standings. I learned how to follow news by reading articles by team reporters and league insiders. I learned some daily math by calculating statistics, figuring out games back, and parsing free agent contracts. Sports taught me how to consume news.1

Typically, I’d turn to team beat writers, the guys who interviewed players in the clubhouse, watched games from the press box, and had an intimate feel for the team. Next to their reports on the nitty-gritty of the team’s day-to-day were thoughts from columnists -- older writers who probably had experience as reporters and now zoomed out to give voice to broader analysis of the scene. Finally, elsewhere, I could find letters to the editors and op-ed pieces by everyday people reacting to it all. This layered landscape compartmentalized the coverage effectively and helped me separate information from analysis from commentary.

Today, that has all but evaporated. Whether in sports or politics or general news, the lines between reporting, analysis, and commentary are blurred, if not totally gone. Reporters, in writing and in broadcast media alike, once obsessively committed to balance in reporting, now openly opine on the matters they cover, and many consumers only egg this on by their voracious consumption of these “takes.” Anchors of news programs, once mostly confined to reading copy, now give their input on the stories they read. Rather than a news climate focused on gathering facts, providing context, and informing news-consumers of what’s unfolding, many reports are hybridized with internal commentary that obscures what’s fact from what’s opinion.

Look no further than the mothership of sports coverage, ESPN, which just massively downsized its stable of excellent writers, with traditional reporter-journalists chief among the casualties.2 Meanwhile, the flagship news show, SportsCenter, is being rebranded to include its hosts’ names, who are narrating fewer and fewer highlights and facilitating more and more takes.3 The core of their talent is now “personalities,” 4 people whose credentials and skill matter less than their ability to infuse volume, extreme opinion, and cheap shots into off-the-cuff riffs on myriad topics. This is what’s become known as a “take.”5

I am not afraid of takes, as I do love a good “barroom argument” or “would you rather” dilemma, but I want it grounded in facts and figures, in empirical evidence, in feet-on-the-ground analysis. I do not want coverage and discussions obsessed with personal criticisms, with unclever word plays, or with getting louder and angrier than ever before. I want the classic friendly banter of Pardon the Interruption and never the flimsy, childish, nonsense of First Take.

Meanwhile, it has been heartening to see the free market offer its corrective, as multiple chapters of The Athletic have sprung up nationwide. As writers are laid off by national companies and shrinking newspapers, this new site is scooping them up, giving them latitude to produce self-started, excellent content, and relying on faithful, grateful readers to commit their support with a modest subscription price. Eschewing takes in favor of statistical analysis, collaborative writing, and God-bless-it, good-old-fashioned beat reporting, this new venture is kicking butt. I did a trial subscription, and I will likely take the plunge as a subscriber soon.

Meanwhile, across the broader news landscape, the New York Times and Washington Post have seen a surge in subscriptions as President Trump has blasted them, and NPR endures as a bastion of journalistic excellence, with local listener-members sustaining its work.

My hope is that we as people of faith can commit similarly to those outlets that help us stay informed in matters of faith and our Church. Across the news landscape, there are many great sources that help us stay informed in matters of our faith. And if we commit to supporting them, we can help prevent the take-ification of religion news (and, God forbid, of religion) in this climate.

One of my goals for limiting and purifying my social media intake is to include these sources in my feeds. They help me not get bogged down in takes, in silly time-wasters (which are good but must be limited), and in content that comes from extremes. I never want my faith to be compartmentalized, because Catholicism’s greatness is its ability to be relevant to anything and everything all the time. These sources help suffuse thoughtfulness and spirituality into the time I spend on social media and keep me grounded in faith while sauntering in these media realms.

A few of my favorites:

+ America Magazine. This Jesuit publication definitely has some opinion pieces in addition to its news, but pieces are specifically headlined and categorized so that you know into what area the article fits. Among their excellent content, Mike O’Loughlin writes, hands-down, the best US Catholicism beat articles out there. He is a must-follow on Twitter, and the magazine keeps a good feed going, too.

+ Crux. Initially an enterprise of The Boston Globe, it was acquired by Knights of Columbus and continues to provide thorough coverage of Catholic news worldwide, including a reporter from Rome. They’re on Twitter, too. I don’t read every article (it’s not all gold), but my favorite there is Charlie Camosy, who is especially insightful on life ethics and political implications.

+ Millennial Journal. This is a blog founded by millennials that produces original content from writers in their 20s and 30s as well as curates a good mix of religious, social, and political content from around the web. Its editor Robert Christian is a good Twitter follow, as well as their main feed.

+ Religion beat writers. Many of the major publications have people dedicated to the religion beat who produce quality content themselves and do a nice job curating the best work of their peers. A few good ones:

+ Catholic Relief Services. They have an amazing website, lots of subcategories, and tons of social media accounts that you can parse to choose your content. They are especially excellent at connecting you to political advocacy as justice issues arise for which you may want to speak up.

+ Local coverage. Keep tabs on your diocese and parish with the best of their news. In Chicago, we have a publication called Chicago Catholic that has a nice website and an email newsletter with a nice survey of local stories.

+ A small dose of thoughtful individuals,6 who may offer mild, limited, measured takes:
  • Tim O’Malley: Tim’s a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame and specializes in liturgical theology. Also he’s witty and has a beautiful family.
  • Rachel Held Evans: She’s a Christian author and speaker who reflects carefully on social trends, politics, and matters of church -- and she’s a new mom!
  • Kathryn Jean Lopez: She’s a Catholic author and speaker who shares nice, short reflections and quotes from her reading and travels and writes periodically for a few outlets, too.
  • Fr. James Martin, SJ: Jim is thorough, always posting and writing everywhere. He’s great for the Church with his visibility and accessibility, but he takes a bit of getting used to, as good as he is.
+ Honorable mention, too:


1 I also loved the weather map, with its color-coded temperatures, key of symbols for pressure fronts and storm belts, and lists of numbers and places.↩


2 I loved reading a lot of those great writers, but seeing the great Jayson Stark get laid off especially killed a piece of my childhood.↩


3 The late night SportsCenter with Van Pelt became more like Fallon and Colbert (in format and tone, though SVP is smarter than Fallon) than anything, and SC6 with Michael and Jemele basically just extends the afternoon block of shouting shows beyond Le Batard, Around the Horn, and PTI to another level with those two. ↩


4 Dubiously trail-blazed by the ever-louder Stephen A. Smith, these “personalities” don’t necessarily have any credentials or tact. They are just somehow deemed talented at opining in a sensational way about the goings-on.↩


5 One could consider this the LaVar Ball-ification of sports news. Coverage is increasingly focused on things other than the actual games themselves.↩


6 Rob adds: “A few more that I find to be good follows: Katie Prejean McGrady (@katieprejean), Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti), C.C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold), Audrey Assad (@audreyassad).”↩

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Monday, August 7, 2017

The Erotic Dimension of Christian Spirituality, Part II: Divine Ecstasy and Kissing Jesus

by Dave Gregory

 A Trinitarian Preamble
Throughout the centuries, Christianity has essentially built a white picket fence around the Trinity; any attempts to logically deconstruct this thing of things, to wrap our minds around it, to define it or pull it apart, or analyze it by means of analogous imagery have generally resulted in some sort of heresy.  I mean, the Christian imagination roots its approach to God in the epistle of John, which declares that “God is love.”  No other image or word ultimately suffices, and this identification of the Trinity as being Love has some dangerous implications.
To say that God is Love posits that God is more of a verb than a noun, more of an action than a thing.  The Trinity, to paraphrase Augustine, is least wrongly understood as a relationship of love between the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love between the two.  In a sense, we can toss out the nomenclature of Daddy, Junior, and Spooky Ghost because the terminology of Lover, Beloved, and the Love they share and emanate approaches their truth a bit more closely.
The Trinity is a perichoresis, a “dance around”1: God pulsates, radiates, irradiates, overflows.  Love can’t just sit there.  Love does not exist, it insists2, it breaks into and en-graces all things.
The Four Loves3
In one of his most underrated works, The Four Loves4, C.S. Lewis discusses the classical Greek categorization of human loves.  Storge, or affection, is human love rooted in familiarity; I can have affection for a family pet, my childhood home, my siblings, et cetera.  Philia, or friendship, is love rooted in shared experiences or interests; it is the love that makes life vibrant, for a life without reveling in truths and beauties and goodnesses with friends is an unhappy one indeed.  Eros, or romantic love, is love rooted in desire for union with another; two lovers seek union, both spiritually and physically.  The final love, agape, or charity, is the apex of all the other loves: self-gift that wholly and selflessly seeks the good of the other epitomizes agapic love.
These various loves mix and mingle with one another, morphing and transforming and intensifying.  I develop affection for a friend or a lover, as I can become familiar with all their quirks and eccentricities and love them more for those idiosyncrasies.  A friendship that begins with shared experience can develop eros, that longing for union.  Likewise, a blind date that develops romantically can also become shaped by friendship and affection with time5 .
A brief tangent: here’s the earth-shattering bombshell implication of merging Trinitarian theology with explicating the four loves: any time you or I experience and/or embody storge or philia or eros or agape, we permit God to live through us.  Any of these loves forms the bridge between the human and the Divine.  The demonic will attempt to distort our relationships, to poison them, for precisely this reason.  Love of any sort remains prime tempting ground.
Finally, and most importantly, the three loves of affection, friendship, and romance become perfected in charity.  The friend or lover (or pet owner, in the case of affection) will become -- at a certain point -- ready and willing to sacrifice without self-interest for the one they love.  God is agape, the Gospels and the epistles remind us, but perhaps God’s sacrificial and agapic love for creation subsumes and includes the other loves.  And if Scripture is any indicator, this is indeed the case.  Metaphors abound throughout the Testaments of God’s affectionate parental love for Israel and humanity.  Jesus exemplifies friendship with the disciples, roaming around Galilee and Jerusalem with them, breaking bread and sharing money.  For those of us within the Judeo-Christian tradition, we tend to imagine God as parent in the Father, or as friend in Jesus, due to the prevalence of this scriptural imagery.  And this is a simple matter, for we have so many examples to go by of divine affection and friendship.
However, engaging God as lover is a bit more difficult, for Scriptural parallels are a bit more uncommon6.  In order to dive into this, let’s check out a couple of mystics.
Christian Mystics: Divine Intercourse and Making Out with God
Spanning every religious tradition, we can ubiquitously find mystics.  These potentially dangerous outliers rattle things up by challenging the status quo of standardized religion.  If we consider our own prayer lives in comparison to theirs -- not for the purposes of competitively ascertaining degrees of holiness, mind you -- what we find can be disturbing, simply due to unfamiliarity.  If there’s one thing that unites mystics across traditions, it’s this: mystics (be they Jewish Kabbalists, or the whirling dervishes of Sufi Islam) primarily speak of their relationships with God through erotic imagery, metaphor, and symbolism.
Christian mystics, in the heights of their experiences with God, describe union.  This is not the language of friendship, or of affection.  Erotic love literally draws mystics out of themselves into ecstasy, inebriating the mystic into silence or paralyzing them into a state of physical inertness.  Let’s check out Saint Teresa of Avila, the wildly feminist 16th century Carmelite, as an example of this.
In her autobiography, Teresa describes an event wherein she is visited by an angel who bears a golden-tipped spear.  The angel proceeds to plunge the spear into her heart, and she describes the sensation thus:
He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying. During the days that this lasted I went about as if beside myself. I wished to see or speak with no one, but only cherish my pain, which was to me a greater bliss than all created things could give me.7


8 If you don’t know she’s talking about an angel here, this just sounds a lot like fornication, no?  All this talk of piercing entrails, of filling with pain and sweetness, of bodily and spiritual ecstasy...well, you get the point.9  Teresa employs violently disturbing phrasing here, as the angel pierces her entrails and withdraws them as his spear exits.  Biographers note that Teresa would have these ecstasies occasionally: she would freeze in place while going about regular activities in the cloister, rendered immobile and silent.  In short, we have an example here of Teresa having some sort of intercourse with God.  While this might not be intercourse as you or I may experience it (given the lack of genitalia), the totality of its description brings no other experiential parallel to mind.  We cannot deny the profound physicality of this encounter.
For a bit tamer of an example, though arguably no less ostensibly scandalous, Saint BernardBenedict of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian reformer of the 12th century, wrote a series of sermons on the Song of Songs.  Keep in mind that he preached to a bunch of celibate monks here, which makes it especially kinda weird.  Within his orations, Bernard describes kissing the feet, the hands, and the mouth of Jesus; each progressive stage of physical and spiritual intimacy parallels progressive stages of virtue and holiness.  Embedded within Sermon 8 is this gem:
Living in the Spirit of the Son, let such a soul recognize herself as a daughter of the Father, a bride or even a sister of the Son, for you will find that the soul who enjoys this privilege is called by either of these names. Nor will it cost me much to prove it, the proof is ready to hand. They are the names by which the Bridegroom addresses her: "I come into my garden, my sister, my bride." She is his sister because they have the one Father; his bride because joined in the one Spirit. For if marriage according to the flesh constitutes two in one body, why should not a spiritual union be even more efficacious in joining two in one spirit? And hence anyone who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him. But we have witness too from the Father, how lovingly and how courteously he gives her the name of daughter, and nevertheless invites her as his daughter-in-law to the sweet caresses of his Son: "Listen, daughter, pay careful attention: forget your nation and your ancestral home, then the king will fall in love with your beauty." See then from whom this bride demands a kiss. O soul called to holiness, make sure that your attitude is respectful, for he is the Lord your God, who perhaps ought not to be kissed, but rather adored with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen.10
Drawing from the imagery of the Song’s lovers, Bernard compels his monks to kiss Jesus on the lips!  Here, he speaks with erotic symbolism full-force, employing language of spiritual union, of wedding oneself to Jesus, the bridegroom.  The whole thing is a bit -- dare I say it -- gender-bending?  At least it obliterates typical norms, recasting the monk into the bride, the daughter-in-law of God.
Some Concluding Thoughts
I could go on for pages and pages about Teresa and Bernard, but I won’t.  I’ll just leave those texts there for you to read and ponder and come to your own conclusions.
Regarding our own individual spiritualities, we can speak of being “with” God through various meanings and intents.  I want to be “with” Jesus as a friend, while I companion and journey with him.  I want God to be “with” me as my parent, guarding me and providing for me.  But do I want to be “with” God as my lover?  We tend to speak of our longing for Heaven in erotic terminology, after all: we yearn to “become one with” God, to share in that unfathomable and inexpressible joy eternal.
The mystical tradition opens up a new path for approaching relationship with God.  Granted, few people will reach the heights and depths of spiritual ecstasy.  However, the solid majority of us will know the realities of conjugal relations with a partner, and God can be found in “doing it” as well, if we take Hosea and Teresa and Bernard seriously.  Sex offers a taste of the Divine, in all its levity and ruckus and gravitas.  But to do sex right, in the realm of Catholic Social Teaching and as discussed by Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est, this requires purification and renunciation and discipline and sacrifice and ultimately agape.  Eros, when it becomes agapic self-gift, draws us into the very heart of God.  In the words of Article 6 from Deus Caritas Est:
It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels (cf. Mt 10:39; 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24; Jn 12:25).11


1 This term was a bit more in vogue in patristic sources.↩


2 This is an insight of my systematic theology professor in grad school, Roland Faber. He’s a process theologian, and does a lot of work with these seemingly minute differences in theological terminology. ↩


3 This is such a brief overview of Lewis’ work, and I cannot do it justice here. Just go read it. Pretty please.↩


4 On a personal note, I first read this in high school, and it has perhaps affected my religious imagination more than any other text. Just like humanity makes way more sense in all its intricacies once you understand Myers-Briggs typologies, I can almost guarantee that reading The Four Loves will result in a whole bunch of little epiphanies. ↩


5 Hence, the shittiness of the hook-up culture: it glorifies eros, though only impartially, for left in and of its own accord, eros must become demonic. Moreover, seeking the *thing* and the *thing* only will result in emptiness, for that desire remains intrinsically self-centered, and therefore unperfected.↩


6 Really, the best example can be found in the writings of the prophet Hosea, in which God declares Himself as Israel’s scorned lover. God tells Hosea to go marry a prostitute, in order that he can understand what God has been forced to endure with unfaithful Israel. There’s talk of being a harlot, but in chapter 3, some of the most beautiful poetry in the Bible pops up. Compelled by burning love, YHWH will not forsake Israel.↩


7 Zimmerman, O.C.D., Benedict. The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. Rockford: Tan Books and Publishers, 1995. p. 267.↩


8 The face of Teresa on Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous “Transverberation of Saint Teresa” (which sits in Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria) bears a remarkable similarity to Lindsay Lohan after a night of debauchery, does it not?↩


9 Pun sort of intended.↩


10 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. “Sermons on the Song of Songs.” Edited by Darrell Wright, Full Text of "St Bernard's Commentary on the Song of Songs", creativecommons.org, 2008. Web. 1 August 2017.↩


11 Pope Benedict XVI. "Deus Caritas Est - Encyclical Letter, Benedict XVI." Vatican: the Holy See. Vatican Website. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005. Web. 1 August 2017.↩

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Thursday, August 3, 2017

Triviality

by Dan Masterton

When I mention to people that I play bar trivia, they usually have two points in response. First, they say how they’ve always wanted to play but never got around to it -- bar trivia is ubiquitous throughout Chicago (and in many areas) as a great way for bars to entice business on otherwise slow weeknights. Second, they say how they feel like they wouldn’t be good at trivia because they’re not knowledgable enough.1

Let me offer my rebuttals.

On some level, a decent degree of trivial knowledge comes in handy. It helps to have a few areas of expertise as well as a decent broad base of knowledge, too. Personally, I bring expertise in religion/theology, sports, presidents, and a few other niches and tend to do fairly well with current events and politics as they come up. However, when it comes to music, movies, and popular awards (i.e. Tonys, Grammys, Oscars, etc.), I bring ignorance and cluelessness. But that doesn’t stop me from playing and contributing and enjoying myself.

The first lesson of trivia is that it’s not simply about what you as an individual bring to the table; it’s about the team’s diversity of expertise and general knowledge. I have a friend who is excellent at identifying award nominees and winners; I have a friend who is an absolute ace at geography; I have friend who is real sharp on history and legal matters, etc.2 Our team strength isn’t determined solely by individual strengths but by the sum of our strengths together. If I only consider something in light of myself and my own strengths and weaknesses, I might miss the boat. Lesson one sounds cheesy, but it’s effective.



Moreover, a team’s strength isn’t solely determined by the diversity and quantity of its trivial knowledge -- though that certainly is important. A major factor is what I like to call “trivia think.” There will be certain questions for which the team either knows the answer or doesn’t, and for those ones, you’re kind of stuck if you don’t know it. However, more often than not, questions are written with enough clues and pieces of information that you can make a strong guess.

The second lesson of trivia is that it’s largely about “trivia think” -- your team and its members’ ability to think out loud, listen to each other, and come to the best decision possible.

This means being able to give an honest measure of your confidence. On our team, we distinguish between feeling “100% sure,” a descriptor signifying certainty in one’s guess, and “trivia 100% sure,” a foolhardy gesture of bravado that comes from a place of flimsy, false trivia-prompted confidence.3 This means keeping your gut instinct guess to yourself for a minute or whispering it to select teammates to allow the others to think independently before being swayed by what’s been suggested. 4 This means making an argument for your answer while leaving space for others to argue for their guess. But these are all tactics for when your team thinks it might have a guess that’s the right answer.

This process alternatively can mean speaking the half-thoughts swirling in your mind out to your teammates to try to jog their memories. It means trying to think what grade you were in when that movie or song came out. It means playing word association to name actors or artists or presidents that come to mind freely. It means running through all 50 states or all 32 NFL teams or every common Mexican last name you can think of. And it means listening as your teammates do the same because the chances that someone can engineer a solidly strong guess off these scattered pieces of information is actually pretty good when everyone does this in earnest.

If you hear a question and shut down because you don’t know the answer or don’t have a guess, then trivia won’t be fun. If you take the time to listen, ask leading questions, and collate people’s input, you can definitely move the team toward its best possible guess. And if you have the patience and humility to toss out half-baked thoughts and ideas and receive them from teammates in kind, your chances of striking the right answer go way up. Some teams have stretches when their raw knowledge propels them; the teams that are consistently good excel not just at trivial knowledge but also at “trivia think.”5

It’s a fun endeavor not just for the intellectual engagement, good drinks, greasy food, and competition. Trivia is a community builder. It forces you to find confidence in your strengths, allow others to pick you up in your weaknesses, and to be a part of a wayward but earnest group effort toward achieving answers and success that are difficult to reach sometimes. Frankly, I think it’s a great fit for Church young adult groups, perhaps with content skewed toward catechesis but definitely for its social, team-building, and relationship-strengthening dynamics.

So get beyond yourself, realize that your strengths can help a team while the strengths of teammates compensate for your weaknesses, and be willing to jump into the fray of wild half-guesses and comments that barely seem relevant to work your way toward the best guess. Your humble best effort will be right more often than you’d think.


1 Others also cite not being competitive enough. While I would never engage in trivia I didn’t intend to win, there are plenty of teams that come out, screw around, get horrible scores, but have a good time. Much like that guy who goes bowling, bowls a 48, but cheers like crazy for the one strike he gets, these teams are just there for fun and that one answer they get right on a wild guess. Cheers.↩


2 Amazing answers we have pulled out of deeply thin air: Mr. Hooper, Meow Mix, and Admiral Stockdale. Answers we have screwed up famously: white dwarf, The Valley of the Kings, and many many many more.↩


3 This has become not just a huge lesson we learned and is now something teammates readily admit after so many of us have burned so often by our bullish confidence that led down a dead end to a wrong answer.↩


4 And sometimes saying your guess out loud at the same time as your teammate to see if you both had the same instinct while your teammates wait to see what track to follow you down. ↩


5 One other potential barrier is when the team is split on what the best guess is. This is where the “trigger man” comes in. Someone has to be the person who keeps track of categories, scoring, and questions, and this person has the responsibility of deciding on the final answer. This is a job I personally love. ↩

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