Saint Valentine Helped Lovers. Why?

Saint Valentine Helped Lovers. Why?

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on February 13, 2015

It is fitting that a Catholic priest and saint is still celebrated 1,800 years after his death – and for his help to lovers. At the heart of the Catholic faith is love. For the Catholic tradition (the richest, deepest tradition of understanding love in the entire world) the proper name for God is that most creative form of love, Caritas. 

This love is the energy that pulses through all other loves. This love is the love that gave birth to the whole still-expanding universe, with all its galaxies, and galaxies beyond galaxies. Our universe was conceived in Caritas. Our earth in the most special way of all.

Saint Valentine, a parish priest in Rome, understood that human happiness, too, for most people, rests deepest in the love between a man and a woman. He became a favorite to young people approaching marriage, who sought him for counsel and comfort, to prepare them for their marriage ceremonies.

“Man and woman He made them. In His image, he made them” (Gen 1:27). This passage suggests that God’s image radiates best of all in woman and in man, conjoined. That is, not only in the man, not only in the woman, but best of all in their union.

For man alone (Adam) was incomplete, was lonely, had no one even to talk to. Life on earth without conversation would be almost unbearable, I think. Man alone would not even be able to sit alone with the woman he loves in a most peaceful, joyous communion. He would not have a lover to caress, or to hug, or to make himself one with. Man and woman together: There best dwells the image of God.

Moreover, the Lord Jesus made the union of man and woman in marriage a special vessel of grace, a sacrament, one of those mystical rites instituted by Christ himself, that at once binds a woman and a man as one, and also brings about that miraculous (but natural) creation of a much loved baby from their union. So creative is that love! Sprung from the Caritas that diffuses itself through all creation since the first moment of time.

In one of the greatest lines of world poetry, Dante bows gently toward “the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.” Many moralists speak of love as the one fundamental and universal moral principle, the golden rule honored in all traditions. But what do we mean by love?

At its deepest source it is Caritas, God’s own love that in Him is so strong it generates another Person, His Son. Their mutual love then generates a Third. Caritas is the inner action of the Trinity. As God’s love flows outward in a creative act, so also the love of married couples creates a new personification of love. Caritas is our participation in a way of loving not our own. It is our participation – partial, fitful, hesitant, imperfect – in His own loving. So Saint Valentine, the urban pastor, was right: marriage is a participation in the creativity of God’s own love.

A Tribute to Father Matthew Lamb

A Tribute to Father Matthew Lamb

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on February 10, 2015

Adapted from remarks given February 7, at the closing dinner of the annual conference of the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University in Florida. The conference celebrated the university’s graduate program in theology, alumni of which presented very moving and learned papers. This year’s conference paid special tribute to Father Matthew Lamb, the bold and pioneering founder of the program.

* * *

As a quite young monk from the Trappist monastery at Conyers, Georgia, the neatly tonsured Father Matt arrived in Rome at the middle point of the Vatican Council in 1964, after the first two sessions, but before the dramatic final two. Like many other excited Catholics in America, Father Matt had been eagerly keeping up-to-date (that is, aggiornamento’d) on every morsel of information about the Council, even the juicy tidbits.

One cannot exaggerate how thrilling those days were. Television coverage almost every day. Front-page stories in The New York Times, above the fold.

Yes, Father Lamb had been closely following the suspenseful first year at Vatican II, not least the shadowy Vatican intrigue reported by the mysterious “Xavier Rynne” in The New Yorker, and gathered up from the scuttlebutt – to use a technical theological term of that time – the buzz that hung above the tables in the fragrant coffee shops along the Via della Conciliazione, and inside the restaurants from the “Hilton on the Hill” (where most of the American bishops stayed) to Piazza Navona, famous for stunning scenes starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren.

Sadly, nontheological scuttlebutt was at times at the very center of the Council, at least as reporters saw things. In 1964 I was among those reporters. I was working for Time that year, and Karen and I had an unlimited expense account so that we could take as many “sources” as we could out to lunch or dinner for interviews and wide-ranging conversations on the state of the Church.

If we could have known in those days that the young Father Lamb would become such an important force in the post-Council Church, and would found the theology department at Ave Maria University, and if we knew where to find him, we would have taken him to such a restaurant as neither he nor we could ever afford to enter again.

Not long after his days in Rome, Father Matt went on to further and then further studies. It seemed in those days as if further studies never ended. Matt studied one philosophy of history after another, and then the metaphysics they implied, then the different horizons employed, the higher viewpoints, the emergent probabilities. (By the way, that’s why Father Matt can always think of another higher viewpoint, horizon, meta-meta . . . and has trouble finishing an explanation.)

Another thing Matt can’t finish – he never forgets his friends. Once, he took a train from Germany back to Rome to visit Fred Lawrence and Fred’s wife, Sue. Fred had left the seminary, but kept up his studies in Rome under Bernard Lonergan. That’s how Fred and Father Matt first met.

Well, one week a few years later, Sue had to stay in the hospital during a scary pregnancy episode, leaving Fred at home with two-year-old Dyer. Like most males, Fred was not quite up to being both mother and father. (How is it most wives seem to do both?) Father Lamb volunteered to help out. He had no idea what he was getting into.

If Fred felt incompetent that week, Father Lamb became completely bewildered. For family chaos the Trappists had not prepared him. A family kitchen was nothing like the world of silence and contemplation. Eventually Father Lamb announced that he must leave. Fred would be better off without him: Be easier to care for one infant, than one infant plus Father Lamb.

When he left Father told Fred and Sue that they could contract with the North American College for a stipend to have a few seminarians come up to help them with their children – that would give them what Newman called a “real apprehension” of the challenges of marriage and children, and why Our Lord made it a sacrament of His self-sacrificing love for His Body, the Church.

Those are days Father Lamb says he truly verified his vocation: Celibacy, pure and simple. Some persons are meant for celibacy. (And by the way, Fred still agrees that after Father left, his little son settled down, at least as much as boys of two ever do.)

After Germany, Father was called to Marquette, where he fell into heavy-lifting writing and editing – including a memorable festschrift for Father Lonergan. Matt’s reputation kept growing. More and more people couldn’t follow Father Lamb’s arguments – Lonergan does that to people – although they knew Matt was quite deep, and holy, and his writing always sparkled with little diamonds of spiritual wisdom.

Then Father Lamb was invited to Boston College. There he met and inspired a marvelous company. With his old friend Fred Lawrence, and Father Joe Flanagan, S.J., who had also studied under Lonergan, and Father Ernest Fortin, the indomitable Straussian, Father Romanus Cessario, O.P., and Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard, he formed a monthly study group centered on Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. Father Lonergan used to complain to Matt that too many had failed to devote time to studying Aquinas.

In the theology department at B.C. Father Lamb faced some notable theological dissent. Some seemed to take Rome as bête-noire. In fact, there was a rumor around the Boston area that Father Lamb once petitioned the president of B.C. to put into practice the principles of Affirmative Action, by hiring at least one ethicist in the theology department who agreed with the Magisterium.

Recalling his own days in theological education, when he was expected to study theological classics in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, and German – not to mention Italian, for reading La Civiltà Cattolica and other Magisterial documents – Father Lamb began to doubt whether American theologians of the future would ever be prepared to pass on the Catholic theological tradition in its fullness. How will they ever be able to grasp the terms of the Greek and Latin Fathers, the millennium and a half of theology after Christ, official Church teaching worded in Latin, and even the rest of the Catholic world outside the U.S.?

That is how Father Lamb began to dream of building a place where deeper understanding could be reached. Ave Maria is still moving toward this goal. But even now our graduates are giving a good account of themselves. Most are finding positions rather quickly, while the demand for them keeps growing – thanks to Father Matt’s vision, insistence, and perseverance.

In person, too, Father Lamb is a wise counsellor. Doesn’t get too excited about difficulties. Urges prayer, patience, and time, time, time. Employs his long experience and the fruits of many inner battles. Knows the mountains and the valleys of the soul in its voyages, its darknesses and lights. Just over ten years ago, he showed immense courage in moving from Boston College to seemingly endless tomato fields in southwest Florida, above which the great Oratory now rises up over large expanses of lawn and campus buildings and hundreds of homes, together reminding one of Tuscany.

This past weekend, the mature, profound, deep, and spiritual papers presented by these sixteen Ave Maria scholars now teaching in other universities and seminaries are a living monument, and a lasting one, to Father Lamb’s courage, depth, and wisdom. His maturing students showed also that they learned well the habit of theological friendship.

This is my way of thinking of Father Lamb: contemplata aliis tradere. He has passed along to others his own contemplation in the presence of the Love of the Holy Trinity, where all theology begins.

The National Liturgy -- The Super Bowl at XLIX

 The National Liturgy — The Super Bowl at XLIX

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on February 3, 2015.

Those who watched the Super Bowl on Sunday took part in a national liturgy – that is, a public, communal sacred rite, in which more Americans participate at one televised event than at any other (on a mystical screen in the family shrine).

Don’t let anybody tell you this gathering is just for entertainment. At least not at “the high holy moments” when only seconds remain and the score is close, and both teams are fighting for the tiny lift of fortune that will waft them into victory. That is no time to cry out for chips or other nibblies. The attention of the devout is intense, “gripping” as some say, and the excitement is tangible. If fortune smiles toward one side, joy erupts, and on the other side the taste of ashes and the deep gloom of sudden death. The end of a close football game is not entertainment; it is experiencing life and death, vicariously.

And so you will see when walking through the parking lot afterward some with furrowed brows and some with exultation. Fortune has smiled on one side, and the winds of Being blow in their sails for yet another season. They have escaped death. Their team bears painful wounds, their lungs burnt sore from intensive breathing and ultimate effort. But the flush of triumph is on their cheeks.

I always like to watch the faces of players on the bench in the final minute. Both benches are alive with intensity and happy expectation one moment, and then on one side the excitement slinks away, skin sags, one sees the agony of death, the inescapable and now final cut upon the neck of the Sword of Damocles. Among men, the verdict of Fate is inescapable.

I have been to many joyous entertainments. But none other than this dramatization of dying and living has ever had such power to put me in depression, or fill me with the irrepressible exhilaration of victory – especially when death did cut so close, and yet we lived.

It could have been my team that lost. Instead, by the blowing breath of gods, WE won! WE won! It is such a communal victory for all who identified with their ritual representatives, our bruised and beat-up victims, whom we offered up in sacrifice. It may seem odd for a man my age, but (many times) I really have lived and died with “our boys.”

And they don’t really live just today, our team, they live outside of ordinary time. They don’t live, need I say, in eternity – but they do live in legend, their deeds will be inscribed in lectures fathers will tell their sons. Those were unforgettable heroic deeds they have witnessed. In the memory of universities and cities, these deeds shall live. Generations later some will bring them back to vivid memory.

My father told me how he had once seen Babe Ruth play in an exhibition game in Johnstown, PA, at the Point Stadium (the very Point where the furious waters of the flood of May 31, 1889, were stopped and spun violently back, and in the swirling waters some 2,000 people died before dawn). On his last trip to the plate, the Babe drove a ball so far past the 406-marker on the right-field wall that it was still rising into the sky as it cleared the wall.

So did I tell my kids. So may they tell theirs.

On Sunday, many must have noticed the difference between “sacred time” and “plain ordinary time.” By rule, a football game must last exactly sixty minutes, not a second more, not a second less. But anybody participating Sunday had to allow about four hours, before getting to the final whistle. Sacred time is what happens during those precious sixty minutes that are the only ones that count. Ordinary time is spent in ordinary entertainment, watching the cavalcade of people all around, a few of whom in every stadium are unsteady on their feet and a bit scary in their behavior. Some of whom are very good looking, and beautifully dressed.

I have heard experts say that each football play lasts on average less than six seconds, and there are only about 140 plays per game. Multiply those through. Now tell me, why are those guys so tired and beaten up from such little time in action?

True, a prescribed number of seconds is allowed between plays, during which the players stand in an oval, patting each other’s backsides. Still, the dramatically intense seconds during which twenty-two over-sized, over-muscled, and over-hardened guys are pushing each other around with all their strength – and with all the precision and intensity they can muscle up – make up in violence what they lack in duration.

Up to here, this post was completed an hour before game time of Super Bowl XLIX. What is written below was completed an hour after the game ended, after the departure of our guests.

At half time, the score was 14-14. The third quarter was nearly all Seattle, which scored ten unanswered points to lead 24-14. The faces along the Seattle bench were exhilarated. There were only eight minutes left when Tom Brady at last completed a touchdown to start the long climb back, Seattle 24-New England 21.

It took until there were only 2:02 left when Brady led his team to a closing touchdown – 28-24, New England. The face of Brady was radiant with joy. The Seattle bench was worried. Amazingly, Seattle’s Russell Wilson led his team down the field to the New England 1-yard line, deliberately letting the clock run down.

With under six seconds left, Marshawn Lynch, ustoppable so far in this championship game (133 yards gained), was leaning to rush forward mightily.

The face of Tom Brady was dejected, resigned, utterly empty. Unaccountably, on the next play, Seattle does not call on the fierce, driving Lynch. Seattle passes.

Seattle had victory in its hand, its receiver arms outstretched. Then New England’s Malcolm Butler makes a desperate stride for the ball and forces into his own hands an “immaculate interception.”

The looks of life and death on both benches instantly switch into reverse. New England is stunned, startled, then exultant. Tom Brady is leaping in the air with disbelieving jubilation. On Seattle’s faces there is unexpected, total anguish.

The deepest beauty of football comes from Fortune’s whipping winds. The football itself was designed to introduce contingency and chance. So football’s liturgy is pagan, to be sure.

But it is also susceptible of a Jewish-Christian interpretation of the sudden reversals in God’s creation. Often victory, alas, does not go to the Just.

For New England fans, this night it did. Improbably, it did.

All Creation Redeemed and at Prayer

 

All Creation Redeemed and at Prayer

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on January 30, 2015

When preparing myself for prayer, and to awaken my sleeping awareness of being enveloped in the presence of God, I like to remember the words with which the great philosopher-theologian of the twentieth century Romano Guardini (1885–1968) defined the sacred prayer of the Church, the liturgy. The liturgy, he suggested in that immensely stimulating book, The Church and the Catholic, is “all creation redeemed and at prayer.”

We do not pray the daily liturgy one by one but together with all the Church on every continent of the world revolving in the sunlight and the dark, with all the planets, all the galaxies, with the sun and the moon and the stars. It is a big, big universe, a vast universe, a universe so far too vast to be fully grasped by human beings – but a universe fired by intelligence and regularities; and also by absurdities, strange patterns of contingency, and even chaos.

Even Plato was able to see in about 347 B.C., in the Laws (book 10), that God (the intelligence and power that fires and sustains the universe) wills the good of humans. And he argued passionately against atheism, which leads to relativism, chance, chaos, meaninglessness, and political darkness.

But Jewish and Christian eyes see more. They have much evidence to confirm what they see. First, the holiness of many ordinary lives (as we care for one another in pain, suffering, and the solitariness of dying, for example), and in many lives of extraordinary holiness and wisdom (such as Elijah, Job, and Mother Teresa, St. Damien the Leper, St. Maximilian Kolbe, and the incredibly brave scores of thousands dying each week these days under the threat, Renounce your faith or die!).

And second, the intense cultivation of beauty (the splendor of being) by peoples of faith wherever they go: Jews more often in music; Christians in painting, drawing, sculpture, and towering works of architecture.

For myself, to bring to consciousness the vastness and the beauty of the Intelligence and Beauty (and Love) of the source of our uncharted universe, I like to imagine scenes of beauty and grandeur that have ravished me.

The photos here are beauties I like to recall. They are taken from the pier near the Lewes terminal of the Lewes-Cape May Ferry on the Delaware Bay. They come to my home day after day, as messages of far greater beauty.

When I bring these sights back again in memory, and contemplate them again in wordlessness and awe, I cherish them as sweet gifts from a Lover for whom I have been longing, a Lover who is often away, but never fails to send little messages of beauty and love.

After such moments, I feel swelling peace and intense gratitude.

I feel so sorry for others who, observing such gifts of beauty, have no one to thank.

To attend Mass, to pray the psalms, especially with others, to open my heart to sacred readings – lectio divina – yes, indeed: That is all creation redeemed and at prayer.

“All creation gives glory to God.”

Put another way, and at its highest peak, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” (St. Irenaeus, c. 130–202 A.D.)

Abortion: The Intellectual Battle Has Been Won

 

Abortion: The Intellectual Battle Has Been Won

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on January 27, 2015

Communism died as an idea fifteen years before the Berlin Wall was pushed over. Communism was a regime of lies. Economically it didn’t work. And for the physical environment it was a disaster. “Scientific Socialism” turned out to be pseudoscience, masking the self-interest of those elites designated by the term nomenklatura.

Something like this is happening again. Last Thursday, January 22, hundreds of thousands of mostly young people marched in Washington, DC, for the pro-life cause, and with a new sense of self-confidence. More today than a decade ago, they knew they had science on their side. Thousands of them have had ultrasound images of younger brothers and sisters posted on their refrigerators – images from just days and weeks old.

This great fact may take a decade or more to become evident to all, but the intellectual underpinnings of the abortion regime have washed away. Four forces washed them away: science, technology, dishonesty, hypocrisy.

(1) Science. During the presidential campaign of 1972, on the McGovern campaign bus, in the middle of a long delay I told a noted feminist journalist I had never had a face-to-face conversation about why abortion is moral. She was patient and friendly. “It’s all about science. What’s aborted isn’t a human life. It’s just a blob of tissue, like an appendix or a wisdom tooth.” I have often wondered what she thinks now.

Science now sees in what is aborted an individual with unique DNA – not the DNA of the mother nor the father. Besides, this living creature within the womb is already male or female, an independent member of the species homo sapiens and no other. Unless interrupted by a natural miscarriage or deliberate human will, he or she will mature and be born and live.

With only a little imagination, a family can admire this independent little one breaking into a smile in a crib, twirling around in a mock dance at age three, attending her high school prom, waving her degree from Stanford, kissing her husband at the marriage altar….

(2) Technology. Since that Dark Age of a political campaign partly about abortion, technology has brought new wonders. Ultrasound imaging makes it possible to record each stage of a unique individual’s growth in the womb, to listen to her heartbeat, to see him recoil at pain or surprise.

Ever-improving technology has also shortened dramatically the age at which a child can safely be born prematurely. While in abortion facilities, many individuals of four or five months are being aborted (at least in America), in more civilized hospitals individuals the same age are being brought to birth.

A dear friend of mine who is a nurse in a very good hospital has told me how wrenching it is for her on the same shift to assist at a heroic premature birth in one room, and then an hour later to assist at an abortion of a preborn child of the same age in another room. It makes her feel ill, and violated.

(3) Dishonesty. Those in favor of abortion seldom say so. Instead they say they are “pro-choice.” As Naomi Wolfe once wrote, these people should at least be honest. What they really are claiming is that they have a right to use violent means to cut short the life of a living, independent, human individual. That is saying quite a bit more than “pro-choice.”

Likewise, my “pro-choice” friend at the American Enterprise Institute, Ben Wattenberg, used to say, “In honesty, I have to admit that to abort is to kill. And also: I’m in favor of it.” He gave his reasons. But they did seem weak in the face of that word “kill.”

Naomi Wolfe’s point was that in the long run, it would be better at least to speak honestly, even if that seemed more shocking. Otherwise, those in favor of abortion would sound less trustworthy, speaking in roundabout euphemisms. They would sound like they were covering up what they are really advocating. They would be caught up in a tangle of evasions – and even self-deceptions.

(4) Hypocrisy. For decades, those who favor the abortion regime have wrapped themselves in the white robes of patrons of science and defenders of sacred “rights.” Today, however, neither science nor the sacred language of rights adequately supports their pose.

Meanwhile, they have painted an ugly self-portrait of those American mothers, who when self-interest rubs them the wrong way choose to put to death the children growing within them.

* * *

In 1863, Lincoln did not expect that the Emancipation Proclamation would immediately end slavery. Indeed, he himself emancipated only the slaves of the Confederacy, not those of the border states that the Union needed to prevail in the war. No, what Lincoln counted on was the fading away of slavery into gradual oblivion, as free states multiplied, and the moral sights of the Union were set above slavery, in favor of a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal.”

That is also the hope of today’s Marchers for Life. They have been patient. They have appealed to reason. They have marched in the January cold for long decades, eager to win over the undecided and the pro-abortionists, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. The intellectual battle has been won. Patient political efforts in persuasion are now the best way – the Lincolnian way – to make the abortion regime fade into oblivion, to be remembered in the future as a dark period in American history.

Emily’s First Question: What separates the Bible from Grimms’ Fairy Tales?

Emily’s First Question

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on January 23, 2015

 EMILY: What separates the Bible from a book of moral fables such as Grimms’ Fairy Tales?

GRANDPA: The Bible confronts you with a choice about your future. It lays a challenge before you: to accept God as God, or not; and to accept His offer of friendship with Him, or not.

The wonderful books of fairy tales and folk tales in many different languages amuse you, frighten you, delight you – but they do not give you such an abrupt challenge, and do not call you to change your life at a radical level.

One thing someone pointed out to me, and then I learned to see for myself, is that every book in the Bible, especially in the Jewish Testament, hinges on a free choice. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham with Isaac, King David – all were faced with choices to make. In one chapter, King David is faithful to his Lord, and in another, he betrays his Lord. Thus the overwhelming questions we learn to face are: What will I do next? How do I intend to change my life, or to go on living in the same path?

We wouldn’t know unless God had revealed it, that the Creator is essentially a force for good, even for love, not a malicious Creator or an absurdist. The Jewish Testament does not reveal everything all at once. It limns characteristics of the Creator little by little, and it also sometimes makes a sketch and then does it over, altering it. To do this, the Bible uses many literary genres, many tones of voice, many points of view. Some stories are told a little ironically, almost playfully. Some have a seriousness that clearly intends to say: “This is the literal truth. Pay attention.” One hears this tone of voice in the Ten Commandments, for example, and in many other places.

The essential point of the Jewish Testament, in my view, is that the Creator of all things – that immense power revealed in terrifyingly tempestuous seas, the crack of thunder, and blinding flashes of light, the sort that teach us how helpless we are out on the high seas in the middle of a storm, sheltered only by the wooden sides of a boat – is not hostile to us. On the contrary, He invites us to be His friends, even to live in Him and He in us.

Sometimes too, we see all around us only meaninglessness. We call on God, but there is only silence, only emptiness, only dark and dry desert air. We can find testimony to this experience even in the most celebrated of believers, such as Mother Teresa, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, St. John of the Cross. Whole books have been written to guide us through the dark nights in which God allows us to experience abandonment and pointlessness.

Given the range of experiences it gives us, human life of itself is not altogether clear about whether God is hostile to us or friendly to us.

The Bible from start to end makes two loud and clear points: in it, the Creator warns that we will be much besieged, left alone in a desert, buffeted, without any sense of meaning or solace or comfort. Even God’s son, Jesus, was reduced to saying as He hung upon the Cross: “My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?” On the other hand, and at the same time, the Bible tells us that the Lord, despite all these bitter trials, gathers us under His arm as a hen gathers its chicks, and that He extends His love to us. His is not always a sweet love, but sometimes a trying and testing love.

Maybe some people want a God who is always sweet, always giving comfort, always giving consolation. That is not the God described in the Bible, either in the Jewish Testament or in the Christian Testament. Consider the story of Job. Consider the story of Jesus – or, for that matter, of the eleven Apostles who met horrific deaths. (Tradition holds that St. John the Evangelist alone died a natural death, at Ephesus, which we visited with Nana just weeks before her death.)

If you are seeking only sweetness, you ought not to come to Judaism or Christianity. “Those He loves, He makes to suffer.”

Reading these texts slowly and often, meditating on them, one is driven to conclude that the Jewish God and the Christian God – without question, they are related – is a tough God, raising up a tough people. But the overwhelming evidence of existence is that He conceived of this universe and created it out of love, out of goodness, out of outward-going generosity, even in the face of our own betrayals, turnings away, sin, and sometimes malice. The Bible rams this point home more concretely and more deeply than Plato in his Symposium and Aristotle in book 12 of his Metaphysics. 

God does not want in return the friendship of slaves; He wants the friendship of free women and free men. As the much-loved French poet Charles Péguy puts it:

When you once have known what it is to be loved freely, Submission no longer has any taste. All the prostrations in the world Are not worth the beautiful upright attitude of a free man as he kneels. All the submission, all the dejections in the world Are not equal in value to the soaring up point, The beautiful straight soaring up of one single invocation From a love that is free.[1]

 EMILY: Admittedly I find this answer somewhat unsatisfactory since the hinge of your explanation is that the Bible asks a person to face moral choices and free will; yet nearly every coming-of-age story could be said to do the same thing, just in a more structured narrative. In fact, after your explanation I am MORE inclined to read the Bible much in the same way I would read Alice in Wonderland.

The original story places Alice through a series of events and challenges that are really only connected by her progress through Wonderland, and during her journey she is constantly learning lessons of deep-thinking and morality, while being challenged and required to act and react along the way. While the figure of Jesus is that of a teacher, Alice is a student of the world, and yet I find myself learning many of the same moral lessons from Alice as I do through Jesus while reading the Bible. Jesus simply lacked the Cheshire Cat.

I say this not as a critical judgment of the Bible, but more for clarification.

 Why is the Bible treated so differently from other books of moral fables, especially given that there are many “kid-friendly” versions of the Bible and picture-book-style renditions of the stories within the Bible that can often be indistinguishable from other children’s books?

GRANDPA: I must think about this, and in the next installment of “Emily’s Questions” offer a reply.

Coming Down to Earth: Dear Bishop

 

Dear Bishop

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on January 20, 2015

Dear Bishop: 

This letter has been building up in me ever since the first session of the Synod on the Family last October (October 5-19, 2014). The tone of clerical discourse on such a subject seems woefully abstract and remote, as is no doubt fitting for bishops. But that leaves the language far out of touch with the realities of marital sexuality experienced in the lives of ordinary Catholic spouses. 

I certainly discovered this disconnect in my own life. 

As you well know, for a little more than twelve years I studied to become a priest of Holy Cross, the congregation I found to be among the very best in the world. I prayed a lot. I studied like a demon. Having lots of unused testosterone, I played very hard, especially football. I thought a lot about celibacy. I tried also to prepare myself for counselling young people, and especially couples preparing for marriage. I learned as much as I could about degrees and types of love. 

Nonetheless, when I was in the seminary, my writings on marriage and family had a streak of unreality in them – and how could they not? For me, thoughts of women and sexual activities needed to be dismissed quickly and successfully (a not always easy battle). When I re-entered the lay world, just the experiences of dating taught me how remote my former ways of thinking were from concrete decision-making about sex. 

Then, some three years later, after Karen and I were married in 1963, I edited a book with the unsigned, anonymous testimonies of 13 couples, writing about sex in marriage as they had experienced it, in the light of Catholic teaching in pre-Vatican II times. It was called The Experience of Marriage, and some of its stories were heart-rending, some beautiful, but all showing a disconnect between their own experience of sex and the way sex was talked of in official Church teaching. 

I thought it might be useful to you if I mention eight or nine things that Karen and I learned about sex in marriage, which we hadn’t quite grasped before. Or, actually, about key habits to cultivate in a marriage if you want it to grow deeper and fuller every year. 

(1) Marriage is essentially a lifetime project that only begins on the wedding day. It takes two persons both committed to the hard work of making a marriage better month by month, over a full span of years. Marriage is something to be achieved, not simply given on day one. 

(2) One of its great assists is a self-deprecating sense of humor on the part of each spouse, about the faults each has, and how neither one is god or goddess, but a faulty human being. Both need to be able to laugh at their own missteps and habitual faults. There are a lot of occasions to do so. 

(3) Another is the daily habit of asking each other’s forgiveness, when hurts are given even unintentionally. Each human is so faulty. It is no disgrace to admit to insensitivities and outright wrongs, flarings of temper, cruel words, not paying attention, and many other wounds inflicted. It is a grace to be able to do so quickly. . . . Even though one sometimes has to be asking forgiveness for the same fault over and over, and it is not clear just how sincere such a repetitive apology can be, each must learn to voice it. 

(4) Happy sexual love over many years is not easy to maintain. Familiarity dulls the novelty. Besides, many layers of consciousness, need, fear, anxiety, and new unsettling emotions are stirred in one or the other. It takes a lot of time and experience to learn what the other is feeling, or troubled by, or pleased by (often not at all what one imagines). There is a kind of asceticism involved in learning to feel what the other feels. 

Male and female, to put it generally, are not naturally attuned to each other. But since each one’s history, temperament, past hurts, and expectations are unique, the achievement of attunement is a lifelong quest. It is not easy to “find” each other. It is not easy to talk about something so intimate and so incomprehensible in itself. Each of us is left searching in the darkness that is part of our human condition. It is stunning how inarticulate one or the other, or both, can suddenly become. It needs to be said, but can’t. 

Trying to look into another’s soul is often blocked. Often the guy is not clear about his own feelings, nor the gal about hers. We are each a bit of a mystery to ourselves, and so in marrying we add even more mystery into our lives. Also, we add many more not-quite-understandings – not quite understanding the other, not understanding ourselves. 

(5) It is also hard to describe to the unmarried how much a sweet act of love can flow over into every other moment of the day. How it releases a tension, brings a peace, emanates a sweetness – or even an anxiety, a fear, an incompleteness, into the whole day. (And how irritable a couple can become if over several days they do not feel intimate.) Thus, lovemaking is a project of a lifelong coming-closer-together. It means fighting through mutual incompatibilities. No two are perfect for each other. Some approach the dream more closely than others, but no one quite gets there. . . . 

Here Karen and I loved Chesterton’s quip: “I learned that in America incompatibility is accepted as a reason for divorce. I would have thought incompatibility is the reason for marriage.” 

(6) The individual psyche is so unique to each person that advice that works for one couple may not begin to bring another to happiness. Love of body and soul is such an art, requires so much care and attention as almost to constitute an asceticism, a constant, softly practiced self-discipline. In so much putting up with the other – and oneself – there is great joy just in making some progress. 

Here it is best for the two not to spend too much time looking into each other’s eyes – although that can be quite marvelous, and also at times quite upsetting. Better is looking outward together, toward the goal up ahead, and to keep moving toward that goal, through many setbacks. 

(7) Most clergy hint that men are the aggressors in sex. They need to know that women are often the ones to take the initiative. At times a woman wants lovemaking even more than, and before, the man does.

(8) Lovemaking is not an act of the body only. In making love one loves the personality of the other, the other’s spirited being, the interior life that infuses the other’s body. The “theology of the body” that Pope John Paul II called for leaves enormous horizons yet to be explored. The church does not yet speak well about sex in marriage. It is too preoccupied with “don’ts.” 

Not sure this helps a lot, dear friend, but it has been nagging at my mind since the Extraordinary Synod last fall.

Coming Down to Earth: “Grandpa, I Have Some Questions”

Published by Michael Novak  at Patheos.com on January 16, 2015  Just twenty years ago, my daughter Jana urged me to respond to a list of questions she had about God, how to live, sex, and other puzzles of life. As we wrote back and forth for nearly a year, she questioned my replies, and I kept trying again. From this filial exchange, Pocket Books published a volume called Tell Me Why, picked up by another publisher in the United Kingdom. Of all my writings, that book gave me the most personal joy to write.

Emily Alston Novak and Michael Novak

Recently my very first granddaughter, Emily, fresh upon getting her degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa, has now asked me another series of questions. We think of it as Tell Me Why 2.0

It would be difficult to explain how much I love Emily – her first name is Emily, but ever since college days she has come to prefer her second name, her grandmother’s family name, Alston. Here is how our love began.

* * *

I was hoping in August 1993 that Emily would be born as predicted on August 2nd, the birthday of my dear brother Dick, who had died as a missionary in what was then Dacca, East Pakistan (today, Bangladesh) in 1964. Dick’s life had been cut short by a knife attack during Muslim riots against Hindus.[1]

As it turned out, Emily’s actual birth occurred on August 3rd, the day after what would have been Dick’s 58th birthday. Fortunately my wife, Karen, was in the birthing room (prudently she had sent me to the waiting room, knowing that I don’t react well to the sight of blood), so this is the story I have from Karen: Emily’s mother, Lucy, was suffering from a cold when she went into the delivery room, and then when the doctor finally held the delivered baby in his hands, Karen noted that the little girl was having trouble breathing and called out about it in the delivery room. The doctor was visibly annoyed by her voice, but the instant he looked at the child he called for the nurses to alert the Intensive Care Unit that Emily was on her way.

In memory, it seems to me that little Emily Alston Novak was not able to be put in the arms of her mother for a few more days (until Lucy’s cold was cured, and the newborn could safely leave the ICU). During that period the doctors allowed Karen and me to come hold the baby, on condition that we had properly gowned, disinfected our hands, and fastened on our hygienic masks. We didn’t want the baby’s first hours of life to be in a machine, we wanted her to feel warm and safe in the arms of her family.

Thus it was that fragile and threatened Emily Alston came to bond so deeply and so solidly, so spontaneously, with Karen and me in a way that has fused our whole lives. Ever since, it has seemed to me that Emily Alston had only to sense Karen or me in her proximity to want to push herself toward us or, as she got older, to run toward us on the instant she spotted us. In her first years, at twenty paces she would start running toward me and at the end simply leap into my arms. This went on for years. At last, she grew into so lithe and agile a preteen that when she ran down a long hallway and leapt into my arms she all but knocked me over. Later on, even bracing myself fully, I was no longer able to catch her as of old. It didn’t seem then (or now) as if our hearts stopped racing toward each other – only that I could no longer absorb the full momentum in her leaps.

I still feel as close to her as I did in those early years. In her presence, I melt.

So I was quite thrilled when in the first few weeks after her graduation from college she sent me a longish email with ten questions on which she wanted my replies.

There was no doubt I would receive her leap, brace myself for the impact, and try to reply. I knew she could respond and force me to get her point exactly, or rebut my first attempts. My first thought was to rearrange her queries in order of importance. Then I thought, “No, I will just answer each of them briefly in the order in which she asked them.”

Most of the questions had to do with religion. Alas, parents and grandparents today cannot rely on a host of supporting institutions to give answers to the multitude of questions a quick child naturally conjures up. And the mass media today are certainly no friends of Jewish or Christian religion. On the contrary, they constantly trivialize religion, treat it as irrelevant, even ridiculous. Far from assisting in educating our children in their faith, the media throw before them all sorts of misinformation. Having seen this already with my children, I was not surprised at the sorts of questions that Alston tested me with.

In the weeks ahead I will be posting here Emily’s questions and my replies, occasionally, with her feedback and refinements.

* * *

The Novaks have been Catholic, so far as I have been able to determine, since at least the 1200s. The family originates in the “little Alps,” the Tatra Mountains of central Slovakia, the mountains that begin in the high Alps of Switzerland, and are still snow-topped when they descend into Slovakia, though much less towering than before.

Saints Cyril and Methodius brought Christianity to the Slavic countries and did much of their work in translating the bible into the Slavic tongue in the territory today called “Slovakia.” In a certain sense, the Slovak language may be thought of as the central Slavic language – closest to the Old Slavonic – out of which the many Slavic tongues went their various ways. (It is not that the Slovak tongue was first, rather that the Slovak lands were those in which that pivotal translation occurred.)

My dear wife Karen’s side of the family has three roots: one goes back to the Carvers of Plymouth Rock, to the younger brother of John Carver, the first governor of Massachusetts. The second line comes through her father, George Laub of Luxemburgish and Bavarian background. The third line comes by way of her mother’s mother, who married a Norwegian immigrant, Jan (John) Swenson. John Swenson and his brother were inventors who owned more than twenty-five patents each. Among their inventions were the stump-puller (winner of a gold medal at the Seattle World’s Fair, recognized as the invention “that opened the American West”), the extension ladder, a highly reliable and popular lightning rod, and a binder for harvesting which was bought by International Harvester.

English dissenters, later ancestors who were Baptist and Methodist circuit riders on the Iowa prairie, Norwegian Lutherans, German/Luxembuger Catholics – Alston comes of a very religiously diverse line indeed. She was brought up Catholic, although her mother Lucy (like her paternal great grandmother, of Carver-Swenson roots) was born a Methodist and became Catholic only later in life.

Emily was always taught to question. On the grounds that the Creator of all things was in the beginning the Logos, and is the source of all intelligence and intelligibility in the universe, a Jew or a Christian is safe in questioning, even has the vocation and duty to question, in order to imitate the Creator, and in order to come close to the Creator. Questions are not the enemy of faith. They are a participation in God’s own living intelligence. And the final resting point of questions, like their beginning, is in the eternal Logos.

In those traditions, a favorite metaphor for the Unseen God is Light, a Light that when approached, blinds. In another metaphor, this light is on a wavelength far too powerful for human receptors.

In this spirit, Emily and I joined one more time, by a leap of hers.

More to come.

[1] My sister, Mary Ann Novak, has written a brief but gripping account of his life and death, The Making of a Martyr (2014).

Inaugural Post of My New Blog "Coming Down to Earth"

A Recent, Much Blessed Trip to Lithuania

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on January 12, 2015

First a short introduction to this new blog:

Much of life consists in coming down to earth. Since college days, I have always preferred Aristotle over Plato, because Plato steadily points upwards (too idealistic), and Aristotle’s hand is palm-down, accepting the imperfections of earth. “All knowledge begins through the senses,” he writes. From the first, I loved the coming down to earth of Raphael’s masterpiece, “The School of Athens.”

Moreover, Aristotle’s preference for coming down to earth, I found, fits better with God’s sending His only Son to earth, in mercy. A bit shocking, that the Messiah should come as a poor and undefended man, of low origins and among a far-off, small, and conquered people. Thus does God bring humans down to earth, sneak up on us from below, teach us to look for our sweetest hopes not toward greatness but to littleness – even brokenness and abandonment. I love the bleakness of Isaiah 53, my favorite text for meditation, which often stuns me through Handel’s Messiah.

Thus, I was delighted to make a recent, much blessed trip to Lithuania. All the little states of Eastern Europe need strengthening now by friends from the United States. They feel lonely and very threatened, watching the bloodshed in Ukraine. I remember Reagan reaching out to Poland during the bad days of 1981. American candles in the window, in solidarity.

But what brought me really down to earth was the humbleness of the 1920s convent in which St. Faustina had her vision of Divine Mercy (1933-1936). I was given a half-hour alone in the humble room of the apparition, and gifted two copies of the Ukrainian painting, loved by her, of what she had seen. (Not the happy painting done elsewhere from her written notes, but the dark one, the strong one, the tough one, in which she guided the painter directly.)

* * *

So, twenty-five years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and after flying from Miami (85° F), there I was in cold and chilly Vilnius, Lithuania (-28 ° F) last November. Last year, 2014, was special year for remembering the great, almost miraculous things that occurred, quite humbly, in the tearing down of the Wall. (This past October, I was also called to Krakow and to Prague for sobering celebrations – and present worries. In Prague, the banner for the conference read: “Democracy, it hurts to think how much we loved you in 1989.” Practicing self-government is a wearying task.)

In Vilnius, I did not hear public worries about another Russian threat. But in private, a young reporter admitted how friends of hers were thinking they should delay marrying, maybe think of emigrating. Russian propaganda is insistent in sowing such fears by publicly accusing Lithuanians of “not behaving well.” Barely disguised threats suffice to sow uneasiness.

The recently begun rotation of 350 American troops into and out of Lithuania, I am happy to report, helps to quiet nerves. A good decision, of which more are needed. The American ambassador there had me over for an hour, and I came away reassured that someone is watching.

In Reagan’s time, during threatening Soviet maneuvers on the Polish border and the imprisonment of hundreds of Solidarnosc activists, there were lights of solidarity lit in millions of American homes, and day after day Lady Thatcher and Reagan made small military and financial moves to rebuke Soviet leadership. Two years before, Pope John Paul II had visited Poland for “nine days that changed the world.” And the Soviets lost their nerve.

Tiny little Lithuania, about 3 million persons, together with its neighbors Estonia and Latvia, feel far weaker than the Russian Bear, and look longingly for stronger responses from the United States and NATO.

It was sad to see how the brilliant hopes of just twenty-five years ago seem so threatened now by erasure, and how asleep leadership in the West is – either asleep, or weak. Burying their heads in the already falling snow.

And yet the lights shine bright in the modern streets of newly built-up Vilnius with its shiny glass buildings. The great Christmas tree just went up in the Old Square around the Cathedral in Old Town. Heroic efforts of restoration during the recent twenty-five years have brought most of the desecration of Old Town by Stalin and Hitler up to freshly painted and refurbished, inside and out.

If tradition is the democracy of the dead, then the generations of the last 500 years of Vilnius’ Old Town are still alive today in the dialogue in Lithuania’s soul. The last of European countries to be Christianized only 600 years ago, courageous and tough Lithuania may still be today (with Ukraine) the closest of all the formally annexed Soviet lands to being a “land of the free, and home of the brave.”

I told audiences that delicious joke about the “Baker-Schevardnadze Pact” of the first Bush administration: a straight-up trade: We get Lithuania, the USSR gets Massachusetts. (The two tallest Lithuanian basketball players on the Soviet team would then bring the U.S. the basketball gold in the next Olympics). The Lithuanians liked being thought of as a land of the free, home of the brave… And when I said “Massachusetts” many in the audience turned to each another chanting “Taxachusetts!”

Among the oldest heroes of Vilnius are three Russian Orthodox monks who threw their bodies against pagan marauders when the latter tried to sack the Church of the Holy Spirit. Today their three mummified remains, in Franciscan-like habits, lie just inside the front portals of that church, as if ready to rise up and to repel again all invaders from abroad.

Since the 1920s, Lithuania suffered the horrors of Stalinist church destroyers, then the Nazi slaughterers of some 70,000 Jews in Vilnius alone, and then again Soviet emptiers and sackers of churches, and burners of homes. Assassinations, barbaric tortures, banishments to the prison-camp Archipelago – what furies were unleashed for more than thirty years.

And yet this is the very city wherein Our Lady of Mercy, swathed in gold, brilliantly reflects the sunset above the Dawn Gate in the ancient walls. And where Poland’s saintly missionary of Divine Mercy, St. Faustina, first saw her visions in the 1930s, in an old and relatively uncelebrated convent (beside an orphanage). This is the city where martyrdom brought out the height and depth of God’s mercy. Down to earth, indeed!

The name mercy goes straight to the heart of God, St. Thomas wrote. Misericordia is God’s heart pouring out to les misérables. God goes to the lowly. Down to earth.

The Archbishop of Vilnius, Gintaras Grušas, a Lithuanian American from California, takes it as a duty to build a fitting shrine to Divine Mercy, and to make the poor convent of Vilnius a pilgrimage center. I hope it will attract many pilgrims who attend the World Youth Day in Krakow in 2016. It is not a long trip from one to the other. Since St. John Paul II deeply cherished the message of St. Faustina, I heartily, heartily recommend it.

Image from my private files.