Seeing Tragedy Through the Eyes of Catholic Faith

In the wake of the unspeakable act of violence in Boston Monday, our hearts are broken. When we see photos of the carnage, hear the testimony of those who were there, we find it difficult not to be very sad. It is only natural that both children and adults will ask questions.

Catechists and catechetical leaders have a special role to play in helping children and adults understand and deal with this tragedy through the eyes of faith.  Because of our Catholic faith, we see the "Problem of Evil" differently.

We should remind them of our beliefs about evil:

Yes, bad things do happen to good people. Look at Jesus and the martyrs. None of them deserved their suffering and deaths. Indeed, their suffering was redemptive. We should unite our sufferings with the suffering of Christ. (A nice explanation of the Pauline theology of that can be found here.)

God does not cause evil or suffering. Evil occurs because some people do not listen to the voice of God but instead make evil choices.  This is because God gave us free will -and because he respects us he permits us to choose. Sometimes, because of sin, we choose evil.  Free will is a gift, but it comes with the responsibility to form one's conscience, through reading scripture and study of moral teaching, and to seek to follow not our own will, but the will of God.

Good will overcome evil - but not always right away. For some things we may have to wait until Jesus comes again at the end of time. All we can do for now is pray regularly in the Our Father: "deliver us from evil..." Meanwhile, we are called by our baptism to  make the world a better place. We should never give up our fight for justice, to right things that are wrong, or to defend the poor, the helpless and the innocent.

Good can come from evil. The Resurrection of Jesus depended on his suffering and death. Sometimes we have to suffer pain or loss before we can accept the call to something better. As St. Paul wrote "We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28)  The Lord is near to the brokenhearted. As an Easter people, looking toward resurrection, we should never succumb to despair.

Lastly, we need to pray for those who were killed or injured and their families. We also need to pray for peace and an end to violence and hatred.  Even more than that, we are called to pray for whoever did this, since Jesus told us to pray for our enemies - and indeed prayed from the Cross for those who hurt him.

For older students and adults, you might want to call their attention to the Catechism of the Catholic Church 309-314, the section on Providence and the Scandal of Evil.

Postmodern Self Help: New Opiate for the Masses

Checking out at a discount store yesterday, I had a few minutes while waiting to peruse the magazine covers near the check-out counter. One particular cover caught my eye because of the promises it made: "Shortcuts to Bliss!"  "Happy Healing"  "No More Tiredness" "Melt Away Pounds!"  It occurs to me that these kinds of promises of self-help quick fixes offered by various gurus on fitness, happiness, etc. are the current opiate of the masses rather than religion. (as Karl Marx famously wrote: "Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes"). Times have changed, Herr Marx.

Having just read Father Dwight Longenecker's well-articulated post "The Collapse of Cultural Catholicism" in which he laments the dwindling number of people who take their faith seriously enough to show up for church, largely because they think they are good enough Christians on their own and have no use for the Church, it struck me that there is a relationship.

We are a society that not only thinks it is all about us, but that we can fix anything if we only try this or that system of behavior, or think positively enough. The Prosperity Gospel evangelists promote an attitude that if you are not rich, happy and leading a perfect life, it's your fault because you are not praying hard enough for those good things.  The New Age version of this comes from guru Eckhart Tolle - made famous by Oprah Winfrey's choice of his book. He would say that if you are not happy, it is because of your negative attitude. The "universe" wants good things for you - all you have to do is plug into the positive energy.  Supermarket self-help magazines direct people to the Self-Help aisle in the bookstore - which seems to get larger all the time, to find the latest books about systems for fixing everything about the human condition. Only around the corner are the corresponding New Age spirituality books which promise to fix your soul.

Organized religion is rapidly being rejected by people who have no use for what they do not understand - because it is not all about them. What we have is a failure to evangelize. Because they do not understand what the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ really has to do with their everyday life, they turn away and look for love "in all the wrong places" - depending on their own ability to follow somebody's "system" for happiness and fulfillment. The Church is not doing well at communicating the relationship of Paschal Mystery to everyday life. For that, I have to put some of the blame on the clergy - in my 24 years as a Catholic, I have only heard one homily that even mentioned it.

Jesus Christ has the ultimate system for self-improvement: his teachings and his example of life, submitting his will to that of the Father. Until people who call themselves Christian acknowledge that and stop turning whichever way the popular wind blows, we are really living in an era of "anti-Christs" - people who draw people away from Christ with promises of happiness. We live in a time where people no longer are addicted to religion, as Marx postulated. Instead, they are addicted to self-help, and to the latest system that promises health, wealth and happiness... until something newer and better comes along. No wonder few of them attend church any more.

Incarnation: God's Gift of Compassion

It's Christmas Eve and as I continue to process the death of the most significant person in my life, I have a growing sense that human suffering is truly the reason God came to earth as a human person.  Jesus, fully God and fully human, experienced both the best and the worst experiences of human life. The gift to us, is that because God, through the earthly life of Jesus, has experienced what it means to suffer loss, grief, pain etc, that God understands us and has compassion for us. (Compassio - Latin root meaning  = to suffer with).

I was told this a number of years ago when I did a Life's Healing Journey retreat with Peter Campbell, MSC, but at the time I only half believed it. After all, how can Jesus, who accepted and chose his path to the Cross, whose parents did not divorce, who never lost a spouse or lover to divorce or death, who was able to raise his beloved friend Lazarus from the dead, understand the wrenching depth of the pain these experiences of betrayal and loss create in the souls of human beings for a lifetime?  Betrayal, humiliation and crucifixion are horrible things, but Jesus only suffered for less than a day - while many people suffer pretty much for the rest of their lives.

In the intervening years, as I have come to understand Paschal Mystery (the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ - the central mystery of our faith) more deeply, I have had a better intellectual understanding of how this is supposed to work. Jesus, who accepted that it was will of his Father that he suffer, showed us that acceptance of the circumstances of one's life is the road to resurrection. This, I tell people when I teach, is why we have faith - so that when life deals us those huge blows, we have a "safety net". What has been more difficult for me to negotiate is the struggle to get the heart to join the mind in that acceptance.

As I write this, I am not there yet. 6 months is not enough time to process a major loss. What frightens me most is that people who have experienced such major loss tell me you never really "get over it." Somehow you just go on. What is not yet clear to me is whether there is reason to hope that any form of "resurrection"  (recovery and joy) necessarily takes place this side of the grave - or whether the promise is simply that we will be given the strength to perseve in spite of suffering and rise again on the Last Day to shed all our tears and pain as we go to our eternal life with God.


This much I do know - Jesus Christ became a human person to share the experience of suffering so that we could be sure that God truly knows what that experience is. He modeled a path through suffering resurrection that mirrors the experiences we have of being brought to our knees by the travails of life and being raised up again.  Whatever the full truth is, I am sure now that God does have compassion in the Latinate meaning of "suffering with" - that God cries when we do and God's heart is heavy whenever ours is. And that is the greatest gift of all - that this is not an impersonal deity who watches us cooly at a distance and waits for us to figure it out. If we are truly created in the image of God, then our emotional life is something God also shares. So, when God came to earth it was not only to share the experience of human suffering, but to demonstrate, through Jesus, how great that love is. The wood of the manger is the archetype of the wood of the cross. 

In that I find comfort, as I struggle my way back to trusting the God who gives and takes away. Blessed be the Lord who loved the world so much that He sent his only begotten Son as witness to that love.  Merry Christmas, all, no matter where your life journey has taken you - in sorrow or joy.

CCC Paragraph 901 - Offering it Up

Had yet another opportunity to mention my favorite paragraph in the Catechism of the Catholic Church the other day: 901, under "The participation of lay people in Christ's priestly office."

Think what a difference it might make in the Church if more people realized that if, as the priest is consecrating the gifts of bread and wine, they offer to God their life, with all its work and activities, successes and even failures and suffering (if these are "patiently born") their offering becomes a spiritual sacrifice that mingles with the bread and wine and makes it possible for their lives to be come holy actions of worship that "consecrate the world itself to God."

In other words, if we offer up our lives, with all their stuff, good and bad, that offering becomes part of the economy of grace, transformed by our faith in Christ. As we go forth into the world, Christ-like, our every action, now sanctified, is a form of praise and worship - a celebration of what it is to be human but always connected to the divine.

So, our offering up of ourselves at Mass makes both us and the world more holy. When were they going to tell us we had that kind of power?

What if we looked at our worship as a real dialog?

Thumbing through a stack of vintage Worship magazines I inherited and ran across a statement in an article from March 1989 by Michael Skelley on Karl Rahner's idea of worship:

"The unceasing wonder of worship is that it is a dialogical relationship with the absolute mystery; an event in which we are graciously addressed by God and in turn, gratefully respond to Him." He goes on to discuss Rahner's idea of openness to God, and that our ongoing daily relationship to God is what we bring to our worship.

So, what if we took that seriously? I think most people recognize that in the liturgy of the Mass, the assembly is sometimes in dialog with the presider. They would realize that both the assembly and the presider frequently lift our voices in prayer and song to God. But, when does God address us? And, are most members of the assembly conscious of that?

Rahner would say that God is always speaking to us in our everyday life, so in our very gathering for Mass, we are responding to that ongoing dialog. Also, in the readings - through the work of the Holy Spirit, we are hearing the Word of God, which God told us never goes forth from his mouth without effect. (See the Introduction to the Revised Lectionary for Mass, Section 9, for more on this process .) Certainly, in the Eucharistic Prayer, especially during the Words of Institution, we hear Christ addressing not only his friends gathered at that first table, but us, gathered at this celebration. And there is the unspoken Word - Christ, whom we receive and are asked to embody and become like when we receive the Eucharist.

Is there more wordless communication from God? Certainly. God speaks to us through the presence of the community, through the presence of the presider, through the familiar rhythm of human ritual that enfolds us, taking us out of our daily sense of time and for that one hour or so, transporting us to the heavenly banquet, among the Communion of Saints - in God's time.

Given all this, should our response not be whole-hearted and genuine? Should our participation in the liturgy not be with our whole heart, mind and being?