Truth from the Heart: God

The Eternal Perspective: No Mere Mortals

6:00:00 AMJonah Soucy

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit” (1).

The other night, I had the opportunity to go see a one man play titled C.S. Lewis: The Most Reluctant Convert, an off-Broadway act which was really incredible. The quote above is one that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since going.

Stepping out of the theater, I looked at the city in a way that was drastically different than how I looked at it when I walked in. As I walked through JFK airport a few days later, that quote continued to play through my head as I walked past thousands of people, each traveling to different parts of the world, where tens of thousands more wait for them in the form of family and friends, lovers and employers. In New York there are over 8 million people. On Earth there are 7 billion. Each is truly unique, never to be repeated.

Kierkegaard writes that man is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, time and eternity (2). We have within us conflicting desires. Are we built for something special? Or are we a simple cog in the great machine of the universe? Destined to rust away, easily replaceable. If there is no meaning behind then our existence is a cruel and sick joke, a laughable tragedy. But what if we were made for more? What if we really do have a role to play in the drama of history that is unfolding all around us, at every moment of every day?

To give evidence for the immortality of the soul and the existence of God is tempting, but there is simply too much ground there to cover for a single blog post to do it any sort of justice. I could go into how scientists still don’t have an understanding of consciousness. Sure, there are explanations for how our memories are stored, how our sense data works. But there’s still no great explanation for our lateral self presence. How is it that man can reflect on the deeper things of the universe? Or I could give a defense of the many different avenues and arguments for God. But again, that’s not the main point that I’m trying to make today. The point that I want to drive home is a simple one, and I hope to leave you, dear reader, with the same haunting feeling I felt walking out of that C.S. Lewis play. If it's all true, if we have this stamp of immortality on us, what are we doing about it? And how are we looking at the people around us?

Reflecting on those words of C.S. Lewis, my mind connected back to the personalism I so dearly love. Writers such as Alice and Dietrich von Hildebrand, Karol Wojtyla, Joseph Pieper; they understood this truth that C.S. Lewis touched on. He called it the “weight of glory”. When we view life through this lens, we see people and situations in a new light, an eternal perspective. Suffering and pain no longer have the same power over us. The little troubles of life get cast away from the foreground and into the back.

The uniqueness of every human being we come across speaks to the infinite and intrinsic value that each human life holds. Every single person you meet has this value pertaining to the metaphysical degree of their being.

And yet, we spend so much of our time putting up walls between us. Instead of having friendly conversations on the bus we put in our headphones and go off into our own world. We put our noses in our phones, not wanting to be disturbed. The population is rising, but we’re making the world a much more lonely place. How well are we loving our family and friends? Are we taking the time to let them know they are loved? That we show them we understand their worth and dignity? Where can we grow in these areas?

These aren’t easy questions. Our place in the universe seems so small and insignificant; yet, we have the power to make decisions that echo throughout eternity.We have the power to make a difference in people’s lives for the better, to bring joy to the afflicted, hope to the hopeless. We have the power to be good, and in being good to bring goodness into the world more and more every day.

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C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory p. 45
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, p. 1

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affectivity death of a loved one emotions

"God What Have YOU Done?" Sorrow at the Passing of a Loved One

6:00:00 AMJeremy Schupbach

I don’t have the statistics to back this up, but I have the impression through personal encounters that the main reason people lack faith in God is not because they doubt his existence, but because they actually hate Him.

This sentiment is unfortunate, but when it stems from a horrible tragedy, particularly the death of a loved one, it almost seems justified. “Why would God have done this?” “How could God have done this?” I have heard these questions asked from many mouths, and then almost always, after a pause and in a softer, often disparate, voice, “I hate God.”

I am pretty talkative, but this always shuts me up because I have never been in their shoes; I have never lost someone whom I dearly loved. So no matter what I say, they can tell me that I don’t understand, and they will be right, I don’t.

At least I didn't until recently when it became quite clear that my grandma, who as I write this is still alive, has very, very little time remaining.

It is difficult to explain how I came to love my grandma so much but I think it is just because she loved me so much first. And the older I got the more I picked up on that, especially when I confided in her that I am discerning the priesthood. She always wanted a priest in the family, and when I admitted her into my confidence, her eyes glowed brighter than any eyes I have ever seen before (although of course she said she had always known). Beholding the love in both of my grandparents eyes in that moment is still one of the most treasured memories of my entire life. As an Irish folk tune expresses with remarkable veracity, “When Irish eyes are smiling, sure ‘tis like the morn in Spring.” (my grandma is passionately Irish)

It is true that the death of my grandma will not impact my life nearly so much as the deaths that many others have experienced, such as the loss of a spouse, or the loss of a parent for a young child, or for a parent to lose a child, and especially the death of a young person. It is true that her death lacks the character of immense tragedy that many other deaths have. But the truth remains that my sorrow at the prospect of parting with her for the rest of my life is wholly genuine, for it seems to me that there are two things necessary for sorrow, and that is love, and loss, and both are present.

Which brings me to the essential thesis that I would like to present, which is that sorrow presupposes love. At first glance this seems obvious, how could anyone feel sorrowful over losing someone that they did not love or care about? If one was to read the list of names in the obituary, they would certainly understand the misfortune of these deaths, and comprehend the hardship implied for the loved ones, but they themselves would not feel sorrow, because they had never known or loved the deceased.

Simple though this revelation might seem, it has very important implications. For love also implies gratitude. To love a person, in some sense, means to be grateful for their existence, and to none other than God. Genuine sorrow, then, is incompatible with hatred of God.

In my own case I feel this quite clearly. To best describe my sentiment of sorrow, I must first explain how happy I am that I was loved and got to love my grandma for 20 years. I am eminently joyful that this incredible woman was my grandma. I would never have wanted another woman to be my grandma and I am wholeheartedly thankful to God for the amazing gift of her presence in my life.

In no way is it my intention to pass judgment on those who have experienced similar and greater tragedies, and have felt angry at, and possibly hated God. But my own experience reminds me, and I hope to remind the reader, that this is not proper to genuine sorrow. The loss of a loved one should not result in despair, which responds to the loss of something precious by lashing out against the fount of preciousness itself. On the contrary, genuine sorrow is an occasion for a new and heightened response to the value of that person, and also to God for bestowing that gift.

Of course it is my hope that my grandma will continue to live as long and as happily as is possible, but whatever may happen, it remains that I love my grandma dearly and with my whole heart, and this is a reminder to me of the greatness and goodness of God, and no separation could ever alter that.

Rather than curse God, “God what have YOU done?” sorrow instead pushes me to the opposite extreme. Overcome by the gift of my grandmother, I tend more to be lost for words, and ironically the same maxim expresses quite well the murmur of my dumbfoundedness and astonishment at the beauty of her Irish eyes, “My God what have You done!”

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C.S. Lewis dietrich von hildebrand God

Its Not Simple To Be Simple

6:00:00 AMJeremy Schupbach

Bible christ featured

Man and Woman He Created Them

6:00:00 AMAnonymous

Have you ever trekked the expanse of an infinity?

In my last post, we discussed the mystery that it is to be a human person. Our infinite interiority, unrepeatability, utter uniqueness, and individual wholeness all combined is enough to leave one breathless with awe if you really stop to think about it. In a culture that is constantly seeking to numb us to our own capacities for greatness through mindless forms of leisure and a decreased quality in modern educational systems, it is so easy to forget about the magnanimity and mystery of one single human person walking into a room.

We are really, very marvelous. Have you forgotten?

Let us begin at the beginning:

“God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Adam wakes up. Eve opens her eyes.

Her senses are instantly flooded with golden light swirling around her – the sparkling rays of dawn overwhelm her as birds sing and a gentle breeze tickles her face.

Light. Color. Sound.

Man.

She sees him, the man, Adam, looking at her. Their eyes lock.

There is instantaneous recognition of sameness, of similarity, of likeness. Adam pronounces, “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” (Genesis 2:23).

I wonder, though, how long it took them to become acutely aware of their differences in embodiment, too. Isn’t it curious that the first impression Adam has of Eve is one of similarity rather than difference? It is only after he makes this pronouncement of their likeness that he acknowledges that she should be called woman, since she was taken from man (an acknowledgement of difference).

Integral to my understanding of what it means to be a human person is a school of thought that can be called incarnational personalism. This marks the first major division under the branch of “personalism,” and this deviation amongst personalists is over the question of embodiment, or, more specifically, the reality of being made male and female (1).

As I mentioned in my last post, while I think analyzing the differences between male and female embodiment is very important philosophically, I want to avoid two extremes: the first extreme would be any sort of notion that male and female are so different that they lack a common humanity, and the other extreme being complete disinterest in the differences of embodiment by holding to a kind of dualism (positing that the real self and the body are two separate things). Incarnational personalism holds that we live in and through our embodiment. Our bodies are not simply vehicles by which we manipulate matter, but an integral part of our personhood itself. Our bodies cannot be separated from our personhood. I am taking this as a given premise (perhaps, if I have time later in the semester, we can revisit why I truly hold to this even in a culture that is rampant with dualism).

After several years as a philosophy student, however, I am starting to learn that there are even serious debates going on within the smaller community of incarnational personalism as well. Novak, in this essay, goes on to state that since mankind is made in the image of God, it must be something about maleness and femaleness together that mirrors God. On this point, I agree. The aspects of being a man must mirror God in a way that are different from the ways in which a woman mirrors God. Thus it is only logical to claim that it is the mystery of man and woman together that most closely imitates what it is to be the Imago Dei, for it is “something in our male-and-femaleness-together that pulls back the veil on what God is like” (3).

However, it would seem to me that taking this concept too far could be problematic. Novak goes on to say that since our communion as persons together is what makes us resemble God, “each gender alone is incompletely human. We are made for the communion of male and female” (4). Respectfully, this statement rang some alarm bells for me.

My struggle with this line from Novak’s essay lies in the fact that it seems to contradict basic elements of personalism that we have been asserting all along, namely, that each unique and unrepeatable human being is in-and-of-themselves a human person in the full sense of the term. The very thought of a woman being an “incomplete human” because she does not contain male-ness in any way does not, to me, seem to be consistent with the personalist approach. Doesn’t this contradict what Crosby and Maritain said when they describe humanity as being a “whole composed of wholes?” (5). For me, this is one of those stumbling blocks that leaves me with more questions than answers, and I cannot wait to continue reading Novak in the hopes of uncovering his meaning.

So, according to Novak then, can we really say that each human person has an infinite interiority to them, or contains the fullness of human nature? What about the fact that this human nature is a shared nature, common to both men and women? Is he attempting to be consistent with a theory of split gender complementary, reminiscent of Edith Stein’s approach? Is he simply being poetic in an attempt to persuade the reader of the importance of communion between men and women?

Check out my next post as I attempt to start scratching the surface of some of these questions.

Until then, thank you for journeying with me so far.

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(1) Crosby, What We Mean by Personalism, 2.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid, 3.

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A Severe Mercy eternity featured

“Your Life Through Heaven’s Eyes”: The Eternal Reality of the Human Person

6:00:00 AMRose Deemer

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In the movie Prince of Egypt, a musical rendition of the Exodus story, Moses’ father-in-law Jethro tells (or rather sings to) the young hero, “...How can you see what your life is worth / Or where your value lies? You can never see through the eyes of man / You must look at your life...through heaven's eyes.” Truth. But how? Sounds easier said than done. Well, there are many ways you could view this quote, but there’s one quite literal way in which a person could learn to view himself and others “through heaven’s eyes”: by looking at each human being from--as far as is possible in our state as creatures--the perspective of God himself.

In metaphysics, we learn that God is necessarily eternal, existing outside of time. Therefore, while God is often imagined to be a sort of benevolent spectator who watches our lives unfold in time much in the same way you’d watch the actions of the characters in a movie, he really knows us and our doings in a much more complex way. Time is a linear--an unfolding sequence of events--but God is outside of the sequence. He is completely untouched by the movement of time. Therefore, he sees everything that has ever happened, is happening, or will happen, in its fullness at every moment. To him, all of history, past, present, and to come, is one great eternal “now”.

This understanding of God’s knowledge is also the “viewpoint” from which he sees the human person: as a whole, in the entire eternal reality which is each human soul. He doesn’t see each person the way we do, in fragments at each particular moment. While we see a person in his or her transient state at a given moment in time (young, old, depressed, joyful, sick, healthy, etc.), God sees all moments of their life as one and in one eternal “moment”. Of course, he respects and takes into account our state as temporal creatures (hence the second chances he gives us, allowing for repentance and the amendment of our lives in the future), but ultimately his vision of time and temporal creatures is not affected by time, unlike ours.

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In his autobiographical study of marital love and the Christian Faith, A Severe Mercy, American author Sheldon Vanauken touches on this very concept of God’s eternal knowledge of the human person as he experienced it. Married for eighteen years to the love of his life, Jean “Davy” Davidson, Vanauken recounts his grieving process following her death in one of the most poignant sections of the book. As he works through the pain of her loss, Vanauken decides to carry out what he terms an “Illumination of the Past”; he goes through every journal, letter, picture, and piece of memorabilia from every moment of their lives together, in order to relive the memories of each experience shared with her. As Vanauken himself describes,

“Now I was discovering...anew...Davy, going through the years: I was touching her soul, the very essence of her being. I described earlier how all the Davys began to flow back to me shortly after her death, and I recovered the wholeness of her. Now with the Illumination of the Past the process was completed. It is sometimes said that the fourth dimension is time or duration: one does not see a person or thing in any one instant of seeing. And I was seeing Davy in all her years...as nearly as a lover can do, I was seeing the whole of her--a wholeness I would never lose--and knowing her soul.” (195-96)

In this beautiful way, Vanauken as a bereaved lover came to know his beloved in the fullness of her reality as a person, as a summation of every one of her states of being. Since she was no longer present to him in time, he was able to contemplate her as a complete whole, a summation of all the moments of her life, and no longer in the context of an unfolding, linear sequence of events. In other words, he began to see her from a perspective similar to that of God.

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To illustrate this beautiful truth of the eternal reality of the human person even further, I want to close by sharing a personal story. A few years ago, a friend of mine--we’ll call her Anna--suffered a serious traumatic brain injury. Against all odds, she survived and began the process of making a full recovery. As time went on, however, it became clear that the injury had changed her, and she wasn’t quite the same old Anna we knew before the injury. She was different, somehow, when she woke from the coma in which she had been since the accident. In a letter to all those who had supported their family during the months following the accident, Anna’s mother touched on this change in a very profound way. She shared with us the beautiful reality that God sees Anna as whole, as herself, always. He doesn’t see baby Anna, teenage Anna, Anna before the accident or Anna after the accident, one at a time and in a linear sequence, as we do, but Anna as she is eternally, a summation of every one of her moments of life and states of being. God’s vision of Anna included Anna’s life after her brain injury, as well as every other part of her life, from the very moment of her conception. To God, every moment of her existence is a part of the beautiful thought in His mind from which she sprung, and which is, in a unique and unrepeatable way, eternally her.

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From Porn to Purity

6:00:00 AMCatherine Yanko

When the modern person thinks of purity, some of the images that first come to mind are the medieval chastity belt and monks/nuns: all things that are neither applicable nor relevant to living out sexuality in today’s secular culture. The pornography industry is an international market of $97 billion and quickly growing. There seems to be no place for purity in a culture that spends so much time and money on something that is antithetical to purity itself. Modern man, myself often included, is left wondering is purity is an endeavor worth, or even possible, fighting for?

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Is the modern notion of purity as described above a correct definition? According to Dietrich von Hildebrand in “In Defense of Purity: An Analysis of the Catholic Ideals of Purity and Virginity”, it is not. Purity is not a sort of insensibility to sex. Hildebrand says that insensibility would actually be detrimental to the flourishing of virtue. Insensibility is a mere temperament; no virtue can arise out of a mere temperament since a virtue requires a habit. A virtuous habit consists in responding to a value, so it is clear that a disposition that does not even recognize a value cannot be grounds for a virtue. Likewise, purity is not synonymous with chastity. While chastity exclusively concerns sex, purity is a more general response to value. But, human purity does imply and demand chastity.

So, what does it mean to be pure? Hildebrand says, “Purity consists… primarily in an abiding in God’s presence and a surrender to the glory of His countenance.” (47). The habit of this virtue is in a constant surrender to the presence of God. Hildebrand also says, “The pure man remains a vessel in which the light which flows forth from God can unfold without obstruction” (42). The pure man is characterized as simple, sincere, humble, and reverent. This is seen in his attitude towards all of God’s creation, not exclusively sex.

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With this new definition of purity, which dismisses insensibility and merely chastity, it is easy to wonder what purity has to do with the problem of pornography. After all, what help can a virtue that is concerned with the unity of God and man be to an atheistic world? The way the pure man perceives and acts regarding sex drastically differs from that of the impure man. With pornography, the impurity is manifested as using sex solely for its own sake. This is isolated from the notion of the beloved. On the other hand, “The pure man perceives the mystery of sex. He perceives its depth, its seriousness, its intimacy” (40). Would an industry like the pornography industry exist if we discovered that our bodies have beauty, that is intrinsic value, and are meant for relation and not isolated feelings? With pornography, the sexual act and beauty of the human body itself is distorted from God’s plan. Whereas, “The pure man always lives in an attitude of reverence for God and His creation, and therefore reveres sex, its profundity and its sublime and divinely ordained meaning” (40).

Realizing both the meaning and great value of purity and the danger of pornography to our humanity and understanding the fact we live in a pornographic culture, it is worth wondering, to return to the original question, how one can restore purity. First, it is important to realize that purity, like all other virtues, is a product of the spirit. Thus, it requires a supernatural foundation (48). Union with God is this supernatural foundation that builds the will of the human spirit into habits (53). The beginning of this supernatural foundation for virtue is contact with the source Himself. Thankfully, God, being perfect beauty, allows us to encounter Him, specifically in beauty. It is by responding to this beauty that virtue can begin to be acquired (of course with the aid of grace).

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So, where do we turn now? Previously, I have discussed the way the beauty of nature allowed me to acquire the virtue of reverence. Nature is a great source of beauty because of its origin clearly being in the creator. For what man can craft a living mountain? Another way we can encounter beauty is in art. Hildebrand says that there are in fact works of the heart that seem to open the heavens to us, and they are opposite to all that is paltry and impure. These works can be purifying.

“Not only is it [sublime works of art] pure in itself like the Beauty of which it is the reflection; it is also specifically purifying, and contributes more than almost any other agent to free the heart from the intoxicating poison of sex isolated as its own end. It raises a man above this sphere, touches and expands the soul, arouses a longing for its heavenly home, emancipates it and guides it into the deepest region of its own interior, and enkindles in our heart a burning desire for God, the everlasting Beauty, and Jesus, ‘fairest of the sons of men’.” (56)

Discovering a lost idea of purity, I still wonder what the effect would be for a culture that turned from what is pornographic to striving towards purity. How tremendous the effects would be! At any rate, the fight for purity is always possible as God continually makes himself known to us by beauty. In beauty, we can have hope, even in this pornographic world.

The Eternal Perspective: No Mere Mortals

"God What Have YOU Done?" Sorrow at the Passing of a Loved One

Its Not Simple To Be Simple

Man and Woman He Created Them

“Your Life Through Heaven’s Eyes”: The Eternal Reality of the Human Person

From Porn to Purity

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