Fine wine, roast duck, and contemplation, the highest activity of man

Last week at Thanksgiving dinner the conversation turned to the topic of redundancy. I know, as opposed to football or politics, redundancy is not a usual topic for discussion whilst consuming turkey--or roast duck, as the case would have it (may Wilbur rest in peace)--but bear with me.

Labor vincit omnia, says Virgil in the Georgics. Labor conquers all things.

Redundancy commonly refers to things that are superfluous, or "extra," which, of course, is anathema in a modern society hyper-obsessed with efficiency and streamlining. The question human resource departments are always asking is: "How can we do more with less?"

Obviously there is value in doing more with less; nobody appreciates a bloated bureaucracy except those parasitically living off of it. But last Thursday our conversation took a deeper turn: I was wondering not so much whether it is a good thing to do more with less, but whether an activity might, by its absence, detract from the fully lived human experience?

The two questions are actually quite different, and that's the point. The first asks whether we ought to make the most of the little that we have. I think, for example, of our own tight family budget and the careful choices my wife and I make to stretch every dollar. It's certainly not a bad thing to do as much as you can with the little that you have, either in setting the family budget or in running a business and trying to make a profit.

The second question, however, associates our performance of actions, even obsolete, redundant actions, with that most noble of endeavors, the fully lived human existence. Might it be, I suggested last Thursday, that redundancy is a necessary part of being fully human?

At Thanksgiving dinner one of my interlocutors agreed, bringing up the example of playing the piano. Even as a non-musician, I understood what she was getting at: The pianist can only play expressively, that is, interpretively, when she no longer has to think about where her fingers are to be placed.

Freedom is found, in other words, when one's mundane, everyday actions become so habitual that they are nearly effortless to perform.

Effortlessness in any human endeavor does not occur overnight. Countless laborious hours spent at the piano, spent reading in a foreign language, spent perfecting any craft, skill or art either fine or practical; a whole lifetime of hours consumed in the peeling potatoes and the preparation of meals, in the planting of seedlings, the weeding of rows of plants, and the harvesting crops; hours not wasted, I argued, but instead invested in the making of mundane things so mundane, so everyday, so mindless, that our minds become free to contemplate higher things, which Aristotle says is the highest activity of man.

All of which leads me to militate even against our hyper-efficient, globalized society that takes doing more with less as its guiding principle. At what point, if that is one's guiding principle, does one decide that more has become too much, or that less is now too little? What keeps a company's human resources department, with its mandate to trim the budget and maximize the profit, from squeezing the humanity out of the humans who are, ostensibly, its resource?

It is very difficult to ask questions like these without becoming an irrelevant, backwards-looking curmudgeon because we naturally, and rightly, seek to be as efficient as possible in whatever we do. I am not curmudgeonly enough to call for farmers to abandon their tractors and return to tilling their fields with horses and oxen. Neither am I suggesting that we walk everywhere on foot instead of driving, or that we rely on the pony express for our mail delivery.

But I think we all know that technology has the potential to steal from us the type of mundane activities that truly invite contemplation. What does the dishwasher make redundant except the tedious hand-washing of dishes, which, of course, leaves us free to... watch movies on Netflix. ...browse aimlessly through Facebook. Etc., etc.

You might protest--No, technology frees me not to waste my time, but to accomplish more than I did before. The farmer can plant five times as much with the assistance of his tractor. The office worker can communicate far faster by e-mail than he could by first-class post, let alone by pony express. But really, is this such an unalloyed good as to be unchallenged? Why make more money than less? Why produce more food here in the United States than we can consume or even export, so that we end up converting it, at a terrible price to the environment, into ethanol to burn as fuel?

Yes, it is curmudgeonly and backwards-looking to ask such questions. But seriously, do we live fuller lives than people did 50 years ago, with so many redundancies having been eliminated through time-saving technologies and techniques? Is our lived experience more fully human than that of our great-grandparents one hundred years ago?

Or are we more distracted than ever, less capable of concentration, and farther from the contemplation of higher things that, again, Aristotle said is our highest good, our summum bonum, that is, happiness itself?

Not that technology is going away any time soon. But these questions are worth asking nonetheless. A few glasses of fine wine and a tasty roast duck can lead the conversation into uncharted waters such as these. Thank you, Wilbur.

Filial Affection in the Age of Pope Francis

"Some, as with certain responses to Amoris Laetitia, persist in seeing only white or black, when rather one ought to discern in the flow of life." ~ Pope Francis, in an interview published in Avvenire on Nov. 16.   

"You get the idea? Keep his mind off the plain antithesis between True and False. Nice shadowy expressions --- 'It was a phase' --- 'I've been through all that' --- don't forget the blessed word 'Adolescent.'" ~ Screwtape to his nephew in C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters

This is a troubling pair of statements. Troubling in their juxtaposition because the first comes from the reigning sovereign pontiff, to whom all Catholics, myself included, owe a deep filial affection. Troubling because the second is from a diabolical uncle--albeit fictional--who writes to his fiendish nephew with advice about how to win the human being entrusted to him to the side of eternal hellfire and damnation..

Let me repeat: We Catholics owe the pope a deep filial affection: not just the petrine office (those who make that distinction are flat-out wrong), but the person who holds that office too. I love how the Italians call the pope by his former name--Papa Ratzinger, Papa Bergoglio, etc.--because this highlights their love for the man who holds the petrine office, with all his personality but all his foibles and all his shortcomings too. We are obliged to look to the Holy Father, a human person just like we are, for guidance and correction because he is our father in faith, the successor of St. Peter, who had plenty of shortcomings of his own. 

But there is nothing in Catholicism that leads me to consider every word the Holy Father utters a divine oracle, and while Pope Francis is most certainly not Screwtape (again, that is the farthest thing from my mind), his words in the Avvenire interview, which I happened to read shortly after reading the relevant portion of Lewis' book, bear a striking resemblance. To say otherwise--to hasten to smooth things over just because the speaker was the pope--would be intellectually dishonest.

This post is therefore the type of honest serious soul-searching that any responsible Catholic intellectual needs to carry out. I am convinced of the need to discuss these things openly and charitably rather than each of us worrying individually and alone. Indeed, anybody who has been following the fall-out from Pope Francis' Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia should be worried because the incongruities really are there, and they've been there longer than this week-old interview.

The context of all this, of course, is the recent news about the four cardinals who submitted a series of dubia--Latin for questions--to the Holy Father in order to elicit his response, in order that the Vicar of Christ confirm his brethren in the faith (cf. Luke 22:32, Lumen Gentium 25, etc., etc.). These four cardinals included two Germans, an Italian, and Cardinal Raymond Burke, for whom I have had a deep and abiding affection ever since I was a seminarian and he was my bishop in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Dubia are a traditional way of eliciting a 'yes' or 'no' answer from the Vatican in regard to questions of faith and morals, and these specific dubia sought clarity in the aftermath of wildly varying interpretations of a single chapter Amoris Laetitia. To some interpreters, Chapter 8, and in particular Footnote 351, implied that Catholics who have civilly remarried without obtaining an annulment may be eligible to receive Holy Communion. The Church must be a source of help for couples in these "irregular unions," Pope Francis writes in the relevant portion of his post-synodal apostolic exhortation, adding in the aforementioned footnote that "in certain cases this can include the help of the sacraments" (my emphasis).

Surely it would be incongruous and troubling if the Holy Father's statement really meant that Catholics in adulterous unions could become eligible to present themselves for Holy Communion without living as "brother and sister," as the magisterial tradition has taught that they must do. Surely. So of course, there have been many faithful bishops, priests, and lay Catholics who have insisted that the passage couldn't be interpreted except in light of the perennial teaching of the Church. 

The Holy Father's statement couldn't be taken any other way, they say, because then it would contradict not only the magisterial teaching of Pope St. John Paul II, not only the entire Catholic tradition, but even the very words of Christ: "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery" (Mark 10:11-12); and of St. Paul in regard to the reception of the Holy Eucharist: "Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord" (1 Corinthians 11:27). 

That's certainly the way Archbishop Chaput, for example, interpreted matters this summer when he published guidelines for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, echoing John Paul II's Familiaris Consortio: "Undertaking to live as brother and sister is necessary for the divorced and civilly-remarried to receive reconciliation in the Sacrament of Penance, which could then open the way to the Eucharist."

And that's certainly the way that I had been telling myself for months that the Holy Father's words must to be interpreted. Because it couldn't be otherwise.

And yet, there is Cardinal Walter Kasper, the original promoter of what has become known as the "Kasperite thesis,"who wrote in an essay earlier this month that Amoris Laetitia marks a "paradigm shift" that "leaves open the concrete question of admittance to absolution and Communion." Then there is the instruction put forward by the bishops of Argentina, who say that "in the first place we recall that it is not convenient to speak of 'permission' to receive the sacraments, but rather a process of discernment accompanied by a pastor."  

I'd say Cardinal Kasper is in the wrong, except that the Holy Father has praised him repeatedly. And I'd say that the Argentinian bishops are surely in the wrong, except that Pope Francis himself wrote to them praising their "pastoral charity" and stating that there are "no other interpretations" of his apostolic exhortation.

How does this not put Archbishop Chaput in the wrong, at least in the eyes of the Holy Father, despite the fact that the Philadelphia archbishop's own pastoral statement echoes the constant teaching of the Church?

Hence the dubia of Cardinal Burke et alii. In particular, the first dubium pointedly asks:

[W]hether, following the affirmations of Amoris Laetitia (300-305), it has now become possible to grant absolution in the sacrament of penance and thus to admit to holy Communion a person who, while bound by a valid marital bond, lives together with a different person more uxorio without fulfilling the conditions provided for by Familiaris Consortio, 84, and subsequently reaffirmed by Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 34, and Sacramentum Caritatis, 29. Can the expression “in certain cases” found in Note 351 (305) of the exhortation Amoris Laetitia be applied to divorced persons who are in a new union and who continue to live more uxorio?

That's the first dubium of five, and surely the pope must answer this first one in the negative. Surely? We will never know, as Pope Francis let it be known that he would not be answering the dubia, leading the cardinals to release them publicly, and leading to his commentary on those who "persist in seeing only in black or white." The Holy Father doesn't say so explicitly, but the assumption is that seeing things in black-and-white lacks pastoral nuance; it's spiritually immature to speak of truth and falsity as if they were antithetical; it's even--and here's that damning word of Screwtape's--adolescent. Blessed, he says, not damning; but that's the problem.

Only the most papolatrous and thoroughly biblically illiterate among us would argue that the formal "Act of Correction" that Cardinal Burke has floated is not on the table. (Think Galations 2: "When Cephas came to Antioch, I [Paul] opposed him openly" if you are tempted to disagree.) Unprecedented in the modern Church, yes; impossible, no.

But one ought to pray that it doesn't come to that. I do, regularly and seriously.

If it does come to something formal, then it's for the good cardinals to take care of, and Cardinal Burke is specifically in my prayers every day in that regard, too. 

What of us lowly laypeople? We too get asked--even lectured--about how the Church is getting with the times and modernizing, and finally updating her moribund, medieval teachings. 

Which is the reason for this post.

And the reason that I say things like this:

I love and respect Pope Francis, and I look to him for spiritual guidance and correction, as he is the true successor to St. Peter. But he is a human being just like you and I, and the Holy Spirit does not perfect his human character, or even his human judgement and intellect. Some of Pope Francis' statements have displayed an undeniable intemperateness. And some of his pastorally-oriented strategies for bringing people back into the fold, while well intentioned, are instead bringing about a great deal of turmoil and confusion, in the present instance because many people are beginning to think that the Church has changed her teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. She hasn't, and she can't. If “even an angel should preach unto you any Gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema” (Galatians 1:8). Please pray for Pope Francis. I do every day.  

To Give Thanks Is Simply To Be Christian

Tomorrow marks the last Thursday in November, and a lengthy car-ride to Reedy Fork Farm for organic feed for our newest broiler chicks appropriately gave me plenty of time to contemplate what exactly it means to give thanks.

I, for one, am thankful that most of the batch of broiler chicks that we picked up at the post office this morning made it safely all the way from Iowa despite the snow and cold!

I have a penchant for looking deeply into the etymology of words, where they come from and how they work in other languages. My students sometimes get impatient with me in this regard, and not wholly without reason, as the meanings of words are really some combination of where they come from and how they're used in the hic et nunc. After all, language is about getting your point across to somebody other than yourself, and any dictionary worth its salt--with the saltiest by far, in my opinion, being the multivolume Oxford English Dictionary--will include both the roots of words--that is, where they come from--and examples of these same words in usage over the course of the millennium or so that the English language and its immediate predecessors have been around.

BUT, I beg your patience for the moment, as I often beg the patience of my students, as I drill into word thanks in this Thanksgiving blog post. BECAUSE... after all, etymology is half of the picture.

Thanks, in any case, is Germanic in origin, with the modern German expression Danke schön being evidence enough of that fact. Any good dictionary--even the online ones--will associate the Old English þanc with both satisfaction and grace, and therein lies our crux interpretum, as the former word implies that a thank you is merely repayment in satisfaction of the debt in which a gift places us, whereas the latter implies that saying thank you is itself a gift of our own initiative freely, even eagerly, returned to the giver.

As I puzzle over this, I recall how hard it is to teach my own four little boys to say thank you of their own accord. You can imagine the situation: My dear wife hands one of our perfect, prim, proper young men a plate of food, as occurs at Kleinshire practically every day (yes, we do feed our children every day), and then she gives the aforementioned young man that certain meaningful look. There is an extended pause. Finally, begrudgingly, so, so, so slowly, the muttered, mumbled thank you is ineluctably, ever so reluctantly drawn forth.

You're welcome could be the subject of a future post.

BUT for now, in the above example the child clearly begins to associate his saying thank you with payment. Thank you becomes something that he owes in satisfaction for the food which he has received. The same thing then applies to birthday gifts from grandma, the holding of doors, the receipt of 4-H fair premiums, etc., etc.: All these supposed gifts become not so much gifts, but more so situations of quid pro quo, where the quid is the supposed gift, and the pro quo is that ever so reluctantly returned payment of those precious words: thank you.

And what's to wonder at the fact that the thank you is so reluctantly given, even if Aristotle would say that the magnanimous man finds pleasure and ease in the exercise of all the virtues, including, most certainly, the human virtue of justice? Aristotle aside, I do not find myself jumping up and down in eagerness to write the check for my mortgage every month. Nor do I sit eagerly at my computer, just waiting for the newest doctor or electricity bill to arrive in my email so that I can enter my credit card information and send off yet another payment into cyberspace. Yes, I pay these bills as a matter of justice, and yes, justice is right and meet. But surely there's more to our thank you than giving unto others what is their due.

What I know of the Romance languages backs me up on this point. Most everybody knows that thank you is gracias in Spanish, or grazie in Italian, and the connection of gracias and grazie with the English word grace is obvious. Gratitude, of course, is synonymous with thankfulness, and grace itself, at least theologically, is a free gift from God, totally unmerited and undeserved, bestowed upon us for our salvation.

God, in other words, fills us with a spirit of thankfulness, which, by its very nature, at least insofar as we are open to this wholly undeserved, unmerited gift, spills over into our everyday lives and our choices and interactions both mundane and major.*

In other words, to be thankful is to be who we are called to be as Christians living in the world.

To give thanks is simply to be Christian.

We don't really use the phrase thank you to mean all of that. But maybe the more that we think about it, the more that our everyday thank yous can begin to transcend the mere requirements of the human virtue of justice and enter the heady realm of the theological virtue of charity.

It's certainly something to ponder on this national day of thanksgiving, which President Abraham Lincoln set aside in perpetuity for Americans to "reverently humble themselves in the dust and from thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of Events for a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land which it has pleased Him to assign as a dwelling place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations."

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* Which is why the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom the Archangel Gabriel calls κεχαριτωμένη, gratia-plena, grace-ful, thank-ful one, really is the perfect Christian. The Holy Spirit overshadowed her, and she had within her, literally, the gift of Christ's presence. But Christ's presence is a gift that by its very nature cannot be contained. Again, literally in this case, as Mary gives birth to the Christ-child, sharing His presence with all of us. I suppose that the parable of the buried talent is also relevant to this reflection as a sadder example, that is, of the gift that does not give.

My two-pence on Mike Pence

My claim to fame today is that somewhere in the dusty files of the now-defunct Catholic Times there is an seven or eight-year-old article of mine with quotations from a telephone interview that I conducted with then-U.S. Representative Mike Pence. Frankly, I don't remember what the article was about (some religious freedom-related legislation, I think, which is unsurprising given the similar legislation that he signed as governor causing such a firestorm in Indiana a few years ago), but what I do recall is that the congressman was friendly and articulate, and that he spoke in a measured, reasonable manner. An articulate, measured tone is nothing to sniff at from a reporter's perspective, as interviews can otherwise be a heck of a lot of work to transcribe.

But more important by far is friendliness. Indeed, a single friendly conversation can go a long way towards enduring affection, and so I've clung stubbornly to my positive impression of Pence even through these past several months of his freely willed association with a man about whom I have had difficulty feeling good. Along those lines, since Trump is probably too busy to give me a phone call, I'll have to settle for his "charm offensive" vicariously experienced through the inestimable Peggy Noonan, whose fine column with that anecdote from the weekend WSJ can be viewed here.

So, I've never been without respect for Mike Pence, and all this is a prelude to saying that my respect for him has doubled with the fine statement he gave today regarding Friday's Broadway play incident. For those who haven't been following the news: On Friday the vice president-elect went to a production of the popular Broadway musical Hamilton, which depicts the life of Alexander Hamilton, one of our nation's Founding Fathers. The Washington Post's account says that Pence was booed as he entered, and that he was booed again at the conclusion of the performance, at which time members of the cast stood up and addressed a statement to the vice president-elect expressing their anxiety and concern that the new administration would not protect them (presumably the LGBT community and illegal immigrants).

President-elect Trump's response to the cast's statement was a "tweet" calling it harassment and demanding that the cast offer an apology. My own take was more bemusement than Trumpian offense, as words are pretty light fare compared the marches and looting that occurred in several cities in aftermath of the election. "Sticks and stones may break my bones" is relevant here, and politics is a no-holds-barred sport, at least as regards the oratory. 

My true annoyance, actually, was that the folks involved in the staging of this work of art--for that is what a drama is--would feel compelled to "interpret" it for the audience. As regards Pence's admittedly troubling stance on immigration, isn't the chorus, "Immigrants, we get the job done," sung by the play's Hamilton and the Marquis di Lafayette regarding the Revolutionary War, where France came to the colonists' aid, powerful enough a statement? Artists have been tempted from time immemorial to interpret art for their bone-headed readers, viewers, audiences, whatever--to "make them see," as Joseph Conrad famously puts it. But this is artistic poison, as people rarely like being told what they're supposed to see. They'd rather see it for themselves. 

To return to my statement, though--politics is indeed a no-holds-barred sport, at least as regards the oratory. BUT... it takes graciousness, compromise, and friendliness to get things done. There was nothing but graciousness in Vice President-elect Pence's statement today that for his own part he was not offended, and that the Trump administration would be committed to serving everybody. 

Maybe some of Pence's graciousness will rub off on Trump. Or maybe it's already there, as Noonan muses in her column about the possibility of there being "deeper reserves of humility, modesty and good intent lurking around in there than we know." 

"Let's hope," she says. 

Yes, let's.

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This blog entry marks my reemergence as a writer after three-plus years spent in the dusty, quiet realm of academia. Okay, not really dusty, as the cleaning crew usually does a fantastic job, and not really quiet, as I currently teach at a Catholic prep school that prides itself on "joyful noise" along the lines of St. John Bosco, but you get my point. I plan to post on Sundays and Wednesdays, and I say so publicly in order to hold myself to it. Please, comment and engage, either here or on Facebook. I'll leave comments open so long as the conversation remains civil, and I'll participate so long as I have the time to do so.

The title for this blog comes from "Burnt Norton," the first poem of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. More on that in a future entry, I hope.