First, I confess that this post will not be professional theology.  Rather, it is a hit job on some of the platitudes that circulate among would-be amateur theologians, the type of platitudes that kill souls with their sophistry.  When I was a child, I imagined heaven and hell as places.  Heaven is up high, somewhere in or beyond outer space.  Hell is a fiery place near the earth’s core.  Basically, like most people, I placed heaven and hell where Dante does in his “Divine Comedy.”  Only later did I learn (the falsehood) that the physical heavens and the physical underworld are thoroughly secular affairs.  How many times have we read some self-appointed question-answerer in a church bulletin or a diocesan newspaper say, “Well, you see, Virginia, heaven is not a physical place, nor is hell. They are the spiritual states of immaterial souls.  The beatific vision or lack thereof of a separated, disembodied soul cannot be physically located.  Ergo, heaven and hell are not physical places.”  Sed contra:  where is the Risen Body of Our Lord?  Where has the body of Our Lady been since the Assumption? Continue reading

There is a divergence of opinion among members of this Society on whether rising early each day is a morally superior act. The majority opinion holds that a schedule for sleeping, working, and living should be considered provisional and personal, chosen or found by personal experimentation as that which maximizes productivity and happiness. In other words, under the covering name of “night owl”, many I know — and respect! — claim that to work into the night, arise late when not called to an early appointment, and thus to divorce their lives from the diurnal cycle, is a morally neutral choice founded on the necessities of personal rhythm and physiological constitution. And while I do not propose to denounce this position with anything like forcefulness, the purpose of this brief reflection is to argue that it is in fact superior to subject one’s schedule to stricture and sacrifice through a generally regular, preferably early, sleep and waking time, even while making allowance for personal variation in wakefulness.

If I am to begin, I must delay in advancing the explanations for why an early and regular waking time is desirable, which anyway are felt by even those most devoted to lying late abed, immediately to answer the dominant objection: what if I am not tired at 9 or 10pm, but am in fact most awake and productive at that hour? Continue reading

Every year during Eastertide I find myself thinking about the virtue of hope, which, more than any of the others, can only make sense when understood in the light of Our Lord’s glorious Resurrection. This year in particular we’ve been subjected to a lot of talk about “hope”, most of which could only serve to confuse and discourage us. So I thought this might be a good year to offer a reflection on the virtue of hope.

The rhetoric of Barack Obama was instructive in some ways in showing what the virtue of hope isn’t. In the first place, of course, Barack Obama could not offer real hope because the end he sought was earthly, and no earthly end will ever fully satisfy our immortal souls. (The fact that the social order he envisioned was neither just nor virtuous is another complication which I will leave aside for the present purposes.) But Obama’s version of “hope” was deficient in another way — it gave no serious consideration to the arduous nature of the journey towards its desired end. In the campaign phase of his rise to power, Obama spoke very little of sacrifice or struggle or hard choices. His starry-eyed supporters seemed almost under the impression that the sick would rise up and walk, ethnic and nationalistic rivalries would evaporate, and flowers would spring up in the earth’s most desolate places on the day of the great man’s inauguration. In his more euphoric moments, he almost promised this. In theological terms, what Obama was offering was an earthly corollary, not to hope, but rather to presumption. He enticed his followers with a shining chimera of a happy new order, and no realistic appraisal of the struggles that would have to be overcome to reach it.

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And now, I hope this isn’t too presumptuous of me, but I wanted to put in a brief appeal to any priests who may happen to be reading our blog this Triduum. It comes from a number of Easter Sunday memories from a number of different parishes which have led me to believe that what I’ve seen may be a widespread phenomenon. Of course, my experience may not be representative of the whole, and even I have not found the problem I’m about to mention to be universally the case. Still, it is common enough that I thought it would be worth offering this humble appeal to priests everywhere…

Could you try, if at all possible, not to be cranky and irate on the morning of Easter Sunday?

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In the midst of this debacle with Iowa and gay marriage, I found this excerpt from this link particularly chilling:

Homophobia drives fearful gay men and women into fraudulent marriages. The pressure to conform, the weight of discrimination, the potential loss of cherished dreams (serving in the military, worshiping in church, getting job promotions, raising kids) propels many into marriages they otherwise wouldn’t commit to. Like my friend Cooper.

Cooper is 64 and recently divorced. He was married for 38 years before he came out. He left behind him a woman whose life was shattered by a truth that tunneled its way out of the mounds of shame, hostility and hatred that society heaped on it. The woman is 62. What is she supposed to with her life now that he’s found his?

and then:

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It was not very long ago that I learned that Isabella of Castille, Queen of Spain, the Catholic, etc. is a Servant of God whose cause for canonization is open. It was, in fact, opened in Rome as recently as 1972. Can you imagine the furor that such a beatification would arouse? Iacobus and I were, accordingly, very happy to see the following from the recent interview with the new Prefect of the CDW, Cardinal CAÑIZARES LLOVERA:

Isabella was a woman of great faith, an exemplary wife, a queen with a unique apostolic zeal, a great Christian. She gave permission to Colombo to cross the ocean only on condition that his primary purpose was to evangelize the lands he might discover. I believe and hope that as soon as possible she rise to the honor of the altars. I confess that often as Archbishop of Granada, especially when I had some important problem to deal with, I would go to pray at the tomb of Isabella, which is there in the Cathedral, and I always felt I had been helped.