Jargon

 

 

I’ve never been adept at jargon. It must be a speech defect of some kind, or maybe a bit of neuro-divergeance.  I like straight talk, preferably concrete with visual references; although I do enjoy humor.

It’s so bad that I just recently brought myself, finally, to refer to the children in our First Communion class as “kiddos.” It was in writing, where it’s easier to experiment. Now, kids is what I called my offspring, my childhood friends and siblings (us kids), and all the many children I’ve worked with over the years. “Children” seems a bit too poetic. Of course, adults corrected us: “Baby goats are kids; these are children.” I had baby goats too, but never confused the two. (I recently saw a reference to “kids and doggos.”

This jargon-avoidance goes across the board. I am, as you might guess, a Catholic—a practicing one, and involved with Sunday liturgy as a cantor. Unlike worshippers at Pentecostal churches, where a spontaneous “Praise God!” or “Amen!” is welcomed, we Catholics (like my Episcopalian brothers and sisters) have a firm, designated set of responses that is strongly encouraged and not open to variation.

For thirty years after Vatican II, we always responded to the greeting, “The Lord be with you!” with the friendly “And also with you!” The Episcopalians still use those words. Some in the Roman Catholic Church found this, and some of our other prayer responses, to be too far removed from the Latin. In 2011 they changed just enough wording to make our Creed and Gloria and Holy impossible to pray from memory. The dependable “And also with you,” became, “And with your spirit.”

My quirk has made this adjustment difficult.  In the Creed we used to pray “He was born of the Virgin Mary and became man..” Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto.”. You can see the problem here. The plain English didn’t capture the sense of “incarnatus” quite well enough, so that had to be changed to “He was incarnate of the Virgin Mary.” I have yet, 13 years in, to be able to pronounce these words from memory. Fortunately, we have to bow at that point in the Creed, which gives me a chance to slur over it or allow the old wording to slip out under my breath.

So, you see, religious language is not exempt from my struggle with terminology that seeks to be over-specific to the point of losing touch with normal language. I think that’s how I would define what I called “jargon” above.  And it affects both conservatives and liberals.

But here is the instance that most recently spurred me to write this.  I was at my thrift store job, pricing books. Our mission as a company is to provide jobs for those with developmental disabilities, and we have a number of such workers. On that day, one of the workers was passing by with his mentor, and she referred in a derogatory tone to “hetero-normative individuals.”  Wait! That’s me she’s talking about, I realized.

This term would have been unimaginable even in the last decades of the last century, when hetero- was still considered a norm in gender relations for most people.

I’m not a homophobe or a bigot; I wouldn’t be working there if I were diversity-adverse—“diversity,” here, understood as embracing all the many cultural, linguistic, developmental, religious, and sexual expressions in our world. I live in a highly diverse neighborhood, in a diverse apartment complex; I go to a church that, on the diocesan level, serves speakers of scores of languages. DEA is not something I have a problem with (DEA being an acronym unknown in the 1990s, even if the concept was very much alive.)

So, it’s not that the idea of gender being somewhat fluid is foreign to me. In fact, I have long held to the scriptural reference from the popular Catholic hymn, “One Bread, One Body”: “Gentile or Jew, servant or free, woman or man, no more.” Our personhood comes before our gender identity in Christ. And this conviction arises not just from religious teaching but also from my own reflection on myself and other people I know. There is a spectrum of gender-identity ranging from the most feminine to the most utterly macho, with most of us falling on one side or other of the middle. That being the case, we have tended to go with the side that corresponds to our physical genitalia, which tends also to produce the hormones appropriate to that sex.

This being said, the norm here is not the center, because the body, with its physical sexual makeup, skews the spectrum into two bell curves—one for the masculine, one for feminine. This is not a single curve in which the norm is at the center, where there the greatest percentage of people would experience themselves as equally male or female, with equal attraction to both sexes.

The two sexes might better be pictured as an upside down parabola, where the truly gender neutral individual is the most rare, while those with a defined sexual identity would group at each opposite side—as biology would tend to predict.

But the point here is not to counter gender theory, but to call attention to the injustice of using terminology to devalue an individual—specialized terminology, invented in order to cast doubt upon a person’s values.

You can’t make a new entrance on the cultural stage and change the words at will. Oh yes, language does evolve! Otherwise we would still be speaking Latin or Old Norse. But it evolves over time in the context of a population of speakers. It should not be some culture-extraneous ideology that sets out to alter the whole course of a linguistic heritage.

Don’t make me say kiddos or doggos; don’t do the new translation trip; don’t make me hetero-determinative. Don’t mess with my language.

 

Plaza del Sagrado Corazon de Jesús, Bilbao

 It was closing in on the last days of our I Cantori choir tour of France and Spain, coming into Bilbao, Spain, after 6 days in France, and another 7 on the north coast of Spain, where we'd spent a night in Fuente Dé in the Picos de Europa park in Cantabria. I had taken part in a hike up to a mountain meadow--nothing like the actual scrambling to the peaks some of our group did (Andrew and Sarah); but for me a climb of 1000 feet in the space of 2 miles was a challenge, as was a 4-mile hike on any terrain.

Understandably, I guess, I was tired on that drive to Bilbao the next day, and driving into the city, I didn't react quickly enough to our guide's pointing out the monumental statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on our left. The size of the monument makes it difficult to take in from close at hand, and we were right there in the Plaza of the same name, driving the last few blocks to our hotel.

 

There was so much we wanted to see in Bilbao: the Guggenheim, the river, the old town, the novel ferry-bridge. I hadn't prepared to visit the Plaza del Sagrado Corazón as well.

Having seen only the base of the immense statue, and heard the words that drew attention to it, I have nonetheless held it in mind as much as if I'd actually seen it.

On this Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, I remember this beautiful sign of the love God has poured out on us through the ages, and particularly in his Son.

Letter to Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt

 

I wrote to Naomi Oreskes, who has written extensively about the period of scientific research in oceanography and meteorography that my own father was involved with. Reading the book was like reading the scientific history of his career.

How is this related to Centrism? The Center, as I have written, is not about coming together in the middle. It's not about both sides having their say or getting listened to. Both sides are not necessarily true. Truth means rising above, climbing up to where the view is unobstructed, to see how the known facts fit together into a view of reality. 

Naomi and Erik do this with Merchants, distilling out of this mass of data what are the real issues. How did scientists researching the same interest area at the same time and in the same institutions end up with opposite points of view? This is not a question of both sides being right. It's a question of allowing values to distort the facts. Seeing the data through a skewed lense yields skewed results. 

When market fundamentalism, unfettered capitalism, fear of Communism take the place of objectivity, conclusions from the same set of facts will differ from a less biased view. 

The last thing we need is more demonization of sides in a struggle for truth. Many sincerely believe Capitalism is essential to the world order we thrive in. Many are unable to contemplate any shade of Socialism. 

The thing is, we benefit from honesty as to what powers our opinions. Knowing what our real fears are can help us find objectivity around them.

 

February 26, 2023

 

Dear Naomi Oreskes,

 

I am just eking out a few more days with Merchants of Doubt before returning it once more to the library. I’d discovered it listed in an article as one of the most authoritative books on climate change/global warming some months back, when the family email discussion revolved around this topic.

Like so many families, we are divided down the middle on the topic, and my sister had demanded some “real” proof for the position we believers have taken. I did recommend this book, and have repeatedly done so, with no takers that I know of yet.

For me your presentation has gotten to the bottom of the question and clarified the central issue at hand: that this is not a real question of proof, but of values--market vs. government regulation.

That said, the book has held a real fascination for me, because most of my family members are involved with science. Both of my parents were chemists to begin with. One brother is a retired physicist; one retired as a bio-chemist. My sister majored in math. I was the black sheep, who went into the liberal arts and majored in French, but I have always had a love for science. The fifth sibling, the peace-maker, teaches surveying.

My dad, Robert Paquette, who taught chemistry at Annapolis during WWII, returned to work at the University of Washington afterwards, joining the fledgling oceanography department as a research assistant under the leadership of Richard Fleming, previously of Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

I grew up in the aura of Dad’s work—visiting the oceanography building on the shore of Lake Union, writing him letters on his many summer cruises in the Arctic, watching the ensuing slide show (or movies by his colleague John Lincoln) of Dad lowering water bottles from the Brown Bear research vessel. Sometimes it was shots of an ice-breaker north of what was then Point Barrow.

Scripps was often in the dinner-table conversation. When I was ten, we took a trip to La Jolla, where he was attending an important oceanographic meeting, while we enjoyed the pool at Rancho Santa Fe.

We moved to Santa Barbara, where Dad worked for General Motors for about ten years designing underwater vehicles, and then he took a position at the newly forming oceanography department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

I had left home by that time, and so caught little of ongoing discussions of what was happening in oceanography, except for a few conversations on El Niño. Roger Revelle came up occasionally, and not always in a positive light. One brother remembers Dad’s feeling that he was, possibly, too much of a “showman.”

My own inclination was to see research on climate change as totally credible. I saw no reason to doubt evidence coming out on the various environmental crises, starting with smoking, which I hated with a passion. I had ended up directing religious education in a small rural Catholic parish in Colorado and being a pastoral musician, and sometimes riling certain parishioners with my environmental views.

When I moved back home to be with my dad after Mom passed in 1998, he was still, at age 84, going in to his old office at NPS to work on RAFOS data being transmitted by satellite.  Then I got to make up for lost time in finding out more about his views—to some extent.

The one closed door was global warming. He would say little about what the RAFOS was all about. As far as I can tell, the new Argo system was already in place, with similar floats, but aiming at much broader goals. He never mentioned it, even though the companion institute involved with it, Fleet Numerical, was right down the coast.

I couldn’t mention the word “climate” without his refusal to discuss further.

The irony here is that he had to have known most of the various players you mention in Merchants.  Undoubtedly he accompanied some of them on various trips and met with them. Yet, having associated with some of the pioneers in climate research, he ended up in total opposition to the idea of global warming, unwilling even to discuss it (and he was not one to avoid a discussion).

This book has uncovered for me at least part of the answer to that question. He never mentioned Nierenberg, that I recall, but he would have sided with him against Revelle, I am sure.  His arguments would have been that the evidence was not strong enough to justify the means needed to make the needed changes.

You have identified the real issue here. Dad supported the market over government regulation. He and Mom were Regan conservatives, but even after the War, when I first became cognizant of politics, he was dead set against Truman, to the point that Mom told me not to mention “the president” in Dad’s presence. I’m sure the New Deal was similarly abhorrent to him.

As a Catholic high school student taught by surprisingly liberal nuns, I came home with thoughts that did not fly at our dinner table. Once, in a table conversation that sent my mom away in tears, Dad called me a “danged Communist.” That was the Cold War era, and my parents were as paranoid against creeping Communism as anyone. You point out that it is still the fear of socialism that motivates many of the fears of government regulation.

I will always honor my parents. My dad was a pioneer in oceanography in a real sense. His life bridged the eras from the days of manual collection and measurement of oceanic data to the present day of automated floats and satellite transmission. He was directly involved with all of that. Even as his work undoubtedly contributed to the present research leading to understanding of global warming, he himself was unable to embrace its conclusions. I hope he is in a place where that knowledge is accessible to him on a new plane.

In any case, I will continue to sing the praises of Merchants of Doubt and hope to write more about it in my blog. No matter which side of this issue one lands on, it is important to understand what the real issue is and to own that.

I would like to see in its message  a bridge even to the late Pope Benedict, and plan to reread Laudato Si in this light as well.

Thanks for your great research and eye-opening writing!

 

Sincerely,

Frances Rossi

Not beautiful?

 

It’s quite a leap from Pope Benedict to Jordan Peterson. But maybe not, since both have been given to pontificating;, although one did so by merit of his position, while the other, by individual conviction.

At hand is the recent Twitter remark by Peterson about model Yumi Nu’s cover photo in the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. (I tried to include the photo here, but it may be copyrighted.) Jordan proclaimed the model “Not beautiful,” by some standard known to him, but presumably tapped in to the universal standard of what is beautiful.

 Like truth-veritas, beauty—bellitas—is a universal quality, a transcendent value, meaning that it stands above and beyond the particular manifestations of what is beautiful. Is this a mountain- top quality? I think we could use this metaphor, at least, to see what is at issue here.

After Peterson met with criticism over his now-infamous tweet, he doubled down, claiming that the SI cover was “a conscious attempt to manipulate and retool the notion of beauty, reliant on the idiot philosophy that such preferences are learned and properly changed by those who know better.” (Emphasis mine.)

The very use of the word “notion” here reveals the discrepancy in this, otherwise often wise, man’s reasoning. There are many notions of beauty. A notion is not universal, but very particular, centered in a culture or set of values that may not be shared by everyone.  In the case of beauty, there are myriad examples.  I will take some from my own recent experience.

 The music I chose to sing at mass this morning would be seen by some as too “folky,” not majestic enough to grace the Eucharistic celebration. (In fact, followers of Benedict might well hold this view.) I find it beautiful because it is melodic and voices words of Scripture in a memorable way. It doesn’t have to be Handel’s Messiah to be beautiful, in my view, although I love that too. I’m not trying to “retool” anyone’s idea of beauty here, but just to assert that this is what will lift the minds and hearts of the people I sing for. They would not work at a Russian Orthodox liturgy.

Recently a friend invited me to visit a display of the art of Leonardo da Vinci from the Sistine Chapel here in Denver. Now this art is universal, you might want to say. No. Beautiful, it is. Unparalleled, yes.  Masterful, undeniably. But what of the subjects from which he took his depiction of characters from the Bible and early times? Here is Leonardo’s “Creation of Eve.” Imagine Eve later on, clad in a bikini. She would bulge more from under its straps than did model Yami Nu.  Yet Da Vinci pictures her as the ideal of womanhood, God’s first female creation, at a size extra-large.

Would he have painted anything but a beautiful woman to grace the

Pope’s own chapel? Is this a “conscious attempt to manipulate and retool the notion of beauty,” as Peterson said of the swimsuit model?  Hardly! This was beauty as seen in the 16^th Century by a keen observer of the human form.

In others of his paintings, women are depicted as strong and muscular as well, but always much curvier than the typical Western model today.

What’s going on with Leonardo’s notion of beauty? In cultures where good nutrition is not a given, the poor tend to be thin as a result of their inadequate diet and life struggles; the well-to-do show their good health and comfort in their physique, well-padded. According to today’s BMI calculations, they would be considered obese. At that time, this was the cultural ideal.

In Iran, as in many other non-Western countries today, similar standards apply. Often the garb is designed to accommodate curves, as was that of earlier times.

Is this some “idiot philosophy” that asserts taste is different from universal standards of beauty? Is it idiotic to claim that tastes are, indeed, learned?

Again, from my own experience. I went to Iran as a Peace Corps volunteer in the mid-1960s—a person of taste, I thought. My family trusted my color suggestions for our home décor. I liked the typical subtlety popular in the West at the time—the beiges and grays with accent colors. When colors were to figure in, avocado, orange and turquoise were a popular trio.

In Iran, a country of vast deserts and lush river valleys, beige was not a favorite theme,  it turned out. A favorite Tehran restaurant, the Paprika, was decorated in red—like, red everywhere, accented by mirrors and sequins. Qashang was the word for beautiful in Farsi, and this décor was representative of Qashang.

 (I would add that the restaurant interior here is not that of the Paprika, but is similarly brightly colored.  Also, that in our global society, tastes have changed world-wide since the 1960s)

One of our favorite pastimes was to go rug shopping in the Bazaar, and we had to get used to the bright hues favored by the Iranians.  Seeing us, a merchant would haul out the “Western-taste” carpets, done in shades of grey and tan. Yes, they were appealing to me, but I began to try to see things through other eyes. I didn’t want to be typed as “Western,” as if that limited my standards of taste.

My roommate and I got tired of our dark little kitchen in the house we rented in the midsection of Tehran. The landlady gave us permission to paint the interior of the glass-door-ed cupboard, and we chose—you guessed it!—orange and turquoise. I will never forget the land-lady’s expression when she saw it. Maybe similar to mine when I first went to the  Paprika.

Is it not “proper” to suggest a widening of the concept of beauty? Is this authoritarianism: that another notion of beauty be presented? We are, after all, a country of many cultures, some of which do not easily conform to the one Anglo standard—for whom different shapes and colors and styles are appreciated.

I would simply suggest that holding one notion of beauty up as the only one a civilized person could possibly embrace is not a mountain-top idea.  I am disappointed that a man of wisdom would not see this, but it does seem to happen in our polarized world, that what would normally be recognized is now shrouded in a partisan drape, not open to the large view.

 

 

 

Witnessing to the Truth in love: how this plays out in our lives

 

Humility and Conviction

 

In his Introduction to Caritas in Veritate, Love in Truth, Benedict XVI provides the essence of his letter in a nutshell:

To defend the truth,

to articulate it with humility and conviction, and

to bear witness to it in life

are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity.

 

How often in this polarized age have you sat with a group of people from the Other Side, listening to their easy generalizations and ideological hooks, and finally had to speak up? “I’m sorry, but Netanyahu will save Israel from destruction!” you blurt out, after your friends have voiced the opposite sentiment from every possible angle. You think about how former President Trump moved the capital to Jerusalem, and how he brought about some important alliances for Israel. And Netanyahu was on the same, pro-Israel, path.

Or maybe you were in a What’s App conversation with people who were trashing Lula in Brazil, and you have to jump in to correct this idea you hear developing—that Bolsenaro really won the election. So you jump in with a long discourse on Lula’s history in bringing justice to the workers, on how the Right Wing trumped up charges against him to remove him from power.

And there’s a big argument, because everyone has heard a lot about the issue from their own media and are quite sure they have the story straight, while God knows where the other side is coming from. You feel it’s important to speak the truth, and if people are your friends they should appreciate the fact that this is an act of love, that you are saving them from the darkness of ignorance and the throes of error.

Speak the truth in love, you think. Ephesians 4:15.

Or Love in Truth, says former Pope Benedict XIV.

I find his nutshell version of this concept, above, to be instructive for all of us. 

 

To articulate the truth with humility and conviction.

First, articulate the truth. It’s hard to articulate, to express clearly, what you haven’t already thought through. Hearing the story on PBS NewsHour doesn’t always provide an articulated understanding of the issue at hand—especially not if you were playing Words with Friends at the same time. Nor is it necessarily helpful to search out the issue at Breitbart or at Mother Jones, where you know you’ll get support in your viewpoint. If it’s Lula vs. Bolsenaro, Reuters would give you a basic understanding of the issue; or, if you want to go more in depth, a story from Americas Quarterly, a journal focused on affairs in the Americas, has a story on Lula that differs from some of the opinion reporting issuing from popular media outlets.

If it’s an issue of faith you need to defend, make sure you have support for your position. If it’s a contemporary faith issue, the Religion News Service or Catholic News Service have fairly good coverage. I like to consult Crux Now with John Allen for a Just-the-facts reporting on the subject.

 

Humility

I know how I feel about various contemporary issues. While I was not a Trump supporter, I liked some of the things he did—like, moving the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. I mean, if you read the Bible, isn’t that where it belongs? So I guess that’s a side I might have come down on in a discussion. But what do I really know? It’s just how I feel.

So recently we had a Christian family from Bethlehem, whose ancestors go back to the time of Christ, selling their hand-made olive wood articles at our church. I asked one of them how things are in Israel right now. “Not good,” he told me. They said the prejudice against Christians is worse than ever, and from both the Muslim and Jewish sides. He went on about the ongoing conflict over holy sights in Jerusalem.

“And how do you feel about the capital being moved to Jerusalem?” I asked.

“Terrible!” he replied. He said it does not help having the capital be in the center of all the disputes.

That made a lot of sense. I never would have known that had I not heard it from one who lives there.

Humility in articulating the truth mean that you recognize what you don’t know. Own up to having an opinion that might not be founded on the real situation. Our understanding of the truth is limited. We see through a glass darkly (I Cor. 13), which is the premise of this blog. We tend to be in our valley-bottom place looking up at one side of the truth, but not seeing its entirety. That is okay. Humility means we ask questions. We listen to others who may know more, or even just to get their take on an issue, even if they may not be completely right. 

 

With Conviction

This is what conviction is not: being loud, insulting, mean-spirited, mocking, ridiculing, boasting, bullying. These are usually signs of a lack of conviction, which we cover up in ourselves by making fun of our opposition.

Conviction is the assurance that we have, in all humility, looked at an issue and have some certainty about it. It doesn’t mean that we know everything about it, or that we have no more to learn. But at this point we can say what we understand in love. This takes courage. Others may bridle and push back. It’s okay. Either they do not yet fully understand, or you don’t. You can assure them that this is what you understand without trying to make them agree.

 

Bear Witness

And this is the bearing witness part, that you summon up the courage of your convictions to put out there what you have already researched and learned to articulate and humbly accepted as undoubtedly inadequate in the grand scheme of things. You say what you are sure of, not what you are still just in the surmising stage on.

This is how we defend the truth.

Probably all of us would spend more time listening and less, speaking, if we operated according to this view of Love in Truth. Yes, love speaks the truth, but does so with humility, having made sure that it is truth we speak and that we articulate it so that it is understood.

 

For more on Caritas in Veritate, click here.

Pope Benedict XVI Saw the Whole Picture

 

 

 

What better example of a mountain-top man than the recently deceased Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI?

I confess I mistakenly saw him through the lens of the media, who wanted to dwell on his social conservatism, and of the American conservative Catholics who celebrated his liturgical embrace of traditional worship.  We saw Cardinal Ratzinger through the eyes of those who interpreted him, and that continued into his pontificate.

He was on the mountaintop, and neither the Left nor the Right, in their respective valley villages, got the full picture, myself included. I despaired at his papal election, and cried tears of joy at the news of white smoke for Pope Francis, not realizing how similar their basic theology was—how solidly situated in the post-Vatican II Church, along with his predecessor, Saint Pope John Paul II.  Situated, as well, in the over-100-year tradition of social justice teaching in the Church, beginning with Pope Leo XIII.

While all three popes have toed the line when it comes to the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, even if Francis emphasizes a pastoral approach over a legalistic one, all three have also held fast to a unified vision of social justice—a teaching sometimes ignored by both media and conservative Catholics.

I remember listening to Pope John Paul II’s talks at the 1993 World Youth Day in Denver, since my daughter was there among the thousands of youth from around the world. While the press besieged him with questions about birth control and abortion, knowing how their American viewers would be looking for cracks in Church doctrine or excuses to dismiss the Church as rigid and out of touch, I heard what he said about society and the common good, about justice and love of neighbor.

Did I imagine that? An article by Mark Engler and John Gershman for the Institute for Policy  Studies written a few months after his death assures me that no. They recall: “Particularly in his teachings about the global economy, the Pope advanced a vision of social justice that challenges the current, narrow political debate about ‘moral values.’“

Likewise, Pope Emeritus Benedict takes up the Church’s teaching on social justice in his encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate, Love in Truth, where he situates truth-based love at the center of the Church’s social teaching.  Unlike those who juxtapose charity and justice, Benedict fuses the two. Justice must be infused with charity/love, and love must take its place in the public sphere, where it joins justice.

The public sphere goes beyond the individual charity of a Mother Teresa, laudable as that was. I do not agree with those who downplay her work for not having changed systems of oppression, resistant as these are to bending. She did what she could, and established a ministry in the persons of women who would take her work to other communities, setting an example to thewhole world. But I think Benedict is calling for even more than that: a charity that will infuse the work of public entities—governmental bodies, corporations.

That his, and his predecessors’, words have been heeded can be seen in the way governments and private companies have begun to let love direct policy. That the U.S. government can recognize the need to treat immigrants with compassion,  that companies can willingly consider the good of the planet and its people, that states can reconsider capital punishment: these are all examples of how charity can join hands with justice in the public setting. Even if you cynically counter that industry chooses to signal virtue in these instances for the sake of good publicity, the fact of the matter—the veritas of it—is that in any case they point to a charitable response to public problems.

This concept of Love in Truth, as developed by Pope Benedict, goes beyond an either-or, black or white view, embracing the whole spectrum of truth. This is what makes it a mountain-top view, where the many sides of a topic are seen in relation to one another in a 360° panorama.

We all reside in our own cultural milieu, somewhat isolated by the very fact of our surroundings. From this standpoint it is impossible to see the other side of the mountain. Our reasoning follows from the situation we are in—a logic predicated on limited understanding. When the first propositions are biased, the conclusions will be as well.

This man climbed the mountain of truth. This is the price to be paid for seeing the whole view. This is not a lazy “let’s meet in the middle and call it good.”  This is, let’s get to the bottom of this, or to the top. Let’s do the work to understand what is really going on so that we can come together.

Love comes from truth,. “Truth, by enabling men and women to let go of their subjective opinions and impressions, allows them to move beyond cultural and historical limitations and to come together in the assessment of the value and substance of things, “ states Benedict. (Caritas in Veritate, p.4, #4) Subjective opinions are those mountain-valley views that don’t hold up at the summit.

Reading Benedict is not an easy task, but to do so thoughtfully, openly, is to make that climb with him as guide. Mountains are perilous places, where a guide is most helpful. Encouraging you to join him in the ascent!

 

Sometimes the Center Means following the Stream

 Following the stream to its source, or to its destination.

I've always been in love with rivers. In Fifth Grade we studied U.S. geography, and I spent hours pouring over the physical map of the country, following rivers. If I had a canoe, I thought, could I cross the country with just that? Well, it would take some uphill paddling, but turns out you could make it if you started with the Mississippi, turned onto the Missouri, and then up the Platte to one of its sources high in the Rockies. Well, you get the picture. 

What about going downstream? I think of the children's' story "Scuffy the Tugboat," where the little boat starts in a bathtub, but finds his way into a stream and then a river, and finally ends up in the sea.

Either way, you come to know this river that you know otherwise just by crossing the bridge to the other side.  And this is also a way to understand something well, to avoid an extremist view (view from the end of a limb--but that's a different metaphor.)

This isn't just about political centrism.  It has to do with all aspects of life, where we do well to situate ourselves in a spot where we know what's going on and why.

Using the Example of the Jewish Fall Feasts and their relation to Christianity.

My current example has to do with the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur, which has fascinated me for many years. This is a feast first mentioned in the Book of Numbers in the Hebrew Scriptures, where Moses calls for a day of fasting and mortification on the 10th day of the 7th month--ten days after the celebration of the new year on the first day, which is now known as Rosh Hashanah.

I've wondered what happened to Yom Kippur in the strain of Judaism known as Christianity. Clearly, the early Christians did observe Jewish feasts, so why not this one.  I pictured this as a stream that suddenly disappears into the earth, although it has not gone away in Jewish observance, so it's a bit unfair to suggest that it has disappeared. Only in Christian tradition has this taken place.

It took some digging, but it turns out this stream actually continued in Christian practice, being known as the autumn fast. Even Paul refers to this--or Luke, actually, in his account of the turbulent voyage on the way to Rome. Later, Pope Leo the Great claims it to be from ancient times. In my childhood this tradition continued as the fall Ember Days. 

For those nostalgic for the glorious past, when the old liturgy reigned and Ember Days stood proud on the calendar four times a year--in Advent, Lent,  before Pentecost and in the fall, I will assure you that these were not exactly a great addition to our liturgical year. They were there, on the calendar, and we were required to abstain on a Wednesday along with the Friday--or maybe it was just fasting on the Wednesday and Saturday, along with Friday of those weeks. No one made much of an ado about it. In fact, the word "liturgy" was not used in ordinary circles, and you just went to mass. You knew the season changed when the vestments changed color, but that was about it. Worship was much more a question of whether you managed to be present during the three main parts of the mass, which meant you could squeak in by the offertory and leave after communion.  

However, what did start happening during those years was a renewal of the liturgy. Ember Days did not figure in, but a renewed emphasis on the three days of Triduum and the original liturgies of those sacred days was reintroduced. No Ember Days at Pentecost either, but in more recent years, a renewed Vigil of Pentecost. There were new, more authentic and meaningful liturgies of baptism, confirmation, reconciliation, the anointing of the sick, and of Christian funerals and weddings. 

It's as if the stream that had continued from the Jewish tradition had been amplified by new tributaries, giving new life to liturgy.

Now this does not mean that the current of the Ember Days needs to be left out. I am excited at the idea of reincorporating the fall fast and thanksgiving into our year, since it fits so well with the way our lives move into this new season. We have no Church observance to help us with this, even if we do add autumn colors to our environment and begin our new year of Christian education. It has all kinds of possibilities. A fast could mark the beginning of this new season, and thanksgiving, a fitting way to enter fall. 

Ember Days as an outlet for the stream begun in Numbers and continued with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur gives and example of how exploring the course of something from its source to its endings can expand our understanding of everything in-between. Discovering the endings can help us understand the center.