We may say that the characters in fairytales are ‘good to think with’…[and that] the job of the fairytale is to show that Why? questions cannot be answered except in one way: by telling the stories. The story does not contain the answer, it is the answer.
From A Story-Shaped World, via squeetus
I guess it was Saturday evening, sitting in the Hilton coffee shop. (Is that name still valid or useful with a Starbucks just down the hall? I wonder.) I looked up from my book, and saw a Jedi pushing a tray along the salad bar, peering intently at the choices for his dinner. He costume was perfect, nothing amateurish about it, but at the same time he had on glasses and a yellow plastic tag hanging around his neck.
That's one image I remember now from LACon IV, one of many. The formal close was yesterday afternoon, but I left before that, but I am sure that the parties would be continuing all night without me. I got back here at a reasonable hour, and I'm taking today off to catch up on laundry and sleep. As I get a little more distance from the con, I am feeling better and better about attending -- I was simply too tired some times and had to learn to take more time off.
I'm processing a lot of memories and images:
Well, I made it here, and made it through the rest of the day.
I made it into Anaheim before noon, and made it over to the convention center to register. The volunteer staff seems to be doing a very good job and things are running smoothly. Two things are making this a rather interesting experience:
Things have been rather busy this summer -- lots of time at work, and teaching two sessions of basic catechist formation for the Diocese. But I'm taking this week off to attend LACon IV, this year's World Science Fiction Convention. It starts tomorrow the 23'rd and runs to Sunday afternoon. I'm going to stay at least through Mass Sunday morning (yep, Mass at a con -- this should be fun).
If I get a chance, I'll post some reactions each evening. My schedule for tomorrow (as far as I know):
If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now…What a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear.
The lessons for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Governing the entire universe is a greater miracle than feeding five thousand people with five loaves of bread, yet no one marvels at it. People marvel at the feeding of the five thousand not because this miracle is greater, but because it is out of the ordinary.One thing that we can see is the nature of God's extravagance with us. Not only was everyone fed, but there were basketfulls left over. But look at what was multiplied: barley loaves and (based on the text) dried or preserved fish. Barley ripens faster, takes less water, and will grow in poorer soil than wheat. Barley was the grain of the poor in those times, and dried fish was a common but humble storable food. Jesus shows his identification with the poor and extravagant concern for their needs.
Who is even now providing nourishment for the whole world if not the God who creates a field of wheat from a few seeds? Christ did what God does.
Just as God multiplies a few seeds into a whole field of wheat, so Christ multiplied the five loaves in his hands. For there was power in the hands of Christ.
Those five loaves were like seeds, not because they were cast on the earth but because they were multiplied by the one who made the earth.
This miracle was presented to our senses in order to stimulate our minds; it was put before our eyes in order to engage our understanding, and so make us marvel at the God we do not see because of his works which we do see.
When the people saw the sign he had done, they said,Some commentors on this passage have presented a more naturalistic explanation, that thee real miracle was getting the people to their food with each other. But that is now how the people reacted in this passage -- Jesus is recognized as not just a nice teacher but the prophet foretold by God, the successor of Moses and Elijah. The reaction of the people is rational, but mistaken. We cannot understand who Jesus truly is without knowing of the Cross and His rising again.
"This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into the world."
Since Jesus knew that they were going to come and carry him off
to make him king,
he withdrew again to the mountain alone.
Differences of opinion in the application of principles can sometimes arise even among sincere Catholics. When this happens, they should be careful not to lose their respect and esteem for each other. Instead, they should strive to find points of agreement for effective and suitable action, and not wear themselves out in interminable arguments, and, under pretext of the better or the best, omit to do the good that is possible and therefore obligatory.
Mater et Magistra (1961)
Life's work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence one's heart first opened.
A phenomena termed "waning of affect" or emotional "depthlessness" (notably in the arts) has been described by authors such as the philosopher Frederick Jameson. This is one of those areas of cultural criticism by postmodernists where one can find a combination of intriguing concepts and impenetrable terminology. My interpretation is that this refers to an apparent superficiality of emotional expression or affect, coupled with an attraction to intense experiences of sensation or emotion. The types of deeper emotional expression that a century ago would have been routine in literature, or for that matter religion, are difficult to find today. We have a preference for the cool or ironic in expression, while at the same time, having a taste for forms of entertainment such as increasingly graphic horror movies and intense video games. A wide array of traditional religious literature simply will not communicate adequately in this environment, and attempts to follow current trends will have interesting but unpredictable consequences - consider Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which had tremendous sales and apparent social impact. As it turns out, that impact was rather limited, based on the research of several different organizations. Consider this report from the Barna group, which was very sympathetic to the religious goals of the movie:
Among the most startling outcomes drawn from the research is the apparent absence of a direct evangelistic impact by the movie. Despite marketing campaigns labeling the movie the “greatest evangelistic tool” of our era, less than one-tenth of one percent of those who saw the film stated that they made a profession of faith or accepted Jesus Christ as their savior in reaction to the film’s content.The anaysis of the shallowness of the consequences of this film refer to the same new world of communications cited before in examining social consequences:
Equally surprising was the lack of impact on people’s determination to engage in evangelism. Less than one-half of one percent of the audience said they were motivated to be more active in sharing their faith in Christ with others as a result of having seen the movie.
George Barna, the director of the research, commented that many people would probably be surprised that there was not a more lasting and intense impact from the movie. "Immediate reaction to the movie seemed to be quite intense," he noted, "but people’s memories are short and are easily redirected in a media-saturated, fast-paced culture like ours. The typical adult had already watched another six movies at the time of the survey interview, not including dozens of hours of television programs they had also watched."You can't counteract the emotional consequences of postmodernity simply by being more ironic, or cooler, or more intense. Just going further and faster does not help you when you are having problems with finding directions -- the proper treatment of ADHD may not include a new Gameboy.
As I pointed out earier in this series of posts, telecommunications has been a key part of the modern transformation. Industrial telecommunications complemented the rest of the Industrial Revolution by promoting a kind of mass communication paralleling mass production and consumption. As this network of mass media has grown global, it is often easier to know what is going on thousands of miles away rather than down the block. There is less personal risk in turning on the TV or even signing on to an online conversation than in talking to your next-door neighbor.
Sociologist and political scientist Robert Putnam has written about the seemingly invisible changes to social participation over the past few decades, including religious participation:
In sum, over the last three of four decades, Americans have become almost 10 percent less likely to claim church membership, while our actual attendance and involvement in religious activities has fallen by roughly 25 to 50 percent. Virtually all of the postwar boom in religious participation – and perhaps more – has been erased. This broad historical pattern in religious participation – up from the first third of the century to the 1960’s and down from the 1960’s to the 1990’s – is very much the same pattern we have noted earlier for secular community-based organizations as well as for political organization.One important point, that Putnam stresses, is that these trends can be seen across almost all religious groups, as well as most voluntary membership organizations in North America and Europe. He found that most groups have tried to understand these trends in terms of the recent history and actions of each specific group. Each group wondered what had caused their drop off in membership, and each group formulated their own individual response (which often could be very different than the response by some other organization). According to Putnam's reseach, it made little difference. Most organizations' pattern of membership and involvment over the past half century look the same. It's not what each organization is doing, it is a change to the society that all these organizations are in.
What is more, in all three cases, the more demanding the form of involvement – actual involvement as opposed to formal membership, for example – the greater the decline. In effect the great institutions of American civic life, both religious and secular, have been “hollowed out.” Seen from without, the institutional edifice appears virtually intact – little decline in professions of faith, formal membership down just a bit, and so on. When examined more closely, however, it seems clear that decay has consumed the load bearing structures of our civic infrastructure.
From Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)
Over the years I have been involved in youth ministry on and off, in more than one denomination. If you do youth work it's hard to avoid Youth Specialites and one of its founders, the late Mike Yaconelli. As part of an article: What I Wish I Knew When I Started Youth Ministry, Mike made a major distinction between ministry as a job, and ministry as a call:
I could easily paraphrase that to fit any other sort of ministry that I have been involved with, such as detention ministry.
- Youth Ministry The Job is about wider. Youth Ministry The Call is about deeper.
- Youth Ministry The Job is about more. Youth Ministry The Call is about one.
- Youth Ministry The Job is about program. Youth Ministry The Call is about relationship.
- Youth Ministry The Job is about being in your office. Youth Ministry The Call is being wherever young people hang out.
- Youth Ministry The Job is about young peoples' souls. Youth Ministry The Call is about your soul.
Returning to the topic of ministry and postmodernity . . .
The consequences of the collapse of the modern and the reaction to that has intellectual, social and emotional aspects, and there are significant spiritual consequences as well.
The central feature of the intellectual reaction was expressed by Lyotard: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives" A metanarrative (sometimes master- or grand narrative) “. . . is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience." When looking at the history of science, such ideas have been called paradigms and the change from one major paradigm to another in one field a scientific revolution. Such a shift follows the increasing difficulty of explaining physical phenomena using the older paradigm. This is true for metanarratives in general – when a particular great story seems to stop working, people tend to find others.
Our perception is never completely naive -- we always bring some baggage with us when we examine and evaluate the world we look at. For example, I have a friend who teaches biology at a local college, who has spent years studying the plant and animal life of this area. I can look some water in a pasture in the hills to the east of here, and see a large puddle that will dry up to a mud flat as summer approaches. My friend sees a vernal pool, ringed with wildflowers, the water containing tiny animals that may exist nowhere else in the world. We have different experiences and expectations of what we will see, therefore we really see different things in the same place. How we perceiveve the world is affected not only by experience, but by expectations and desires. The old saying is more accurate when stood on it's head: "believing is seeing." And the most powerful way to affect all these things that we bring to perception is by stories -- narratives that tie together our experience and desire with meaning, embedding it into our memories and emotions. Change the metanarrative, and in a way you change the world.
One relevant example of a metanarrative is the idea of progress. After almost unlimited trust in secular progress starting in the 18th century and extending into the 20th, experiences over the past century seem to have destroyed the faith of many that we are on the way to anywhere we really want to be.
This distrust of metanarratives is reinforced by the observation that social elites often have used the promotion and manipulation of such grand stories as a form of masked social power. Reaction has led to the attempt to replace grand narratives with smaller, local, more individual narratives. The personal is preferred to the universal.
This presents challenges to Christians, Catholic Christians in particular. Over the past two millenniaia, the Gospel has been the source of foundational metanarratives, first within Europeanan cultures, then globally. If one mistrusts metanarratives in general, one can specifically mistrust Christianity, often without really encountering its message and claims. Part of these ruling stories from the Gospel (and the Old Testament before that) is the idea that God is not on the side of the powerful, but on the side of the poor. The Christian message is not intended to protect the powerful but to subvert unjust power -- which makes it a "sign of contradiction" when compared to all the metanarratives that serve to keep things as they are and the powerless in their place.
That is why historical episodes such as the Spanish Inquisition continue to cause Catholicism trouble in this current situation. The proper apologies of the Church (which were overdue) and the revision of scholarly opinion on the Inquisition (which now appears to be that it was a much more limited and secular institution than often thought) do not seem to be relevant to the world in general. The problem comes from the perception that the Church, the bearer of the Gospel message, lent its approval to what, to 21st century eyes, was a program of ethnic cleansing. Arguing over who did what, when, does not address this problem: the identification with the Spanish Inquisition paints the Church as just another institution, and the Gospel message as just another metanarrative serving power, not to be trusted.
It is useful to consider just how this affects how both Catholics and non-Catholics see such issues as liberation theology (and the Vatican's reaction to it), clergy sexual abuse and misconduct, and neo-Gnosticism in works like The DaVinci Code.
Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, 'Abba as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?' then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, 'If you will, you can become all flame.'
from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers
I could not resist taking this test -- the results are published here as fair warning.
Back to the issue of postmodernity.
In saying that we are in a postmodern predicament we are discussing both reaction against as well as development from the modern. It is not a return to the medieval or a rejection of all things modern. Too often we use the analogy of a pendulum, implying that over time, things swing back to where they were before. Basic social changes such as the ones we are living through work differently – we react against some aspects of our lives while clinging to others, in particular economically driven changes. For example, some (inaccurately in my opinion) from time to time will assert that there is or will be a reaction against, and rollback of, the changes that came out of the feminist movement of the 1960’s-70’s. Various social phenomena are pointed to in support of that – but the percentage of women who work full time does not change, and is not expected to change. We are reacting against some parts of the modern world while clinging to others. If one is waiting for the return of the medieval world or the rise once again of the classical philosophers, one should either join the Society for Creative Anachronism or a university classics department, and get it out of one’s system safely.
Next: the consequences of the collapse of the modern.
The lessons for the sixth Sunday of Easter:
Beloved, let us love one another,When we say we have faith, that we will set our hearts on God, we are saying that the ultimate ground of reality, behind everything we see or feel or hear or touch, is love. If we do not know love, we cannot know God. And love is not something abstract, it is concrete, it is personal. We can believe that God exists, because somebody, somewhere, sometime, loved us in such a way that we could see that God could exist, that love really does make sense. Each one of us must have at some time, known that someone else valued us just for our own self.
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.
In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.
We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.God has loved us from the beginning, that is how we know who He is. We must decide whether we will do our part to make that love real for the whole world.
. . Every human being has a great, yet often unknown, gift to care, to be compassionate, to become present to the other, to listen, to hear and to receive. If that gift would be set free and made available, miracles could take place. Those who really care can receive bread from a stranger and smile in gratitude, can feed many without even realizing it. Those who can sit in silence with their fellowman not knowing what to say but knowing that they should be there, can bring new life in a dying heart. Those who are not afraid to hold a hand in gratitude, to shed tears in grief, and to let a sigh of distress arise straight from the heart, can break through paralyzing boundaries and witness the birth of a new fellowship, the fellowship of the broken. . . .
To care means first of all to empty our own cup and to allow the other to come close to us. It means to take away the many barriers which prevent us from entering into communion with the other. When we dare to care, then we discover that nothing human is foreign to us, but that all the hatred and love, cruelty and compassion, fear and joy can be found in our own hearts. When we dare to care, we have to confess that when others kill, I could have killed too. When others torture, I could have done the same. . . .
By the honest recognition and confession of our human sameness we can participate in the care of God who came, not to the powerful but powerless, not to be different but the same, not to take our pain away but to share it. Through this participation we can open our hearts to each other and form a new community.
from Out of Solitude.
In previoius posts, we reviewed briefly the nature and sources of the dominant modern Western culture. The positive achievements of this modern world, the world of science and the idea of progress, are easy to see. There are technical achievements in medicine, manufacturing and communications, and social achievements in establishing a new ideal of liberty and individual rights that is, at least in part, approached in a number of places around the world. But there are negative achievements as well in this modern world. Starting with the French Revolution and stretching on to global climate change, we have learned of the social and environmental cost of the “modern” world.
One particularly interesting area of modern change is communications. Two hundred years ago, printing still used human power to run the press, and messages could only move as fast as you could move a piece of paper. Over the intervening time, our ability to communicate expanded drastically in both speed and capacity. This process resulted in the creation, in the 20th century, of mass communications, where one person, in the right place with the right resources, could speak to an entire nation at once. This had effects throughout human societies around the world, changing the way we create and maintain organizations, including religious organizations and activities. Protestant churches, the mainline denominations in particular, are very modern in character, and often model their organizations almost exclusively on corporate models. (In fact, after some historical examination, it could be argued that many Protestant bodies are products much more of the Enlightenment and industrial revolution than of the Reformation.)
The Enlightenment and the modern paradigm was an outgrowth of European philosophy and culture – European culture (which includes American culture) developed along with these ideas and structures. Other, non-Western cultures encountered them through colonialism, or 20th century mass culture. These non-Western cultures have adapted to the impact of the modern in various ways, often involving rapid change and social upheaval. The apparent successful adaptation to some Western ideas in much of Asia in the 20th century follows tremendous dislocation and conflict during the 19th century. Islamic cultures have generally not been as successful, even though there have been numerous top-down attempts to force such adaptation over the past century and a half. These failures are partly responsible for the apparent conflict between western and Islamic states at the beginning of the 21st century.
The Catholic Church struggled with these changes throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The French Revolution (the ultimate example of both the bright and dark sides of the Enlightenment), combined with Napoleon, caused damage that the Church in Europe has not yet fully recovered from. For example, the 1,500-year history of monastic life in much of Europe almost came to an end at that time. The attempts to wrestle with the intellectual challenges of the era led in many ways to the “Modernist“ conflicts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The centralization of control that started with Pius IX can, in many ways, be seen as a reaction to these political and intellectual stresses, as well as to the introduction of early forms global communications. Word now could and did get to the faithful by other means than the local bishop, which meant that the Church needed to find new ways to try to keep Christian teaching and ministry “on message”, beyond simply the control of the local bishop. (It is interesting to look at the First Vatican Council in this light.) By the end of the 19th century, the Church started its sophisticated reaction to the social and economic changes of the era , as shown by Rerum Novarum (1891) and the subsequent development of Catholic social teachings. In general, the Catholic Church has adapted to the modern era, with varying levels of success, but is less tied to these “modern” ideas than other Christian bodies. At times in the past, this sometimes seemed to be a problem — but in our new predicament this may be a significant advantage, along with the increasingly global nature of the governance of the Church.
Next -- after the modern, what?
The basic decision, after all, is to let God be God, to say 'yes' to the work of the Lord, which goes before the church's ability to understand or even perceive it.
from Scripture and Discernment
Enough with the heavy culture -- on with some links:
