If you’ve been keeping up with the blog for a while you’ve probably noticed that once a week or so I just post a quote from a saint or a Church father or mother. Usually I pull these from the Office of Readings, part of the Liturgy of the Hours, which is the official prayer book of the Church.
For example, the first reading in the season of Advent is from St. Cyril of Jerusalem, a theologian from the fourth century. Here he covers some ground that informed yesterday’s post about the Ascension icon:
We do not preach only one coming of Christ, but a second as well, much more glorious than the first. The first coming was marked by patience; the second will bring the crown of a divine kingdom.
In general, what relates to our Lord Jesus Christ has two aspects. There is a birth from God before the ages, and a birth from a virgin at the fullness of time. There is a hidden coming, like that of rain on fleece, and a coming before all eyes, still in the future.
At his first coming he was wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger. At his second coming he will be clothed in light as in a garment. In the first coming he endured the cross, despising its shame; in his second coming he will be in glory, escorted by an army of angels. We look then beyond the first coming and await the second.
For me, readings like this every morning have rooted my own thinking in Sacred Tradition, the wisdom that has been handed down from the apostles and unfolded in the Church over the centuries.
One of my favorite icons I own is this one, pictured above.
(I took this picture last night from my parents’ trailer where, for COVID reasons, we are spending Thanksgiving weekend.)
I like it because it reads two possible ways: the first, most obviously, as an icon of the Ascension. You can see Christ, at the top (shrouded in darkness since he’s furthest from the candle). Behind him, the blue circles signify his movement between earth and heaven, escorted by two angels. Below are the eleven disciples in disarray, along with Mary. Jesus has just instructed them to wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Holy Spirit. Among them, two angels speak to the disciples, saying, “Why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).
This word from the angels point us to the second way of reading the icon: as the Second Coming. The image itself gives us no clear indication of whether Jesus is going up or coming down. So we might also see it as a picture of the Church—here represented by Mary and the disciples of Jesus—awaiting the apocalypse, a Greek word which means “revealing”.
Which makes this icon not only appropriate for the Feast of the Ascension, but for Advent as well.
Advent is a time of awaiting, hoping, expecting. We prepare, of course, to celebrate Christ’s birth, which was his first coming—but we also prepare ourselves for that second coming, when the Kingdom of God, hidden for the present time, becomes revealed in full, and the world is set to rights by its coming King. The disciples gaze into the sky, awaiting the return of their Lord and God. So we, the Church on earth, watch and wait.
It’s tricky to post today because we’re traveling over Thanksgiving weekend. But I refuse to break my streak of posting each day!
Advent begins tonight, the first day of the year in the Catholic liturgical calendar. It’s one of the few times of the year that’s already richly textured and traditioned for most of us, what with Advent wreaths, Nativity scenes, and Christmas music on the radio.
There’s plenty more of that on the internet, of course, but I think a good rule of thumb is to just try one new thing each year rather than bite off more than I can chew.
In 1263 in the small town of Bolsena, an itinerant priest was having some doubts about the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation: that despite its appearance as bread and wine, the Eucharist really was the body of Christ. While celebrating Mass there, he looked down to discover that one of the consecrated hosts had begun to bleed onto the altar cloth beneath it.
Construction on Santa Maria Assunta began 22 years after the miracle at Bolsena in the nearby town of Orvieto. The site was built to be the home of for the relics of the miracle. Because of the beauty of its western façade and it’s two frescoed chapels, it’s regarded as one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Christendom.
It’s certainly the most striking of any we’ve looked at so far.
At the top of the façade is a mosaic depicting the coronation of Mary, Queen of Heaven:
The four columns depict, from left to right, stories from the Book of Genesis, Jesus’ ancestry, the New Testament, and Revelation. Here’s Adam and Eve on the leftmost column.
I don’t know much about the decorative pillars here but I love the design:
Finally for the outside, these bronze doors are quite recent and were installed in 1970. You’d never know they weren’t original to the building:
The façade is my favorite part of the cathedral—it’s amazing how much unity the art has taken together even though it’s been worked on over seven centuries.
Let’s go through the doors and look at the nave.
I think the striped pillars are so unique here and I’ve never seen them anywhere else so far!
Here’s a shot of the altar and reliquary where the blood-stained altar cloth is kept. Every year on the Feast of Corpus Christi, the relic is removed and paraded around Orvieto as part of a city-wide processional. (In fact, legend has it that Pope Urban IV may have establishes the feast precisely because of what happened at Bolsero!)
But we haven’t even looked at any of the frescoes yet! Here’s just a small sample:
I really like this one below, depicting the resurrection of the dead at the Last Judgment:
If I ever get to go to Italy, I’ll definitely find a way to see this one in person. There’s a thousand details that I could never capture in a few images, and besides, it seems like it’s one of those things that needs to be taken in as a whole.
While the “warp” of the American tapestry is Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, running east to west, its “woof” is certainly Latino and Catholic, running from south to north. In many ways this forgotten woof of America’s fabric precedes its well-known warp (and hell, it might outlast it, too).
Point of fact: the very first Europeans to celebrate a day of thanksgiving on American soil definitely weren’t the Puritan settlers in Massachussets in 1621. That distinction probably belongs to Spanish explorers in Florida, fifty-six years earlier in 1565. From the Jacksonville Historical Society:
Fifty-six years before the Pilgrims celebrated their feast, Spanish explorer Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles arrived on the coast of Florida. He came ashore on September 8, 1565, naming the land on which he stepped “St. Augustine” in honor of the saint on whose feast day, Aug. 28, the land was sighted. Members of the Timucua tribe, which had occupied the site for more than 4,000 years, greeted Menéndez and his group of some 800 Catholic colonists peacefully.
Colonial records indicate that on the date they came ashore, and in gratitude for their safe arrival, the Spanish celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving, the very first Catholic mass on American soil.
The article goes on to note, however, that French Protestants may have beaten the Spaniards by just a year, celebrating a thanksgiving feast (also with the Timucua) near what is now Jacksonville, Florida.
I was digging around yesterday after thinking more about my last RCIA entry about grace when I stumbled across this article at JSTOR, an online library of academic journals.
Titled “Guilt and Religion: The Influence of Orthodox Protestant and Orthodox Catholic Conceptions of Guilt on Guilt-Experience”, the article shares the results of the authors’ psychological research into how Catholics and Protestants experience guilt. What they found was quite interesting: while members of both groups, on the whole, report experiencing more guilt than their non-religious peers, the Catholics tended to experience more constructive guilt, while Protestants tended to experience more non-constructive guilt.
The distinction between constructive and non-constructive guilt is similar to the distinction I made in my last post between guilt and shame. From the article:
In brief: constructive guiltis characterized by both a sense of agency and responsibility: this is my fault and I have a responsibility to make things right. Non-constructive guilt, by contrast, is characterized by a sense of one’s own weakness and wickedness. Furthermore, while constructive guilt is interpersonal, experienced as something outside the self that is resolved on the outside, non-constructive guilt is intrapersonal, experienced as something inside the self that must be resolved (or not) internally.
So why do Catholics experience more of the former kind of guilt, and Protestants more the latter? The study was surprisingly clear: the two sects have very different beliefs about sin, salvation, and human nature which bore a direct correlation to their subjective experience of guilt.
To measure this, the study asked the participants to rank their level of agreement with six different theological claims. See for yourself:
The survey showed Catholics were more likely than Protestants to agree with statement 2 and 5, that a good deed counts for something and that confession brings forgiveness.
On the flip side, Protestants were more likely than Catholics to agree with statements 1, 3, 4, and 6: that human are essentially sinful, one can only rely on God’s mercy for salvation, that no good deed is perfect in God’s eyes, and that God wants to us to understand that we are sinful (I talked about the last one a lot yesterday).
What do these statements have to do with constructive or non-constructive guilt?
Simply put (and speaking as always in the aggregate), the Catholic emphasis on human goodness, active participation in the salvation process, the merit of good works, and the power of confession mean that Catholic guilt has somewhere to gofor resolution. The authors of the study note how Catholicism has a lot of institutional practices and rituals (confession being the obvious example) that serve to externalize and resolve guilt. And this has a demonstrable effect on their psychology. Religious coping, the authors state, is a “controllable stress buffer”. Heightened religious practice, in other words, helps Catholics feel better.
Conversely, the relative Protestant emphasis on the essential sinfulness of man, the inefficacy and worthlessness of good works, and salvation as something God does alone means that the Protestant is pretty well “stuck” with his guilt. Protestants, of course, don’t have the confessional, but they also have fewer liturgical rituals that deal with guilt generally.
All of this has a demonstrable effect on Protestant psychology. The authors note three core doctrines of Protestant belief—the instruction to feel dejected, one’s helplessness before God, and the worthlessness of good works—are ‘depressogenic’, meaning they can lead to depression.
Which, in hindsight, of course it does. What could be more depressing than believing that you are essentially bad, that you can’t help yourself become better, and that nothing you do matters anyway?
In fact, whereas religious coping acts as a stress buffer for Catholics, for Protestants, religious forms of coping tend to exacerbate stress. Here, more religion tends to make Protestants feel worse!
The authors note that no study has been done on the relationship between Catholicism and depression, likely because “the combination of guilt-related pathology and orthodox Catholicism is not that often found in clinical practice. If this is indeed the case, Catholics may have a healthier way of coping with guilt than Protestants.”
So, there you have it: scientifically speaking, Catholic guilt is actually a good thing.
Our RCIA director is a good doctor of the soul. She began our first session with the question: “What do you think of when you hear the word ‘grace’?”
All three of us gave a variation of the same answer:
Grace, said one of us, is when my spouse is patient with me even though I’m being annoying.
Grace, said another, is when God gives you something good even though you don’t deserve it.
Grace, said the third, is Jesus dying on the cross even though I’m a sinner.
Isn’t it weird that all three of us understood that “even though” as being essential to grace? I had never noticed it before, but it had been the same arrangement of theological furniture in nearly every “room” I’d ever been in: the doctrine of grace was always situated next to the doctrine of sin. So much so, in fact, that I couldn’t conceive of one without the other.
I realized then that, whether it was among liberal mainliners, who tend to conceive of sin in structural or systemic terms, or among conservative evangelicals, who tend to think of sin as an irreparable defect in the fallen human heart, nearly every sermon I’d heard on grace was first and foremost a sermon about sin. In order to understand God’s grace, I first needed to understand human depravity, whether my own or just in general.
“Amazing grace,” so that most famous hymn goes, “that saved a wretch like me.”
Anyone who’s been raised in Protestant worship services can think of countless reiterations of this, whether they be in the old hymns or the latest Hillsong album.
God is amazing, I am terrible.
You’re so good, I’m so bad.
This sort of attitude isn’t just a problem of bad hymns or bad catechesis—it’s a pretty foundational Protestant understanding of the word.
The Reformers, eager as they were to counter the “works-righteousness” they saw in 16th-century Catholicism, brought the doctrine of grace under the heading of justification. We are not saved by our works (by anything we do) but by the grace of God. We have no righteousness in us at all, but righteousness has been imputed to us by God in Jesus. God sees us, as I heard many a time, through “Jesus-colored glasses”. Grace is God’s loving us even though we don’t have a righteousness of our own. Grace is Jesus dying on the cross even though we are wretches, sinners—as Calvin would have it, totally depraved.
I have heard this so many times, I could go on and on without much effort.
Our director is a very good Vatican II Catholic, so she’s eager to speak well of Protestantism as much as possible. However, here she just shook her head and smiled, as if she had a bit of good news for us.
“So, what you’ve all said is a bit foreign to me, but it’s something I hear from nearly every Protestant who comes to RCIA. When Catholics talk about grace—I mean, yeah, sometimes we might talk about not deserving it—but most of the time, whether or not we deserve it isn’t really that important. St. John tells us that God is love; it’s the same thing with grace. Grace is basically God’s eternal giving of himself to us. It’s an essential part of God’s nature, so whether or not we deserve that gift is not really an important part of the doctrine.”
I had read the word “grace” plenty of times before in the breviary and the catechism and other Catholic sources, so I was familiar with what she meant. When Catholics speak about grace, it tends to be about seeing God’s presence in all things, or receiving an unexpected gift, or having a fresh insight into God’s goodness. I’ve experienced grace, for example, when, during a long walk, I feel enchanted by nature’s beauty; or, in the midst of a difficult day, I realize that God is helping to preserve me and strengthen me.
God is always present, always offering himself, always sustaining and sanctifying every sphere of life. That’s the meaning of grace.
What we do is pay attention, receive, and give thanks.
By the way, all of this isn’t to say that Catholics believe that, contra the Reformers, we do deserve God’s favor apart from grace! It’s only to say that the concept of grace is bigger than the issue of human sin.
Come to think of it, in the Protestant conception of things, the meaning of the word “grace” depends on our first understanding how much we don’t deserve it! That’s why so many sermons begin with a lengthy meditation on how bad we are (and the punishment we thus deserve), because there’s a hidden worry that, unless we thoroughly understand how bad we are, we won’t understand how gracious God is.
But isn’t it more correct to say that God’s goodness—God’s grace—doesn’t need sin to in order to operate in the world? Grace is not something external to God, but rather something intrinsic to the divine nature. It’s not something that God has to come up with after sin enters the world, but rather, something that God always is and always has been and always will be: absolutely good and totally self-giving. And that grace is present and available at all times and places, not just when we’re dealing with our own failures.
A final thought on this.
One of the ideas the three of us riffed on quite a bit last week was the difference between guilt and shame. That is, while guilt says that I did something bad, shame says that I am something bad. The two are often confused, but there’s an enormous psychological difference.
Catholic guilt, is of course, a cliche, and there’s some truth to the stereotype.
But given everything we’ve noted above, how many times we’ve heard sermons and read books about how bad, how depraved human beings are, and how essential this is to Protestantism’s “good news” about God’s grace, I had a strange thought.
It is a glorious privilege that God should grant man his eternal image and the likeness of his character. Man’s likeness to God, if he preserves it, imparts high dignity.
So we must turn back our image undefiled and holy to our God and Father, for he is holy; in the words of Scripture: Be holy, for I am holy. We must restore his image with love, for he is love; in John’s words: God is love.
Today it’s the feast day of St Cecilia! I just have a quick story about her.
Once when my wife and I were trying to get more into music at home, we were hoping to get a piano. Pianos are expensive, and we were—are—poor, so it had to be a free one. I was experimenting with asking saints for their prayers, so we looked up who the patron saints of music were, and it was St. Cecilia and St. Gregory the Great.
“Alright,” I said aloud, just to humor her. “St. Cecilia, St. Gregory, we need a free piano. Please pray for us!”
The next day one popped up on craigslist! It was nearby, just 20 minutes away in Corralitos.
We drove out there (it was also Holy Saturday, I remember) and pulled up to the darkened barn where the seller told us to meet him. There it was, bathed in a single sunbeam:
We both burst out laughing. It was as if the heavens had opened and dropped this out of the sky for us.
So thank you, St Cecilia, for your prayers, and for the piano. It served us well!
What does it mean to be Black and Catholic? It means that I come to my Church fully functioning. That doesn’t frighten you, does it? I come to my Church fully functioning. I bring myself, my Black self, all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become, I bring my whole history, my traditions, my experience, my culture, my African American song and dance and gesture and movement and teaching and preaching and healing and responsibility as a gift to the Church.
Coincidentally, I watched this exact speech recently when I was taking care of our newborn son late one night. The full video is right here: her speech (about a half an hour) starts just after the 7-minute mark:
Given the often mild nature of Down syndrome, I was shocked at that number.
The possibility of being able to test in utero not just for Down, but for all kinds of hereditary syndromes, disorders, and diseases is full of disturbing ethical implications. For example, what if you could use IVF to create dozens of human beings, then test each of them and select the one whose genetic profile you like best? Zhang goes on to consider this as well, not shying away from the re-emergence of eugenics in the West:
Garland-Thomson calls this commercialization of reproduction “velvet eugenics”—velvet for the soft, subtle way it encourages the eradication of disability. Like the Velvet Revolution from which she takes the term, it’s accomplished without overt violence. But it also takes on another connotation as human reproduction becomes more and more subject to consumer choice: velvet, as in quality, high-caliber, premium-tier.
Wouldn’t you want only the best for your baby—one you’re already spending tens of thousands of dollars on IVF to conceive?
“It turns people into products,” Garland-Thomson says.
America has already published a response to the article by a father of not one, but two children with Down syndrome, which you can read here.
It traces the history of capitalism’s gradual conquest of family life, from the nuclear family to the two-income trap to the advent of the smartphone and work-from-home living:
Our current arrangements work on multiple levels at once, simultaneously ramping up both supply and demand for goods and services. They do this by pulling us away from each other, sapping the warmth and belonging that might still some of the profitable psychological disquiet that Lasch and Fisher describe. We need – most of us literally need – to devote our adult lives to working outside the home, and answering work emails into the night. This dominance of work, and the loneliness, anxiety, and absentmindedness it produces – I should be accomplishing something right now! I should be more productive! – in turn calls for ever-present laptops, smartphones, tablets, and social media participation for mother, father, and children.
The newest frontier of capitalism is a family simply enjoying each other’s company with a $2 deck of cards. Much better to mine that as an untapped resource for data that can be bought and sold. The best tool for that process of extraction is, of course, the smartphone. And if so doing necessarily pulls each member away from the other, well, such is the price of endless profit!
Casa Nova 