Prayer Request

Please remember in your prayers our friends the T. family, who lost their husband and father on Good Friday after a long battle with cancer.

Lenten Meditations on Purgatorio: Avarice & Prodigality

[Things have been very busy at work lately, and we've both been involved in various parish activities leading up to Holy Week, so my progress through Purgatorio has been sadly slowed. I'll probably be finishing well into Easter Season at this point, but I do plan to push through and finish blogging the second volume of the Commedia this year. I'll save Paradiso for next year.]

When I stepped out into the fifth circle,
I witnessed people on it who were weeping,
Lying on the ground with faces downward.

"My soul cleaves to the dust," this psalm I heard
Them murmuring with sighs so deep and gasping
That scarcely could the words be understood.
(Purg. XIX, 70-75)

As soon as the poets reach the fifth terrace, they find the ground covered with penitents laying face down in the dust. Dante asks if any of them are Italian and if someone can explain to him the nature of the sin they are seeking to expiate, and he is answered by Pope Adrian V, who reigned for one month only in 1276.

Pope Adrian tells Dante of how his ascension to the papal throne showed him at last that earthly honors and possessions do not bring true happiness, and brought about in him a conversion to true love of God -- and just in time as he lived but one month more. On this terrace, those who placed their love in earthly things and turned their backs to God lay face down, facing the earth which they so loved, with their backs to heaven. They water the earth with the tears of their repentance until they are judged ready to move upwards.

Dante is moved to be addressed by one of the successors of Peter, and is about to kneel down before him, but Pope Adrian orders him to remain standing:

"Straighten your legs, my brother, on your feet!"
He answered, "Make no mistake: with you and others
I am a fellow-servant of one Power.

"If ever you have understood the word
The Holy Gospel sounds in ‘They neither marry,’
You can see clearly why I speak this way.

"Now move along: I would not have you stay
Since your remaining here keeps me from weeping
The tears to ripen penance which you spoke of.
(Purg. XIX, 133-141)

Obedient to the pope, the poets move on down the terrace, which is so covered with the prostrate penitents that they have to pick their way carefully in order to avoid stepping on anyone.Greed is the most heavily populated terrace we have reached since pride -- humanity hasn't changed much in the 700 years since Dante's time.

After proceeding a little way, they hear called out three examples of holy poverty and generosity: Mary's giving birth to our Savior in a stable; the early Roman consul Fabius, who died in poverty rather than accept bribes; and St. Nicholas, lauded for helping the three dowerless maidens, among many others.

Dante is eager to find the speaker, and when he identifies the penitent who has been crying out these examples asks him who he is. The soul identifies himself as Hugh Capet, the founder of the French royal dynasty, who ruled from 987 to 996 AD. Hugh bewails the depths to which greed for wealth, land and power has driven his descendants, culminating in a prophecy of the kidnapping of the pope and Avignon Papacy -- which would begin five years after the internal date of the Divine Comedy, 1300, but before Dante's writing of it in 1308-1321.

Between these two characters to whom Dante speaks, we see examples of the two sources of power in medieval Europe, church and royalty, condemned for greed. The symmetry is surely not coincidental.

Hugh then goes on to list a number of examples of greed -- far more than the normal three we have heard on other terraces. Perhaps the pervasive and consuming nature of avarice deserves more exemplars. Among them are King Midas, Achan who tried to keep for himself spoils from Jericho in the book of Joshua, Sapphira and Ananias from Acts, and Marcus Licinius Crassus -- the Roman triumvir so known for greed that when the Parthians defeated and killed him in 53 B.C., their king had molten gold poured down the throat of his severed head, which was then left out as a warning to others.

After talking with Hugh, the poets move on around the terrace.

We were already gone away from him
And struggling to go forward on the road,
So far as our own powers would permit us,

When I felt — like something that is falling —
The mountain tremble, and at that a chill
Gripped me, as grips one going to his death.

Surely Delos did not shake so sharply
Before Latona built her nest in it
To give birth to the two eyes of the sky.

Then such a cry on all sides started up
That my master drew close to me and said,
"Don’t be afraid while I am guiding you."

"Glory to God in the highest" they all cried,
By what I understood from those close by,
Where the crying could be comprehended.

Motionless and in suspense we stood,
Just like the shepherds who first heard that song,
Until the trembling stopped and the song ended.

Then we took up again our holy road,
Looking at shades that lay along the ground
Already turned to their accustomed weeping.
(Purg. XX, 124-144)

Dante is so amazed by the tremor and the cry that he is afraid to ask any of the souls they pass the meaning of the event. After a few minutes the hear a greeting of, "My brothers, may God give you peace!" And turning, they see a soul approaching them from behind, walking upright among the see of prostrate penitents.

Virgil tells this new arrival the nature of their journey and asks him what the meaning of the recent tremor and cry of rejoicing was. The soul explains that when, after many years of penance, a penitent's will suddenly find itself able to conform perfectly with the virtue proper to the terrace, the soul rises from his penance and proceeds to the angel who guards the pass to the next terrace. As the soul rises, all the other penitents on the mountain cry out in rejoicing, and the mountain itself is shaken with God's joy.

The soul now speaking to them is the penitent who has just risen from over a hundred years spent on this terrace. Dante asks him who he was in life, and he says that he was Statius, a Roman poet of the first century A.D.

Statius waxes eloquent about poetry, and the inspiration he drew from reading the poetry of Virgil, who lived just a hundred years before. Dante cannot help smiling at this, and when Statius questions him reveals to him that it is the shade of Virgil who is standing with them at that very moment. Statius is overjoyed, but Virgil refuses the homage that Statius tries to pay him, saying that they are all brothers now in death.

Still immersed in conversation about poetry, the poets reach the angel who guards the pass to the next terrace. Another "p" is erased from Dante's forehead.

---

Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by AllenMandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.

Pride Goeth Before a Toddler

Sunday was one of those beautiful Texas spring days, and while doing a big of work in the new Darwin garden, I was pleased to see the first tomatoes of the season forming on one of the cherry tomato plants that I put in a few weeks ago.

So I took a picture, figuring I'd post it with some sort of vaunting statement like, "Those who are still dealing with snow and ice in mid March may like to know that in Texas the first tomatoes are appearing."

The picture came out beautifully, but today I got home from work to find that Miss Two Year Old had ripped the tomato plant out of the ground while playing outside today. (While crushing some purple basil as well for good measure.)

So it's back to the nursery for me in regards to cherry tomatoes...

The Church-goer Divide

I ran into a couple of posts on Ross Douthat's blog at The Atlantic last night, dealing with the question of whether Sen. Obama is being unfairly held accountable for the black power/liberation theology beliefs of his minister, Jeremiah Wright. Douthat argues, and I think persuasively, that on the Republican side of the aisle no one could get off the ground as a presidential candidate who actually belonged to the congregation of one of the gonzo preachers (Hagee, Falwell, etc.) or the "religious right". Republican candidates certainly accept the support of these preachers and their congregations, but I think it's pretty fair to say that they would not elect a member of one of those congregations as their presidential nominee. Look how much low-level flack Huckabee absorbed because of his evangelical preacher background -- and he has a pretty tame theology by comparison to these more extreme characters. (A friend predicted to me: "Huckabee could never be elected president, because he believes the world is only 6000 years old." I suspect that's the case. Despite the rather large number of Americans who have some degree of creationist sympathies, it's just not something people would want to see their potential president holding fast to something so far out of the intellectual mainstream.)

What struck me as most interesting about these two Douthat posts, however, was the reaction which he was receiving from Atlantic readers. Many of readers essentially argued that the beliefs of Obama's pastor (that crack cocaine and AIDS were developed by the CIA to kill black people, that 9/11 was a punishment from God for America's sins against people of color, etc.) were not that weird compared to other things said by religious leaders. They would then either point to the outrageous statements of characters like Jerry Falwell, or argue that it was no more weird to believe that AIDS was developed by the government than to believe that God exists in the first place.

Both of these underlined to me that part of what we're seeing here is a difference between those who consider attendance at religious services to be a normal and important part of their lives, and those who don't. The latter argument, indeed, reminded me of a question which I believe Razib brought up on Gene Expression some months ago -- and I meant to blog about but never got around to -- which if memory serves was basically: Is it possible to say that one religious belief is more probably than another? At the time, Romney was catching some flack over Mormon beliefs, and Razib's question was: Is it actually any less probably that we all become gods of our own planets after we die than that Jesus rose from the dead, or is it simply that the former is a belief fairly alien to mainstream US culture, while the latter is familiar even to those who don't accept it.

It strikes me as an interesting point. I think I would say that it's not possible to assign probabilities to religious beliefs. One can consider whether they are internally consistent, whether they are consistent with any scriptures on which they may be based, and whether they seem to fit with what we know of the world, but it strikes me as impossible to assign probability to a question like: Was Jesus God?

Now what this means is that to many non religious or non church-going people, especially if their ideas of what goes on in churches on Sunday is mostly informed by odd-ball televangelists which they stumble across while channel surfing, it probably doesn't seem very improbably that most people hear weird conspiracy rants and shouting on a regular basis from the ministers, priests or rabbis. Judging strictly my media portrayal, it wouldn't be hard to get the idea that most sermons have to do with gays, abortion, the end of the world, or damnation.

However, the majority of Americans do enter some kind of religious service pretty regularly, and to those folks, the YouTube videos of the sermons by Obama's pastor do actually look pretty alien. To most church-goers, Reverend Wright shouting "God damn America" to thunderous applause or miming Clinton "riding dirty" on Monica Lewinsky bear no resemblance at all to anything they've seen in a church.

Similarly, the antics and thundering of TV preachers bear little resemblance to anything that most churchgoers see on a regular basis. However much these people may symbolize the "religious right" in the perceptions of many secular Americans, their rhetoric is actually starkly different from what most churchgoers actually hear on Sundays. Which is why it really would be very hard for a politician who attended one of these more fringy right-wing congregations to win a Republican nomination for a high profile office.

In Obama's case, his deepest base of support is not necessarily among churchgoers, so the initial reaction may be, "You have to belong to a church to stand a change for running for high office in this country, and his is probably no more crazy than most."

That may play with a fairly secular audience, but I don't think it will wash in the general election.

Guest Post: Becoming a Revert to Catholicism

An old family friend, himself a fairly recent "revert" to Catholicism emailed me the following, which had started as a comment on the other day's post on grace and forming a relationship with God. But since it had grown too long to be a comment, the author emailed it to me and I thought I'd turn it into a guest post. The author blogs under the name Logeyed Roman over at Forest and Mote -- though not as often as some might wish.

Okay.

Bottom line: Your only hope is the grace of God, but that’s true for every one of us in all things.

I mention something that basic because of the way I keep forgetting it, and being astonished when I remember it.

You can trust in God and His mercy and grace. But His grace requires a response from us.

I was away from the church for over 30 years, and taking those final steps back was the hardest thing I have ever done. However, all the strength which got me over those last hurdles came from God, not me.

What I found so difficult was to turn everything over to Him. To really turn my will over to His.

After I did that, the rest was relatively downhill. No, it was not a smooth hill with a comfortable slope and a smooth surface. It was more like a broken ridgeline on the Moon or something. Lots of boulders, and ravines that require some uphill climbs. Nevertheless the trend is downhill and as long as I keep turning to God, His grace draws me on like gravity.

The step I first took, which I here recommend to you, was so simple and easy it took me forever to think of it.

So I wanted to trust Him and have faith, but couldn’t take that final step. Finally, I told Him that I was willing for Him to change my heart for me. I was willing to let HIM give me the will and strength to turn back. With that, though the struggle was still long and hard, I had in fact turned the corner. I might still relapse, of course. But now it would take an act of will on my part.

As for the rest, our response to God’s grace includes doing everything we can while trusting the ultimate guidance of our journey to Him.

I concur with the comment that books alone are questionable, though for me they provided essential information and encouragement. But it was contact with good orthodox Catholics which was the most important factor in my reclamation. Prominent among these has been Darwin’s parents and Darwin himself. I have been a friend of the family for decades.

People like Darwin and his parents are in short supply. But if you trust and seek, you will find.

You have some resistance, due to a bad experience with a priest and perhaps with the resistance of your friends. All this is totally understandable to me. I found past mistreatment by Catholics, as well as the fear and hostility to Catholicism which surrounds us, to be formidable obstacles. But such difficulties have been the lot of the faithful all along. Our Savior was in fact crucified by his own people, betrayed by a close friend. In fact the struggles of the faithful go back all the way to Abel, murdered by his own brother for the offense of simply being more devout than Cain. We can expect this situation to improve after Judgment Day.

I bring this up to make the point that these same difficulties have always been the lot of the Faithful. God understands, and the means to overcome these are available. While the details are unique to every individual, our faith journey is a walk to Calvary.

It was pointed out that when Jesus said “My yoke is light”, he was probably referring to the common ox yoke, which was made for TWO. Remember that the cross you are being called to bear will have a Helper alongside, giving you all the help you need.

Okay.

After prayer, I would suggest scaring up some Catholic friends and counselors. I don’t know the specifics of your situation, and none of us know the exact means God works to help us until after it arrives. But I found it useful to talk to a priest after Mass if I felt I could trust him. I found it useful to volunteer to help with catechism and RCIA. They’ll train you to teach catechism classes, and give you time to prepare ahead of time. You don’t need to be an expert ahead of time. One of the best experiences I had was taking the Archdiocese’s “Ministry Formation” class. Especially for the people; they were committed, friendly, orthodox Catholics. Finally, a good Catholic bookstore might be helpful. Not only to find more books, but to talk to the staff. If you live close enough to one, I especially recommend the bookstores run by the Pauline sisters. There are a number around the country. Their selection of books etc. is excellent and the staff is very helpful.

In the meantime, I might suggest you putting as much consoling and edifying materials into your reading and entertainment that you can. I’m serious. Watch movies with good Catholic messages. The Pauline sisters have a very good selection of videos. Watch things like good Narnia movies, and the “Lord of the Rings” series which embody strong Christian values. Read Scripture (and don’t neglect the Old Testament!). I recommend the Navarre Bible series. These are highly annotated Bible texts, put out by Navarre university. They have the text itself, then along with it, page by page, extensive commentary and explanations. There are several versions. The fanciest one has the Old Testament in like six hardback volumes, and the New Testament in twelve paperbacks. I have the whole set; it took me years, because it’s nearly $200 for the whole thing.

The other books recommended are, I’m sure, excellent. I am familiar with most of them. I will add a few suggestions: “Why Do Catholics Do That?” by Kevin Orlin. It’s both very readable and very well-informed, useful for the seeker, the curious non-Catholic, and the experienced Catholic who can use reminders of the basics. Then there’s “While You Were Away”, I forget the author right now. It’s a guide for returning Catholics about some of the changes in the Church. Finally, I strongly recommend—believe it or not—“Catholicism for Dummies.” Not only does it cover the basics thoroughly, it assiduously explains them for the modern person. One priest says it does this so well that even experienced catechists turn to it for useful arguments and so on to present to curious and sometimes hostile non-Catholics.

Anything by Peter Kreeft is likely to be useful. And of course Benedict 16 and JP II. I also recommend the works of C.S. Lewis. Including the big ones: “Mere Christianity”, “The Screwtape Letters”, “The Problem of Pain”, “Miracles”, and “A Grief Observed.” These are available in a box set of paperbacks; slightly cheaper and more elegant but less portable, they are available in a single volume in a nice hardback. (Cheaper used, of course).

I especially found Lewis useful; he can’t quite match Kreeft’s outstanding philosophical and theological abilities, but Lewis’ work is so literate, even poetic (he wrote a lot of poetry and was always sorry that it was never popular), that I leaned heavily on it for consolation for decades. (Still do.)

The Man Without a Country

There's currently much flap, it seems, over video of Senator Obama's pastor of twenty years giving a sermon in which he shouts rather forcefully that black people should not sing the song "God Bless America" but rather "God Damn America".

One may say many things about about the Reverend Wright's comments, and I'm sure many will, but in my case the fuss reminded me of one of my favorite stories, and thus took me pleasantly out of the here and now.

The Man Without a Country was written by minister Edward Everett Hale, and appeared (anonymously) in the December 1863 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It tells the story of a young naval officer who is caught up in Aaron Burr's treason shortly before the 1812 war and says, at his court martial for said treason, "God damn the United States. I hope never to hear its name again."

The court chooses to issue that as its sentence.

The story is at once patriotic and deeply humane -- perhaps unsurprisingly as it comes from a time during which the nation was engaged in tearing itself apart in the greatest war it has ever fought. Slightly easier on the eyes than the above reproduction of the original publication in the Atlantic is this electronic version from Bartleby.

It's not a very long read, and much rewards the reader for his trouble. Definately something I would put down as a "must read" in any homeschooled high school or junior high curriculum.

This Week's Weekly Bread

For comparison with my shopping from last week, I offer up this week's grocery run:

The Darwins, Round Rock, TX
Grocery total: 98.49

The little pink thing in front is a rubber duckie we picked up in the checkout line.

When I was younger, my family ate on a tight budget, which seemed to translate to certain kinds of cheap convenience foods. I remember plenty of kraft dinners with hot dogs, hamburger helper, little boxed potpies, canned vegetables, instant mashed potatoes, kool-aid, "family-size" frozen entrees (Salisbury steak, anyone?). I don't know whether it was actually less expensive to buy certain low-budget prepared items than to get fresh ingredients, or if it was just that if you wanted to eat more expensive items like meat for the lowest cost you bought potpies and frozen entrees.

We're fortunate to have a larger food budget than my family, but I'd still rather forgo lots of meat and buy fresh produce instead. Ah, when the garden comes in...