| The novelist as theologian, Dostoevsky & - thanks to John Sanders Jones - Michael O'Brien
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Hi John! To let the world-at-large know where we're at: I'm reading through a second of Michael O'Brien's Dostoyevskian novels, after you gave me his “A Father's Tale” for Christmas.
I just finished the chapter where he is sent to Warsaw, the town of his youth, and ends up hearing the confession of am old, dying Count, who, as it turns out, was inhumanly cruel to the person Fr Elijah credits with saving both his soul and his then young life, in the holocaust that ravaged the city during his adolescence.
This chapter epitomizes, I believe, the prophetic role of O'Brien within the Catholic Church at this time. Correcting the translations in the Mass – which at times were not so much heretical as totally meaningless, such as that the Son is “one in Being with the Father”; capitalizing “Being” doesn't alter the fact that it applies universally to everything that is; the Son is just as much “one in Being” with an ant, or with the piece of dirt the ant is moving to make its home, as He is with the Father, with Whom He is more properly said to be “consubstantial” even if this does not exhaust the mystery, but only eliminates error. So correcting these egregious mistranslations is hopefully only the first step in the revitalization of the Holy Supper which has taken place in the secularized west. I have been attending Mass so as to enter into the world of my children and grandchildren, and I have also been blessed to make friends with several souls living a loving and truly saintly life within the Western Communion. But I also grieve as I am stung by the loss of the Gregorian sung Mass which I was able to at least experience occasionally with my children as I was bringing them up, themes from which I taught them myself. The Orthodox Liturgy is still sung in its entirety – and, as the Gregorian Mass used to do – the musical tonalities which are theologically harmonized with the words engrave themselves on one's very inmost being. And, incidentally, we see how the popular so-called “music” of our times likewise engraves itself on one's very soul, to the extent that, in the wake of the Houston death, it is beginning to be made public, and a matter of concern, that such music is a lifestyle in which one's life-expectancy these days is less than 50! Music carries its message far better than the spoken word! Moreover, I believe Houston started off as a gospel singer, also Elvis' musical incubator, surely a signal that – judging by their lifestyles as also deathstyles -- “How Great Thou Art” can, when so belted out, acquire a different sense from the words alone!
What we learn from Michael O'Brien's account of the unimaginably venal degenerate who nevertheless dies a contrite death is, I believe, that the Church's power to bring souls to holiness is from God sanctifying, not from the sanctity of --- well, anyone or anything else. Herbert used to say with a special glee: “God loves hopeless cases!” Because then especially He shows His power so that we trust in Him and not ourselves.
I believe it is Michael O'Brien's role in the Western Church today to depict, and invite us into, real-life, lived and living scenarios embodying the Church's teachings, at this time when even that which the Catholic Church professes as her sacred “Creed” utterly contravenes the true teaching, the true Church, the genuine reality, she nevertheless remains – well, not THE True Church, as Catholics more often than not proclaim themselves, incontrovertible evidence to the contrary flashing in the news headlines on daily basis notwithstanding – but nevertheless truly the Church.
While Orthodox engaged in “ecumenism”, therefore grieve – genuine Orthodox, that is, there is no dearth of pretenders in this field, just look at some very highly placed persons in the OCA, while it is such genuine Orthodox as Met Hilarion Alfeyev, for instance, who grieve over the Catholic preoccupation with “settling” what Catholics call “doctrinal differences” which are not such at all, but are only the kind of garbled nonsense (surely it is not coincidence that “garbled” starts off as “garbage”!) that gets regurgitated in a so-called Christian tradition in which Gospel singers can no longer expect a 50 year lifespan.
If the Catholic Church cannot give us great theologians, she neverthless is giving us a great novelist! As the Russian Church did at the turn of the last century, when she raised up more martyrs than at any time since the early pagan persecutions of Christians – but even the best theologians of the time, Soloviev, Bulgakov, Florensky, Florovsky, come to mind, but I think they lacked the theological tools hammered out by St. Thomas Aquinas, especially, whose works are a study in how – just for starters – to pose the question properly!!! Herbert stressed that we must first ask the right questions to get true answers, but, just as I did not catch onto how Pauline Herbert's teaching was until I worked on presenting it after his repose (see my website, m4m4leh.l4ris4@gmail.com) I also did not appreciate how St. Thomas teaches us to use our minds rightly until I needed this understanding in order to share it with others.
So John, thanks again for the gift that keeps on giving as we follow and share Michael O'Brian's “theology as experienced in True Life”!!! All my love, Mom
Why did Christ die on the Cross for us?
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Herbert used to ask the same question as did the child in the class addressed by Br. Raphael Forbing, O.P., see below. Herbert’s typical reply was that our fear that God does not love us is so deeply ingrained in our psyche that such a dramatically sacrificial death is what it took to overcome this misgiving. Already Adam and Eve were persuaded by the devil’s charge that GOD DOES NOT WANT US TO BECOME GODS AS HE IS, and for this reason forebade our first parents’ taking the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: cf Gen 3:5 I find there are still people out there who will do anything to twist Herbert’s words in order to use them against him; during Herbert’s sojourn on this earth, such machinations were a constant barrage, and one of the charges in this matter was that we shouldn’t ask WHY God does anything!!!!! I thought this was about the most stupid interpretation of “living by faith” I ever heard tell of, but the prevalence of such a mentality was the reason I was living in Herbert’s community, and had brought my family there, so I just ignored such attacks on Herbert. It was only as I was working on getting the jist of the Bible into readable and comprehensible form --
(see my site: http://www.mamaleh-larisa.com/bible_orthodox.html)
-- so it was only more recently in this connection that it dawned on me how radically Pauline Herbert’s teaching is! This teaching has been horrendously obscured in the western Christian tradition, which is also pathologically concerned with proliferating misinterpretations and mistranslations to get these lies into the minds of the erstwhile faithful - how unfaithful they have become can be read daily in their news and politics which have the entire globe in a bind, as outlined in an insightful post I came across just today:
Russian Church: Global war almost inescapable
Moscow, February 17, Interfax - The current global contradictions could deteriorate into a global war sooner or later, the Moscow Patriarchate said.
"There are many processes ongoing in the world in which Russia should play a much more active role, since the economic and social contradictions that have cropped up in the world are so strong that they are sure to blow up into serious military operations," head of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin said in an interview with the Svobodnaya Pressa (Free Press) Publishing House.
"In order to ensure that these military operations not unfold in our territory or in the vicinity of our borders, we need to keep our armed forces combat ready and to participate in settling all situations that may lead to a war, be it the Middle East or Central Asia where the situation is also tense," he said.
"By all accounts, we will not manage to escape a big war," he said.
Father Vsevolod also said that the development track of the civilization may lead to the annihilation of cities.
Given what we are seeing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Syria -- just for starters -- there are hopefully fewer now that formerly who would wag their heads at these “crazy Russians” - altho there are obviously plenty such still out there, or these things wouldn’t be happening.
Well, as my researches were bringing to light that - if St. Gregory Palamas called Paul “Christ’s mouthpiece”, Herbert was most assuredly Paul’s mouthpiece - I came across this passage in Paul’s letter: He who did not spare his own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? Rm 8:32
So I am most gratified -- since Herbert was a Dominican tertiary, and signed himself as such when he wrote, and I myself was a tertiary even before I met Herbert -- that the Dominicans of the Eastern Province, St. Joseph’s, are also on the ball as regards this point which lies at the very heart of our salvation”
“Recently I had the opportunity to speak with a class of third graders about Lent. Focusing on Jesus’ forty-day fast in the desert, I compared it to the Israelites’ forty years in the wilderness and to the “forty days and forty nights” of the Flood. My time with the class was brief, but toward the end I was able to take two questions. The first was, “Why does God allow people to do bad things?” and the second, “If Jesus was God, how come He had to come down to earth and die on the Cross?” Out of the mouths of babes … come tough questions. It didn’t hit me until I had left the classroom that these two particular questions are profoundly connected.
“The first question involves the mystery of free will. God creates us out of love, and He wants us to love Him in return. We know from our own experience, however, that love cannot be forced. Even if the external signs of love are present, it’s not really love unless it comes from within, from the mind and heart, from the whole of one’s being. If God forced us to love him, our “love” would not be free and, therefore, wouldn’t be love at all. In fact, the very idea of forced love is a contradiction in terms, a non-idea, like a square circle or a round triangle. In order to love, we must be free, and, for those of us who do not yet enjoy the Beatific Vision, being free entails the possibility of choosing not to love, of sinning, of doing “bad things.”
“This helps us to answer the second question, “If Jesus was God, why did He have to come down to earth and die on the Cross?” The simple answer is, He didn’t have to. He did it freely, out of love, and in so doing he both showed us the depth of his love and set us an example. After all, the greatest sign of love is suffering for another, sacrificing oneself for another: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13). Indeed, it is not suffering as suffering that has meaning, but suffering for the sake of. Jesus’ suffering was for our sake, and the great sign of this is that, although He was free to turn down suffering, to escape, to save us in some other way, instead He embraced the Cross and suffered death.
“Another way of putting this is to say that, although Christ’s death on the Cross was not, strictly speaking, necessary, it was eminently fitting. And it was fitting in more ways than one. For example, just as, in the beginning, a tree was the occasion of our death through the disobedience of Adam, so now another tree—the Cross—is the occasion of new life through the obedience of Christ. Jesus, the new Adam, true God and true man, makes all things new. No longer are we bound by sin, to labor through this life, only to reach its end in darkness and death. Now we have new life in Christ, if only we choose to live in Him, with Him, and through Him.
“It is true that we do not get to choose the cross that is ours to bear in this life, but whether or not we accept our cross for love of Jesus Christ and for love of the people he has given us, is our choice. We can embrace it or reject it; we can resent it or be healed by it. If this choice makes us sad or afraid, let us take consolation in the fact that a God who has himself suffered so much for us will not abandon us in our suffering. He will be with us and help us, even when we do not perceive it: “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you” (Isaiah 49:15). by Br. Raphael Forbing, O.P.
Meanwhile, in the Holy Land, this sacred and seminal truth is being horribly desecrated:
UNKNOWN VANDALS SPRAY GRAFFITI THREAT ON GREEK ORTHODOX MONASTERY IN JERUSALEM
February 8, 2012
A Jerusalem monastery, built on the site where tradition says the tree used in the making of Jesus’s cross once stood, was defaced with “Death to Christians” graffiti on Tuesday.
The words “Price Tag” daubed on a vandalized car parked outside the 11th-century Monastery of the Cross suggested that militant Jewish settlers were responsible and police said they were investigating that possibility as well as other angles.
The term refers to retribution the settlers say they will exact for any attempt by the Israeli government to curb settlement in the West Bank, an area Palestinians seek as part of a future state.
“Price Tag” attacks have targeted mosques, Palestinian homes and Israeli military installations in the occupied West Bank, but vandalism of Christian holy sites in Jerusalem is extremely rare.
Police said “Death to Christians” was painted in Hebrew on the outer wall of the fortress-like monastery administered by the Greek Orthodox Church in a valley overlooked by Israel’s parliament.
“I am a priest and I forgive,” Father Claudio of the monastery told Reuters.
Elsewhere in Jerusalem on Tuesday, “Death to Arabs” was painted in Hebrew on the wall of a playground of a Jewish-Arab bilingual school.
In the West Bank, anti-Muslim slogans were daubed on the walls of several homes in the village of Al-Lubban al-Sharqiya overnight, a Palestinian official said, blaming Jewish settlers.
A similar incident occurred on Sunday in the West Bank village of Al Janiyeh, the official said.
(Source: Reuters.com)
www.pravoslavie.ru/english/51569.htm
I visited this very monastery when I was in Jerusalem; when I saw the photograph of the graffiti message -- it brought back to me another morning in Jerusalem, it was in 1987, when I found, on the large metal double doors of the Russian Mission in Jerusalem, enormous Hebrew letters written in thick red paint that looked like the dripping blood of some huge giant, after our youngest priest had been assassinated the previous Sunnday -- stabbed in the back as he carried water from Jacob’s well, as I later learned.
But such atrocities inevitably entail a message for the perpetrators. This young priest was assassinated on the feast day of the head of the Russian mission, then Archimandrite Paul, my Spiritual Father, now Metropolitan Paul of Ryazan and Kasimov, who has transformed his oblast - and is slated to do the same here in our flailing “New World”. A few days after the tragedy, I opened my Bible and realized that I had some days earlier left a marker in it. I often just open my Bible and “take and read”, as St. Augustine was bidden, and never have I failed to find a very timely message directed to my special need at that moment. But a few days previously I had followed this practice -- but turned only to a passage in the Maccabees’ history in which, try as I would, I could find nothing relevant to my situation. So I read the pages indicated by the marker again -- and they told of the death of a holy warrior for the Maccabean cause who was killed in battle, but who appeared to the Maccabean leader from heaven, telling him to fight confidently despite his paucity of men and resources against the great superiority of the enemy -- as the Maccabees did, and carried the day overwhelmingly against their enemies!
So we have confidence that neither can these adversaries who threaten us prevail -- it will be just as in Russia itself, where the efforts of the godless Soviet regime served only to raise up more martyrs than at time since the early persecutions against the Christians, and where today the first government in living memory (if at all!) which has governed in harmony with the Christian Church and in such wise that other traditional religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, native shamanistic religions, and the like, recognize the harmonious agreement of their own traditions with the the direction being taken by Russian civic life - and abjure the efforts of western protesters to scream their way in and reduce everything to chaos as we have seen happen in Egypt, Libya, Syria ….........
Let a word to the wise be sufficient. How about trying the old tried and true? Carpe diem!
At the moment we seem to be - uh, fighting on 2 fronts, I hate to put it that way, but ……….
On the Catholic Bishops vs Obama front, when Obama showed his concern to accommodate the Church, these prelates who serve no god but themselves merely dreamed up a whole bunch of gobbledygook to maintain their mindlessly partisan political onslaught!
On the Syria front, who should enthusiastically volunteer to join ourselves and the totally befuddled "protesters" -- I mean, do these guys have functioning minds that even think at all? Thus far there has been absolutely zilch to indicate that this is the case.
But, ah, fear not! Who is coming to their rescue but "Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri [who] has voiced his support for the Syrian uprising in a new video message released on jihadist Internet forums, US monitors said Sunday. In the video titled "Onwards, Lions of Syria", Zawahiri criticized the Syrian regime for crimes against its citizens, and praised those rising up against the government, SITE Intelligence Group said. AFP Feb 12, 2012
Yet, fear not, brothers and sisters in Christ, let us seize this propitious moment!
Let us turn to the Maronites, the Christians of Syria and Lebanon, and for starters find a way to save them from currently threatened distinction at the hands of the NATO coalition aided by Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri who I guess has stepped into bin Laden's shoes. I will refrain from commenting further on this development, anyone in his right mind can see the obvious.
The Maronites are possessed of rare treasures and valuable resources. Syrian is actually akin to the Aramaic language used by Our Lord Himself. Even if it has changed over time, it has got to be of a higher intelligent quotient than Americanese!!! How far the native tongue of these atrocious Catholic bishops has deviated from the norms of human logic in our once great land of the free and home of the brave! Pronouns almost alone have retained the declensional endings indicating what part of speech the utterance is - but our speech has so degenerated that gramatically correct pronominal usage actually sounds downright weird, it is so rare and foreign to everyday parlance. I wince every time I speak ungrammatically just because people would be more suspicious of me than they already are if I followed correct usage.
I don’t think I need to labor the point that it would be to our advantage here in North America to capitalize on the gifts and culture of the Maronite Christians among us, just for starters. I had more or less forgotten them myself (that’s what this crazy society will do even to a decently brought up and educated person like myself) until my friend Carlos Nader, a Mexican of Lebanese background, had some recent facebook posts on them. So it looks like Zuckerberg’s folly may be able to make some contribution to civilized culture after all.
Of course I am going to suggest that the effort be spearheaded by my Spiritual Father, Met. Pavel, currently of Ryazan and Kasimov, as he himself has, to begin with, as a Russian, a mindset formed by a linguistically very sophisticated mother tongue. When I find horrifically ghastly translations in the Bible in English, I first look them up in my Russian Synodal Bible, which was translated by the Moscow Patriarchate from the Leningrad Codex (or Codex Leningradensis) which is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, using the masoretic text. Then I compare the text with the Greek, and I consistently find that the Russian is effectively a perfect clone of the Greek. The Synodal Russian Bible has profoundly influenced Russian hymnology, from which Russians learn theology through their liturgical celebrations, not from sterile “theological” tomes a la Descartes et al - something also true mutatis mutandi of the Maronites, making Russians and Maronites intimately kindred brethren.
Metropolitan Pavel’s special role during the past decade or more has also uniquely prepared him for such a role inasmuch as Kasimov was the capital of the Kasim Khanate until 1681 when the khanate was reabsorbed into Russia, so there is a contemporary Islamic presence there, which also stretches back to a more ancient time when Russia was actually under Muslim rule. The oblast he presides over also effectively constitutes a huge suburb of Moscow, rife with both the advantages and the snares such proximity to an urban capitol city affords.
I can think of no one better positioned to deal with the religious complexities that have Syria and so much of the Middle East tied in knots -- and I am sure my Mexican/Lebanese friend Carlos, who was part of the Mt. Hope community gathered around Herbert Schwartz, will be of invaluable assistance, as he is also very close to the Carmelite Convent of St. Joseph in Mexico City, of which Dr. Schwartz was also the Spiritual Father. A Mexican Bishop who later was made a Cardinal intended to ordain Herbert a priest, and in line with that gave the nuns into Herbert’s spiritual care. Herbert actually went to Rome in this connection, but in the end the plan was not realized. He did, however, remain the Spiritual Father of the nuns - two of them, Mother Josephine, the Mother Superior, and Mother Margarita, who is my own special Carmelite Sister, even managed to travel to New York for a visit with us, and stayed in my house!
Hopefully I will be able to host them again, now that it looks like I will be getting back my beautiful RV - when people ask what it's like, I tell them inside it's like a Manhattan efficiency apartment, and outside, just drive to wherever you like! I think we can go on the road and make our case all over this hemisphere, actually! Surely this is a fine way to bring our world together in God!
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