Saturday, February 13, 2010

Naked on the Golf Course

Don't ask me what nudity and the golf course have in common. I really have no idea. But my 15 year old friend has somehow experienced these two things together. I must really give him credit since he seems to have done so recently and lives in the middle of Montana. Now that's fortitude of the type that one only finds among adolescent males. I'm glad his clothes were nearby.

He has other problems right now, of course. We all do. His other problem is rooted in that oldest of human issues, the problem of evil. It seems that he's abandoned his faith in God because of evil, specifically because of the fact that two young girls he knows were killed by a drunk driver. "Where was God," he demands to know, "when this happened?"

I must admit that this an easy question to ask. Of all the reasons for doubting the existence of a benevolent and powerful God, the old "problem of evil" is certainly the most sympathetic. We've all wondered the same thing. I asked this question long ago and I abandoned God myself. I sought other solutions. The idea of a loving God didn't make sense when I held the hand of my dying mother; it didn't make sense when my wife died in my arms; it doesn't make sense in the suffering of my daughter in her illness.

But giving up on the notion of God poses a new and serious perplexity. We've gotten rid of God, but the evil, the suffering, still exists and we seem to be powerless to do anything about it. We have made ourselves gods, and a pretty sorry excuse for gods we are. There is no God, and hurricanes ravage our coasts, we can't stop that. There is no God and illness strikes down our loved ones, we can't stop that. There is no God and drunk drivers plow into teen aged girls, we can't stop that. Now what? Our suffering is meaningless. Where is our hope?

In order to find our hope, I would suggest that we have to re-examine the question of God. For us to have hope in the face of the evil and misery in the world any deity we seek would have to have suffered for and with us. Only in the Christian tradition do we find such a deity, that is Jesus Christ and "Him crucified." Only in the Christian tradition, and most especially in the Catholic tradition, are we exhorted to join our sufferings to that of our God. In this way, and only in this way, does suffering, does evil, have any meaning whatsoever. In fact, our suffering takes on an infinite meaning.

Without that hope, left to our own devices limited as we are by our faults, we're left as naked as a fifteen year old boy on a Montana golf course in the dead of winter.

Til next time, all the best. Joe

Friday, February 5, 2010

Do You Think Jesus Would Like All the Crosses?"

The title of this post is taken from a question I was recently asked on an atheist forum I visit occassionally. My answer to the question was simply "yes". One poster responded wanting to hear further explanation and commenting that my belief was a bit presumptious. I offer further explanation here.

In fact, I think it is the crucifix, with the corpus hung upon it which is the most potent symbol. 'The man known as Jesus' spoke repeatedly of crosses.

Matthew 16:24 'Then Jesus told his disciples, 'If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me...'' Then He proceeded to set the example by doing exactly that. When taunted by bystanders to save himself and to come down from the cross, He desn't. He remains and fulfills His mission.

St Paul in his letter to the Romans speaks of the Cross as a a scandal to the Jews and a stumbling block to the Greeks, yet he continues to preach '...Jesus Christ and Him crucified...'

For Christians, specifically for Catholic Christians, one of the great lessons of the Cross is that suffering has a real value. Suffering came into the world through an act of the will of Man via the Fall, for some reason that suffering cannot be alleviated, but must be endured. Somehow, suffering figures into God's plan of salvation and is so central to salvation history that even God is not above suffering. Like Christ, we do not seek suffering, but when it is necessary, when it is unavoidable, we accept it willingly. Like St Paul, we unite our sufferings to the sufferings of Christ; hence that uniquely Catholic concept taught to Catholics by their mothers to 'offer it up'.

In the heaveny liturgy revealed to St John in the book of Revelation it is the sacrificed Lamb who sits upon the throne. It is the crucified Christ who reigns as King."

It is the Cross of Christ, then, whic becomes for Christians the central point of history, the focal point of all that has transpired and all that is to come. We view the world through the lens of the Passion, but not just the Passion, since the Passion of Christ is inextricaly linked to His Resurrection. It is through the suffering of the Cross that the hope of the Ressurection, that promise of Christ to make all things new, is realized. There, at the Cross, the "scandal" and the "stumbling block" become our hope.

And, as Pope Benedict XVI tells us, "He who has hope lives differently."