Turn on Your Brain
The culture of rage is here, a general acceptance of rule breaking in the furtherance of political ends. Rage is primal, reaching into the area of your brain that runs your internal “fight or flight” response. It shuts down logic and instead pursues action, no matter how unhinged.
A sad consequence of this indulgence of rage is that it rewards the party that can convince the highest number of people to turn off their brains. Alexander de Tocqueville marveled at the educated electorate that he met in America, and how everyone engaged in the democratic process. He’d be shocked to see that it only took 200 years to convert that America into a mob.
Humans are naturally trusting, and so it can be easy to accept reasonable sounding arguments, even if they’re fallacious. Many will ask you to excuse the intentionally killing of a child, but only in “rare” cases of rape, incest, or the health of the mother. A critical review of this request presents some questions.
Why is the only response to the violence of rape, the violence of killing a child? In what medical circumstance is it medically necessary to kill the child, rather than end the pregnancy early by delivering the child and admitting them to the neonatal intensive care unit?
Under the weight of logic, the argument collapses. We know inherently that killing is always wrong, with the sole exception of in self-defense.
Rage, and the beneficiaries of rage, benefit when you turn your brain off. Keep yours on.
A Fresh Look
For over a year now, we’ve lived in our new house. I think that it takes time to get used to your new environment before you deeply understand what changes would improve your lifestyle. We’re at that point.
My father-in-law was here last week for a visit. An extra pair of hands, along with the natural feeling of renewal that springtime brings, inspired us to move on to the next phase of home improvement.
When we moved in, our house had an intercom system. We removed four of the five speakers shortly after moving in, with the last one in the master bedroom. Over the weekend, we pulled it down, patched the wall, and painted. I have a great feeling of completion.
Along with the system were two intercom boxes on the porches. Five minutes of screwdriver work, and their yellowed squares were down and in the trash. We pulled down a fake fence in the side yard and trimmed dead branches that were overhanging the deck.
These were small projects, many taking less than an hour to complete, but the overall impression is a gigantic change. A cleaned up yard, a completed bedroom, and little annoyances resolved.
It’s easy to feel trapped in the same sinful inclinations, day in and day out. Our character flaws pigeon-hole us into the same types of sin. But while we may feel trapped, Easter invites us to take a fresh look. A bit of TLC, a little time changing our environment or refreshing our perspective reveals two truths. God defeated sin, and so we can conquer it. Our God is a God of mercy who gives us all the resources we need to embrace and live His Law. All we have to do is put in the work to make the change.
The Paradox of Time
There’s a quirk in human psychology when it comes to time. We have lists of things that we’d like to do, but never enough time to do them. Yet, when our schedules open up, we’re more likely to drift to watching TV or wasting time, rather than investing it in quality activities from our list.
The path of least resistance is too easy to take. I enjoy a lazy river as much as the next guy. The mistake is believing that important things like work and chores get in the way of recreation.
A healthy amount of work is part of a well-balanced life. Work gives us productive activity and dignity. We use our skills to improve the lives of others, and generate compensation that supports our family. Engaging in quality work allows us to mirror the lives of Jesus and his father Joseph, who we know based on historical records, worked very, very hard.
At the end of the day, I’m often tired. It’s hard to summon the energy to clean the kitchen or take care of the little tasks around the house that need to be done. Some days, I whiff and check out for the evening. But on the nights that I take 15 minutes to get the kitchen clean, or the 10 minutes to pick up the books and toys around the house, the following day always goes better.
I’ve always planned to have a date night with Alison once a week. An evening where there’s nothing on the schedule except spending time with her. When I was solely an at-home dad, it rarely happened. We’d spend small chunks of time several times a week in the same room, and that was it. Now that my availability is cut down, Sunday night is a much bigger priority for a date night for me. Coincidently, we’re having date night much more regularly.
There’s a balance to managing the many responsibilities that we have in life. In the face of them, we can’t surrender to idleness or overwork. Like our spiritual life, making this balance requires daily effort and some amount of failure. Try harder next week.
Victory
Easter is here and the tomb is empty. The timing of Easter this year was prescient. In my listening to the “Bible in a Year” podcast, I lined up exactly with the events of Holy Week. The same went for my daughter’s Bible curriculum. For her school work, we read a story and the next day she narrates the story and draws a picture. In her telling, Jesus was hiding behind a tree, waiting for Mary Magdalene to show up. The image she drew of Jesus lying in wait was amusing.
Now that we’re into the Easter season and our Lenten practices are over, it’s time for an annual reminder about the point of what we just did. Lent, Holy Week, and Easter are only the beginning. They’re the keys that unlock the true freedom of Christian life. They’re the exercises and disciplines that draw us into our call to constant conversion.
Fasting from sweets, your snooze button, or meat on Fridays is the first step. It’s the introduction to the discipline of fasting. Fasting isn’t giving something up, it’s raising our awareness. Many vices aren’t driven by a desire to do evil, but a reaction to some negative event in your life. Drinking to excess may be covering up deep emotional wounds. Impatience behind the wheel may be about allowing too many pressures to build up in your life. When we give something up, we have an opportunity to be curious about what’s really going on in our lives.
Our successes and failures this Lent are another part of our journey. The Christian Life is anything but boring, and answering Jesus’ call to pick up our cross and follow him is the work of each day. But when we’ve completed our trek to the top of the hill, the place of the skull, what waits for us is not public humiliation and complete destruction. What waits for those who answer the call is the ultimate victory.
The Human Person
It’s a great paradox that in the Information Age, when every book every written and every fact known to man is available on your phone, that our connection to the truth is at great risk. The future that GK Chesterton presciently wrote about over 100 years ago is coming true; we are drawing swords to defend the basic and observable truths in the natural world.
Under the banner of progress, the new Imperialists seek not to seize lands and property, but to colonize minds. Submit and convert to their way of thinking, or submit to a public social execution. These emboldened voices challenge the very ideas that underpinned human civilization for over 3,000 years. As they pull blocks out of the bottom of the jenga tower, human civilization begins to wobble.
In their view, the family is outdated and human sexuality is nothing more than consensual recreation. Masculinity and femininity are not differences to be embraced, but simultaneously anything you want and nothing at all. These new pseudo-ideas posses the logic of a toddler, but we see them roll over institutions with little resistance. The Supreme Court has found in the Constitution, written by deeply religious men in the late 1700s, an unlimited right to kill at child until birth and that marriage is whatever two people say it is.
It can be hard to watch these threats emerge when we instinctively know that they’re wrong. But how do we defend these first principles when we’ve never had to articulate them? Our explanation that the sky is blue is just that; it’s an observable fact across all reaches of the globes by all people. We must find ways to explain this simple truth to people who refuse to look up.
Intellectual exploration is a wonderful thing, and human curiosity continues to expand the reaches of our understanding. Intellectual colonization is a pernicious threat, as evil as any other form of colonization. It seeks to subjugate and enslave its victims, all to gain raw power and control.
The human person, and our understanding of its dignity and importance, is the lens through which we live our lives. It informs how we behave and how we treat others. A solid understanding gives us the ability to recognize the commonalities that we share with everyone that we meet, and to empathize with their pain and sufferings.
A lack of respect towards the human persons results in the depredations that we’ve witnessed throughout history. It’s a conflict that continues today, whether in front of the camera in the villages of Ukraine, or far from the public view in other places.
Applied Bioethics Magazine takes on the bioethical issues of our time. The first issue is out now. In it, we explore and define the human person. It puts into words the truths about the human person that you instinctively know and it only takes about half an hour to read. Once finished, you’ll have a philosophical and theological understanding of the human person.
Confusion and stress can cloud our thinking, but we can’t let it diminish the central truth of our world. The human person is worthy of dignity and respect at every time and in every place. This is a fight worth fighting.
Increments
Lent is quickly winding down, and perhaps the success of your Lenten rituals is a bit checkered. Sustaining any type of radical life change is often easy at the beginning, but the slightest bit of friction from life can cause the best intentions to crumble.
Jesus tells us that he came to fulfill the law. In many ways, he raised the bar, asking us to aim even higher. He asks us to be perfect as God is perfect, despite his full knowledge that we will never attain that level.
Reading through the Old Testament can be scandalous. The modern Christian views their relationship with God through the lens of the New Testament and its revised covenant. But salvation history traces its roots much further back in time. The Old Testament has dozens of rules and prescriptions from God himself that seem crude, violent, and the antithesis to our understanding of God.
The Old Testament historical times were difficult ones, in which tribalism and violence ruled the day. Although often we find in the Old Testament God giving permission to commit acts of violence against other people, there’s a deeper thread that runs from Genesis to Revelation.
God understands the heart of man, and he understands that the fundamental conversion that he calls us to is a difficult one. He asks for us, with the weakness of original sin, to set aside our desires and aspirations so that we can think and act perfectly in concert with God’s mind and heart. To accomplish his ultimate vision, and with full respect of our free will, God invites us to incremental change.
Each time God lays out a new law or instruction in Scripture, it is an action that is slightly less violent than the one before. Inch by inch, decision by decision, he moves the people of Israel, and us, closer to his divine will.
The process of conversion is a life-long one. At each decision point, the call is for us to turn slightly more towards God and slightly away from ourselves. We should not begin our Lenten penances with the expectation of perfection, but we should begin with the hope of perfection. The goal of this Lent is that as we gather around the altar at the Easter liturgy, our efforts have brought us incrementally closer to the freedom and purity of heart that God so deeply desires for us.
Examination of Conscience
Last month, my son received his first confession. As he was preparing to receive the Sacrament again last weekend, I sat down for a few minutes to help him do his examination of conscience.
We printed out a helpful sheet to guide our discussion. It contained the common errors that kids make, all of them rather pedestrian. As we went, line by line, I’d read out the sin, and ask if he committed it in the previous month. Each question brought a new contortion to his face. I could feel his discomfort.
My examinations require far less work and recall. I carry my mistakes with me, always near top of mind. I replay the scenarios, recall the poor decision-making, and let them be a burden. That is what Reconciliation is, a release. A forgiveness that gives us permission to set down that burden and endeavor to live our lives in freedom.
I attempted to assuage him as he felt his sins, but I also recognized that gift that it was. He wasn’t burdened by his mistakes, although he surely felt their impact. He was experiencing a conscience properly functioning. His conscience a discernible plumb line, and he knew that he’d gone out of bounds.
He has many mistakes ahead of him, but if he can stay close to the Sacraments and maintain that clear conscience, perhaps his sins will stay pedestrian.
A Sense of the Sacred
A few years ago, I watched a documentary about the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. They followed the historic rise and fall of the population, along with the complexity of adjudicating cases of those sworn to defeat the United States of America as an experiment in human history. Although I can’t tell you much beyond the scope of the documentary, I vividly recall the coverage of religious life in the facility.
There is a librarian who stores and distributes copies of the Koran. Each copy, a bound book, is kept within linen cloth. When ready to be prayed, they unwrap the book, and when the study is complete, it’s re-wrapped. To these men, the Koran is a sacred book, and they approach it as being personally handed to them by their Creator.
We’ve clearly lost this sense of the sacred. Our behavior at Mass, our attitude towards prayer, and even the way we treat the numerous Bibles and sacramentals in our household reflect this. In a way, that’s good. It means they are ordinary and expected things, they are things that make up the tapestry of our homes. But in another sense, it’s sad that we’ve brought them to a lower place in our consciousness.
There is no doubt that Catholicism possesses the best theology and liturgical life, but that doesn’t mean that we live our faith the best. We could learn a thing or two about how Muslims approach the Koran, the courage of LDS missionaries taking two years off to knock on strangers doors, or how the Baptists are always first on scene in a natural disaster.
A sense of the sacred, a sense of mission that pushes us beyond the staid confines of our pews and closer to the fruitful life God envisions for each of us.
Desensitized
Evil’s greatest objective is to desensitize us to its reality. If we fail to perceive evil for the threat that it is, to our lives and our society, then it can more easily dominate us.
We have a political class in Washington that universally denies the basic dignity of children in the womb. So evil their beliefs, that they don’t even believe that these children have a basic right to life. That is evil. The Chinese Communist Party has interned over a million Uyghurs in concentration camps for well over a year, and the strongest response to this evil from the world community is not sending diplomats to fancy parties at the Olympics. For two weeks, the deranged machinations of a single man has inflicted pain, suffering, and misery on the people of Ukraine.
In days like these, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. We are looking evil in the eye, that reality that we tried so hard to deny. We pray for peace, but still see suffering. Despair is a terrible thing.
This is another wake-up call for us. It’s a reminder that the fight for our salvation is a daily struggle, and that we are witnesses to the light in the face of great darkness. This is the essential truth that C.S. Lewis so beautifully conveyed in the _Chronicles of Narnia_. In the face of evil, good always triumphs.
Never Wasted
Starting or growing a habit of prayer can seem like a big lift. We first have to restructure our day to meet our new objective, and then we have to maintain the momentum each day. The biggest challenge comes when there’s disruption. Like any diet or exercise routine, vacations or illness can throw a wrench into our finely tuned machine and cause us to feel discouraged.
Prayer is a relationship, not a zero-sum game. It’s a conversation, one without beginning or end. The solid relationships in our lives aren’t things on our to-do lists, and they’re rarely quality spot-checked. Instead, they take on a character of life, requiring daily attention and not always going perfectly.
Lent is a time when we’re reminded of the importance of prayer in our lives. We need it for our healthy growth, and to remain focused on our core identity as a child of God, in the midst of the chaos of the world. Whether you’re in a good routine or starting all over, remember that time in prayer is never wasted.