She said, he said

Have you ever been approached by a Jehova's witness and had them quote from the Bible to you? I have (several times :) and the thing that first struck me, and I have found almost invariably since, is that they tend to use a small set of passages to further their cause while being blind to the fullness of the Good News. A frequent example is their reference to Revelation for arguing that very few will be saved (and that they can get you a seat): "I heard the number of those who had been marked with the seal, one hundred and forty-four thousand marked from every tribe of the Israelites" (Revelation 7:4). Yet, only a couple of sentences later John says: "After this I had a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue. They stood before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands." (Revelation 7:9). And my pointing it out to them in their copy of the Bible tends to be the end of our friendly chat …

"OK," you may think, "so Jehova's witnesses are a bit blinkered - but I already knew that!" and you'd be right. There is no surprise there, but where I have been surprised recently was by the controversy surrounding Dr. Tina Beattie, Professor of Catholic Studies at Roehampton University. Prof. Beattie has last week had an invitation revoked to be a Visiting Fellow at the University of San Diego and to deliver a series of talks. Naturally, she objected and she went on to claim that unfounded denunciations of her writings by numerous “Catholic” blogs were to blame. This is not the first time such cancellations happened either, as plans for a lecture by her at Clifton Cathedral in Bristol have also been cancelled recently on grounds of her alleged heterodoxy. Such claims by her and her critics made me curious about what was behind them and the following is what I managed to piece together.

First of all, Prof. Beattie does not deny that she holds some views that are in conflict with the teaching of the Church (e.g., she signed a letter to The Times, saying that Catholics could, “using fully informed consciences, … support the legal extension of civil marriage to same-sex couples.”) Instead, she justifies her position by the following:

“I am an academic theologian who is also a practising Catholic. (This is subtly different from claiming to be a Catholic theologian if that implies somebody with a licence who is authorised to teach by the official magisterium). […]

Any academic theologian working in a university must […] seek to promote an intellectual culture in which reason rather than fideism is the basis for enquiry and research, knowing that in the Catholic tradition reason and revelation go hand in hand. […]

I have also always had absolute respect for the difference between the doctrinal truths of the faith, made knowable through revelation alone, and those truths which are arrived at by reason and which involve philosophical reflection informed by natural law and in engagement with other sources of human knowledge. So, with regard to all the doctrinal teachings that belong within the deposit of faith entrusted to the Church, my theological position is absolutely orthodox.”

Hmm … where to start?! Even before looking at what Prof. Beattie has to say, I see several issues with how she positions herself, although I also see things that I agree with unreservedly! Promoting an “intellectual culture in which reason rather than fideism is the basis for enquiry and research” is certainly one of them. Where Prof. Beattie and I would part ways though is her compartmentalization of herself: as a practicing Catholic on the one had and as a critical academic on the other. Not only do I believe this to be unhealthy, but also impossible! Either one strives to be a practicing Catholic (with all that implies and not only with a cherry–picking of it), or one places themselves outside that community and is honest about it.

Such bipolarity is further underlined by the last part of the above quote, where Prof. Beattie draws a line between faith “knowable through revelation alone” and “truths arrived at by reason [and] human knowledge.” At its basis this is just as contradictory a position as the practicing-academic one. Dei Verbum states very clearly that “God, who spoke of old, uninterruptedly converses with the bride of His beloved Son; [through the] Holy Spirit, through whom the living voice of the Gospel resounds in the Church, and through her, in the world” (§8). To draw a line between God speaking “of old” and his “uninterrupted conversation” with the Church is just as contrary to what the Church teaches as the other topics that she has been picked up on.

I don’t mean to recount in a lot of detail what Prof. Beattie is being criticized for, and if you are easily (or even not all that easily :) offended, please, skip to the last paragraph.

The key bone of contention, as cited by the “Protect the Pope” blog and many others, beyond her support for same-sex marriage and abortion under some circumstances, is the claim that she describes the Mass as “an act of (homo) sexual intercourse” on pp. 80 of her book entitled “God's Mother, Eve's Advocate.” This is an accusation that Prof. Beattie vehemently denies and claims is a result of a misunderstanding:

“In the work that is cited and quoted by these bloggers, I was writing an extended critique of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose writings I have studied for a number of years. My comments were made in the context of my deep concern over his highly sexualised representation of the Mass. This criticism is shared by a number of others who have written on von Balthasar. The suggestion that I mock the Mass because I criticise another theologian’s interpretation is outrageous.”

I have to say I agree with Prof. Beattie here: the remarks she is being attacked for are ones she herself is critical of and attributes to another. On pp. 196 of the same book she states clearly that “neo-orthodox theology risks reducing the Mass to an orgasmic celebration of homosexual love.” Where my agreement fizzles out though is with her attributing the view she criticizes to von Balthasar. While I haven’t studied his writings “for a number of years,” I am familiar with some of them and have even tracked down the following passage, where von Balthasar talks about the Trinity (which must also inform his views on the mass), in terms that others have taken as him reading their relationships in sexual terms:

“In Trinitarian terms, of course, the Father, who begets him who is without origin, appears primarily as (super-) masculine; the Son, in consenting, appears as (super-) feminine, but in the act (together with the Father) of breathing forth the Spirit, he is (super-) masculine. As for the Spirit, he is (super-) feminine. There is even something (super-) feminine about the Father too, since as we have shown, in the action of begetting and breathing forth he allows himself to be determined by the Persons who thus proceed from him.” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-drama. V: The last act, pp. 91)

To take the above and interpret it as von Balthasar talking about homosexual relationships among the persons of the Trinity or during the mass is confused though - and, more importantly from the perspective of the argument I am trying to make here, not what von Balthasar meant! Here it suffices to just read on in the same paragraph, where he says:

"The very fact of the Trinity forbids us to project any secular sexuality into the Godhead (as happens in many religions and in the gnostic syzygia). It must be enough for us to regard the ever-new reciprocity of acting and consenting, which in turn is a form of activity and fruitfulness, as the transcendent origin of what we see realized in the world of creation: in the form and actualization of love and its fruitfulness in sexuality."

Far from sexualizing the Trinity, von Balthasar instead points to the Trinitarian origin of human sexuality, where its self-giving, reciprocal, consenting and fruit-bearing aspects reflect the dynamics of intra-Trinitarian relationships. A very different and wholly orthodox view in my opinion … It may well be that her way of interpreting von Balthasar is again a consequence of Prof. Beattie’s distinction between Scripture and Tradition as it seems like the taking of a text in isolation and a free interpretation of it (free as in fall - not beer :).

In summary, I acknowledge that I only have a very partial view of Prof. Beattie’s thought and even though she recently prepared a “public statement on [her] theological views,” its focus was on what she does not mean rather than on what she does - a useful, but inherently limited exercise. Further, her self-justification seems to rely on a separation between Catholic practice and academic thought and between Scripture and Tradition, neither of which are beneficial or orthodox. While I wholeheartedly support Prof. Beattie’s commitment to a reasoned critique of Church teaching and to the model of “diversity in unity,” her own approach seems to me heterodox not only in content but also in method. Finally, let me express an even more categorical disagreement with blogs like “Protect the Pope,” who snatch a fragmentary quote out of context and present it in a light that is diametrically opposed to its original meaning and, furthermore, that they take this to initiate a witch-hunt! In the end we arrive at a misrepresentation of a misinterpretation, which instead of supporting either party’s position just places both into disrepute. This is not a reasoned diversity manifesting itself (which I would wholeheartedly support and be proud of), but brawlers lashing out at each other in the dark.

The child inside

The other day I came across a beautiful letter written by the poet Ted Hughes to his then 24-year-old son Nicholas, and reading it I was immediately struck by his fatherly love, by the strange familiarity, yet distinctness, of his advice and by the streak of sadness running through it.
The gist of Hughes’ advice derives from the idea that “every single [person] is, and is painfully every moment aware of it, still a child.”:

“It’s something people don’t discuss, because [they] are aware of [it] only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, […] or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them.
Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable […] eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances.
And when we meet people, this is what we usually meet [and we] end up making ‘no contact.’ But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child.”

When I first read this, I immediately had the sense that it contains those “reflected rays of truth” (Nostra Aetate 2); I could sense the traces of Jesus’s words in it - both in the image of the child as the underlying paradigm (“I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:3) and in the mechanism of getting to a true “meeting” by having inner child engage with inner child. In fact, if you read on in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says: “whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me” (18:5) and St. Paul elsewhere adds: “yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20) which takes us to the long-established Christian image of each one of us being Jesus - having Jesus inside. With this key, I can read Hughes’ “child inside” as Jesus, which makes his proposal for how to truly meet another person essentially take us to Jesus’: “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). If Jesus in me and Jesus in another connect, He is not only in each one of us, but also among us. Our meeting becomes like that of the persons of the Trinity, where the “meeting” itself takes on a level of reality like that of those who meet (“[Y]ou see the Trinity if you see love … They are three: the lover, the loved, and the love.” St. Augustine).
Am I saying that this is what Hughes meant? Certainly not. While being clearly distinct, the negative image of a person’s inner child being hidden behind the “armour of [the artificially constructed,] secondary self” does have close parallels with and traces of the Gospel. The difference between Hughes’ “inner child” and Jesus seems to grow further still in the following lines though:

“Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. […] At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation.”

This does sound quite unlike Jesus - or does it? Looking more closely, it seems to me that a lot of what Hughes says here is reminiscent of Jesus suffering on the cross, even to the point of feeling abandoned by his Father (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark 15:34). The wretched isolation facing death - that is Jesus on the cross and that is Jesus in me, when I am made to suffer by others or when I make him suffer in me by placing my own interests before those of others. Read in this way, Hughes view of the person and inter-personal relationships, appear in a very Christian light. Here Jesus suffers in those who smother him with an “artificially constructed, secondary self” and shows an “impulse of real life” when he is allowed to meet himself in another person.
Hughes then continues with a seeming contradiction, which, however, supports the above, Christocentric reading:

“That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. […] But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.”

It is in his suffering that Jesus most vividly show’s his love for us, his friends, and it is in suffering that I too am most undeniably called to make a choice between what matters and that “artificial armour” that I allow to obstruct Jesus’ life in me. This is not some morbid fascination with suffering or a form of masochism - on the contrary, it is a realization that in suffering I have an opportunity to encounter Jesus, who then takes me with him to the joy of resurrection. Hughes does not wallow in the negative either and leads his son to the following conclusion:

“[The] only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all. It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems—he would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers.”

The call to love that Hughes arrives at is nothing other than Jesus’ challenge to all who came to seek his advice: “love one another as I love you[, for n]o one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:12-13).

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If, like me until very recently, you haven’t read any of Hughes’ poetry, here is a great selection - mostly from Crow. As you will see, the tone is dark, cutting, negative and atheist throughout, but I couldn’t but see the beauty of his language and the heartfelt cry of his voice.

All saints

If you are a regular reader, you'll know that the saints are very close to my heart and a frequent topic on this blog. Today, I'd just like to share the above painting with you (the cover of an book on saints for children, in preparation by my besties PM and JM) and the following quote:

“[O]nce you enter into friendship with God, everything in your life begins to change. ... You are attracted to the practice of virtue. You begin to see greed and selfishness and all the other sins for what they really are, destructive and dangerous tendencies that cause deep suffering and do great damage. ... You begin to feel compassion for people in difficulties and you are eager to do something to help them. ... And once these things begin to matter to you, you are well on the way to becoming saints” (Benedict XVI, addressing Catholic pupils on 17 September 2010, during his visit to the UK)

Happy All Saints day!

Queen of Paradise مريم

A couple of days ago I came across the following tweets, written by a Muslim:

“Mary = Maryam/Miryam. “None among women have reached perfection except Mary the Virgin” - P. Muhammad”

“Since the Quran venerates her & the Prophet Muhammad called her […] the Queen of Paradise, I do recourse to her intercession.”

As you can imagine, it stopped me in my tracks and I have been trying to find out more about where these statements fitted within Islamic teaching. While I was vaguely aware of the Qur’an considering Jesus a prophet and also mentioning Mary (and doing so more extensively even than the New Testament), what I learned over the last couple of days goes so far beyond that and I would like to share it with you.

Muslims believe that God sent the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muhammad, who transmitted to him God’s words, verbatim - the Qur’an. There Mary is mentioned from the start and the Annunciation, is recounted as follows in the third chapter (Surat 'Āli `Imrān):

“[T]he angels said, “O Mary, indeed Allah has chosen you and purified you and chosen you above the women of the worlds. O Mary, be devoutly obedient to your Lord and prostrate and bow with those who bow [in prayer].”” (Qur’an, 3:42-43)

“[T]he angels said, “O Mary, indeed Allah gives you good tidings of a word from Him, whose name will be the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary - distinguished in this world and the Hereafter and among those brought near [to Allah].
He will speak to the people in the cradle and in maturity and will be of the righteous.”
She said, “My Lord, how will I have a child when no man has touched me?” [The angel] said, “Such is Allah; He creates what He wills. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.
And He will teach him writing and wisdom and the Torah and the Gospel.
And [make him] a messenger to the Children of Israel, [who will say], ‘Indeed I have come to you with a sign from your Lord in that I design for you from clay [that which is] like the form of a bird, then I breathe into it and it becomes a bird by permission of Allah. And I cure the blind and the leper, and I give life to the dead - by permission of Allah.”” (Qur’an, 3:45-49)

The Qur’an also talks about Mary’s birth, the years leading up to the Annunciation and her life of prayer under the supervision of the prophet Zechariah in earlier verses:

“[W]hen the wife of 'Imran [Joachim] said, “My Lord, indeed I have pledged to You what is in my womb, consecrated [for Your service], so accept this from me. Indeed, You are the Hearing, the Knowing.”
But when she delivered her, she said, “My Lord, I have delivered a female.” And Allah was most knowing of what she delivered, “And the male is not like the female. And I have named her Mary, and I seek refuge for her in You and [for] her descendants from Satan, the expelled [from the mercy of Allah].”
So her Lord accepted her with good acceptance and caused her to grow in a good manner and put her in the care of Zechariah. Every time Zechariah entered upon her in the prayer chamber, he found with her provision. He said, “O Mary, from where is this [coming] to you?” She said, “It is from Allah. Indeed, Allah provides for whom He wills without account.””(Qur’an, 3:35-37)

Later on, chapter 19 (Surat Maryam) is dedicated to Mary, which after an account of John the Baptist’s birth proceeds to re-tell the Annunciation (having the angel say to Mary: “I am only the messenger of your Lord to give you [news of] a pure boy.”) and then proceeding to the birth of Jesus:

“So she conceived him, and she withdrew with him to a remote place.
And the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree. She said, “Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.”
But he called her from below her, “Do not grieve; your Lord has provided beneath you a stream.
And shake toward you the trunk of the palm tree; it will drop upon you ripe, fresh dates.” (Qur’an, 19:22-25)

“[S]he pointed to him. They said, “How can we speak to one who is in the cradle a child?”
[Jesus] said, “Indeed, I am the servant of Allah. He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet.
And He has made me blessed wherever I am and has enjoined upon me prayer and zakah as long as I remain alive
And [made me] dutiful to my mother, and He has not made me a wretched tyrant.
And peace is on me the day I was born and the day I will die and the day I am raised alive.”” (Qur’an, 19:29-33)

Mary is mentioned 34 times in the Qur’an (the only woman to be referred to by name) and there is a wealth of ways in which she is revered and taken as an example in Islam. What am I, a Catholic, to make of this though? Primarily, my reaction is one of joy at having discovered a previously unknown community of my Mother’s sons and daughters. There is no doubt in my mind that Muslims who look to Mary as a role model (which I didn’t know existed before) have a lot in common with me and that is unquestionably a delight. Even from the few quotes above (that barely scratch the surface and don’t even touch on exegesis), it is clear though that there are dramatic differences here both in direct contrast (e.g., the account of Jesus’ birth being at odds with its Christian understanding) and in terms of lacking parallel accounts (Mary’s youth not being recounted in the New Testament), not to mention the very different conception of Jesus as compared to the Christian one. While it would be a mistake to look for syncretism (it always is), I believe it would also be a missed opportunity to only focus on differences. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is very clear about there being goodness and truth to be found in all religions (§843) and that they all “reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men” (Nostra Aetate 2). I certainly feel enriched from having read the above passages of the Qur’an and will seek to further deepen my understanding.

Allāhu Akbar.

Contemporary art and its enemies

To paraphrase Karl Popper, let me start by saying that it is “impossible to make art in such a way that it cannot be misunderstood.” Over the course of this last week I have come across no less than three articles in which Christian authors denounce the evils of contemporary art.



First, there is our old friend Nikos Salingaros - of Oakland Cathedral review fame, who has a go at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels this time. His argument is again the same: “We have here a celebration of asymmetry, which might be understandable if there were a sound reason for it coming either from design necessities, or from religion.¹ But there is none. The building’s asymmetry serves an essentially negative purpose: to deny coherence and harmony.²” And there is the usual litany of nonsensical gems like: “geometrical fundamentalism,” “naked concrete walls [being] ultimately unpleasant,” lacking “connective ornament,” and claiming that religion “has a natural affinity with traditional architectural expressions of coherence” before taking Antoni Gaudí’s³ name in vain. There is only one thing to say in response to this: bullspit! Instead of trying to debunk this junk head on, I think that I have a sense of the root cause of his confused misreading of this piece of architecture: an expectation of the literal. God is perfect harmony, so churches need to be perfectly symmetrical; the Church values continuity, so a church needs to look old; the soul needs to ascend to God, so there need to be vertical lines in the church’s geometry (and the list of naïveté goes on and on). What I believe this approach entirely misses are two key aspects of beauty: mystery and surprise! Why is it that an object evokes emotions, triggers reflection, prompts insight and delivers aesthetic joy and pleasure? Sure, there are plenty of theories, but periodically an artist comes along and creates a piece that breaks them, yet that is unmistakably appreciated as art. Surprise too is a key element of art, in my opinion, and the kind of literal expectations that Salingaros relies on would entirely eradicate it.

Second, I have made the virtual acquaintance of another budding art critic: Jimmy Akin, who takes it upon himself to have a go at the Vatican’s touring art exhibit: “The Vatican Splendors: A Journey Through Faith and Art,” exclaiming that the works “from the mid-2oth [sic] century onward were terrible.”⁴ Akin is much more to the point than Salingaros and doesn’t even feel the need to back up his claims - the art of the last 60+ years is just “terrible.” But what he lacks in specificity, he certainly makes up for in initiative, with the “brilliant” idea to do something about “all the lousy Catholic art” by “supporting Catholic art education so that we can get better Catholic artists.” So far so good - I am filled with anticipation of the centre of excellence he’ll propose to support and the examples of their great Catholic art, done right [no, not really]. Instead, Akin unveils the following “stupendously amazing” piece by a 12th grader:



And, just to underline the horrors of the “lousy” art we have had to put up with, he pulls out Pericle Fazzini’s “The Resurrection” situated in the Vatican’s Paul VI’s hall:



I am stunned by this guy’s barefacedness. How can he put a school-kid’s (admittedly skillfully executed) drawing of Michelangelo’s Pieta beside Fazzini’s masterpiece (a 66x23 foot bronze created it in 1977 and showing Jesus rising from the crater of a nuclear bomb) and say: more of the former and less of the latter, please! The mind boggles!

Third, I have come across a far more cogent, yet - to my mind - still misguided, piece by Francis Phillips. Here the composer James MacMillan is first quoted as saying that “[a]rt can be a window on to the mind of God. Through this window we can encounter beauty and divine truth” and I am thinking that I have finally come across a good piece on the subject, following the arid head banging of Salingaros and Akin. Sadly, Phillips decides to take us down a frustrating route too, by turning a promising piece into a crusade against the National Gallery in London showing Richard Hamilton’s “The Passage of the Angel to the Virgin.” The piece is a giclée photomontage that bases itself on Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, but with two female nudes where Fra Angelico has the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary. Phillips proceeds to label it as “scandalous,” as “shocking to Catholics, who have a particular reverence for the Virgin Mary,” as skewed for “[p]ortraying the Angel Gabriel as a young woman [since] the traditional Christian understanding of angels [is] as sexless spiritual beings”⁵ and as “desecrating.” Personally, I have a profound love for Mary and a deep gratitude to her for being the model of the perfect Christian, but I have to say that I disagree with all of the above. Since some of you may side with Phillips in your reaction to this piece, I will not reproduce it here, but only provide this (NSFW) link for those of you who choose to follow it. I have to say that I am not a fan of this piece by any means, but my reaction is one of curiosity about why Hamilton made the choices he made in it. Instead of a feeling of indignation, my response is more one of boredom and I would just walk past it and enjoy the rest of the National Gallery’s exquisite collection, instead of mounting a (failed) attempt to have it taken down, as Phillips did.

A point that seems to emerge to me from these last two articles is one of a decorative and exegetical role for art. A looking for pieces that would be good interior decoration for a church or that would illustrate a passage from Scripture or the Catechism. While some great art can certainly do that, it will do so in a way that transcends the simple, literal and functional. Other, equally great art would be entirely out of place as decoration though, yet would have the capacity to “be a window on to the mind of God.” I am certainly not thinking of Hamilton’s piece here, but more of something along the lines of Richard Serra’s work, such as his “Trip Hammer”:



Relegating “the mind of God” to decoration just seems like something that not even a heathen would do ...

UPDATE (12/11/2012): My bestie JM went to visit the Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels, with my über-besties MR and RR, and had the following to say:

I went to visit the Cathedral last weekend, in anticipation of coming down either on the side of its supporters or detractors. Instead, while I am undeniably an outright fan of it as a place of worship, I have to say that it is so ugly on the outside that only its mother could love it. You would be forgiven for mistaking it for a car park or a storage facility, if it wasn't for the separate bell tower carrying a cross and the rather beautiful statue of Mary above its main entrance.

The interior is another story and is an unreserved and total success. The space is vast without being overpowering; it is light and welcoming and beautifully laid out not only in the main nave but also with its numerous chapel-like spaces that face out and away from the building’s main volume. They, like the whole church, are bathed in natural light and house content as diverse as a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Día de los muertos arrangement, a temporary exhibit by a local painter, artifacts from Pope John Paul II’s visit to LA and the confessionals. Outside too, the space is at the service of the community, with a great playground and a cafe/grill on the other side of a large square adjacent to the Cathedral.

In many ways this church is like one of those great Northern European cathedrals turned inside out. Instead of an ornate exterior and a plainer interior, here money has been spent on the interior space that church goers enjoy (including a great set of tapestries showing the communion of saints - and not only of canonized ones) while leaving the exterior plain and purely functional. Would I have preferred a more pleasing external architecture? No doubt! But, I believe the diocese spent their money where it matters to its members and visitors. This is a church that embraces those who come to it, instead of advertising itself to all. Not that the latter has little value, but I see why they would have favored the former. For some photos of my visit, see this Flickr set.

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¹ I wasn’t going to engage with this nonsense, but - come on! - to claim that there is no "religious" reason for asymmetry! How about the following (vastly incomplete) examples: good - evil, infinite - finite, uncreated - created, selfless - selfish. And the list could go on and on.
² How about: to show movement, ascent, growth, a pull towards God?
³ To invoke Gaudí in an argument for traditional, symmetrical, literal architecture is just beyond nuts!
⁴ The hubris here would easily make Achilles’ dragging Hector’s lifeless body behind his chariot in front of the gates of Troy an act of level-headed diplomacy.
⁵ Not noticing the irony of this objection. Would the sexless angel better be portrayed as a man? Why?

Divergent rays

The Gospel verse “In the beginning was the Word” has been going around in my head, ever since it dawned on me last weekend that it clearly points to something having preceded it. Thinking more about it made me revisit a text (actually, various fragments of it, since it has, as yet, not been published in full) where Chiara Lubich recounts her “intellectual visions” of Paradise that started in 1949. In particular, I wanted to re-read how she described Jesus, the Word:

“I found myself […], as in a vision seen with the eyes of the soul, having come into the Bosom of the Father, who showed me, as it were, the inside of a sun that was all gold or flames of gold, infinite, but not frightening.”

“[F]rom the walls inside the Sun, the Father pronounced the word: Love, and this Word, concentrated in the heart of the Father, was his Son.”

The picture here is very vivid and in many ways like those of St. Hildegard of Bingen’s visions. It transmits a very clear sense of what it may have seemed like to be there “in the beginning.” Reading on, Chiara also shares the following vision of creation:

“When God created, He created all things from nothing because He created them from Himself: from nothing signifies that they did not pre-exist because He alone pre-existed (but this way of speaking is inexact as in God there is no before and after). He drew them out from Himself because in creating them He died (of love), He died in love, He loved and therefore He created.

As the Word, who is the Idea of the Father, is God, analogously the ideas of things, that “ab aeterno” are in the word, are not abstract, but they are real: word within the Word.

The Father projects them — as with divergent rays — “outside Himself,” that is, in a different and new, created dimension, in which he gives to them “the Order that is Life and Love and Truth.” Therefore, in them there is the stamp of the Uncreated, of the Trinity.”

I find the above paragraphs particularly important since they indicate several key ways of thinking about how God and the universe are related:

1. That God (the Trinity, the Uncreated) can be found in nature since it bears His “stamp,”


2. that Jesus - the Word - is not only God who made himself present in the world as a human being 2000 years ago, but is the very means by which the Father goes “outside Himself” in His Creation,


3. that creation is an act of self-noughting love, and


4. that creation can be thought of as a new dimension of God.

This relationship is clearly not that of a “God of gaps,” cobbled-on caricature, but a tightly-interwoven, integral, first-person communion. Creation is to God as the rays of the sun are to the sun.

In fact, the picture of the sun and its divergent rays (and the use of “picture” is very deliberate, given what follows), is also very much consonant with Wittgenstein’s thoughts on how a system (the world) and its meaning relate:

“The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.41)

Where does this leave a Christian in terms of how science and revelation make sense of the world? I believe, James Clerk Maxwell put it very well: “I think Christians whose minds are scientific are bound to study science that their view of the glory of God may be as extensive as their being is capable.” It is with this mindset that Prof. John Lennox commented on the Higgs Boson discovery by saying “God created it, Higgs predicted it and Cern found it.” Instead of a conflict, the advances of science are as much a source of wonder and joy to a Christian as are the visions of those who seek God and to whom he makes himself known in entirely unscientific ways.

Bishops’ synod conclusions: faith open to reason and science

The Bishops’ synod on the New Evangelisation (i. e., a renewed sharing of the Good News with those who have drifted away from the Church) concluded on Friday and resulted in 58 “propositions” that were presented to the pope and that will form the basis of a future encyclical. If you are not into the whole synod thing, here are (telegraphically) at least the points that stood out for me:

1. Not a proposition, but nonetheless worth noting, is the fact that the propositions were written in English rather than the usual Latin (although the authoritative final version will still use it) and that “with the kind permission of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, the provisional, unofficial English version, prepared under the auspices of the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops [which is normally kept confidential], is published in the Bulletin of the Holy See Press Office.”


2. Prop. 8: “The world is God’s creation and manifests his love.” This presents a very positive view of the world, unlike attitudes in the past where “the world” was presented more like a necessary evil, in conflict with God.


3. Prop. 12: The “hermeneutic of reform in continuity,” championed by Pope Benedict XVII is taken as the underlying method, as described here: “There is the "hermeneutic of reform", of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God. [...] However, wherever this interpretation guided the implementation of the Council, new life developed and new fruit ripened” (Benedict XVI, Address to the Roman Curia, 22 December 2005)” I believe this shows very clearly an acknowledgement of the need to keep updating the Church and also the tension of this process with the need to stay faithful to Jesus’ teaching.


4. Prop. 13: “believers must strive to show to the world the splendor of a humanity grounded in the mystery of Christ” Again there is recognition of the value of the natural (humanity) and a claim of its fulfilment in the divine (Jesus).


5. Prop. 17: “It is necessary not only to show that faith does not oppose reason, but also to highlight a number of truths and realities which pertain to a correct anthropology, that is enlightened by natural reason. Among them, is the value of the Natural Law, and the consequences it has for the whole human society. The notions of “Natural Law” and “human nature” are capable of rational demonstrations, both at the academic and popular levels.” This was followed with a call to develop a “theology of credibility,” that expresses Church teaching in terms consistent with current scientific understanding.


6. Prop. 20: “Christ, the “Good Shepherd” (cf. Jn 10:11) is the Truth in person, the beautiful revelation in sign, pouring himself out without measure. It is important to give testimony [...], not only of his goodness and truth, but also of the fullness of his beauty. [...] Beauty attracts us to love, through which God reveals to us his face in which we believe.”


7. Prop. 54 (in full): “The dialogue between science and faith is a vital field in the New Evangelization. On the one hand, this dialogue requires the openness of reason to the mystery which transcends it and an awareness of the fundamental limits of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, it also requires a faith that is open to reason and to the results of scientific research.”


8. Prop. 55: “believers and non-believers can dialogue about fundamental themes: the great values of ethics, art and science, and the search for the transcendent. This dialogue is directed in particular to “those to whom religion is something foreign, to whom God is unknown and who nevertheless do not want to be left merely Godless, but rather to draw near to him, albeit as the Unknown” (Benedict XVI, Address to the Members of the Roman Curia, 21 December 2009).”

I was pleased to see so much emphasis on reason, science and credibility and will try to do the little I can to contribute towards them myself.