Questions from the Unsettled Mind

The Church has taught from the beginning that there is only one baptism, namely that baptism in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit that Jesus tasked his apostles with spreading to the four corners of the earth.

Imagine if you knew that Jesus was coming back to judge the world and bring in his kingdom in exactly 17 months.  What would you do?  You might quit your job and cash out your retirement.  No sense saving for what’ll never happen!  Some people have done that.  You might get all serious about your faith, thinking that maybe you need to make up for some missed masses and some gaps in your devotion!  Some people have done that, too.  You might join some sort of special religious group focused on spirituality, communal living, daily praise worship, and an overall sense of seriousness.  Some people have done that, also.  You might consider all the bloody reports about the Last Days and take the military route, prepping for Armageddon, fortressing yourself in the mountains or else preparing for an urban guerilla war.  Some people have done that, even.

The notion that there might be a sin or sins that are absolutely unforgivable, even by a bishop, is pretty terrifying.  Given what the Church teaches about the sacrament of confession and reconciliation, it’s hard to see how a priest or the bishop wouldn’t be in a position to provide some way back to God.  What’s more, isn’t baptism, the originating sacrament of faith, supposed to be able to cleanse all sins?  A clean slate?  A totally new beginning?

Many Catholics are puzzled by the embrace of incoherent ideas and straightforwardly bizarre practices advanced by the cultural elites in contemporary American society.  How can young men claiming to be women seriously expect to compete in women’s athletics?  But they do.  And they are competing.  How can women in their final weeks of pregnancy discredit the fact that they are carrying a human child and then murder it?  But they do.  And some of them celebrate with abortion parties.  How can state governments having convicted men of felonies incarcerate them in women’s prisons when those men start taking hormones?  But they do.  And the predictable results of sexual assault are now becoming apparent.  It seems to many that we aren’t living in the same world anymore.  And that sentiment isn’t far from the truth of the matter, so let’s look at how we got here, because radical rejection of human nature doesn’t just happen.

Let’s begin our exploration of the way in which human nature is essentially expressed through gender by taking a look at the current lay of the land on sex, sexual preference, and gender.  What, in other words, do our universities, entertainers, and cultural elites showcase as the truth of the matter on these issues?

Imagine entering a quiet church, looking about to ensure no one else is there, then walking up the center aisle toward the altar, bowing, and sitting in one of the first couple of pews on the right.  You drop the kneeler and take on the position of a supplicant to God, beginning your prayers.  But unlike the many times you have done this in the past, you suddenly feel a wave of heat to your left.  Opening your eyes, you behold what has to be an angel, a dazzling bright young man, wings outstretched behind him, and his feet not exactly standing on the cold stones of the sanctuary.  How would you react?

Other than the Pope, no person rankles Protestants more than Mary, the mother of Jesus.  Protestants see what looks like hysterical Marian worship in many videos of third world Catholic masses, hear Mary described as co-Redemptrix and the Queen of Heaven, and observe her being called theotokos, the very “Mother of God.”  If Mary is divine, then who needs Jesus?  How many Gods do these Catholics have?  Just how far have they sunk into the abyss of paganism?  So, what’s with Mary anyway?  Why does Mary matter?

I’m writing this question at the outset of Advent, which might seem an odd time with the season’s emphasis on the birth of Jesus to instead write about marital infertility.  However, the Christmas story does not begin with the annunciation, but instead with an infertile couple, Mary’s relative Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah.  So, Advent is exactly the right time to approach this traumatic challenge to married couples.  And a quick note to those who have been fortunate enough to conceive, carry children to term, and birth them into the world, do not pass on this question.  Why?  Because all around you are other couples approaching Christmas yet again with an agonizing longing that they cannot satisfy.  Imagine how difficult your Christmas would be without your children.  So, with the golden rule in mind, listen on.

As Congress continues to be briefed by numerous whistleblowers concerning a significant program to recover and reverse engineer extraterrestrial UFO technology, we appear to be ever-closer to what UFO-researchers call “Disclosure.”  Disclosure is the moment when government officially acknowledges or reveals the existence of alien life, particularly, sophisticated and advanced extraterrestrial persons.  Such an event would likely be the most important event in human history other than the Incarnation.  While it has not yet happened, it is worth our considering how we might react if it did, especially if we consider our reactions not just as stunned human beings but as Catholics.  So, what if we really are not alone?

Because the choice of the priesthood or the consecration of a nun (just two examples of the non-marital vocation) is unnatural insofar as it requires non-marriage as part of its discipline, it’s quite rare.  People accordingly figure that there must be some means by which God selects who will join this separate vocation.  And as such, they say that God “calls” people to it.  Biblical examples are then trotted out to support this view:  Jesus literally called out his disciples, “Drop your fishing nets and come, follow me.”  St. Paul was knocked off his donkey and surrounded by a great light when Jesus personally came to him and redirected his life to become an apostle.  So, one might think that it’s the same today, that there must be some special sort of event whereby God “calls” people into these vocations.  As a result of this assumption, it’s hard to find a seminarian who doesn’t have some bizarre story about the moment God “called” him.  Or, if he doesn’t have one yet, he is earnestly concerned about the legitimacy of his vocation.

Let’s begin our exploration of this question by remembering that all of the created world is a divine gift.  Thus, we should be thankful for everything regardless of whether God did a second miracle (after the miracle of creation) to convey one of his products to us in an hour of need.  So, we can always give thanks, because God has already provided everything.  We call this creative act of God his general providence.

This question haunted me for a very long time during my slow philosophical education into the Faith. I could clearly see why God had to be all-knowing and all-powerful if he were infinite, but why good? It wasn’t until I read into St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles that I finally understood the essential nature of divine goodness, something, it turns out, that some 1,500 years earlier, Socrates had already realized! Socrates assured his followers that he feared nothing from death, because, he said, the affairs of a just man are not a matter of indifference to the gods. It follows that the gods love justice, a principle that becomes crucial to the conclusion of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates showcases the surpassing value of justice not only in this life but also in the next. Socrates knew that the gods ultimately had to be just, because justice lies at the bottom of all things. Because he also understood that the Greek pantheon mixed good and evil in its gods, Socrates often talked about “the God,” the God he could not name but knew had to be perfectly just. After the Athenians began to regret killing Socrates, they constructed an altar to this unnamed or unknown God, an altar that some 400 years later, St. Paul pointed to as honoring the true God whose Son, Jesus Christ, had become incarnate into the world. St. Paul realized that Socrates had it right, that to truly understand the nature of the divine, we must identify God with goodness. But why?

After Jesus rose from the dead, the Church started thinking about everything Jesus had said, what he had done, what God had said about him, and what the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) had prophesied about him as Messiah.  They recalled how Jesus had called himself both the “son of man” and the “son of God,” and they were accordingly struck both by how human he was and also how divine he was.  They quickly realized that you cannot be part-god the way Hercules was, because God is infinite.  You’re either God or you aren’t.  Being the “Son” of God didn’t diminish that, of course.  On the contrary, it established that he was nothing other than the perfect image of the Father, hence “true God from true God.”  But likewise, the Church realized that you cannot really be part human either.  So, the Church mulled this over and eventually came to the conclusion that Jesus can only be fully God and fully man!  The technical formulation is that while the Trinity is three persons in one substance/nature, so Jesus is one person in two natures.  How that can be and what that ultimately signifies is the point of this question on the significance of Jesus in the Incarnation.

The answer to this question is “no, never” or “yes, and a lot more often than you might think,” depending on exactly what we mean by a “lie.”  The problem is complicated by the multiple ways people use that term.  For example, you’ll often hear someone confess to you, “I lied,” when what the person really means is nothing more than, “I made an error.”  But being mistaken is not the same thing as lying, since lying requires a deliberate intention to tell a falsehood, a condition that is absent when we make mistakes.  Thus, mistakes are not lies, and we would do well not to confuse them.  Why?  Because we use certain terms to convey automatic moral condemnation, and lying is one of these terms.

Knowing God is understandably a major problem for creatures like ourselves.  We are the bottom rung of rational creatures, heavily linked to our physicality that narrows the extension of our minds.  Nearly all of our knowledge is derived through our sensory systems, yet God is not subject to sensory inspection.  What color is God?  Does God smell of citrus or hickory wood smoke?  How does God’s skin feel, furry or scaly or feathery?  None of these questions make any sense to us, because we know that God is a spirit, a wholly immaterial being.  Yet our primary mode of knowledge is sensory, rooted in physicality.  So, how can creatures like ourselves possibly know God?

The term “judge” seems to connote different things in different contexts. Legally, we think of the judge as the person who oversees the judicial process, ensuring that the law is followed. We tend to feel pretty good about him. Morally, we often think of judgment as something suspicious, that we’d best tend to our own affairs rather than sticking our noses into everyone else’s business, judging them. Prudentially, we think of judgment as a character quality, a person of sound judgment being capable of making the wise choices in tough situations. Philosophically and scientifically, we think of judgment as the capacity to distinguish truth from error, something pretty important if we intend our planes to stay in the air! So, is judgment good or bad? Should we judge or not? Why does Jesus condemn it, in one of the most oft-quoted verses of the Bible in contemporary America? And what does he mean when he does condemn it?

Since not all of you are Roman Catholic Christians, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the mother of Jesus, may be less well known to you. It is different from the Virgin Birth of Jesus and different yet again from the Incarnation of the Son of God. Let me start, then, with those two doctrines in order to set up the contrast clearly.

One of the more surprising stories in the Old Testament book of Exodus receives little attention, perhaps because the story is so short. But Moses is up on Mount Sinai receiving the Law, and God tells him that He intends to come down into the camp and meet the people in three days. Moses accordingly reports God’s intention to the people down below who tremble with fear (they can see the fiery shaking mountain, after all) and suggest, alternatively, that they will stay in their tents, and perhaps Moses can just climb back up the mountain and meet God there.

My wife and I recently found ourselves at a dinner/musical performance where a young female singer began her set with a question to the audience: “How many of you have ever met a goddess?”  We were mildly alarmed when some forty percent of the audience raised their hands.  Was it possible that paganism was making major inroads into the American heartland?  Were Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera back at it?  Well, her next question clarified things a bit: “How many of you have a goddess within you?”  Our alarm turned to shock when nearly every member of the audience—save us, of course—raised their hands.  Males and females, mind you.  Nearly all claiming to have a goddess within them.  We took this to mean not that they were admitting to possession by feminine demons, but rather that they were claiming divinity for themselves.

A British empiricist philosopher named David Hume is famous for his skeptical arguments attacking the notion of a natural morality. Hume claimed that no moral (“ought”) claims could be derived from descriptive (“is”) claims. From the mere fact that something happens to be a certain way, it doesn’t follow that it’s supposed to be that way. Hume assumed that things just happened to be the way that they are. But what if he were wrong? What if God created the world, human nature in particular, in such a way that it reveals the way things are supposed to be?