A New blog feature: Letters from Andrew. Letter Number One where Andrew and Larry Discuss holiness and truth

I am starting a new series on the blog wherein I will publish what I am calling “open letters” from my tech guru Andrew Gniadek to publicly explore some of the ideas discussed here on GS22.  Andrew is more than a techie and the only reason he came to my aid in running this blog many years ago is that he was already reading my blog in those early years and after I pleaded for tech help, he came to this Luddite’s aid.  His more expansive background is as a scholar with an expertise in philosophy and scripture.  He emails me with some frequency, so we finally decided to bring these questions and thoughts out in the open. My hope is that by sharing our ongoing conversation, the wider community can benefit from the exchange of perspectives, ask their own questions, and deepen their understanding of what my podcasts and blog posts are about here at GS22.  These letters aren't about being right or wrong, but about fostering a richer dialogue and collectively learning more together. I rarely respond to comments in my combox for reasons of time, but I am hoping that these exchanges between Andrew and myself can spur on a conversation into which I will gladly enter. In other words, "letters" from others are most welcome and I will try and respond. But others are free to respond as well.

Letter 1

Dear Larry,

Are we going in circles? I know that beginning with a question in a letter is probably not the best approach, but I think the question points towards the answer not of “yes” or “no,” but instead as a way to elicit the dialogue where we can hopefully pan for some spiritual gold in the mess we have in our culture and in our world.

Sometimes when I am in front of the Blessed Sacrament for adoration, I bring something to read. It’s my way of being with our Lord; I feel like I am sharing with Him. Anyways, I started reading Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi, that is, his encyclical on evangelization.

In §2, Pope St. Paul VI (henceforth PVI) says that the Church’s duty is to be the messenger (I could see “carrier”) of the Good News of Jesus Christ. In this section, one part struck me: PVI says that the Good News is proclaimed through two fundamental commands: “put on the new self” and “be reconciled with God.” Yet, as I look around today, I see nothing but actual rather than apparent contradiction of these fundamental parts of evangelization. Note that fundamental is a synonym for necessary, which is the opposite of contingent, which means that these two things must, as in only this one way, be present for evangelization to occur, and possibly bear fruit.

One of the verses cited by PVI is Eph 4:24, which when one looks at the original, some interesting things come to the forefront. First, St. Paul says we need to put on the “fresh” or “new” man, and that this “new man” is being “created according to God in righteousness and truth’s holiness.” One thing that stuck out here to me was “truth’s holiness”; truth is not simply an intellectual exercise.

Pope St. John XXIII wrote in his journal that he hoped the council would be for spiritual renewal of the Church. If you look at the history prior to the council, you see the political situation in the nineteenth century with upheaval after the French Revolution leading to the centralization of power in the papacy, and the encyclical becoming a different genre than it was originally as a “circular letter” where the Pope teaches in a way that due to the reception by the faithful becomes oracular rather than pastoral. I see that as the key distinction, in my mind at least, that sometimes we look at what something is while lacking how it was received. For example, any married person knows that if you are in an argument with your spouse about something that matters deeply to both of you, you want to make sure your spouse hears what you are trying to say, and that how you present the words, your tone, etc., matter just as much as the substance, that reality which the words point to. I am not saying encyclicals are bad, or that everything they said are bad; I am simply pointing out that the relation of encyclical as promulgated with encyclical as received changed at this time that shifted the dynamic.

Back to the council, both in his opening address and his journal, Pope St. John XXIII wanted the council for the spiritual renewal of the church. Spiritual renewal requires putting on the “new” or “fresh” man in “righteousness” and “truth’s holiness.” This spiritual renewal is necessary to spread the Good News, as PVI stated in his encyclical. How do we get this holiness? Well, for starters, the ascetic life, detachment, mortification. We need to make space for God.

Yet, I don’t see much of that if at all today in our larded culture. You do not see much conversation about evangelical poverty outside of it’s reduction to a political category, instead of a spiritual principle like in Mt 5:3. We clamor that our churches are empty, but you always say, you and I and all of us suffer from the same leprosy that stays away from becoming this new person. Instead, time is devoted to fighting about intellectual abstractions amongst ourselves that have an importance, but only when, in my opinion, the ascetic life is in place. Look at the early Church pre and post first Nicaea: all so-called theologians were ascetics. You saw their holiness, their truth, in their life. Can we all say that honestly about ourselves today? Post Nicaea, we see many great doctors of the Church who in their holiness then fought the intellectual battles against Arianism and other heresies. There was plenty of pleasure back then; remember they were part of the Roman empire.

Anyways, I don’t want this first letter to go on too long, but I will conclude with the following: if we are called to evangelize, see Mt 28:19-20, then we need holiness, and we know that the intention of Vatican II was spiritual renewal, yet most of the debates come from intellectual issues starting in the nineteenth century culminating in the council, and then post-Council the Church drops off overnight. It seems like a cause here is that there was no spiritual grounding. I read that Balthasar was a big fan of Buber, and how Balthasar wrote a book on Buber praising him highly, and how Buber focused on dialogue as a one person speaking heart-to-heart to another. But today, the word “dialogue,” at least in the church, is a euphemism for a bureaucratic mechanism of ideological force, depending on who holds the joystick.

I will stop here and let you respond because I think this is too long for a letter.

Best,

Andrew

Reply to Letter 1

Dear Andrew:

One of the central themes for this blog is precisely the absolutely fundamental (necessary) nature of the universal call to holiness.  I consider this call to be the most important aspect of Vatican II, a Council whose deepest truths have never been appreciated, let alone lived.  Perhaps those truths will never be appreciated.  But that is no excuse for abandoning them. Because if history is any indication most of the central truths of Catholicism are usually ignored by most of the clergy and the laity.  This is why I have long been of the opinion that the laity get the clergy that they deserve.  And today’s Church is no exception.  

Ask any priest how hard it is to get lay people more involved in the parish.  It is always the same 5% of folks who do all of the volunteering and work.  The other 95% are perfectly content to with

Our parishes are so often boring because they are expressive of the Church’s decades-long settlement with the culture of boredom.  Nicholas Berdyaev makes the observation that of all the religions of the world, Christianity is the hardest to live out because of its totalizing demands.  The Incarnation of God in Christ signals the transposition of all of creation into the divine life, and with that transposition comes an uncompromising call for a painful and purgative transformation, wherein a thousand small deaths must happen before our true form can appear.  Therefore, that transformation requires an equally uncompromising response to that call. And no half-hearted responses will do, since the Incarnation is not a half-hearted overture in the first place.  This requires brutal honesty about who we really are, fully realizing that it is in our secrets that Satan lurks. The call and its response are similar to the quality of love and courtship when the moment is reached where exclusivity is demanded by the very nature of the love itself, and is experienced as a sweet burden, a joyous bondage, and a liberating slavery. The demands of such love are total, as it now transposes life into an entirely new logic and regime wherein all that is old is new again. And in no way is it experienced as just one “part” of my life among many other parts.  Indeed, it isn’t a “part” at all, but the transposition of all of the parts of life into a newly transformed whole, and any attempt to mute that transformation and exclusivity through compartmentalization and compromise and even, infidelity, is to betray it and eventually kill it off entirely.  So too goes the path of conversion to Christ.  It is not a white-knuckled affair of obedience to a command, but an entry into the way of love.  And the way of love is far more demanding than mere obedience, which after all, knows only limits.  And such limits are boring.  

What is needed therefore is for the lay revolution called for by Vatican II to be taken up anew with powerful leadership from our bishops and priests. The Council failed to achieve its ends, but so did Nicaea initially.  It is not too late to take up the challenge with a renewed sense of crisis and urgency.  We need a reinvigorated “discalced laity” who live the evangelical counsels in a manner appropriate to their station in life but animated with an intentional faith of deep human awareness and sensitivity.  Will this happen? Probably not in the short term since all indications are in the other direction and our deep culture works against it.  Which is why we need in the interim the pockets of intensity - - think Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” here - - that faith-filled parishes bring no matter the liturgical form.  

And so by all means let us continue in a spirit of Christian amity our discussions concerning the liturgy.  But in order for those discussions to actually “matter” in any meaningful sense, they have to be carried forward by people whose first and deepest love is for Christ and His Church. But it must be a love for the Church as she is, and not the Church of secular, progressive globalism or of traditionalist liturgical pettifoggery. We need the silent minority of discalced laity to step up to the plate and to make some noise.  We need holiness and holy people, in all their ordinariness, to take up the challenge.  Now is the time for courage.  It is the time, as Balthasar would say, of the Ernstfall.  

And all that I have said thus far is a mere preamble to my main point which is that herein lies the real essence of the revolution called for by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin.  And such holiness can only be found among those who have developed an ascetical discipline in their lives grounded in the evangelical counsels.  Only then can we fight what Balthasar called “The System”, Paul Kingsnorth calls “The Machine”, and Simone Weil called “The Apparatus”. No “synod” and no “stratagem” will suffice.  In fact, more often than not they deflect our attention away from the task at hand.

And a bored Church of the “it’s nice to be nice to the nice” variety also cannot lead us to truth.  As you wisely pointed out, holiness brings in its wake the renewed “mind” and the fresh “eyes” to see the truth.  And that is the weird thing about Christianity.  It gives us a truth that can only be truly known when it is lived.  And is not the current confusion in the Church regarding matters of the faith that were settled centuries ago the biggest sign of all that the Church is not living her call to holiness?  How can it be that there are actually prominent priests, now famous and who get phot ops with the Pope, that actually believe that a “man” can get pregnant.  That kind of mental rot only happens after a period of spiritual rot.  

We have become a Church of dung beetles who need a feculent Church in order to survive, and who prefer the dark and moist realm of the moldy shadows to the living Light that shines into the darkness.  And therefore if “Personnel is Policy” then we are in a world of hurt.  

Along these lines I will end with a line from one of my favorite movies.  Many decades old now (as am I), there was a German movie about a U-boat and its captain called, simply, “Das Boot.” The submarine had been attacked and nearly sunk, and was only saved by the courage and valor of the captain and his crew.  After getting a report from one of his submariners that the boat had been saved the captain says to him in gratitude and with tears of relief in his eyes, “Gute Leute muss man haben. Gute Leute.”  Translation:  “One must have good people. Good people.”

Indeed.

Dorothy Day, pray for us.

Larry

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