Free-Will and Suffering
Should God have ended the world when Adam and Eve sinned? As I tell high-school kids, as soon as Adam and Eve had sinned...There were only three options that God had for a planet spiraling towards total sin: 1) Blow up earth to end both sin and free-will...or... 2) Turn people into robots that would automatically obey, so as to terminate free-will but keep the planet...or... 3) Send a rescuer who could transform the human state of suffering into redemptive suffering. If you can think of a fourth option, let me know. In the mean time, notice that only the third option allows for free-will. Because option #3 allows for free-will to continue among both the good and evil people on this blue planet, it is the only option that allows for either love or harming people until the end of time. For example, if a woman is choosing to offer up her suffering for her children after [...]
America’s Passion
Driving across the country just two days ago, I came into DC during the night. Fireworks had already started over our Nation's Capital. As I drove, I had been listening to the unabridged version of the book that probably many of you have read: Unbroken. It's the story of resilience of an American soldier from WWII named Louie Zamperini, liberated from a Japanese concentration camp. (See above.) Louie belongs to what Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation." The Greatest Generation had what it means to be an American: passion. In The Greatest Generation, Brokaw interviews an older couple about divorce, and why divorce flattened future generations so severely. The older woman's remedy is a show-stopper: "People don't fight enough nowadays. They just give up." They just give up. Somehow the passion to fight in marriage is better than silent back-stabbing or just [...]
The End of the Mass
You might think that this is a grumpy-the-grump post on bad liturgy with a title like "the End of the Mass," but it is not. The "end" simply means the goal of something. The Greek word telos was appropriated into the English to mean "the end term of a goal-directed process." For philosophy students out there, it's the final cause. What is the telos or goal or end of a pencil? Writing. What is the goal or telos of the Mass? We will get to that, but—okay—permit me one grumpy-the-grump story in contrast. Last year, I was traveling across Florida. In Tampa, I stopped into a Church one afternoon. I kindly told the secretary of the parish that I was a traveling priest and that I'd like to offer Mass. She was confused, and asked if I had a group of [...]
Sons of Thunder
By a strange turn of events, I have to spend a day in Istanbul while trying to get home from Spain—even though it's the opposite direction. The reason this is especially strange is because these two countries were evangelized by the brothers James and John, sons of a Galilean fisherman named Zebedee. These two men became first century Apostles of Jesus Christ. Jesus nicknamed them "Sons of Thunder" because of their attitude towards life. After His resurrection, Our Lord sent St. James to Spain and St. John to Turkey (with His own Blessed Mother.) I flew from James' land to John's land today, and I'm tryıng to navigate a keyboard set up for the Turkish language at 9pm here in the city center of Istanbul. Now, it's a Muslim country. But did you know that for the first 500 years of Christianity, Turkey had a Christianity as booming and as heroic as the newly-converted Roman Empire? The two centers [...]
Pilgrimage 5 of 5
When I lived in a hermitage in Arizona called Merciful Heart Hermitage I was befuddled about why my hermit buddy named it Merciful Heart and then spoke so much of the Heart of the Father. "We only know of the Sacred Heart, not of the heart of the Father," I silently thought. But one day, in this very hermitage, I was reading the Gospel of St. John, and I noticed that the chest of Jesus (upon which the Apostle John listened to the heartbeat of love at the last supper) was the same Greek word (κόλπον ) as found much, much earlier in John 1:18: No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him. That word "bosom" comes from κόλπον or kolpon from the noun kolpos. [...]