Those types of platitudes surround sports today, especially youth sports. And I have to admit:

I don’t understand them.

If you’re playing a competitive sport, you’re playing to win. That is the only substantive good that runs through all competition: baseball, cross-country, checkers, bass fishing, NASCAR, beer pong, poker. Winning. That’s the point of competition.

Does that mean that competitive sports don’t have other benefits? Of course not. Some (track) get you into shape, others (chess) help your ability to concentrate, some (poker) make you money, some (beer pong) get you buzzed. Every form of competition (except maybe NASCAR) has an ancillary benefit, but it’s not a benefit that’s necessary to the pursuit of competition in general. Such benefits are what the Schoolmen might call “accidents” of competition.

Accidents aren’t substances. When it comes to competitive sports, winning is the form that makes competition what it is. It is the essence of competition. If you’re not playing to win, you’re denying the core nature of competition, and it’s no longer competition. If you don’t want to play to win, that’s fine. Take up knitting or walking a treadmill . . . but get off the daggone track.

Now, does all this mean that winning is the most important thing?

Maybe. It depends what you mean by “most important.”

On the plane of competition, yes, winning is the most important thing. Hands down. It’s illogical to claim otherwise, for the reasons set forth above.

But on the plane of existence in general? Is winning the most important thing? Of course not. Don’t be a fool.

Here’s the thing people don’t seem to understand. There are planes of goods and activities. There are higher planes, and there are lower planes.

Sports is a lower plane. In fact, it’s one of the lowest. Without even trying, I can spout off a dozen higher planes of activities: praying, striving for sainthood, being a good Christian in general, serving, being a good husband or father or son or brother or friend, staying healthy, practicing the four cardinal virtues, study, writing. Even earning money is a higher plane (planes’ elevations can shift, incidentally, depending on your station in life and age, and the planes overlap, but that’s going beyond the scope of this piece).

The cardinal rule: Never sacrifice the goals of a higher plane for the goals of a lower plane. The temptation to do otherwise is the old Theophilus/Faustian bargain: Selling your soul (the highest good) for money and success (lower goods).

When it comes to sports, you shouldn’t cheat to win because you’d be sacrificing higher planes of activity (e.g., the obligation of truthfulness) for the goal of a lower plane. You shouldn’t grow glum when you lose, because that means you’ve lost your vision of the higher things in life.

Ersatz Instruction and the Culture of Moral Morons

This whole meditation got me thinking: Why do so many people toss around platitudes like “Winning isn’t everything”? If the person is saying that there are more important things than winning when it comes to that low plane of sporting competition, he’s wrong. If the person is talking about winning compared to, say, being a good father or neighbor, the point is so obvious that it doesn’t merit mentioning (what’s next, you want to tell me fire is hot?).

Either way, it’s a stupid thing to say.

Yet I hear it all the time, and I think a lot of people mean it. They obviously haven’t thought it through, but that doesn’t exonerate their palaver.

But the palaver might be understandable.

Sports might be the only arena where morality can be taught today. Public schools have taken over all areas of youth formation, but the public schools (for a variety of reasons that go beyond the scope of this piece) are poor places to teach morality. Talk about morality and virtue in the classroom and you’ll hear snickers . . . and maybe get a summons from the ACLU.

Sports, though, might (might) offer a pale imitation of moral formation.

Through sports, you can build a kid’s character and make him tough, and thereby indirectly show that, on the plane of existence, virtue is important. You can teach a kid that life goes on even if he loses, and therefore downturns aren’t disastrous. Through sports, a kid comes to realize that behaving like a jackass sticks in the heart longer than winning a trophy, and thereby the kid learns that the means are more important than the ends. A child might learn that practice results in victories, and he thereby learns the importance of sacrifice.

These are good things. These are things sports can help instill.

And in a culture where such things can’t be taught through philosophy and theology, it might be all we have left. It’s our ersatz moral formation. It’s a poor substitute, but it might be the only substitute we have left on the mass society level.

But rest assured: It doesn’t excuse adults who earnestly implore in the heat of competition, “Winning isn’t everything.” In competition, winning is the only thing . . . the only essential thing.

Those who say “it’s not the most important thing” mean well.

They don’t think well.

Most everyone knows what happened: Appalachian State pulled off the greatest upset in college football history. The Big House's 100,000 fans were silenced.

I know. I was there.

I wasn't even supposed to see the game, since my semi-rural area doesn't get the Big Ten Network. But at 9:00 a.m. that morning, a friend called, offering me four free seats on the forty-yard line.

I almost declined. I had just gone back to bed after getting up obnoxiously early that morning. I was in my pajamas. I would have to drive over two hours for a game that started in just three hours. My gas tank was empty.

Most of all, I had been looking forward to a no-obligation and relaxing Labor Day weekend.

But then I saw my third-grade son smiling excitedly. He had overheard the conversation. For his upcoming birthday, he wanted one thing: attend a U of M football game. I earlier told him tickets were almost impossible to get.

I accepted my friend's offer, rolled out of bed, got dressed and assembled the team: two sons and my nephew next door, all young football fanatics. We ambled into the mini-van, got gas, and speeded to Ann Arbor.

I'm generally about as spontaneous as Old Faithful. Even as a child and teenager, I always had my days mapped out, always arrived to events on time, always planned ahead.

But I've always kind of admired the less time-bound. Although I tend to agree with the popular t-shirt that says "Hippies smell," I appreciate their laid back ways. The Doobie Brothers' lyric "I ain't got no worries cause I ain't in no hurry" resonates with me.

On that opening Saturday of college football, it felt good to be spontaneous, even though I needed a gallon of Mountain Dew to keep going. The next morning, I started thinking of other times I acted spontaneously: a sudden day trip to Chicago with my girlfriend (now wife), a last-second trip to the great sand dunes of Lake Michigan with my children, a spontaneous pilgrimage to Notre Dame for Mass.

They've all gone well.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Christian thinkers from Evagrius to C.S. Lewis have emphasized the importance of living in the present. God, C.S. Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters, wants men to attend chiefly to two things: "eternity itself, and to . . . the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity."

The Psalmist writes that the Lord's word is a lamp to one's feet (119:105). It's not a spotlight that lights a person's entire horizon. We shouldn't lament the past or fret about the future, and we should be ready to accept whatever comes. When a person rolls with the sudden twists in his days, he's in a better position to accept whatever graces God sends.

That opening football Saturday was a grace. Yes, my alma mater suffered a stunning loss, but it was a great game, my children witnessed sports history and the day went smoothly. On the way home, we laughed (with an occasional rant thrown in) at the absurdity of losing to Appalachian State; we laughed at Michigan's number five ranking; we laughed about a brutal season ahead of us.

And where there's good laughter, there's grace. I'm still Old Faithful-like, but I'll always remember that fun day and remember the wisdom of spouting spontaneity.

It's the Fast Times part that interests me. We were also both raised Lutherans. He's still Lutheran and pretty serious about leading a Christ-like life. I'm trying to do the same thing with the extra help of the Church's sacraments and saints.

Notwithstanding our efforts at holiness, we still chuckle about that era's racy movies like Porky's and Risky Business. We also joke about other aspects of that era that aren't fit for pew or home, and sometimes the discourse ventures where it shouldn't.

I'm not proud of it. We're slowly (oh, so slowly) maturing, mellowing, meandering in our efforts at holiness. But we're both still sinners and liable to stumble during a ten-minute break filled with hard laughter stemming from a risqué comment or two.

I've noticed something, though: There are times when he better avoids the risqué talk, there are times I better avoid it. There are times when he tries to elevate the discourse, times I try to elevate it.

I can't speak for him, but my times typically follow Confession. During the days immediately following Confession, I do a pretty good job of walking the narrow. But if he is feeling boisterous, I'm more inclined to stub my toe on something like the gym scene in Porky's. I know I drag him down, too. There is a direct correlation between the lapse of time since my last Confession and my inclination to start ribaldry.

If only we could hit on the same cylinders and experience divine closeness at the same time. Of course, maybe we do, and we just don't know it. As men mostly concerned with the world's practical affairs, it's something we aren't inclined to discuss ("Is your soul elevated today, Rob?").

A similar thing happens with my wife. The best times in our marriage come after we attend Confession together. It doesn't happen often enough. With seven children and scarce Confession times in our rural area, it's often hard for just one of us to get to Confession, much less coordinating a joint trip. But when it does happen, the sense of joy jumps.

It reminds me of a youth group outing that I chaperoned years ago. The priest heard Confession from everyone, then said Mass. The rest of the evening was loud, fun and joyous. I didn't realize it at the time, but another chaperone commented on it later: "Did you notice the good electricity in the air? The whole place was charged with holiness." He was right.

Grace is perhaps the most confusing thing ever. Prevenient grace, sanctifying grace, actual grace, habitual grace, justifying grace. It has spawned heresies from Pelagianism to Quietism. No one knows exactly how it works and why. It's elusive, frustrating, at times despair-invoking.

I don't pretend to know much about grace, but over the years I've grown to understand that it works well when it works with another. Indeed, the Church has always taught that one major effect of Confession is that it reconciles us to each other and revitalizes our relationships, making them right. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1469) When one grace-filled person meets another, goodness sparks from the contact.

Each of us can be a source of grace for another. Unfortunately, each of us can also be an obstruction. If we could get the grace to work in tandem with those closest to us, we'd be a lot better off.

Might a grace-filled friend and I still joke about Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Sure. But I'm convinced that we'd blush a little sooner and turn the conversation onto better roads more swiftly.

William Burroughs was a member of the Beatniks, that dope- and jazz- and danger-loving generation that dazzled and unnerved America during the decades following World War II and gave rise to the peace, love, and hippie movements of the late 1960s.

If a person compiled a list of history's Most Hip, names from the Beat generation would litter the top 20: Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady. They'd be right up there with James Dean, Miles Davis, Lou Read, Dennis Hopper, Jackson Pollack, and Lenny Bruce; and Nike, McDonald's, Madison Avenue, and the army of men in grey flannel suits that have marked American business for the past 100 years.

That's right: Kerouac and McDonald's, Miles Davis on Madison Avenue, Burroughs donning Nikes, James Dean in a grey flannel suit. They're related: they're all hip.

Every manifestation of hip — from Walt Whitman to the Harlem Renaissance to the Beatniks to Kurt Cobain — has this in common: it lives for now. That's what makes it so cool, whether it's a heroin junkie playing a saxophone (see Charlie Parker) or a speed junkie who dies walking outside on a cold, wet night wearing nothing but a t-shirt (see Neal Cassady).

Compare that to the American marketplace. What does it want? It wants people to live in the present, preferably with no thoughts about the past and definitely no worries about the future, including second mortgages and 18% APR credit cards.

Simply compile advertising slogans: "Just Do It," "It's Time for U," "No Limits," "Get More," "Is This a Great Time or What?" "It's All within Your Reach," "Expand your Playground," "Keep Going," "Challenge Everything," "Live Your Life," "I Am What I Am." They scatter misty mental images in our heads, difficult to nail down, but at bottom they all say, "Gratify Yourself. Buy Now."

It's a hip message and it's working. In his 2004 book Hip: The History, John Leland writes, "The squarest of American institutions, from gardening manuals to Army recruitment ads, now market themselves in two strengths: hip and hipper."

What does America's hip culture do? It buys and goes into debt. The United States is "awash in debt," to quote Merrill Lynch chief North American economist Dave Rosenberg. Consumer credit and mortgage debt are both a higher percentage of disposable income now than they've ever been before.

Hip and debt have risen together because the marketplace feeds off that central element of hip: concern for nothing but immediate satisfaction. In Leland's words, hip "is well suited to the values of the market, which has always had a place for wild yea-saying."

But the marketplace doesn't emphasize another aspect of hip; namely, that of Matthew 5:3: "Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." It's an important element in the hip formula. Hip originated among poor blacks who didn't have much wealth or prospects to distract them. It was a central element of the Beatnik phenomenon: "Better to live simply, be poor and have the time to wander," is how Pulitzer Prize poet Gary Snyder explained the Beats.

Heresies, G.K. Chesterton observed, aren't errors. They're simply exaggerations of one truth to the detriment or suppression of other truths.

Hip's emphasis on Now is good. Perhaps the Now's highest praise came from C.S. Lewis, who wrote, "The Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them."

The free market's ability to meet our needs and wants is also good. Market prices provide information that, properly sifted and responded to, allow buyers and sellers to conduct their affairs in the most advantageous manner. Since every person acts for a good (to move from a less satisfactory state to a more satisfactory one, said the commonsensical Thomas Aquinas), the market's ability to meet our needs is a great good.

But hip's emphasis on immediate living through things like reckless sex and the market's promotion of it through frenzied buying are exaggerations of the Now's goodness. Debt-racked and videogame-playing adults with the mental horizon of kindergartners are merely one example of the heretics produced by the exaggeration. They are the existential offspring of heroin junkie jazz musicians in the mid-twentieth century.

James Dean died young when he lost control of a racing car. Lenny Bruce overdosed at 41. Charlie Parker died of alcohol abuse at 34 and Kerouac at age 47. Cassady died along the train track at age 41. Early death, says Leland, is the ultimate renunciation of the future tense.

Years after their deaths, Jack Kerouac and James Dean appeared in ads for the Gap. It was fitting. Consumerist spending is also a renunciation of the future tense.

The architecture of my mind changes day-to-day, hour-to-hour, sometimes minute-to-minute. As a good Catholic, I generally want to live a life of holiness, good deeds, uplifting counsel, and noble thoughts. But as a typical human being, the mental architecture of a particular day or hour might be more inclined to make me obsess about money, be loud, and tell ribald jokes.

The most troubling thing: the architecture I wake up with or shift into during the day isn't a conscious choice. I don't wake up and say, "Well, yesterday I was Gothic: grand, prayerful, elevated in thought, word, and deed. Today, I want to be Victorian-like: noble, demur, of fine dress. Tomorrow, I'll be Romanesque: sleek, elegant, and a temple to the pursuit of money." It doesn't work like that. I wake up or find myself in the middle of the day with a mental architecture that I didn't choose.

Pretty much the only thing I can do is work with it the best I can. The ease or difficulty of working with it depends on what I want to do. If the architectural style that day is Romanesque and I want to make a lot of money, it's a great fit. But if I want to be in church and meditating on the Bible? That's tough. It'd be like living a life of chastity at the Heffner mansion.

Our mental architecture is crucial to determining whether we'll be holy or sinful, noble or mean, courteous or abrupt. Although we don't have control over the architectural form like we do our day's clothes, we can sway it. We can supply the building materials that cause us to find ourselves in a Gothic structure with flying buttresses, pointed arches, detailed with gargoyles. Or we can supply the materials to be Modernist: plain, flat roofed, black and white.

In one sense, this is no more than recognizing the age-old understanding of the deadly sins: certain actions and thoughts create a disposition to sin. It's also recognition that the spiritual masters are right: guard your thoughts carefully, because thoughts have a way of growing and morphing into words and deeds.

But I think it's more than that. I think it's more McLuhanish.

A Catholic convert and daily communicant, Marshall McLuhan was a household name in the 1960s. He built a career around examining the way "media" — extensions of ourselves, from wheels and roads to phones and computers — change the way we think and behave, altering us in ways we often don't perceive.

His message can be illustrated well by the saying, "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

A hammer is a type of media, an extension of ourselves.  It increases the power of our muscles. The man who buys a hammer normally does so for a set purpose: to strike a nail. But if he carries it around with him enough, everything will start to look nailish: perhaps a stuck bolt, maybe the skull of a boor.

Imperceptibly, the man with a hammer starts thinking differently.

Every medium has that effect. Problem is, a lot of people don't realize it, and even those who are aware of it often have a hard time figuring what the effect is. And if they figure it out, they can't explain it convincingly to others. In efforts to examine the effects of a medium, a person normally relies on introspection, anecdotes, and other forms of evidence that don't translate well empirically.

If the modern world has one dominant characteristic, it's media. New tools, machinery, technology, toys. They flow out of corporate R&D like water from a fire hose. Every calendar year brings a handful of novelties that could be standard household items in a few years. Think of the cell phone and email: novel in the mid-1990s, ubiquitous now. Same with the VCR in the early 1980s. iPods and MP3 players are hitting the same levels today.

What are the effects of these media on our mental architecture?

I honestly don't know, but I have hunches.

I think all the popular technology from the past 15 years has one thing in common: speed. The Internet: speed of information. Email: speed of written communication. Digital music: speed of access. Blogs: speed of publication. Even those media whose primary improvement isn't speed offer greater efficiency, which is simply a kind of speed. Cell phone use isn't speedier than its landline ancestor, but the overall efficiency associated with it (immediate access and voicemail) saves time.

Speed and efficiency are the products of the new technology. We use the new technology, we become speedier and more efficient. We also start valuing speed and efficiency. I know I have, often to the point of frenzied living.

By contrast, what are the inputs of religious life? What do these things have in common: life in the monastery, attending Mass, reading the Bible, meditation, cultivating virtue?

Those things conjure up certain images, and they're not images of speed and efficiency. The images are of slow and deliberate things: hooded monks walking slowly, kneeling, patience, stillness. Calm, not frenzied.

If everything starts to look like a nail to a man with a hammer, how well is he going to deal with a crying newborn? How will the religious life look to a person with email, cell phone, and iPod?

Don't get me wrong, all the new technology can help in the religious life. I, for instance, religiously listen to Benedict Groeschel's Sunday Night Live (EWTN) while I walk for exercise, using my iPod to download the pod cast. It provides great fodder for religious thinking. Without the iPod, I would rarely get a chance to hear Groeschel.

But I'm not interested in how a technology is used. The observation that each technology can be used for good or bad is so commonplace that it barely needs stating.

I'm interested in how technology shifts our mental architecture. What role does it play in the type of mental architecture I'll wake up with tomorrow or find myself in tomorrow afternoon? Those are the most interesting questions.

And for people who, like me, enjoy the modern technology but also want a religious life, they're crucial, even disconcerting, questions.

I know, gluttony is one of the deadly sins. Gluttony and its sibling sins (lust, avarice, watching Jerry Springer) lead to other sins.

But that didn't stop me when my parents handed down their old big-screen TV. I plopped it in my basement… a full eleven inches from my 28-inch TV. Both are hooked up to cable. Both receive Fox Sports, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, TNT, and every other sports cable channel except the NFL Network. Both are situated within fifty feet of my beer refrigerator and a bathroom.

One evening last fall, I sat on my couch with two strong ales, my two TVs, the Detroit Pistons, the Detroit Red Wings, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Boise State/Fresno State. I felt like I was in a bar, but without the smoke, the need to tip, or the cheap women. My children were running around, so I was a little distracted, but other than that, I think I caught a glimpse of heaven that night.

Think I'm exaggerating?

Contemplation

The closest we can get to God on earth is contemplation. Aristotle thought that play bore characteristics of contemplation. Here's how Fr. James Schall explained it in his excellent book, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs:

Considering God and considering a game [have] something in common. Play and contemplation [are] alike in that both [are] activities indulged in "for their own sakes," whereas business and work [are] for something else. Games need not exist, just as the world need not exist, but both do… [W]atching a good game can be fascinating. It is its own world and time. It absorbs our attention in something that is not ourselves. Aristotle taught that our relation to God was not unlike that experience.

I think Schall and Aristotle are right. When we absorb ourselves in a game, we have a watered-down type of contemplation, and it's a good thing.

I experienced this last September at a Detroit Tigers game. Right after the national anthem, I sat in the upper deck, checked out the Detroit skyline, sipped my eight-dollar beer, and thought, "I have nothing to do for the next three hours, except sit here and enjoy the game." Within twenty minutes, I was absorbed: "Why is Leyland doing that?" "Check out Pudge." "I can't believe we're bringing in Perez."

I was detached from ordinary life. In that, it was contemplative.

Relaxation

But was I contemplating that night when I was watching the Pistons, Red Wings, Cavaliers, and Boise State? I don't think so. Notwithstanding the beer (a contemplative aid), I wasn't engaged in an activity that is akin to contemplating God. It was more pagan-like: watching many gods at the same time.

I'm not saying it wasn't a good thing. It was. I'd had a rough week. It was good for me to unwind, and it was good for my children and long-suffering wife to see me calm for the first time in days.

But I don't think it resembled contemplation. It was simple relaxation. It reminds me of a desert father story. A man walked by a desert monk's hut and saw the monk and brother monk lounging around in front, just chatting. The man derided them for not being occupied in prayer. The monk said, "A bow can't be taut all the time" (rough quote).

Relaxation and contemplation. Those are two good things about watching sports. There's a third approach to sports, but it's not very good: watching sports as a diversion.

Diversion

This is me and fantasy football: searching the waiver wires, making trades, obsessing about my point totals on Sunday afternoon. This is me placing petty bets on college football, NCAA hoops, and pretty much anything else with a ball in it. This is me channel surfing, watching highlight reels, and surfing the Internet for scores and stats.

Is it a bad thing?

A constant stream of diversions presents problems. Man naturally seeks diversions because they prevent boredom. Even better, they guard against boredom's wicked cousin, ennui, that "state of emptiness that the soul feels when it is deprived of interest in action, life, and the world (be it this world or another), a condition that is the immediate consequence of the encounter with nothingness, and has as an immediate effect a disaffection with reality" (Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature).

I like to stave off ennui. It's nasty stuff (and also a deadly sin, according to some ancient sources).

The problem is, we tend to take diversions seriously (think of the golfer) because we need them to preoccupy us in order to ward off ennui. But when we take them too seriously, they can erode our pursuit of higher things as we start to think the diversions really are important (the golfer who hits the links every Saturday instead of spending time with his kids).

More troubling, diversions numb us to the ultimate things, like death and final judgment. Diversions, Blaise Pascal pointed out, "amuse us and help us reach death imperceptibly."

That's a good thing for people who don't believe in eternity but are uneasy with their disbelief. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, "Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it."

But for Catholic men who believe in eternity and ought to be spending their lives preparing for it? It's not a good thing.

A moderate number of diversions are good, especially the sports types. They help us relax, and they might even lead to contemplative-like activity. But when are they too much? When do they cross the line into diversions that numb us to the prospect of death?

I don't know. Each man has to watch his own soul.

I'll watch mine as I keep watching my two TVs.

It's Global Fast 2007, and it's encouraging people to fast and give alms. The goal: to change the world by getting 10,000,000 people to give up their food for one day and donate the money saved to charity.

It's an audacious goal, but Global Fast Founder Rich Halvorson thinks it's possible. "I'm the first to admit that it's going to be hard," says Halvorson, "but from the beginning, this was a miracle-oriented project. It depends on God. And it depends on people being empowered by this vision for change, and doing their part to make it a reality."

Calling the project "GF07," Global Fast has targeted February 21, 2007 — Ash Wednesday — as the fast day. "The beginning of Lent," says Halverson, "is the ideal time to bring together fasting, prayer and charity into one coordinated effort. Tens of millions of people fast and go to church every Ash Wednesday — we're hoping to gear all that spiritual energy into one day of charity and real change."

How it Works

Global Fast is a new movement that works with established charities. Its goal is not to amass donations, but rather to act as a conduit. When people agree to fast for a day and pledge that day's food money, their gifts are given directly to charities targeted by Global Fast.

"Our goal with the charities is to get as much as possible to the areas of greatest need," says Trisha Amadura, who serves as Partners Coordinator for Global Fast. "For 2007, that means 100% efficiency — because we don't even touch the donations. They go straight to our charity partners, who are committed to match what our fasters donate."

"In a way," Halvorson says, "we're a charity research organization. We engage in extensive research to find out what faith-based charities are efficient, meaningful, and most worthy of donations."

The first Global Fast project announced is with Food for the Poor, and Global Fast's primary goal is to move thousands of people off a trash dump in Haiti – and into livable housing with clean water and sustainable food.

"Haiti is one of the three poorest countries the world," says Halvorson. "I've seen it myself. There are 10,000 families literally living on a trash dump."

That's where Food for the Poor comes in. Ninety-six percent of all money raised at Food for the Poor goes to relief efforts, and they've agreed to use all money raised by Global Fast to create a sustainable village with wells, a community center, schools, and job training. The cost averages $4,000 per family, and Food for the Poor has pledged to match all money raised during GF07 for this specific relief effort.

To give fasters a choice in their giving, Food for the Poor isn't the only charity that will reap the benefits of Global Fast 2007. A quick peek at their website reveals 15 other charities that are under consideration: World Emergency Relief, HOPE, Feed the Children, and others. Global Fast also welcomes charity recommendations.

"The charities have been so responsive and enthusiastic," says Amadura. "In mid-January, we will announce our top ‘Priority Projects' with about five charities." Global Fast asks each charity to agree to find matching dollars for every pledge dollar that GF07 fasters give.

When Does the Money Flow?

Perhaps the most interesting thing about GF07's effort is the pledge system. Right now, it's asking for pledges, not actual money. When Ash Wednesday gets closer, it will remind people via email to start sending their money to the respective charities. They will provide ample instructions and links to make donating easy, but Global Fast doesn't want participants to send the money until the Lenten season.

"This isn't only about charity," says Halvorson,  "The real key to change is fasting and prayer. What is the power of millions of us praying together to fight poverty and injustice? Some nations desperately need our charity, but the whole world needs spiritual renewal. Fasting is a spiritual change-agent for personal growth and national — or even global — change."

Catching the Vision

GF07 is a grass-roots movement. To date, Global Fast has not sought big donations and has even declined overtures from potential big donors who have heard about the project.

"This is about empowering individuals to change the world together," says Halvorson, "We want five hundred $20 donations, not one $10,000 donation. We want families and schools, churches and communities to catch the vision, not one big foundation to pay the freight for everyone else."

GF07 needs a lot of local support. It will look under every rock and in every home to find 10,000,000 American fasters. To spread by word of mouth, the effort needs local leaders of all ages:

? Teenagers can take pledge sign-up sheets (available at the GF07 website) to school.

? Adults can provide sign-up opportunities before and after church.

? Workers can take sign-up sheets to their places of employment.

? Priests and ministers can preach Global Fast from the pulpit.

? Bloggers can urge readers to join the fast.

"Any number that ends in ‘million' is humbling for a grassroots movement," says Halvorson, "But we believe that most people truly want to make an impact. If we all commit our food and prayers for one day, we can save thousands or tens of thousands around the globe."

"In the future, we hope the number of fasters worldwide increases to 50,000,000. That would be a great day in the battle against our world's spiritual and material poverty."

If you want to help, check out the GF07 website and click on the "Get Involved" link.

You might want to reassess your Catholicism if:

You think the Rosary is a cute thing that old ladies do.

You'd sing louder in church, but you prefer Ted Nugent songs.

You've recently made an aggressive and obscene gesture to a 90-year-old lady while leaving the parking lot after Mass.

You don't like saint veneration because it's elitist.

You wish there were more Hindu saints.

You've ever asked, "Weekday Masses? What for?"

You don't own a breviary, don't want a breviary, and don't know what a breviary is.

You thought for sure that Vatican II legitimized fornication for people really, really, really in love.

You'd go to Mass every week, if it took place on a weekday and your boss would give you the time off with pay.

You think the Bible is too exclusionary.

You think one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit is a short Sunday Mass.

You think the Twelve Fruits of the Holy Spirit should be expanded to include "feelin' mellow."

You thought the virtue of obedience was outlawed after the Civil War.

You think the priest scandals were bad, but nothing compared to Pius XII's anti-Semitism.

You think sodomy is a fundamental right (and not just in prison).

You sorta feel like abortion is murder but don't, you know, want to tell a woman what to do with her body.

You're afraid of voting Catholic principles because you might be subject to a Section 1983 civil rights claim for violating the First Amendment.

You refuse to fast, but you like to diet.

You fast because the weight loss makes you sexier.

You're not sure which came first, Catholicism or Scientology.

You're not sure if, once you strip away all the stupid nuances and language games, there's really an essential difference between Catholicism and Buddhism.

You'd rather drink yourself silly on Christmas Eve than attend the midnight Mass.

You drink yourself silly on Christmas Eve and then attend the midnight Mass.

You don't like Easter because your parents expect you to go to church.

You think Good Friday is good because you get off work at noon.

You'd rather be seen with a hooker than seen coming out of a confessional.

You stopped your religious studies at your Confirmation because you pretty much had it all figured out at that point.

You think that foreigners who wear funny hats have a lot of nerve trying to tell us Americans what's right and wrong.

You can't for the life of you figure out why the Vatican hasn't considered JFK for canonization.

You don't really accept that "of Obligation" part of "Holy Days of Obligation."

You'd go to Mass more often, if they served better food.

You scour the Yellow pages looking for a Catholic Church with a good female priest.

You enjoy Catholicism, but you feel awkward holding hands with your same-sex partner while walking into church.

You read this list and don't get it.

1. There's a lot of James Bond stuff that Joe Public never hears about. How much? I have no idea. I'm part of Joe Public, and even if I held part of the Bond information, I couldn't tell you (I'd be killed).

2. There's a type of spy decorum, even among enemy nations: when something in Covert-land takes place, it's addressed in Covert-land, not in the press.

So when I hear about something that takes place in Covert-land, I'm suspicious. Why is this one item hitting the press? Last weekend, the British Home Secretary told the press that the police were looking into the poisoning. The press also obtained a copy of the poisoned man's written allegation that he had been poisoned by Putin.

If my two assumptions are correct, we shouldn't be hearing about this stuff, unless (i) Britain has reasons for smearing Putin, or (ii) there was a breakdown in Covert-land and information got out that wasn't supposed to and now the Home Secretary and other British officials are trying to deal with it the best they can.

I assume there's significant information we're not receiving. I don't have an objection to the arrangement. In these perilous times of terrorism, we don't have the luxury of having a fully-informed press, no matter how much the press wants us to believe that it does keep us informed.

But even though I don't object to the lack of information, it makes me wonder: how can a person form a valid opinion? We never know whether we're getting 2% of the information or 98% of it, and whether 10% or 90% of the information is a lie or otherwise bogus. How does a person form an opinion, knowing that the information he's relying upon is unreliable? Trash (the information) in, trash (your opinion) out.

And it's not just spy games.

Everyone calls this the "Information Age," but I prefer to call it the "Bleeding Information Age."

Information bleeds from everywhere: a hundred million websites; hundreds of thousands of new books every year; 10,000 newspapers; network television; cable television; AM, FM, and satellite radio. The signal trait of the Information Age, one commentator has properly pointed out, is that the data endlessly proliferates.

We can't possibly absorb it all, and the stuff we read or hear could be inaccurate.

And here's the exacerbating rub: We're unworthy information processors.

Not only can a person not absorb all the facts, but no person can master metaphysics, the mysteries of science, world history, and the myriad of other disciplines a person would need in order to process the enormous volume of facts effectively. This has always been the case, but we never realized it. Thanks to the Internet and the Bleeding Information Age, though, I think a few people are beginning to see our innate limitations when it comes to forming opinions.

So what's a person to do?

He needs to find an authority to follow. Not blindly, mind you (after all, we have some information and the power of logic, so we can question), but every person needs some sort of authority he can trust.

I know this conflicts with Americans' deep-seated individualism. In redneck terms, "Nobody is gonna learn me nuthin'." I can respect the redneck if he adopts a resulting attitude of complete skepticism: "I can't know, therefore, I won't believe," but for him to form a firm opinion on something? That's ridiculous.

Of course how reliable an authority we need depends on the importance of the subject at hand. That is why the state regulates and licenses physicians, while anyone can hang out a shingle as a “fashion expert.” But what about really important stuff? Like whether a particular medical treatment is not merely effective, but morally right, and whether there is even a difference between the two. If a person wants to form an opinion – to reason, to think, to reach conclusions with a possibility of being right – he needs a reliable authority, one he can trust to give valid information and/or premises that he can work from. Without that valid authority, he's just flailing away in an ocean of facts, half-facts, ideas, and half-baked ideas. So what will be your authority? Drudge? The Daily Kos? Ann Coulter? The Washington Post? The John Birch Society? Larry King? The government? Fox News? Yahoo? Wikipedia? You might say, "I'll adopt a handful of authorities and use their mix of facts and analyses to reach my opinions." But that ultimately doesn't work either. You will still need an ultimate authority when your little authorities clash. And if they're "little authorities" that you're not trusting fully, why are you trusting them at all?

In areas where she deems herself fit to teach, I trust the Church. For me, that's the only authority worth trusting because it's the only institution that can make a historically valid claim to legitimacy, and I believe she cares about my well-being. If anyone thinks the United States government, the United Nations, the broadcast networks, or the New York Times can cogently make those claims, he's fooling himself.

In the category "Religion," people wrote "Jedi." It was humorous, but then a few newly-proclaimed Jedis decided to take it seriously and start a Jedi religion. Last week, two of them, along with Chewbacca, went to the UN and demanded official recognition of their religion.

I thought it was a joke at first, but nothing in the article said it was satire, and people commenting on the story around the Internet say it's real.

It also isn't unbelievable. We've always had nutty religions. In the Americas alone, we've had practitioners of Santeria, a Mexican religion favored by drug lords who sacrifice chickens and occasionally a human being in efforts to gain power; the People's Temple; the Unification Church; the Charles Manson family. Scores (hundreds?) of various occult beliefs have laced US history for over a hundred years.

What is new, though, is the request for official recognition. The demands have been popping up like dandelions. Last week, for instance, two widows of Wiccan veterans sued to have a Wiccan symbol (a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle) on their tombstones. Earlier this year, worshippers of the Greek pagan gods successfully sued for recognition in Greek courts. In 2003, Haiti officially sanctioned Voodoo as a religion.

How long until Baal is revived and his worshippers want phallic symbols put on their tombstones?

Unless we want to recognize every crackpot that comes along with a new religion ("I worship the female body. I'd like my pornography purchases to be tax-deductible"), we need to figure out how to deal with them.

I think we have three options:

1. Regain a sense of fundamental metaphysical and logical truths, so we can cogently mock them. We could start by reaffirming the basics: If the world is created by a first mover, the first mover must stand outside of the thing moved. The world, being material, must have been moved by an immaterial (spiritual) cause. This first cause, being the genesis and sustainer of all that exists, must be unlimited by material constraints and must be omniscient and omnipotent. This set of metaphysics eliminates pantheism, paganism, dualism, and an assortment of other religious genres. Further metaphysical advancement would eliminate other nutty religions, but would leave intact most of the major ones. It's really not too hard, but I think it's safe to assume that such a goal is quixotic. Metaphysics and logic will never make it back into the public school curriculum, much less into our sex and money-obsessed legislative bodies. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I want bureaucrats reading, much less interpreting, Aristotle.

2. We could just keep muddling along with the current arrangement, using an ad hoc approach to the various requests for recognition. The IRS does that now, using a lengthy test to determine whether various "churches" are religious bodies that merit tax-exempt status. I've read those Private Letter Rulings carefully, and they're not too bad. If they were put through a brutal test of logic, they would shatter, but so far, those Rulings have endured.

3. Adopt a libertarian approach that doesn't officially recognize anybody.

I can't go into all the reasons, but I favor the third one. Quite frankly, if the state hadn't swollen itself beyond all proper bounds, the nutty folks wouldn't be clamoring for official recognition. It's only because the state has become so overwhelmingly important (intrusive, meddling, powerful) that people want access to it. If it were to shrink back to a healthier size, where local control counted for more and families counted for the most, its religious blessing wouldn't be nearly as important.