We had a great fear of the word “religion”. Christianity (I was taught) was a relationship, not a religion. “Religion” had about it the savor of something stiff, dried out, mummified. It was (we thought) the husk left over when the juice of a living relationship with God had evaporated. It was the cardboard container the food came in—a thing to be thrown away, avoided, despised. And creeds seemed to be a dose of “religion” in chemical purity: an attempt to put the living God back in the box.

The problem came as we tried to live out the gospel in the real world. It’s all well and good to be “Spirit-led”, footloose and fancy-free, a leaf on the wind, when you are in college and you are singing chipper tunes about God loving you to the thrum of a guitar. But as time goes on and your prayer group graduates and tries to become a local church and starts to attract a few strangers from the neighborhood who aren’t part of your cozy circle of friends, things get complicated. Fairly quickly, somebody asks “What do you believe?” and you can no longer rely on a sort of network of unspoken knowledge that you and your friends are decent folk who wouldn’t believe or do anything at odds with the gospel. You have to try to articulate what, precisely, you believe in a way that is intelligible to somebody who doesn’t know you.

And so we found ourselves, a group of perhaps thirty young adults, huddled in a room with a blackboard, trying to summarize what we, as Bible-believing charismatic Christians, believed in a “Statement of Faith”. It was, in its own way, a hilarious afternoon (at least in retrospect). The chalkboard was soon filled with different clauses and points of doctrine, connected in a baffling web of arrows that looked like a football diagram in a Goofy cartoon. After several hours, we gave it up as a bad job and went home. A week or so later, the pastor just pounded out something on his own typewriter about how we believed in the Bible, God the Father, Jesus His Son, the Holy Spirit, and being a community of Spirit-filled servants. I thought to myself dimly that it reminded me of something I’d heard somewhere, but my lack of familiarity with historical Christianity had prevented me from having much familiarity with the Apostles or Nicene-Constantinopolitan creeds. When I did discover them a few years later, it began to dawn on me that we could have saved a lot of time just copying them instead re-inventing the wheel with corners on it.

Pagans didn’t have creeds. You don’t need a creed for a collection of tales about gods in Asgaard, Olympus, or the Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The myths of Greece or Rome or the folk tales of Germany and the Great Plains required only poets and bards, not creeds. It was only when Heaven began to upset the apple cart by involving itself in the mundane day-to-day events of very real group of humans called “Israel” whom the Lord God had brought from Egypt, that something like creedal formulae began to emerge. Suddenly something had happened, not Once Upon a Time, but to a specific group of people in history. Moreover, this people was constantly being pressured by its neighbors and by its own sinful tendencies to forget what had happened. And so, their history became one long and the careful act of remembering, not imagining—designed to make sure that their past was not lost.

When the Church began, that need to remember and summarize what had happened continued. And since what had happened was so strange—and so fraught with the possibility of being misunderstood in a thousand ways—the Church also was immediately committed to creating summaries of the Faith that, while initially brief (“Jesus is Lord”), expanded in length over time to make sure that the broad contours of the basic story and its meaning were not lost. That’s because the central command around which the entire Church was built was “Do this in memory of me.” No creed, no memory. No memory, no Eucharist.

Over the next dozen installments of this column, therefore, we are going to take an extended look at the Creed and see how this long act of remembering still speaks to us today in the heart of our Eucharistic Church.

So, for instance, , in antiquity, the egalitarianism of the Faith was scandalous.  It was all so disgustingly vulgar to a Greco-Roman culture that had not the slightest qualms about saying that some—indeed most—people were naturally inferior.  Pagans came by this notion honestly, because the whole conception of human beings as “equal” owes its entire existence to the Judeo-Christian tradition and absolutely nothing else.  It is pure mysticism based solely and exclusively on Genesis and related biblical texts.  Pagans, having no access to this revelation, tended to concur with Aristotle that some people were “natural slaves” and “talking plows” since it is manifestly obvious that people are not equal in terms of intelligence, musical aptitude, facility with languages, strength, speed, mathematical abilities and a million other factors.  Alone in pagan antiquity was the Christian claim that God is no respecter of persons and that all were equally beloved by him who gave his only Son to save all, right down to the most wretched and seemingly insignificant sinner.

That’s why some of the earliest criticisms of the faith came from elitists of various stripes who could not believe that any self-respecting revelation from God could possibly involve the first century equivalents of trailer trash.  For Jews, the classic complaint was “He eats with prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners.”

For Gentile philosophers like Celsus, the complaint was similar.  It boiled down to “Look at those tacky people!  Just look at them!  Slaves!  Women!  Children!  The dregs of the earth!”  Celsus lived in a world where such a complaint would be taken as self-evident proof that Christianity was laughable.

Today, however, we live in a world with very different assumptions.  That’s because two thousand years of Christian mysticism about human equality coursing through the bloodstream of western culture makes us tend to mistake our supernatural advantages for our natural virtues.  Now we tend to “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”.  And because we take equality as self-evident something entirely different about the Faith offends us: the notion that some people are “chosen”.

There’s no escaping the doctrine.  God is constantly choosing people in Scripture.  From Abraham to Moses to David to Jesus himself.  God chooses this one and not that one.  Indeed, according to Paul you and I are chosen, if we are baptized.  That’s why he writes:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. (Ephesians 1:3-4)

And Paul says this because his Master said before him, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16).

The fact that God chooses is as offensive to moderns as God’s acceptance of all was offensive to ancients.  Why does God heal this person but not that one?  Why does God give this person a gift and not that person?  Why is that person blessed with something and not that one?

The answer of the Tradition is as startling and surprising as the answer given to ancients.  Just as God calls all because he made and redeemed all in love, so he chooses this one and that one—in love.

The pattern is given in Genesis and never really varies.  When God chooses Abraham out of all the nations as the one with whom he makes his covenant, he tells Abraham: “by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves” (Genesis 12:3).

In other words, Abraham alone is chosen out of all the nations, so that, through him, God can bless all the people he did not choose.  The chosen are chosen for the sake of the unchosen.

That has huge implications.  It means, for instance, that those who, say, miraculously survive the railway catastrophe are not just “lucky”, nor are they “the ones God loved” to the exclusion of those who died.  Rather, they are signs of the hope of life for those who did not survive.  Those who are healed are healed not because God loves them more than those who are unhealed, but as signs of the hope of ultimate healing in heaven.  God chooses some for the same reason he calls all—because he is Love.

If uptight, anal-retentive secularists want to get their sphincters in a knot with terrors about speaking of the Holiday that Dare Not Speak its Name, I will, as a cheerful counter-cultural Catholic, enjoy all the more saying “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” out loud and not give a fig about offending anybody, because, well, I’m just happy it’s Christmas. I love Christmas! And, in point of fact, I have never encountered anybody who is offended at the mention of Christmas. I’ve only met jittery shopkeepers and the occasional co-worker who have been cowed by the panicky miasma of offensitivity in Seattle culture and who are afraid of giving offense, but who would never take offense. Such people go all melty once you break the ice and they realize it’s okay to say “Christmas”.

If that’s the norm here in Seattle, the very heart of the Soviet of Washington state, you can bet it’s the norm most places. So whatever the case, I refuse to let panicky offensitivity derail my joy in the Feast of the Incarnation with fear, just as I refuse to let Culture Warriors derail the joy with encoded talk radio anger where “Merry Christmas” really means “Take that you liberal peacenik, granola-eating, non-cigar smoking, blue stater who doesn’t watch FOX News, celebrate the wisdom of the war in Iraq or uphold Christian values like torture!” Half the fun of being Catholic in these United States is belonging to a bizarre and exotic sect that freely indulges in uncouth and mysterious rites and uses arcane language that half-terrifies and half-fascinates my countrymen. Saying “Merry Christmas” is among these prerogatives and I have no intention of changing that to suit either the fearful or the angry. When I say “Merry Christmas!” I mean just that: I hope the person I am talking to has a Merry Christmas! I’m wishing Merry Christmas because it’s the Feast of the Incarnation and I’m happy that God became man—because if he hadn’t everybody on both sides of the culture war would be equally doomed to eternal damnation, which is not a big boast for all us good Christians.

Of course, that’s not to say there’s no War on Christmas. There’s been a War on Christ ever since the first anti-Christmas Human Toothache slaughtered the babes of Bethlehem and other enemies played whack-a-mole with Jesus until they succeeded in running Him through a kangaroo court to a brutal state-sponsored murder that Pilate, Herod Antipas, and Caiaphas could all happily agree on. As St. Paul says, we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with powers and principalities. The thing is, Jesus told us to expect just this, and in the early centuries of the Church, there was no “War on Christmas” hand-wringing because the Church did not imagine they were living in a culture that was anything but a mortal enemy of the gospel. Today, we live in the illusion that the world is now the friend of the gospel and so live in perpetual surprise when it is not.

With the Culture War approach to Christmas there comes (on both sides) the recurring notion that God must perform some act of worldly power to show himself as God by winning the Culture War and, concomitantly, the fear (and gloat) that if he does not manifest himself in this way, then the whole Christian picture of things is endangered. So, for instance, we see many Christians panicking about the loss of the elections and wondering why God didn’t help His Party to win. Or you have atheists demanding that God give chemical formulae for Martian soil composition to Moses centuries ahead of time in order to prove his existence. Similarly, you have people like Richard Dawkins sponsoring the Blasphemy Challenge on the theory that any God worth his salt would, ‘ow you say? smite the high school sophomores who Youtube themselves saying something smutty about the Holy Spirit and showing off their atheist chops to their peer group of fellow high school sophomores.

God does nothing like this, so we are to conclude… what?

Personally, I conclude that a lot of people need to familiarize themselves with the Temptation Narratives in the gospels. Because one of the major points of that narrative is that Jesus refuses to do magic tricks, publicity stunts and appeals to earthly power. He specifically tells us elsewhere in the gospel that the Kingdom does not come in such a way that people say “Lo! Here! Lo! There!” So the whole “Do something flashy so people will believe!” thing is pretty firmly denied by our Lord.

So how then does the Kingdom come? 1 Kings 19:11-13 tells us of the encounter the despondent Elijah had when God said:

“Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD.” And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

Physicists these days are telling us that most of the matter in the universe is not the big flashy stuff that makes up the visible stars and galaxies. Most of it is dark matter you can’t see and it is this dark matter that does most of the gravitational heavy lifting keeping the cosmos together. I think this is an apt metaphor for most of God’s dealings with us. The world has few parting seas or miracles of the sun (which unbelievers, in any case, laugh off even when there are 70,000 eyewitnesses). But it is chockablock with small moments of grace which, to the recipient, stick in the heart with an accumulating power that can change us forever, yet be utterly invisible to the people charged with giving us the evening news and telling us what “the real world” is like. Some time ago, Penn Gillette was a recipient of one such bit of dark matter. And I would bet that all of us, if we are honest, can name similar moments in our lives when we also encountered moments which were utterly invisible to those around us, yet which left us with the distinct awareness that God had called us by name.

For example, back in my days as a college pagan hedonist, I returned to my dorm from Thanksgiving dinner with my parents with a ruinous case of Weaponized Martian Death Stomach Flu that had no doubt been introduced by Communist agents of evil into our home-made sauerkraut. Stomach flu is horrific enough. But stomach flu with sauerkraut… There are no words.

I stumbled into my room and pitched forward on to my bed, there to lie motionless in a gathering pool of drool while the hours ticked by. At length, the phone rang and it turned out to be somebody calling from 2^nd Floor Lander Hall, the dorm building next to mine. I was a bit wary of the folks on this floor because it was The Christian Floor, full of Born Again types and Jesus Praisers while I was, well, not one of these types.

I mumbled something about Martian flu and my fervent wish for the sweet release that only death can bring and then politely bowed out of whatever social event I was being invited to by my friend who lived on that floor. Then I hung up and lay my head back in the drool pool.

About ten minutes later there was a knock at my door. Shirtless and with the imprint of the creases in my pillow pressed firmly into my face, I heaved my bulk to the door, only to be surprised by the presence of Sandy MacKinnon, a woman I did not know from Eve, standing there with a kind smile on her face.

“I heard you were sick! I brought you this,” she said cheerily, and brandished a bottle of Pepto-Bismol that she had run out and bought for me.

I was moved by that act of kindness from a total stranger. I still am, to this very day. No, I was not converted to her faith in Christ on the spot. But it was one of the moments in which the millions of rounds of God’s mercy pierced the defensive armor and I started to think about Christians as something besides people whose eyes were set just a little too close together. Pepto-Bismol remains for me a sacramental of the love of God. There would be many other dark matter moments, as there are for all of us. But that one sticks out in my memory as a turning point in my life that would eventually lead me to faith in Christ.

The Incarnation of God in Christ is the ultimate Dark Matter Moment, a paradigm of the hidden way in which God has always worked in the world. When Mary visits Elizabeth, there are no signs in the sun, moon, and stars. Just a little flutter below the diaphragm and Elizabeth’s whole world is changed forever as she realizes just who is standing before her. When our Lord is born, it happens not in DC or LA or NYC, but in something like the broom closet of the Stop ‘n Sleep Motel in Snohomish, Washington because his parents were down to their last dime and the snow was piling up on their stalled ’78 Ford Pinto when Mary went into labor. The sole attendees of the birth are some parking lot attendants who explain to Mary and Joseph that they were sitting around saying “Dude! If God is everywhere, then does that mean he’s in my toe right now? Whoa!” when all of a sudden the garage lit up and these angel dudes told them to go to the broom closet of the Stop ‘n Sleep Motel on sixth street and everything would be explained.

That’s not a story that would ever get coverage on the evening news. But it’s fairly representative of the hidden way in which God is, even at this hour, revealing himself to the hearts of men. Indeed, at this moment, somewhere on earth, Jesus Christ is hidden in plain view before the faces of mortal men and women as a priest again holds up a perfectly dull-looking bit of bread and a cup of seemingly ordinary wine and says “This is Jesus. This is He who takes away the sin of the world. Happy are we who are called to His Supper.”

By that hidden miracle of his Real Presence, and not by flash, earthly power, or magic tricks does the dark matter of grace conquer the hearts of even his bitterest enemies, not with servile terrors imposed by partisans of some worldly system of fear, but with love and the freedom of the Holy Spirit.

Merry Christmas!

I think of that story as I read a piece on the Blessed Virgin Mary allegedly appearing in Egypt that came out on the Spirit Daily site some months back. Dunno if it’s a real apparition or not, but the headline got me thinking.

You see, I’m always rather leery of stuff on Spirit Daily since it’s a site that I tend to think of as Credulity Daily. But, I’m also not altogether convinced that this speaks very well of me.

I live in an age where making fun of the credulous is as easy as falling off a log, particularly when the credulity is directed at things having the savor of Christianity its Catholic expressions. To be sure, the people who are often doing the laughing—such as Bill Maher—have, when the subject is not religion, fathomless oceans of credulity on other matters. But still, from Bayside visionaries to Br. Polyester’s Miracle Revival Prayer Cloths to Oral Roberts’ excited claims of a 900 Foot Tall Jesus demanding cash, it’s not hard to develop a pretty thick armor plating against the more or less steady stream of claims of the Wondrous that emerge from the ranks of Christians. And, of course, there is always a steady stream of village atheists and skeptics ready to debunk the bulk of this as the mixture of bushwah, lies, hyperactive imagination, and mental illness that it often is. In a related vein, of course, are the believing Christians and Vatican investigator types who possess no agenda of religion-debunking, but who simply want to know if a given claim is on the level. In the midst of this general mood of skepticism, my ego is big enough that I am particularly sensitive to the thought of being laughed at because I was taken in. So are the egos of an awful lot of other people. So I am much more susceptible to being skeptical than I am to being credulous.

Yes, granted: Spirit Daily may see Mary appearing all over the place where the rest of us see water stains on freeway underpasses. They are often wrong in their zeal to believe that God is busying himself with all manner of signs and wonders done for the benefit of plaid-wearers in Bugtussle, OK who see miracles where the rest of us see a grilled cheese sandwich. Duly noted. Haw haw. Boy, are they dumb. Let’s all ritually denounce them and pat ourselves on the back for being so smart and skeptical. Nobody took me in. I’m safe! However, despite the boasts of the Brights, that’s not always such a bright thing to boast. Because, of course, the thing about the hyper-credulous is that sometimes, like Luna Lovegood, they are right and there really are nargles.

Which means that if I keep that up and make it my Life Ethos, I will be rather deprived. Because if skepticism becomes my creed then I’m numbered with the people who laughed at the children at Fatima, who scoffed at St. Bernadette, who explained that Pentecost was due to an excess of wine, who called the voice of God the mere rumble of thunder and who had the handy dandy explanation that the Resurrection was faked by the apostles. I’m wise as a serpent. Yay me. But serpents aren’t really all that much to write home about. And simple skeptical explanations are sometimes more simple-minded than the most credulous person who ever lived.

See, the thing is, sometimes God shows up. Indeed sometimes God actually does something extra wondrous. By “extra wondrous” I mean that, while I consider “holding the entire field of reality in being nanosecond by nanosecond for 13 billion years” to be wondrous enough for my tastes, it is also the case that now and then, at moments of His choosing, He throws a little something more into the mix by, say, sending angels to announce things like “Unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord.”

When He does that, He tends to do it, not so much for the benefit of plump and self-satisfied college boy skeptical suburbanites like me, but for shepherds, parking lot attendants and members of the lower eschelons who lack my tedious fear of looking unsophisticated. He does it for the benefit of the meek and lowly: people whose taste for Dick’s Drive In Gut Bombs keeps them from foregoing food they like in favor of the Right Food eaten by the Right Sort of People. He does it for the benefit of people who do the decent thing because they never understood that stuff their brother-in-law preached to them from his graduate philosophy class about being Beyond Good and Evil before he ditched the wife and kids. He does it for the benefit of people who never forgot what their mother told them about how God was in heaven and looking out for them. He does it for the benefit of people who say their prayers at night, and think you should not speak ill of the dead, and who don’t enjoy wry, sarcastic laughter at the expense of GEDs. He does it for the benefit of people who watch corny Frank Capra movies and resolve to be better because of it, despite critics who sneer at them for being sentimentalists. He does it for the benefit of people who don’t use scare quotes to say words like Truth or Holy. He does it for the benefit of people who, when they see something wonderful, think first of God and not of how to dissect the wonder and kill it. In short, God shows Himself to the Faithful, whom the world routinely sneers at as the credulous, the foolish, and the suckers.

Our age, which tends to prize . being excessively wise as a serpent over being excessively innocent as a dove is not really smarter for it. It’s just more closed to the possibility that God might, in fact, show up. That’s not a virtue. It’s just cynicism and cowardice about being laughed at as a fool. The guys at Spirit Daily are willing to risk being laughed at a hundred times for being wrong because they know that if they are right on the hundred and first time, it will have been worth it. And they know that sooner or later they are bound to be right because God has, at Bethlehem and Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre (among other places), already shown up in a big way and promised to show up again where two or three are gathered in His Name. So though my personality type makes me tend toward leeriness, my intellect says, “So what if they’re a bit too inclined to believe in miracles over at Spirit Daily? It doesn’t hurt anybody.” The shepherds of Bethlehem seem to be none the worse for wear, though they probably credited all sorts of urban legends, nursery stories and Tales of the Unexplained as true when it was all just thunder or a thing that went bump in the night. Nonetheless, when God showed up it was to the “low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor 1:28-29). If Mary is turning up in Egypt, it wouldn’t be the first, or even the second time. I don’t know that she is, mind you, and I’ll bide by the Church’s judgment in the matter. But in the meantime, I will strive to avoid excesses of doubt just as much as I think others need to avoid excesses of credulity. You never know when some shepherd is going to show up saying “We have seen the Lord Jesus!” and you can’t afford to be snobby when he does. It might make you miss Christmas!

My thought: “Good luck with that.”

I’m highly skeptical that guys like Hugh Owen, who believe in a young earth and the co-existence of dinosaurs and humans, are going to land any punches that overthrow the basic arguments for stuff like an old earth and the evolutionary growth of life . over the past three billion years or so. But they are welcome to give it their best shot. I don’t have any religious faith invested in the theory of biological evolution one way or t’other, so I don’t think skeptics about it are heretics who need to be silenced and shouted down as monsters, fools or wicked people. If somebody is wrong or dubious about, say, quantum mechanics or special relativity (which likewise present us with claims about the universe that are a bit hard to comprehend or swallow), the answer to their dubiousness or confusion is not “SHUT UP!”

But that has been the approach of the scientific establishment to people who have doubts about evolution—for decades. It’s lousy pedagogy and it tends to create conformists and skeptics, but not inquirers. I favor inquiry, even when the inquirers are making mistakes. The facts behind the basic evolutionary narrative of life on earth are pretty sturdy and can take care of themselves. Theyt do not require the likes of P.Z. Myers and his toadies to be Inquisitors.

I think the reason there are so many folk in the SHUT UP! crowd is mostly that, for many people, and especially for many of our manufacturers of culture, evolution is the central prop, not of science, but of a particular religious/philosophical outlook which relies on one of the only two objections St. Thomas could ever find to the existence of God:

Objection 2. Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God’s existence.

Meaning, in translation, “Things seem to work fine without God, so there’s no God. Ancients thought lightning was divine wrath, but now we know it’s just electricity. Ancients thought disease caused by evil spirits, but now we know it’s just germs. Ancients thought creatures were made by God, now we know it’s just evolution.”

Thomas’ answer to this line of thinking, of course, is still sensible:

Reply to Objection 2. Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle, as was shown in the body of the Article.

But people who are looking for an excuse to ignore God are not really interested in reason, however much they may bill themselves as “Brights”. They are looking for a very powerful aesthetic appeal to a pre-conceived and pre-rational choice to reject God. As I noted some time ago:

In God Is Not Great, Hitchens describes how, at the age of nine, he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong:

I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong.

Hitchens’s brother, Peter, drily replies:

At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection.

It’s my view that he still doesn’t know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he “simply knew” who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind.

What is marvelous is how nakedly Hitchens reveals his own atheist convictions to be entirely faith-based and—what is more—based on faith in a mystical epiphany to a nine-year-old boy. All the massive artillery of his adult wit and eloquence is, in the final analysis, ranked and ranged to protect that boy and his emotional epiphany. In contrast, all Christ asks of us is to have hearts like children, not minds like children. St. Thomas’s faith was childlike; his intellect was formidably adult. Hitchens, in contrast, demands we reject St. Thomas’s fifth demonstration of the existence of God — because a nine-year-old boy had a really strong feeling once half-a-century ago.

The odd paradox about Thomas’ second objection to the existence of God is how incurious the people who believe it are. It’s like the child who thinks that he has “figured out computers” because he now understands that all the empty theological speculation about “CPUs” and “chips” is just woo woo. “We now know”, he says with confidence, “that pressing ‘C’ is what makes the C appear on the screen.”

Likewise, the atheist materialist says, “Given the vast panoply of Being which somehow exists and organizes itself according to intelligible physical laws governing time, space, matter and energy, we can confidently state that our after-the-fact guesses about how this massive and elegant panoply of Being resulted in the giraffe mean that we never have to account for the fact of the vast panoply of Being, much less why it is self-organizing and intelligible.” It’s a massive act of hand-waving (and, of course, shouting and denunciations of heretics who go on being a bit curious about questions like “Why is there anything?” and “Why is it so elegant?” “Why does itt all tend toward an end?” and “Why can my three pound piece of meat behind my eyes understand it at all?” In the end, atheist materialism, particularly of the Darwin-adoring variety, often seems to me to be a huge case of intellect worship rather than intellect use.

In a somewhat related vein is the ongoing battle being waged over the whole “Intelligent Design” argument. For us laymen, things seemed fairly obvious for a while. The ID guys appeared to be restating Thomas’ fifth demonstration of the existence of God, using some cool new info from the biological sciences. Thomas says:

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

Seems like a rather straightforward point, clouded only by the kinds of ingenious avoidance of the obvious in which modernity specializes. Arrows find their mark, not because of their keen and innate cleverness, but because the archer makes the arrow to find its mark. There may be all sorts of secondary causes at work as the archer does his business: the sort of feathers he chooses for it, the kind of bow, the sort of target, the way he exploits the breeze. But at the end of the day, it comes back to the archer, not the arrow. Things are made to find their ends—rocks find the ground when you let go of them, electrons find protons, and geese find their way south each winter—because they were made to find their ends by a Creator who made them that way.

The ID guys make rather similar points. When you see “specified complexity”—Mount Rushmore vs. Mt. Rainier, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony vs. the rain on the roof, or a complicated little gizmo that acts as a motor for a bacterium flagellum vs. a leaf twirling in the wind—you naturally intuit “design”. (A friend of mine who works at Boeing once took an illustration like the one I link here, stripped it of its descriptive caption and sent it round to a bunch of engineers to ask for their commentary. Instant response: “Who designed this?” They took it for a piece of nanotechnology.) Indeed, so strong is the inference of design that guys like Francis Crick have to formulate credal utterances like, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” to keep the Faithful from straying from the True Path. Because, as True Believers in Thomas’ objection 2 believe and profess, it’s gotta be that either God the First Cause designed it or evolution the second cause produced it. No both/and allowed.

But the ID guys have run into some trouble. Not from atheist/materialists (that’s to be expected) but from Catholics and, in particular, Thomists. The problem with ID arguments, Thomists maintain, is that they buy into the same either/or thinking as the atheist/materialists. In this critique, the problem is that ID argumentation tends to set living systems in stark contrast to the rest of the created order, such that, say, the eye or the bacterium flagellum is designed but ordinary seawater, or soil, or a rock are just random “nature”. The problem with this, say the theological critics of ID, is that it doesn’t think deeply enough about what the Tradition means when it speaks of God as the Creator. Rocks and wind and weather and all the other events taking place in Creation are likewise part of the design of God. Calling out living systems alone as evidence of Intelligent Design tends to reinforce the notion that the rest of nature is not designed too.

Michael Flynn sums up the difference between the Thomistic and ID approaches this way:

The difference between the ID argument and Aquinas’ Fifth Way is that the former take the apparent exceptions as evidence of God while Aquinas takes the rules as the evidence. Channeling the old boy for a moment, he would more likely regard Darwin’s theory as mild support for God’s existence than he would [Michael] Behe’s apparent exceptions. Even if Behe were right that natural selection does not account for certain biochemical structures, that does not preclude some other natural process yet to be discovered from doing so.

So ID looks, for instance, at things like “irreducible complexity” and says, “Nature can’t account for this irreducibly complex paramecium motor, so it suggests some sort of divine creation at work.” Thomism says, “Don’t focus on God of the Gaps arguments (“We don’t know how this could have arisen naturally, therefore God did it.”) but instead look at the nature of being itself and how it so elegantly works and is intelligible. Otherwise, on the day somebody figure out how some inexplicable mystery can be explained (as has happened thousands of times in the sciences), somebody’s faith in God will die because they hitched it to the notion that mysteries are necessarily proof of some miraculous intervention by God apart from the normal course of nature.

Rather strenuous denunciations can sometimes ensue as people get het up about all this. And, of course, the atheists are still busy denouncing anybody who thinks God has anything to do with anything. So the ID guys tend to get it from both sides in the debate.

Me: While I can certainly see big problems with God of the Gaps arguments, I’ve never quite grokked the hostility that ID people often receive from the Catholic and Thomist sides of the argument (and I’m a big fan of Thomism). It’s always seemed to me that the arguments for ID can quite easily be read in pretty much the same way that the Catholic tradition has always read, for instance, the miracles of Jesus: as places where the veil between this world and the next is especially thin, not as places where, alone, design is happening. So yeah: I get that a rock is, in its own way, just as “designed” as an eye or a liver cell. I get that it is Being itself and the intelligibility thereof that are the real metaphysical realities that ultimately need to be addressed. I get that the rules, far more than the exceptions to the rules, are what need explaining.

But, well, I don’t see the big problem with saying, “When it walks and talks like a duck, odd’s are it’s a duck.” So when I look at what the ID guys call “specified complexity” I make exactly the same inference every single time: somebody designed this, just like the Boeing engineers did. I don’t think there’s any need to invoke the God of the Gaps, or to assume that the Somebody who designed it couldn’t have used natural means to achieve his affect. But I do have the same sensation as Chesterton when he observed that, “one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.” When something is massively and eloquently redolent of the astounding ingenuity of the Creator as, say, even the simplest living system is (however it may have evolved), then why not chalk it up to a Creator? I don’t think that takes a God of the gaps argument. I think it just takes common sense. If an arrow in a target says “archer” and a bullet in a body says “murderer”, then why doesn’t that paramecium motor scream “Design!”?

Part of the issue, it seems to me, is that the theological approaches . want very much to avoid “Then a miracle occurs!” thinking. ID seems to many Christian critics to invoke God the Tinkerer, who endlessly pops into the natural order to say, “Presto! Now let’s have a species of tyrannosaur!” There appears to be, understandably, an aesthetic resistance to the notion that nature is basically a sort of badly running engine from GM that requires constant interference from Outside to keep cranking out new species of critters. Everybody likes (and this is a favorite word in the scientific community) “elegance”: a self-contained system where you don’t have to constantly monkey with the rules to keep it going. It takes care of itself and runs smoothly. Scientists like this. So do theologians (and this is often a shock to atheist materialists).

And there is a real reason for that. We know instinctively that reasonable explanations for events in nature are nearly always natural ones. The car crashed, not because fire demons demanded a sacrifice and took over the teenager’s brain, but because he got wasted at the dance and tried to drive home. Evil spirits didn’t eat your homework. The Scooby Gang really did see Old Mr. Higgins in a bedsheet and not a ghost. Lame appeals to the supernatural to avoid doing your math are lame.

Moreover, Christianity and Judaism present us with a revelation of a God who has invested in creation a certain autonomy, if you will. Nature depends on him, to be sure. But God is not an arbitrary magician who is continually fiddling around with the laws of thermodynamics and Planck’s Constant just for the heck of it. He is, as Christ reveals, the Logos who cannot contradict himself and who invests creation with his order and harmony. And so the psalmist, like St. Thomas, sees that it is the mundane orderliness of nature doing what it does every day that is the big miracle. “O Lord,” he cries like Thomas, “how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy creatures.” This deep and broad strain of worship and acclamation which sees the wonder of God precisely in the fact that stones fall every time you drop them, water runs downhill every time you pour it, and the sun rises every morning is real and profound and valid. Such a “theology of thanks” for the wisdom of God revealed in the ordinary undergirds, for instance, the entirety of Chesterton’s outlook. He doesn’t need to see a man grow new leg before his very eyes to be thankful to God. He is grateful for the miracle of two legs to put in his trousers. In just the same vein, I have no problem with the notion that life evolves by means of the ordinary powers God has invested in nature for the same reason I have no problem with the notion that Michaelangelo used a chisel. God seems to be rather fond of making creation a participant in his work. He’s free, if he likes, to create and develop life via the innate behavior of the time, space, matter, and energy that he himself invented.

And yet… Christianity does in fact insist that God acts on the created order in ways which both incorporate and transcend the “laws of nature” and that the “laws of nature” are, in the end, simply descriptions, not prescriptions. Such laws are “what God has designed nature to do—most of the time” and not, in the slightest, “what God is bound to do by the Higher Power that is Nature.” In short, Christianity insists on the reality of miracles.

Because of this, I remain deeply agnostic about what God is and is not allowed to do in the creation and development of life, especially human life, particularly when we know so very little about the history of life on earth. For in addition to praising God for making a world in which the marvelous order of being speaks to the fact of the Creator, there is another dynamic well established in revelation too. It is the fact that God is also praised for doing things like the miracle of the loaves and fishes where, quite some time after the Big Bang, he opted to call matter into being from nothing as he did at the Beginning. It is the fact that he also occasionally designs eyes or other organ systems from scratch as he did in the miracles of Jesus and in the miraculous healing of Peter Smith’s destroyed eyes. So I’m not going to sit here and tell God that it upsets my theories about elegance and my aesthetic notions of how Nature should go when, for all I know, he’s been tinkering with nature from the start.

Mind you, I don’t think he has been doing this and I have grave doubts that the suggestion he has is a very adequate account of the origins and development of life. I’m as skeptical as the next guy toward “Then a miracle occurs!” attempts to get around doing the hard work of science. But I’m also a Christian who thinks the record is really quite plain: sometimes a miracle does occur and aesthetic objections by atheist/materialists are faced with a great divine exclamation of “Tough beans!” from the God who, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, does whatever he feels like doing.

Therefore, my own take on the ID thing is that the “irreducible complexity” argument is extremely weak and the “specified complexity” argument is strong. That is, when somebody tells me “I don’t understand how it happened, so God or pixies must have done it” I think this is lousy philosophy and lousier science. It’s just the God of the Gaps all over again. However, when somebody shows me highly specified complexity—say, an Encyclopedia Britannica or a Boeing 747—I don’t regard that as a product of dumb luck but as an artifact of Mind. So do engineers when they find a car, coroners when they find a bullet-riddled body, and my older brother when he found my name scrawled on his TV screen in my nine year old hand. And when I look at a cell—the simplest of which dwarfs the Encyclopedia Britannica and a Boeing 747 in specified complexity—I have exactly the same intuition. I have it so strongly that I can’t even repeat Crick’s creed with a straight face. I sense that, however that specified complexity arose through the meandering course of evolution over three billion years, it still puts me in a place where the veil between this world and the next looks exceptionally thin. It’s the same sensation I have when I encounter the miracles of Christ.

So in the end, it seems to me that both the normal rules of the universe (such as entropy breaking down dead bodies) and the exceptions to the rules (such as generation of living bodies and, still more, the raising of Lazarus) point, as they pointed for the apostles, to God. I empathize with the Thomist who sees God in the ordinary boring rules of physics and I empathize with the rather conflicted atheist Francis Crick, who said, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” Crick’s atheism prevented him from facing what I regard as the bleedin’ obvious: “almost” a miracle nothing! It was (and remains) a huge and ongoing miracle and a place where the veil is particularly thin between heaven and earth—even if we reach the stage where we really can account for every last detail of the physics and chemistry by which life occurred. For the physics and chemistry themselves simply point to the fact that the Creator writes Being elegantly. As St. Thomas says:

Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship. (Commentary on Physics II.8, lecture 14, no. 268)

The sciences, in analyzing the origins of life, are like a man analyzing the manuscript of Hamlet and discovering the sort of wood pulp the paper is made from and definitively showing that the ink was composed of this or that chemical. But it is for those who can read to point out that this is not what Hamlet is, but only what it is made of. Not for nothing then do we hail the Holy Spirit as “the Lord, the giver of life.” Living systems do not seem to me to be places where “design” happens exclusively and in stark contrast to the “undersigned” rest of Nature. Rather, like the miracles of Christ, living systems seem to me to be places where the veil between this world and the next is particularly thin. To be sure, there are some places where the veil is even thinner: such as the miracles of Jesus themselves. The Incarnation of Christ, his signs and wonders, the sacraments, and the Eucharist all constitute remarkable instances where God does things “not according to the normal course of nature.” And yet they are not “tinkering” or propping up a badly running system in need of kluges and fixes to make it work. Rather, grace perfects nature. If God did something similar in, for instance, the creation of the human species, I can’t see that he’s not allowed to. I merely see places where atheist/materialists with a particular aesthetic sense of “how nature is supposed to be” are worshipping that sense as an idol.

So, while I’m skeptical of the ID case for a tinkering God of the Gaps peppering nature with “Then a miracle occurs!”, I don’t entirely rule out the possibility of miracles now and then either. Nor do I see why the ID emphasis on specified complexity as strongly indicating a Creator is, by itself, such a bad thing. To me, it seems like window dressing on the same point Paul is making in Romans 1:20. But above all, I agree with Thomas that the big miracle is not the occasional miraculous exception to the rules, but the fact that there are any rules, and indeed, any things at all.

Given this view of the Faith, discussions in the press then break down into inane prattle about mortal and venial sin.  Here, for instance, is Slate explaining it all for you:

What kinds of sins aren’t deadly?

The venial ones. The Catholic Church divides sinful behavior into two categories: mortal and venial. (The distinction wasn’t widespread until the medieval period.) Mortal sins are those that the sinner knows are serious but nonetheless decides to perform. They include the seven deadly sins as well as countless others, like witchcraft or skipping out on Sunday Mass. Other indiscretions, including any that were carried out by an ignorant or unwilling sinner, fall into the venial category. So do lesser versions of the mortal sins; for example, mild overeating would be a venial sin whereas gluttony is deadly. With both types, you can wipe the slate clean with confession and repentance, but only unrepented mortal sins can condemn you to eternal hell.

What is absent from all this is any concept of life in Christ as relationship. All you get are rules, written on a card and magnetized to the refrigerator. Break rules on Card A and the Divine Administrator puts in the record that you are slated for Hell. Break rules on Card B and the Divine Administrator marks down the infraction and gives you a warning. Earn enough infractions and the Sin Monitor Task Force transfers your name to the “Go to Hell” file. However, if you do the theological equivalent of filling out a waiver by going to Confession, the Divine Administrator will, for inscrutable reasons, round file your sin folder and let you start over.

The goal of the Christian life, in this scenario, is to die with your sin folder empty. Then God has to let you into Heaven, which is this beautiful place that has nothing to do with Him really. It’s just a pretty park where your favorite dead people have been standing around waiting for you to arrive. The notion of a life of virtue spent trying to cultivate a relationship with God never enters the picture. It’s just a question of keeping and breaking rules. And nobody (in the MSM) really knows why one rule is more important than another. Indeed, some of the rules appear to have nothing whatever do with anything, if you judge by the portrayal of the MSM. A mortal sin to miss Mass? That one must have been stuck in by the Church to try to control people. Hey! Everybody lusts. Downgrade that one to venial. And if we are going to have rule to control people, why not put something in there about banning SUVs? Destroying the earth is more serious than missing Mass you know!  Surely God is madder about that (of course, he’s mad about pretty much every infraction so it’s hard to tell.)

In the same way, Hell seems to have nothing to do with relationship in the modern mind. I constantly meet people who think of Hell as an absurdly sadistic overreaction by a touchy God who gets irrationally angry when people don’t keep his arbitrary rules. Or else it’s something that falls on the head of innocent people like a safe from a third floor window: “How can you believe in a God who would damn to Hell people who were doing their best, just because they never heard of Jesus?”  Prescinding from the fact that the Church believes no such thing, what is striking is that again this notion of Hell has not one thing to do with relationship. There is not the slightest grasp that Hell is the “definitive self-exclusion” of a soul from the society of God. Hell is not some arbitrary punishment that God sticks on us like postage stamps because we got too many infractions in the file or forgot to get a waiver.  It is Hitler (or maybe you or me) looking squarely at the offer of relationship with God and man he systematically destroyed and blaming everybody else for his choices.  It is the human heart walling itself off finally and utterly from relationship with God and man in idiotic pride.  It is any of us, making the final choice to be bricked round in the furnace of ourselves.

In short, people don’t seem to grasp that Heaven is simply the fruit of a life that pursues relationship with God on His terms and Hell is simply the fruit of a life that pursues its own course on its own terms. Mortal and venial sins are useful distinctions, to be sure. But if you turn them into another way of trying to be saved by law, you are stone deaf to the most elementary teaching of the gospel: that only Christ, not law, can save us.

That pattern can be seen all over the place.

Consider the Pilgrims’ Progress over the past four centuries. In their day, these Angry Young Men were, as Angry Young Men usually are, certain they were where History was going. The Puritan stormed out of the ecclesial house in a huff in the 17th Century. In that, he was a little like and a little unlike his Anglican father who had himself walked out of the Catholic house a century before. The Anglican had mostly done so, not out of religious zealotry, but because Henry VIII wanted to remarry and he and his buddies had their eye on all that delectable property that the Church was blowing on such wasted pursuits as educating the poor and caring for the sick.

Of course, once Henry was gone, it became necessary for the winner of the Darwinian struggle for the throne, Elizabeth I, to consolidate Henry’s victory lest she lose the power Dad had won for her. So with ad campaigns against the Catholic “Bloody Mary” and assiduous cultivation of “Virgin Queen” mythology (imagine walking into your local Catholic parish and finding all the statues of Mary replaced with likenesses of Michele Obama if you want to get the hang of how crass it was), she pulled it off. In the great revolt of the rich against the poor that was the English Reformation, the Church was pillaged of its dangerous affinity for the oppressed and made the docile servant of Caesar. But as the revolt began to age and the Anglican Church became the tool of the rich that its royal architects had always intended it be, something happened that they did not intend: real religious zeal was unleashed by extremist 17^th Century Radicals called Puritans who took way too seriously all that Calvinism that was getting Continental Protestants worked up. The Puritans looked at their Anglican fathers and said, “You guys sold out!”

So, like all hotheaded young turks, the Puritan set himself to show the old man he could do it better. Dad, said the Puritan, had rejected the Pope but retained popery. The young Puritan, full of the future with his New Model Army and exciting theories about election and predestination, would at last scour the Faith clean of all the smells, bells, feasts, fasts, images and statues and become Purely Spiritual (see here). He rejected anything with a popish scent as the worship of Satan. He was particularly hostile to religious images and smashed them with zeal. With a sort of silly logic, he set himself against feast days because a) they gave honor to saints instead of God Alone and b) they provided the shiftless poor with a day off to have fun instead of inculcating the famous Protestant Work Ethic that would make the Industrial Revolution so much fun. Indeed, he was so distrustful of the Catholic idea of “sacred time” that, in addition to inventing Grinch behavior by banning Christmas, some Puritans even tried to ban speaking of “Monday, Tuesday” etc. because these names came from Norse and Roman deities. However, the attempt to inaugurate “First Day, Second Day, Third Day” and so forth failed due to the congenital English inability to maintain religious fanaticism once the mood passes. So did Cromwell’s attempt to get rid of the King, theatres, feasts and pretty much anything else the English thought was fun. In the end, England had enough of the Pure and brought back the King, Christmas, theatres, feasts and all the rest (except the stuff—like the Catholic Church—that threatened the rich winners of Henry’s revolt). Not without reason does Chesterton express the general feeling of “good riddance” that reigned at the time of the Restoration when he remarks that “In America, they have feast to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims. Here in England, we should have a feast to celebrate their departure.”

Thanks to America, the failure of his English political fortunes did not spell the end for the Puritan. Long after his star fell across the Pond, the Puritan soldiered forth on our shores, fretting that someone, somewhere was having a good time. But something odd happened during the long years after the death of Cromwell. As time went on the Puritan found that the face staring back at him from the mirror each morning was looking more and more like his comfortable Anglican Father’s.

As an example of what I mean, consider the curious interior of King’s Chapel in Boston. An amalgam of Puritan and Anglican heritage, it was assiduously scoured clean of any Romish imagery that might tempt the unwary Puritan into the sensuous worship that characterizes the benighted papist. However, it is also a chapel which was essentially funded by the prosperous local burghers and young capitalists whom the American colonies produced with such fertility. It being only their due for such public-spirited generosity, the benefactors naturally received the thanks (one might even call it the “veneration”) of a grateful church in the form of dozens of statues and busts bearing their likeness which adorn every nook and cranny of King’s Chapel. And so the Puritans achieved the overthrow of Rome and all its pomps and works—its crucifixes, stained glass, baroque saints, shrines, and rosaries—and proceeded to put in place of all this Romish piety… the statues of a bunch of rich guys. Eventually, they also created a civilization in which the central architectural feat was no longer the Romish cathedral of ignorant superstitious Dark Age faith, but the sleek, modern skyscraper dedicated to the forthright worship of Mammon.

All this was a bit awkward for the architects of the City on a Hill, so it was necessary to establish a Creation Myth for the new country that preserved something more ennobling than, “As a matter of fact, you can serve two Masters.” But it couldn’t be a creation myth that acknowledged the Roman Menace as the 19^th Century Know Nothings called the Catholics in their midst. So instead a 19^th century Protestant culture naturally established a Protestant creation myth starring…well, that’s the funny thing.

You see, as the children of a young country began to crowd around the portly and prosperous Puritan, asking him to be a heritage, identity, and guide, the once-rebellious Puritan found he had to submit to the humiliating process of become Venerable. He discovered that he could not build a life on mere protest. He couldn’t be Pure anymore, because his children needed him to be human. So the old firebrand who once swore to burn down every last vestige of popish pomp found himself dragging such things as Tradition out of the attic in order to teach his children. The hater of religious images started turning up in paintings hung in churches all over America. The smasher of statues got his graven image covered in pigeon doo all over America. This old radical whose rebel hero Cromwell had beheaded the King had to invent a government, and eventually fight a Civil War in which his heirs in Boston and Washington DC found it necessary to crush rebellion.

And most ironic, the government prosecuting that war found it necessary to raise the spirits of a battle-weary nation by pointing to none other than the Puritan’s honored example in the establishment of what amounted to (horrors!) a civic liturgical feast to be held on a particular sacred day every November. In the supreme plot twist, this despiser of Holy Days wound up being remembered by a nation hungry for a creation myth as the establisher of the first holiday celebrated on American soil—a Feast whose name, in Greek, is “Eucharist.” Indeed, the day would eventually arrive where his children would fight as hard to honor this feast as he had fought to destroy all such liturgical celebrations. They would find themselves protesting the War on Christmas as vociferously as he had protested Christmas.

And most ironic? As the Puritan went through all these changes, he would discover another, rather unexpected, voice close beside him: the voice of the Holy Father in Rome, speaking out against tyranny, speaking out for the Gospel of Life, speaking out for the Gospel of Christ, speaking out to give thanks to God as he had done in that first Thanksgiving. In this curious development, we may discern a bit of Malachi’s prophesy that God would turn the hearts of the fathers toward their children and the hearts of the children toward their fathers (Malachi 3:23-24). And so we can pray that the day will come when all the children of Puritanism give thanks (as so many already have) for the Holy Father who, like Twain’s father, turns out to have learned an amazing amount in 400 years.

Here she is, holding forth on “breast cancer awareness” campaigns and such like:

Shut up about breast cancer awareness. We are so frickin aware I’m gonna vomit. People are always “raising awareness” about things everybody knows about. It is the activism of cowards. Especially women, who are so desperate for safety and approval.

When I got lupus there was this big pull to “get involved” with what I call the “bourgeois disease complex”: the annual “months” and ribbons and in the case of lupus, really corny mascots like butterflies. I think I willed myself into remission just to avoid it. It was all so… female. Ugh.

As a citizen of the Soviet of Washington, I must attest a certain resonance with this. There are certain pieties which much be observed here the Land of the Green and the Home of the Gay. So we are perpetually being made aware of things that we would have to be in a coma not to be aware of. Did you know that AIDS is a deadly disease we must defeat? News to me. Also, it turns out that we need to fight it, not by keeping our pants zipped and not swapping body fluids with complete strangers, but by wearing red ribbons and attending Pride Parades.

Also, were you aware that care for the environment is important and that we should respect the Earth by wearing green ribbons and recycling? Total news flash to me. If I didn’t have Seattle media making me aware of that 24/7/365 my short-term memory loss would have completely erased that knowledge from my mind.

Indeed, if it were not for ribbons, I would be totally unaware of lots of things only a victim of massive brain hemorrhage could be unaware of. How could we possibly remember that gender violence, suicide, prostate cancer, slavery, sex trafficking, autism, child abuse, lupus, cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, stomach cancer, racism, diabetes, brain cancer, sexual assault, childhood cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and congenital cytomegaloviruses are bad without ribbons to remind us? (Actually, I really wasn’t aware of congenital cytomegaloviruses, but I would assume that anything with “congenital” in the name is probably bad.) Some things, like brain cancer and brain disorders have two separate ribbons, one silver and one gray, which is confusing and redundant. Other ribbons are to make us aware of unspecified things like “targeted individuals” (which, I suppose, means something like “Save Ferris”.) But at the end of the day, the vast majority of these ribbons are designed to make you aware of things you’ve been aware of practically since the day you manifested a brain wave.

And that got me thinking. One of the things a culture seems to naturally do is establish a sort of liturgical repetition of Sacred Truths which it then repeats over and over and over. Which Sacred Truths get repeated over and over and over more or less seems to determine what that culture is actually about. So, for instance, we go to Mass to hear, well, basically the same thing repeated to us again and again, often in identical words (the Creed, and, most especially, the Words of the Institution of the Eucharist, for instance). Exactly what we don’t want—what would be a very bad thing indeed, is to hear something new: to stop reading from the Scriptures we’ve heard a million times and start reading from the latest bit of New Age twaddle from some book recommended by Oprah. The core and essence of what we do at Mass is make ourselves aware of what we already know or believe.

Other structures of belief do the same thing, so you go to your favorite political or cultural group in order to hear, yet again, that liberals are evil dumbasses and we good guys value freedom and the little guy, or to hear that conservatives are corporate stooge dumbasses and we good guys value freedom and the little guy, or that Breast Cancer Awareness must be promoted because evil males have minimized this dread disease and we must raise the consciousness of the public, or what not.

In short, for each culture and subculture there’s a Sacred Story that must be spoken again and again which gives each group its cohesion. Such stories may or may not be true. They may be true but trivial. They may be some mixture of true and false. They may be outright lies. They may be (and often are) recognized by the adherents of the group as “sacred” only in the sense of an emphatically small “s”: the moment when two people looked at each other and said, “You like keeping aquarium fish too? Wow! I thought I was the only one! Hey! We should start a little group to talk about keeping tropical fish!”

But whatever the sacred story is that keeps a group of people together to discuss their passion, such stories are the things which hold together that gathering of Cub Scouts, or Lesbians for Choice, or Model Railroad Enthusiasts, or KKK members, or MAD Magazine Collectors. This is all quite normal and human and is the basis of every private association on the planet.

Now sometimes that sacred story gets seized by enthusiasts and raised to the level of what Catholics call Sacred Tradition. When the sacred story is something relatively minor and gets this inflationary treatment, people usually laugh (as, for instance, in this classic essay by Chesterton in which he addresses a Lawn Tennis enthusiast who took the game waaaaaay too seriously).

But when the Sacred Human Story elevated to the status of Sacred Tradition is about some of the bigger issues in human existence—nations, blood, race, economics, sex, family, etc.—these things can often loom so large in our minds that we are tempted to elevate them to the altar and confuse them with the Word of God Himself. When that happens, it is almost a certainty that somebody is going to get hurt or killed as a result.

That’s what Paul is really warning about when he tells the Colossians:

See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

This passage, one of the most misunderstood in Scripture, is not a denunciation of the Catholic idea of Sacred Tradition. It has not a word to say against the basic Catholic idea that apostolic Tradition comes down to us in written and unwritten form and constitutes the common life, teaching and worship of the Church. It doesn’t even have anything particularly hostile to say about human traditions, which are the lifeblood of normal human society and constitute the way in which civilizations function. (Imagine, if it’s even possible, a world with no human traditions: no birthdays, anniversaries, special meals, toasts, wedding rings, rites of passage, funerals, retirement parties, favorite games, favorite songs, or any other repeated group actions. You may as well try to imagine a world without human beings. Tradition is how we remember who we are.)

No, the only thing Paul warns about here—the only thing Scripture ever warns about human tradition—is the elevation of mere human tradition to the status of Sacred Tradition: the confusion of your own Favorite Human Thing with the essence of the gospel Jesus Christ entrusted to his Church. Against that, Paul and the Church warn us with great force and it has ever been the task of the Magisterium to help us distinguish between mere human tradition and Sacred Tradition. Every time we are tempted to make our views about some ideology, or prudential judgment, or hot button issue into Sacred Tradition, or to minimize some aspect of the Tradition in order to get away with excusing our favorite ideological sins, the teaching of the Church is there to check us. We can love our girlfriend all we like, just so long as we do not love her more than the command not to commit fornication. We can love our country all we like, just so long as we do not place the love of country higher than the love of God and the command, “You shall not do evil that good may come of it.” Tribal allegiances are fine, as are such requirements for loyalty to one’s own flesh and blood: but such allegiances, exalted to a theory of race superiority or genocidal war against the impure are sins against the two greatest commandments. Love of science is fine. But love of science divorced from love of God and neighbor is toxic.

The paradox is that the warning against such confusion is based exactly on the fact that the human things we love and want to exalt are not bad but very very good. It’s because our family, our country, our life, our children, our property and our work, our art and our science are great and good things that we must keep them in their proper places lest they so easily become idols that we place on the altar instead of the Eucharist, where they inevitably become demons. And yet, paradoxically, the Church is the strongest defender of those who savor their particular human traditions, yet remember they are merely human and not divine. So the Church loves the flourishing of local cultures and has been the Mother and patron of thousands of different human cultures. She likewise encourages all sorts of investigation and experimentation in disciplines like science, philosophy, politics and art. The only point where she draws the line is when somebody attempts to claim that “All true Catholics must adhere solely and entirely to capitalism/liberation theology/Impressionism/the Republican Party/Obamacare/Thomism/America/Saving the Children/Predestination/Darwinism etc.” The Faith is not a human ideology or tradition and therefore cannot be whittled down to fit any of these human traditions, however good and useful they may be.

Just something to be aware of.

How do I live in that sort of contradiction?

I am large. I contain multitudes. I also believe in democracy and yet I vote. I oppose abortion and yet love babies at the same time. I think the family and marriage to be sacred and yet I hate divorce and oppose gay “marriage” as a sham and a fraud. I believe in Catholic Just War teaching and yet I oppose war crimes. I say I support Catholic moral teaching and yet I reject the notion that the ends justify the means. Clearly, I am a fragmented and incomprehensible personality. There’s no telling what I might say next! That apparently is why people repeatedly talk as though things I have to say about the Bush policies which resulted in the torture and even murder of detainees (not infrequently innocent detainees) have nothing to do with things I have to say about Catholic theology.

This phenomenon of bafflement about how to fathom the connection between my religious views and my politics happens with my Lefty readers too. How can I believe in the gospel of love and the Prince of Peace and yet be so mean as to reject the sham of gay ‘marriage’? How is it possible for me to regard the Bush Administration as a catastrophe and yet not be filled with elation at the election of Obama? My email box is full of puzzled frustration at the mystery of my political views and lots of advice from people who tell me “Stick to theology” as though the two have absolutely no connection in my mind. In turn, I find the mystification of my readers even more mysterious. Here’s the key to the riddle: I’m a Catholic. So, in my mind, politics (like everything else in the universe) is intimately connected to theology or, more precisely, to God.

I think that politics is the art of the possible. I regard political parties as large clumsy mechanisms which Catholics should attempt to use in order to try to enact as much Catholic social teaching as possible. Sort of like trying to knit with tire irons. The moment such parties stand in the way of some fundamental aspect of Catholic social teaching is the moment I drop them like a hot rock and look around for some other means of advancing the Church’s teaching. I have absolutely no party loyalty whatsoever and never have. Such loyalty seems to me as sensible as cleaving loyally to a hammer through thick and thin when what might be needed to do the job is a wrench or a screwdriver. I also endeavor to have as little ideological loyalty as I can possibly manifest, because I regard ideology as almost intrinsically heretical: an aspect of the Church’s teachings that is ripped off of the whole and then blown up to absurd proportions. As such, ideology almost invariably tends to start crowding out other aspects of the Church’s teaching sooner or later—generally sooner. There can be grace periods where there doesn’t necessarily have to be war between the part that is the ideology and the whole that is the Faith. But when war comes (as it almost always does), I want to be on the side of the whole Catholic teaching rather than on the side of the heretical shred.

So, for instance, the Dems were, once upon a time, much more amenable to enacting Catholic social teaching. They were also, as are all pols, about getting elected. But it was still a workable alliance so long as the Dems didn’t pit themselves in a fundamental way against some crucial and non-negotiable teaching of Holy Mother Church. During that long-ago time, it was the GOP that was a political home for registered Republican Margaret Sanger. Had I lived then, some sixty or seventy years ago, I would have been an Al Smith Labor Democrat, trying get as much of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno enacted as policy as I could.

But when the Dem party cast itself in with fealty to the sacrament of abortion in the 70s, they committed spiritual suicide in their worship of Moloch and have paid for it ever since. I will never support a candidate who favors intrinsic moral evil and abortion is a spectacular example of precisely that.

A lot of people share this sentiment. So many, in fact, that the GOP saw the opportunity in the late 70s just as the Dems were making themselves willfully blind to it. So the GOP became, sort of, the party that “opposed abortion” and started to bill itself as the Party of Human Life. They also, to a degree, became serious about the Little Guy (though, to their credit, the Dems still have those sympathies too—to a degree). Of course, the GOP “opposed abortion” largely by phoning it in every Roe v. Wade Anniversary and occasionally enacting laws that brought American jurisprudence and legislation up to sub-Carthaginian levels of respect for the unborn. They also gave us such valiant pro-life warriors as David Souter, Harry Blackmun, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day-O’Connor, who did ever so much to advance the prolife cause. And they reliably made the right noises to us prolifers every four years, keeping us on the reservation and getting our votes while coughing up an occasional token effort here and there. Oh, and they panicked the faithful into voting booths with dark prophecies about the horrors of Dem presidents who appoint pro-choice justices—even as they supinely approved the appointments of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer. But they were better than nothing and, while not much to write home about in their supposed dedication to the dignity of unborn human life for 30 long years, they were at least not zealous fanatics for the sacrament of abortion as the Dems were. So I supported Republicans on the theory that it’s better to have politicians who don’t care about abortion than politicians devoted to killing as many children as possible.

But the thing is, now both parties are increasingly the parties of Salvation through Grave and Intrinsic Moral Evil. Dems do it with their Nanny State devotion to the Culture of Death and the sacrament of abortion, their sole core value. “Bush Conservatism” does it with its insane combination of Mystical Imperialism that believes in redemption through democratic capitalism by means of torture and war crimes. And, as icing, both parties believe devoutly in the Drunken Sailor approach to the national larder. Dems want to build the Great Society at home and Republicans want to build the Great Society abroad. But for me, the deal breaker is not so much the utopian nation-building stuff as the grave intrinsic evil stuff: abortion or torture, which shall I choose? As a Catholic, I choose neither.

Now living, as we do, in the land where there are only two sides to every question, I find that the result of this choice is to be routinely accused of being a closet Obama supporter on the theory that failure to support the preferred grave and intrinsic sin of the GOP means I simply must support the preferred grave and intrinsic sin of the Dem party. But, in fact, when I turn my back on grave and intrinsic sins, my mind actually goes, not to the platform of either party, but to Scripture.

I find myself thinking of Israel and Judah in 1 and 2 Kings. Israel apostatized immediately and completely after the split with Judah, embracing the worship of Baal and Moloch and never looking back. Israel was eventually smashed to atoms by Assyria after ignoring God’s warnings that things would not end well for her if she did not repent. Judah apostatized slowly and had its good and bad spells as it circled the drain before finally ending in the Babylonian Captivity. But the fact is, both apostatized and both eventually paid the piper—as shall we if we will not face the fact that God is not mocked. The Dems embraced the worship of Moloch 36 years ago and have never looked back (though the existence of people like Bart Stupak raises one’s hopes that there may be a remnant that does not bow the knee to Moloch in that party). The GOP has made a vague and transparently reluctant gesture of caring about human life, which kept me voting for them for years on the off chance they might occasionally do something. And occasionally, they have.

But with the advent of Bush/Cheney Conservatism, the GOP too has embraced intrinsic moral evil in the dangerous form of cheerleading for torture. With the exception of a couple of leading lights in the Thing That Used to Be Conservatism (for instance, John McCain (sort of) and Ron Paul), the grave intrinsic sin of torture is now as much a pillar conservative ideology as abortion is of liberal ideology. To criticize it is to be called evil and anti-American by the bulk of Movement Conservatives, just as to criticize abortion is likewise to be called evil and anti-American by the bulk of liberals.

So I find that the chances are growing ever slimmer that I can support either party’s candidate if they spout the increasingly common party lines in favor of one or other (occasionally both) of these intrinsic evils. My reason for this is simple and eminently theological: It’s not that I’m a closet Obama supporter. (In fact, I think Obama’s actions with respect to torture have been dodgy and dangerous. And don’t even get me started on his zeal for the sacrament of abortion!) It’s that I’m a Catholic who thinks that when the Church declares something inexcusably evil, it must not be supported with excuses, much less celebrated as heroic. That goes for both abortion and torture. Indeed, in my more quixotic moments, I’m even a Catholic who hopes that the state will resume its traditional role of supporting the common good and not merely “not doing grave evil”.

That is because, at the end of the day, I don’t believe that the state or the corporation or the party are what history is about. I believe history is about Jesus Christ, not the American experiment, nor any other state or nation that is a mere human creation. I believe that Christ is the center of history and I believe that the family, as the image and likeness of God is the most crucial thing on earth, short of the Blessed Sacrament. Therefore, I believe that the center of Catholic social teaching is the good of the family. All my bleats of protest, whether at the sacred Dem sins of abortion and gay “marriage”, or the sacred GOP sin of torture, have in view my conviction that these evils constitute an enormous peril to the family because they empower something else—whether the individual, the state, or the corporation—to play the tyrant over the good of the family (in addition to being Just Plain Wrong). And I believe that the family matters ultimately because it is the primal human sign of the Blessed Trinity.

That’s why I find myself forced to talk about political stuff like abortion, torture and gay “marriage” and any other grave evils our Ruling Classes may attempt to transmogrify into signs of National Greatness: because these things are inseparable from my faith as a Catholic. It’s also why I find myself at sixes and sevens with any political ideology. In the words of Treebeard, I am not on anybody’s side because nobody is on my side. I try to be on the side of Catholic social teaching. I often fail whether through lack of wit or charity. But I see no alternative to that approach to ordering my political life, since I am aware of no party that views the teaching of the Church as something other than a thing to be exploited when useful and castigated when it stands in the way of their pursuit of the One Ring. Therefore, as a free man, I make use of political parties when they support Church teaching and reject them when and where they do not.

These days, our rapidly de-Christianizing nation is discovering that a Culture of Death is also a Culture of Fear. From massacres in high schools, colleges, military installations and malls to jitters about the next 9/11, we live in a world that is slowly being smothered with fear.

That’s what “the world” means in the biblical sense of the term: the place where Satan gets his way, where fear seeps into everything, where some jerk commits an outrage to get his name on TV. Where a whole culture is forced, willy nilly, to create a world where every minor activity is endlessly policed in order to create the illusion of safety, even as we fret endlessly over where the next outrage will strike.

Hell promises liberation through rebellion against God and delivers a world in permanent lockdown, because rebellion against God produces snipers and bombers who aren’t constrained by bourgeois morals such as “You shall not kill.”

And many, including many Catholics, believe this. If there’s anything we’ve heard since 9/11 it is “Be afraid! Be very afraid! Only fear can keep you safe!” That’s why there’s all the endless chatter about just how much prisoner abuse you can get away with before it’s legally, technically, you know, torture. That’s why all the endless fantasizing about ticking time bombs, World War III, nukes in Manhattan, and sundry horrors lurking in the wings. When we aren’t in Church where people are supposed to say things like “trust God”, we talk and act as though it is folly to do so. We talk as though “Trusting God” is for milksops, pantywaists, bedwetters and moralists who don’t have the brutal willingness to do the dirty work it takes to fight the Real World on its terms. We talk as though we have to trust in our own strength: the strength to do whatever it takes in order to survive in a purely Darwinian world where idiots who hope in Heaven are the first to get killed and only ruthlessness can save. We talk as though Machiavelli is right: It’s all about power. Freedom, love, compassion: these are the luxuries of a simpler time, before technology made it possible for a handful of men to kill millions.

Meanwhile, though, the Church recalls the Prayer of Zechariah:

This was the oath God swore to our father Abraham:
to set us free from the hands of our enemies,
Free to worship him without fear,
holy and righteous in his sight all the days of our life.

Free to worship him without fear? To really be free from fear? That is the oath we are sworn by our God. An oath he apparently means to fulfill in this world.

How can the Church believe such Pollyanna rubbish? Doesn’t she know that 9/11 Changed Everything?

No. She doesn’t. Because that slogan is the real rubbish. The fact is, the world has always been a dangerous place, good people have always gotten it in the neck, and freedom, love, compassion and the vulnerability that go with them have always been a risk in a world of ruthless and evil men. Our faith begins with a man tortured and murdered for reasons of State Security. It begins in a world that needs the promise from God that we shall worship him without fear, because the Jews could tell you all about living in a world where their worship of God was fraught with terrors from Pharaoh to Antiochus Epiphanes. So could the Holy Family, on the lam from Herod.

We do not worship God without fear because we have been handed a world rendered safe since the coming of Christ. We worship him without fear because the worst thing that could ever happen in the entire universe—the murder of God—has already happened.

And that resulted in a Resurrection so powerful that this fallen world cannot contain it: a Resurrection that will one day be consummated in the New Heaven and the New Earth.