Ubi Petrus

More than once on-line and off but not so oddly mostly on-line I’ve run afoul of Catholics who are pro Marian apparition, one non approved, alleged Marian apparition in particular.

Why have I run afoul of them? Because, simply put, I have interest, especially in non approved, alleged Marian apparitions and especially in that one in particular. I don’t even have to say whether I am for or against, all I need to do is show little interest and explain why. Here’s why:

Throughout the ages, there have been so-called “private” revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church. They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.

Christian faith cannot accept “revelations” that claim to surpass or correct the Revelation of which Christ is the fulfilment, as is the case in certain non Christian religions and also in certain recent sects which base themselves on such “revelations”. [CCC #65]

Those who rally in favour of the non approved apparition or private revelation are quick to note, where it is possible, that their favourite and perhaps even for them life-changing one hasn’t claimed to surpass or correct but often the subtleties are lost, clouded, and unsettled such that honestly the matter is not quite so easily declared. That’s another reason I have no interest in the unapproved, still-going-on apparitions and private revelation. Perhaps that sounds unkind or to the elect perhaps it even sounds unspiritual.

However, I find that I have not come close to plumbing the depths of actual and true Revelation, not in the form of sacred scripture nor in the form of authoritative Tradition, the living Magesterim nor indeed in the very Person of the revealed living Word of God, the Christ.

And then there is the highest prayer of the Church, the Mass  and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and how about the graces of Christ given us in the Sacraments of the Church? I have not found all the healing, the wholeness, the purity, the wisdom, the strength for daily living, the preparation for eternity and so forth that there is in those definitive disclosures of the Divine.

Why, here I am reading and contemplating my way through the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I don’t have time to hope on a bus Gus and get myself gone to an alleged apparition or unapproved apparition and I’m not inclined to argue about it all one way or the other.

For the Catechism Project, this is your Artist + Illustrator + Occasional Catechist, owenswain of owenswain.com/blawg & Cross-posted here.

One of the things I’ve always wondered when contemplating the beginning of Genesis is just what it must have been like to live in original innocence.  We forget sometimes that before the Fall Adam and Eve were not “just like us” – they enjoyed several preternatural gifts we can only offer brief glimpses of.  But yet, somehow, they fell.  God walked with them in the Garden, revealing Himself to them, yet in their moment of trial they fell.

But yet “[t]his revelation was not broken off by our first parents’ sin.” (CCC #55)  Despite turning away from the great and many gifts He had given them God did not cease to reveal Himself to His children.  Whereas before the Fall He could reveal Himself in a fullness we can’t entirely understand, he now had to slow down and “save humanity part by part.” (CCC #56)  “For he wishes to give eternal life to all those who seek salvation by patience in well-doing.”

He had to slow down His revelation of Himself to His children (forgive the weak terminology) because quite simply after the Fall humanity could not have handled anything more.  It takes us time to learn lessons, and sometimes those lessons have to be learned the hard way – that goes for everything from how to ride a bike to the nature of God.

If you get frustrated with God seeming to take forever to do what seems obvious, remember two things.  First, God doesn’t operate in time the way we do – things will happen precisely when they need to (and not when we want to, no matter how much we may want!) because God sees the whole of the big picture.  No matter how sure we are of what “needs to happen” we don’t know what’s going to happen in the next minute – God does.  Second, “[w]e know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” (Rom 8:28)

Trusting God can seem very hard at times, but not trusting Him always works out to be far harder.  When that hope just doesn’t seem possible, do what Jesus did and turn to the Psalms; make Ps 42:6 your own prayer: “Hope in God; I will praise him still, my savior and my God.“

Scattering and gathering; in the covenant relationship between God and mankind God seems to have an inexhaustible ability to gather what man scatters. True, at times it is God who scatters his people but even then it is for their ultimate redemptive good because he cannot break his word, his covenant.

From the time of man’s first rebellion and throughout salvation history the covenant is never broken by God and only ever reaffirmed through divine revelation and ultimately revealed and fulfilled in the coming of the God-man, the Christ.

It’s humbling even convicting to know this,

Even when he disobeyed you and lost your friendship you did not abandon him to the power of death. . . Again and again you offered a covenant to man, [CCC#55]

and at the same time it is freeing and life giving.

For the Catechism Project, this is your Artist + Illustrator + Occasional Catechist, owenswain of owenswain.com/blawg & Cross-posted here.

In the last sections we talked about the ability of man to know God through his own reason and external evidence.  But let’s be honest – for a God who created everything out of nothing, who desires each and every one of us from the very beginning, leaving us to our own devices just wasn’t going to be good enough.  The God who loved us enough to create us was not about to sit back on his proverbial hands and see whether we could dig ourselves out of the hole we’d put ourselves in.

Through an utterly free decision, God has revealed himself and given himself to man. … God has fully revealed this plan by sending us his beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. (CCC #50)

God didn’t send us an antiseptic set of rules to follow.  He didn’t send us just brief messages and leave us to figure it out on our own.  He didn’t even just whisper in the ear of His chosen prophets words meant for all men and all time. He sent us His Son.  He didn’t do this all at once, humanity had to be prepared over time to hear, understand and believe – “God communicates himself to man gradually.” (CCC #53)  After sending the Law and the Prophets God provided the keystone of His saving plan in sending His Son.

In his short meditations on the Way of the Cross Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote the following reflection for the twelfth station, in which we reflect on Jesus dying on the Cross:

The Eternal Father determined not to pardon us without a price, in order to show us especial favour. He condescended to make us valuable to Him. What we buy we put a value on. He might have saved us without a price—by the mere fiat of His will. But to show His love for us He took a price, which, if there was to be a price set upon us at all, if there was any ransom at all to be taken for the guilt of our sins, could be nothing short of the death of His Son in our nature. O my God and Father, Thou hast valued us so much as to pay the highest of all possible prices for our sinful souls—and shall we not love and choose Thee above all things as the one necessary and one only good?

As I reflected on these paragraphs I couldn’t help but think of gospel of John chapter 10 and the words of Christ, “I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me.”

This passage has stayed with me since I made my first Poustinia where the only thing one takes into that 24 hour retreat besides a toothbrush and PJs is a bible. I had left mine behind but happily each room is supplied with one. In my case it was the 1966 Jerusalem Bible with all the notes.

The notes for John 10:14, quoted above, reads

In biblical language, cf Ho 2:22+, ‘knowledge’ is not merely the conclusion of an intellectual process, but the fruit of an ‘experience’, a personal contact (cf Jn 10:14-15 and 14:20; 17:21-22; cf. 14:17; 17:3; 2 Jn 1-2); when it matures, it is love, cf. Ho 6:6+ and 1 Jn 1:3+. [Emphasis mine.]

Jesus is no ordinary teacher. His pedagogy is personal. Not only does he teach “as one with authority” because he is God but he is a teacher who knows each of his students by name, intimately, personally, experientially.

It practically makes one want to declare with extemporaneous praise, “Praise the Lord.”

For the Catechism Project, this is your Artist + Illustrator + Occasional Catechist, owenswain of owenswain.com/blawg & Cross-posted here.

Several years ago when I was still new to the job I currently hold I had a meeting with my then-boss to go over a presentation I was to give up our management chain.  When I mentioned my discomfort at “not knowing their language” she gave me a quizzical look, as if I had suggested the meeting would be held in Swahili.  I explained I didn’t mean the language of English, but the particular words and phraseology that allows those “on the inside” to say accurately in two words what those on the “outside” take twenty to create a barely recognizable facsimile.  I didn’t know, as I told her, their “trigger words” and that was going to make getting my point across much more difficult.  It may not have been in Swahili, but it was definitely a distinct dialect of English which I had only just barely begun to learn.

Similarly, we as Catholics often find ourselves talking in “code” – using terminology that is not only confusing but meaningless to those on the “outside”.  That doesn’t make us sound smart, it makes us sound stand-offish to some and aloof to others.  As a catechist this can be dangerous, which is bad but relatively limited in scope as the people to whom we talk are at least already somewhat interested in what the Church has to say.  As an evangelist this flaw can be fatal, and this applies to every single one of us.  We all are called to evangelize even if without words.  We must constantly check our vocabulary to make sure we are talking to the person in front of us rather than to ourselves as projected onto that person.

While the Church is confident “in the possibility of speaking about [God] to all men and with all men” (CCC #39), it also admits that “[s]ince our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so.” (CCC #40)  We must start, as discussed in the post on the previous section, with nature and with man himself.  I think this quote from CCC #41 offers us a wonderful starting point when talking with those who do not already share our faith:

The manifold perfections of creatures – their truth, their goodness, their beauty – all reflect the infinite perfection of God.  Consequently we can name God by taking his creatures’ perfections as our starting point, “for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.” (Wis 13:5)

Start always with what the other can understand and relate to, but never forget or deny “God transcends all creatures.” (CCC #42)  Express the God we know while admitting we do not know everything about him and celebrating the fact there will always be more to know.  St. Paul talks of having “become all things to all men … for the sake of the gospel”; I truly believe today this type of evangelization is needed more than ever.

Who first shared Christ with me? I wish I could recall, definitively. My paternal grandmother in her cranky Methodist way – that’s her own description of herself not mine though it is fitting – not so much.

There was the weird kid who got stickers and buttons and such and was very excited about it all. He could get more if I came with him to some school, that met on Sunday, in a church. Not so much. That sounded weird to me, even weirder than the weird kid so, even though I could have got buttons and stickers myself I took a pass. Even kids know what it is to be someone’s project.

There was Dave who worked at the same art studio I did when I was a seventeen year old high school drop out. A drop out with my parent’s permission I hasten to add because I dropped out to take that full time job.

Dave used to do something really odd every day at lunch. He would open his paper bag, taking things out one by one and after arranging them to his satisfaction he would close his eyes and then suddenly nod off for twenty or thirty seconds, sometimes longer. Then he’d come-to and start eating. I asked my other workmates about that but they only snickered or rolled their eyes dismissively.

I finally gave in and asked Dave why he fell asleep right before he ate? He seemed offended and didn’t answer me and let into his ham n’ cheese.

I asked him again, a few days later, being careful to say that I wasn’t mocking him, I was sorry to be so ignorant and meant no offence. I was only curious, really curious. He softened as told me that he was saying grace. Oh, ok, I may have said but I was no further ahead. Hard to believe? Maybe but my house, other than gran who kept wisely to herself, was totally secular. I had no frame of reference to sort out what I saw Dave doing and that was the 1970s when our overall North American culture was more Christian than today. Believe it, there are people living in our midst who have no clue. I didn’t.

A few days later I asked Dave again what he meant by “saying grace” and he explained he was praying, giving thanks to Jesus for his lunch. No doubt he saw my disconnect and so he briefly explained that it is ultimately God who gives us everything, life, breath and ham n’ cheese sandwiches.

Looking back, I’d have to say it was Dave who first gave me an idea that there was a Someone out there, maybe the Someone I thought might be out there whom I’d been wondering about as a child, lying in my backyard, looking up to the sky through that little diamond shape made with fingers pressed together. Dave showed me there was a way to speak of God and gave me a glimpse into the idea that this Someone was knowable, personally, like someone you can just talk with before eating your lunch.

We really can name God, starting from the manifold perfections of his creatures, which are likenesses of the infinitely perfect God, even if our limited language cannot exhaust the mystery.

Without the Creator, the creature vanishes (GS 36). This is the reason why believers know that the love of Christ urges them to bring the light of the living God to those who do not know him or who reject him. [CCC #48-49]

For the Catechism Project, this is your Artist + Illustrator + Occasional Catechist, owenswain of owenswain.com/blawg & Cross-posted here.

“But how do you know?”  I think more than anything other objections that is the one that today stops most people in the tracks of their spiritual journey.  We have been so conditioned to believe only we can prove through proper experiential scientific method.  But how do you “prove” the existence of something following the scientific method that cannot be experienced directly by any of the senses (leaving aside miraculous occurrences for the moment)?  I once heard that we must believe that “if it can’t be measured it doesn’t exist”.  Despite the myriad exceptions that must be made to prevent the obvious contradictions to that purported law (e.g. one cannot “measure” love, yet no one argues whether such a thing exists) this idea is accepted as obvious truth by a surprising number.

Even the numerous proofs for the existence of God – I can think of those from St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure and Pascal just off the top of my head – don’t seem to hold any weight.  Why?  I think largely for two reasons: 1) because logical deduction is a vanishing art in the modern day – we prefer tangible and obvious proof that doesn’t require following a long line of reasoning, and 2) because the concept of first principles has been exchanged for relativism – no truth is singular, and we must all accept as “their truth” whatever anyone else wishes to believe.  Indeed, as Pius XII stated in Humani Generis, “men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful.” (CCC #37)

It seems we today must, rather than getting more complicated, get more simple.  When a people has puffed up their own idea of their knowledge of the universe beyond reality, one has to start not with even bigger ideas but with smaller ones.  We are too smart to be out-smarted; it is only the little and the small that will pass through our filters.

There are two main sources by which people come to know God.  First is the world – nature itself, its organization, its beauty can become catalysts for people to come to understand the existence of something greater and thus begin down the path to finding God.  Quoting St. Augustine, CCC #32 puts it this way:

Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky … question all of these realities.  All respond:  “See, we are beautiful.”  Their beauty is a profession [confessio].  These beauties are subject to change.  Who made them if not the Beautiful one [Pulcher] who is not subject to change?

The second source is the human person itself.  Even in spite of all the challenges and contradictions from the modern world, man can see within himself something that years for something more.  It can take much time, and as in the posts on the previous section of the Catechism, there can be many obstacles in the way but nothing can alter that fundamental orientation of man towards his Creator.  Silence is a great danger to one who does not wish to come to know God.  It is there, when the whirling bustle of the world has subsided even for a moment, that you find everything you are and everything you truly love pointing you in one direction.

“But how do you know?” one asks.  Look around you, allow the beauty and order of the world to shine through.  Look within you, allow that same order and beauty to lead you towards its Creator.  A treasure map has been left imprinted on the heart of every person; follow it and that question will take on a whole new meaning.

If you hold your hands in front of your face pressing the first finger and thumb together on each hand and then touch them to their opposites you form something that looks like a tiny ‘diamond’ shape that you can see through. Try it, I’ll wait…

When I was a young child I would lie on the hill in our backyard and look up through that little diamond and into the sky. I would look past each thing in turn, leaves on a tree, a bird above that, a cloud far above the bird, a plane cutting through the highest cloud and at night beyond that, stars. It was one of my early personal encounters with the Other or at the very least with the realization that we humans are really very small and mightn’t there be something or even Someone beyond us.

Of course comic book and TV aliens came to mind but even then I knew they were just pretend. Mightn’t there be Someone real and actual beyond all of this down here who perhaps even made all of us and this down here? Maybe I was a strange kid, I don’t know. Maybe I just began asking those questions a little earlier than most but I don’t know that either.

It’s primal to ask those questions. It’s instinctive to consider that there is an Other, greater than we and Good. Had I then any idea at all of St. Paul and his letter to the Romans, chapter one I might have known I wasn’t alone in asking these questions about God based solely on creation and that intuitive pull toward the divine. Or, had I had any sort of Christian upbringing at all, which I had not, not at all, I might have had a reason outside of myself and not of creation itself to think of these things, that is to say had it been suggested to me. It had not.

I had a paternal grandmother who was a cranky praying Methodist but she never really presented the idea of God to me even though she lived in a granny flat in my childhood home. I once, that’s once had an encounter in a United Church Sunday School but that was all finger painting and snacks and friendly matronly women older than my mother and it was but one time and combined with a very negative experience that would certainly have the opposite effect from causing me to want after God. A story for another time perhaps.

So my personal experience is in concert with the passages from the CCC when it says,

33 The human person: with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. the soul, the “seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material”, can have its origin only in God.

34 The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls God”. [CCC #33,34]

By the time I was seventeen I had more than an inkling as to the limits of my own lights and the beginnings of a grasp both my own brokenness and that of creation. It had become hard to look through my little diamond a believe.

“In the historical conditions in which he finds himself, however, man experiences many difficulties in coming to know God by the light of reason alone…This is why man stands in need of being enlightened by God’s revelation, not only about those things that exceed his understanding, but also “about those religious and moral truths which of themselves are not beyond the grasp of human reason, so that even in the present condition of the human race, they can be known by all men with ease, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error. [CCC #36-37]”

Cross-posted here.

For the Catechism Project, this is your Artist + Illustrator + Occasional Catechist, owenswain of owenswain.com/blawg & Cross-posted here.