I have decided to embed below one of the very best articles I have ever read on modern socio-economic woes, written from a macroscopic perspective. I am embedding it, because if I made it downloadable now that the original magazine has it archived and available only for purchase, I would certainly get my pants sued off - or at least be violating their copyright.
Here is an excerpt from a simple speech of the late Holy Father, John Paul II of venerable memory. I love this one:
Dear young people, many false teachers point out dangerous ways that lead to fleeting joys and satisfactions. Today expressions of our culture are mired in superficiality... Refuse to sell your dreams too cheaply! Dream, but in freedom! Plan, but in truth!I love that speech to the second international meeting of "Young People to Assisi". You can read the whole, brief thing by clicking here. The quotation from St. John's gospel is among my favorite. It's a great one for prayer when I am tired of following Jesus sometimes, or feel like giving him an ultimatum to do things my way. "Jesus, you better... or else I'll walk!" So many times the words of Peter have drifted back into my heart and mind at those points. "Fine. I guess I'm still yours, thick or thin."
The Lord is also asking you: "Will you also go away?" Answer with the Apostle Peter: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (Jn 6,68). God alone is the infinite horizon of your life. The more you know him, the more you will find out that only he is love and an inexhaustible source of joy.
But to enter and remain in contact with God it is indispensable to establish a deep relationship with him in prayer. When it is genuine, prayer spreads divine energy in every context and at every moment of life. It makes us live in a new way. Is it not prayer that made Francis a new man and Clare a source of light?
This article at the Times (of London) Online is very exciting. It is about Eduardo Verastegui, a very popular Mexican actor who starred, most recently, in "Bella". He is co-owner of a production company called Metanoia, and the article is about how he went from being a not-interested Catholic to a very sincere and devout one - while living and working in the not-too-religious environments of the movie meccas of Mexico City and Hollywood.
As an interesting side note, the article notes that he is going to England to speak to a Catholic youth rally with about 1500 teens expected to attend. I don't know if this sort of thing is yet common in England, as it is getting to be here - I suspect not. In itself, this event is exciting because it means that the Church is stirring in England, one of the most thoroughly secular countries in the very secular West. My gut instinct is that many of the youth waking up the Church in England, responding to their shepherds' calls, perhaps traveled to World Youth Days in close neighbor Cologne, Germany, and in closely akin Sydney, Australia. However He's doing it, the Holy Spirit is sure doing something cool.
What daring times to be a Christian!
Sometimes our "culture" can seem more homogeneous than it is, here in the U.S., because of our national media, which tends to project just a few key images. Those images are necessarily a bit stereotypical. Since we all watch the same shows, we tend to absorb, I think, the same national self-image.
But in reality, travel throughout the U.S. shows that even aside from superficial similarities and differences, there are really profoundly different cultures speckling our country.
When I was in Omaha for a summer, I noted something different there, as surely as I did when I lived for a semester in the forests of Westchester County, outside New York City. I note differences in Ohio and Michigan from Nebraska or Virginia. In reality, the very ways of thinking vary across the fifty states as surely as the landscapes.
The Catholic Key Blog posted this article, describing something different going on in the area around Kansas City, MO. One wonders how such a phenomenon starts in a given locality. There must be a story there. In any event, it is a beautiful thing to read about: a local community that somehow came to decide, without voting it seems, but just by knowing, that it would be accepting of people with handicaps. To be fair, America as a whole has come a long way in basic tolerance of people who are weird, unusual, burdened, or struggling. I can see it with my own sister Keelin. When we take her out nowadays, it seems to me that people are much more likely to be understanding (or at least tactfully quiet) of her funny noises or mannerisms than a decade or two ago. Very rarely do others mock her, as was common back then. That is a good thing. Still, something special seems to be happening in the KC-MO culture.
You gotta check out this video interview from WashingtonPost.com. The family has eighteen children, and they love it! Most of us aren't as saintly as they seem to be, for sure, but one has to wonder - maybe it's the willingness to love that we lack, sometimes. Certainly our life circumstances and emotional capacities don't lend themselves, usually, to such a big family... but I wonder how willing I am to stretch myself.
I've applied for a couple summer positions, and decided finally to apply for one with the pool company that employed me through high school and college, and sporadically since then. I have a good history of managing pools with them, and they've re-hired and -certified me before. I haven't worked with them since 2003, but just this past summer I was looking at their website.
This time around, though, nothing came up. At least, not at first. I couldn't find their website anywhere, but then I found some disturbing blurbs in the Post, inter al. Play the YouTube video below for a pretty good summary.
Whoa! That about blew me away. I found another story in which some interviewed Eastern workers said that it had been a great place to work as lately as 2005 or 2006, at about which time the company gained a new CEO or president, and perhaps owner(s) as well. That makes me feel a bit better. It still stinks.
I've put in a call to one of their competitors, a smaller, family-owned operation, and will put in more calls to other pool companies and restaurants in the next few days. Coincidentally, if anybody has any other ideas for summer jobs, please let me know.
A friend of mine just shared this story with me. A twelve year old girl in Canada decides that for her persuasive speaking topic, she will speak against abortion.
Take two or three minutes to read the full story about what this kid had to deal with just to speak her mind (in the enlightened and free West).
My niece experienced her first snow day today. School was cancelled for mommy and fun ensued. She even got to sled for the first time, down the hillock in front of their house, a drop of about four feet at a forty five degree angle. Do you remember the sheer joy of such things. It's distant for me.
Dear Jesus, please increase our virtue and wisdom so that we may be young in spirit again, and enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.
This past week, Magdi Cristiano Allam spoke with students at the Roman university students. In case you've forgotten, the former Muslim is one of the chief editors at Italy's most important daily newspaper and was baptized in St. Peter's this past Easter Vigil by the Holy Father. Highlights from his talk can be found by clicking here.
His insight is pretty poignant. He links his path to conversion to a variety of other factors: his education in Catholic schools in Egypt, the witness provided by some practicing Christian friends and of our Holy Father, his philosophical maturation, and his desire for integrity of ideas and living. He also sees a genuine return to a genuine practice of the genuine Christian faith as key to the survival of Europe as a socio-cultural entity, to the survival of Europe as Europe. The same might really be said of the entire Western Civilization that has had Europe as its seedbed and mother.
The Mass readings for today (Tuesday after 1st Sunday of Advent, year B1: Is 11:1-10; Ps 72:1-2, 7-8, 12-13, 17; Lk 10:21-24) are really nice. The first one, from the prophet Isaiah, is fine, and the second one from Luke is one of my very favorites. It articulates the topsy-turvy logic of the Gospel in which the whole thought of the city of man is turned upside down. Below, I've copied it out of the RSV translation because it sounds a bit nicer to my ears than the lectionary.
In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will. All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."
Then turning to the disciples he said privately, "Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it," (Lk 10:21-24).
We think we're good, we think we know how Jesus thinks and works, we think we've got life under control. Children know that they need help. "Daddy, can you tie my shoe?" A drug addicted prostitute lying in a gutter knows that she needs help. She might even know that help's name is Jesus (it literally means "salvation" in Hebrew!). But we are smug and sit in the train station thinking that we are conducting the salvation train, and so it leaves the station without us. How many of us, perhaps unbeknownst to even ourselves, feel that we are somehow doing Jesus a favor by going to church. It makes me think of the ancient pagan idea of feeding the gods with sacrifices of the flesh of goats and bulls.I had what I believe to be an interesting thought a few years ago, and one that has stuck with me. It came while looking at a map of Europe color-coded to show the pro-life voting record of each country's members of the European Parliament (MEP). What did not surprise me was that the low countries and former communist countries, except for Poland, were solid red - represented almost entirely by pro-abortion MEPs. What did surprise me was that France, Germany, and England had mixtures, and seemed to field MEPs that were about 1/3 pro-abortion, 1/3 pro-life, and 1/3 trying to draw some sort of compromise. I was stunned. I got to thinking, "By all accounts, Western Europe is entirely secularized and dechristianized. What's this?" Then it occurred to me, the pre-interesting-thought thought. Most of the world gets a warped view of America because what they see is what Hollywood and CNN show: violence out of control in every neighborhood, rich people who never work, relentless displacement of traditional values, etc. Needless to say, that is not the America most of us know, even if there are a number of very serious threats facing us these days. Where do we get our information about Europe? From Hollywood and what CNN, or Europe's equivalents, choose to show us.
Maybe we've got Europe all wrong, or at least partly wrong, oversimplified. My first trip to Europe took me from Rome to Lourdes and back, with a side trip to Assisi. I was happy to note that in Lourdes, there were many French pilgrims. On a subsequent trip, for World Youth Day in Germany, we went to Paris and Lourdes again, because hey, we were all the way over there, so why not? A woman who identified herself to me as a Parisian protestant was very glad to see our group there. "Things are bad for religion," she said, "But are getting better. Groups like yours are a good witness to Jesus."
On his first visit to France as pontiff, the late Holy Father John Paul II famously called to France's conscience, "France, eldest daughter of the Church, what have you done with your baptismal promises?" The question must have made a mark on the French psyche, because even though the number of people identifying themselves as Catholics fell over the next 20 years decline, two interesting trends speak of something different. In a 2001 report by the bishops of France, over 8000 adult baptisms were recorded that year. A decade earlier, this was unthinkable because everyone was leaving the Church; four decades earlier, it was doubly unthinkable because everybody was Catholic. In name, at least. An Irish seminarian I know, studying for the Archdiocese of Boston (where else?) told me that he found his faith in France. I joked that he must be the only one, and he replied with a fascinating description of a cluster of villages in the west of France where the faith has been resurgent, so much so that many young Catholics move there for specifically for that reason. And the bishops' report bears out the trend: 3/4 of the converts were under 40 - hardly age-representative of the French population. They tend also to favor solemn worship and even the tradition Latin Mass. There is also lots of anecdotal evidence of a quiet, unorganized, grass-roots shift toward religiosity, if not exactly toward religion, among the French populace. The French president has been eager to work with the Church, and the episcopacy and the Holy Father have gladly reciprocated, as the November 7 issue of Commonweal magazine reports. Perhaps more importantly, the same article notes that the typical practicing French Catholic is "pluckier" and "more confident" than virtually anyone in France, where pessimism and malaise have become ways of life in recent decades.
The second trend is the number of revival movements growing in France, and the success of lay movements like Opus Dei and the Neocatechumenal Way in France. A Spaniard I met during that second trip to Europe for World Youth Day told me something related. He said to me, "In Europe, if you still go to Mass, you belong to a movement," like Opus Dei or Communion and Liberation. Maybe France, the Eldest Daughter of the Church, is not dead yet.
If we humbly access ourselves, we can see that we are perhaps further along than we think: while most Americans go to church, America still produces untold quantities of violence, porn, abortion and divorce, relentless commerce even on the Lord's day, and all other manner of social ills. The faith of many Americans is clearly a shallow, Sundays-when-I-feel-like-it commitment. Perhaps we are further along in dechristianization than we like to admit. So we in America should be heartened by the thought of faith, like a mustard seed, beginning to sprout again in France. If, as many conservative Americans fear, we are about to go the way of Europe, France's example shows us that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel for us, too. At the very least, as brethren in Christ when we pray for our own nation, rather than mocking them to make ourselves feel better, we should pray for theirs as well.
"But I ask you, is it better to be resigned to a life
without ideals, or rather to seek truth, goodness, justice,
working for a world that reflects the beauty of God,
even at the cost of facing the trials it may involve?"
Ryan Matthew Haber
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