Violence Defeated by Valiance

This is not an ordinary gift…let’s unwrap it in bliss. Jesus assured His Apostles at the Last Supper: “And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth…” (John 14:16-17) Jesus is consoling them that the Holy Spirit will be His very presence in them, their comforter, counselor, leader, and guide. More importantly, the Holy Spirit is the revealer of God’s plan. His mission is to reveal Jesus, the Word of God, and make the person of Jesus fully alive in each one of us.  The one thing I learned about the Holy Spirit is that He is a person. I can hurt Him, insult Him, or blaspheme Him. And when I have offended Him, I have seen the loss of joy in my life. A dark shadow seemed to hover, and no matter what I did to satisfy my yearnings, my spirit became inconsolable. When I regain His friendship, there was that bubbling joy, and even amidst affliction, I got the courage to pass through with strength and gladness of heart.  He blessed me with the gift of tongues. A gift, which I have used to proclaim His glory ever since I received it back in 2000. It helped me during many troubled times, when I am confused, fearful, anxious, sad, persecuted, or when I pray over someone.  There was this one time, which happened several years ago. I was walking along a trail when I saw a group of young men standing at the end of the road looking suspicious. Praying in tongues as I walked, I heard the Holy Spirit say: “Do not take that path. They will harm you.” The Holy Spirit led me to tread another road at the fork; it took me an additional 20 minutes to get home, but I was safe. Working with the Holy Spirit in obedience is another wonderful gift from Him.  Praying to the Holy Spirit is not a formula. It is asking Him to help us, surrendering to His will, and empowering us to obey and live like Jesus. It is ongoing and very intimate. Your joys, glad tidings, delights, fears, worries, afflictions, and pains can be freely shared. Like your best friend, He embraces even your deepest, darkest secret with affection, gentleness, and well-guarded understanding.

Wonder what it is like to be a prison chaplain? Read on… Chaplaincy in prison is like no other, and we never know what the day ahead is going to look like; actually, we never know what the next minute is going to be like as we chap on the next cell door of the prisoner who has asked to see us. The request might be as simple as asking to come along to worship, or it might be that someone needs to talk and to have, for the first time (for many), someone to listen to them, not to judge them nor criticize them, but simply just to listen. The pain of being imprisoned brings to the forefront of many a prisoner’s mind, memories, and issues that they may never have dealt with and had been trying to suppress for years with drugs and drinks. Now, though, they find themselves locked away, sober, and having to face reality. Chaplains are there to listen, to let inmates share their pains and traumas, and if need be, point them in the direction of the professional help that they need—get them going along to Recovery Groups or help them find a place in a rehabilitation center when they are released from custody. We can even get some counseling put in place for them to truly let their pains and sorrows be dealt with at long last. Sometimes, though, the conversation isn’t about pain anymore or about their needs. Often, we sit down to listen to a prisoner who shares how they have encountered God in their lives on their own in their cell, and they want to tell us what it was like for them and ask us what it means. These cell visits make the job so precious. Every meeting is already a blessing, but when God is at work and you just happen to come across it, wow, what a wonderful gift! For it hasn’t been anything the chaplain has said, it hasn’t been any course or worship service the prisoner has been on, it has just been God and that individual sharing time together. God reveals Himself to the open heart, and a life is being changed in the process. We often hear this question in society, that if there was a God, why doesn’t He do the miracles He did when He was here on earth over 2000 years ago? Well, He still does, and we, prison chaplains, are privileged to hear and witness such miracles. The church also prays for revival. Again, when a soul is saved, isn’t that revival taking place throughout our land even if it is behind the walls of prison? It is when we are at our lowest point in life that our God carries us; when we are weak, He is strong. And the people whom chaplains minister to in prison know that better than any of us.

There are things more than your eyes can see… A man was exploring caves by the seashore when he found a canvas bag containing hardened clay balls. It was as if someone had rolled up some clay and left them out in the sun to bake. The clay balls didn't look like much, but they intrigued the man, so he took the bag with him. As he strolled along the beach to pass the time, he threw the clay balls one by one into the ocean as far as he could. He thought little of it until he dropped one of the balls, which cracked open on a rock. Inside was a beautiful, precious stone. Excited, the man began breaking open the remaining clay balls and found a hidden treasure within each one. He discovered thousands of dollars' worth of jewels in the twenty or so clay balls he had left. Then it struck him. He had thrown maybe fifty or sixty clay balls containing hidden treasure into the ocean waves. Instead of thousands of dollars in treasure, he could have had tens of thousands, but he just threw it all away.  At times, it's like that with people, too, that is, when we look at someone or maybe even ourselves, we tend to see only the external clay vessel. It doesn't look much from the outside or may not always be beautiful and sparkling, and we often regard that person as less important than someone more beautiful or renowned. But if you take time to get to know that person and if you ask the Holy Spirit to show you that person the way He sees them, then the brilliant gem begins to shine forth. The beauty of friendship goes beyond just a helping hand, a warm smile, or the joy of spending time together. It truly shines when you realize that someone believes in you and is ready to share their trust and friendship with you. Look Inside Each one of us is truly God's wonderful creation. He created each of us in His image and endowed each person with unique abilities. To unravel the inner beauty from the depths of our souls, we need to be touched by the true and unconditional love that will radically transform us into our true selves. That genuine and unconditional love comes first from God, who has loved humanity from all eternity, even before the creation of the universe, and that love has always been given to us through God's beloved Son, Jesus Christ. Through His self-sacrificing love, God's only-begotten Son shed His blood for the redemption of humanity and to atone for our sins so that we might be reconciled with God. Beauty is like a precious jewel that will shine daily through our good actions for others and our authentic lives. We should be able to realize the beauty and nobility in the very hearts of others, given by God himself when He placed us in this universe. Only true and unconditional love can inspire and transform us into people who know how to live for others and are ready to commit themselves to selfless service.

I have been reading, with both profit and delight, Thomas Joseph White’s latest book: The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology. Father White, one of the brightest of a new generation of Thomas interpreters, explores a range of topics in this text—the relationship between Jesus’ human and divine natures, whether the Lord experienced the beatific vision, the theological significance of Christ’s cry of anguish on the cross, His descent into Hell, etc.—but for the purposes of this article, I want to focus on a theme of particular significance in the theological and catechetical context today. Father White argues that the classical tradition of Christology, with its roots in the texts of the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, understood Jesus ontologically, that is to say, in terms of His fundamental being or existential identity; whereas modern and contemporary Christology tends to understand Jesus psychologically or relationally. And though this distinction seems, prima facie, rather arcane, it has tremendous significance for our preaching, teaching, and evangelizing.  In the famous scene at Caesarea-Philippi, Jesus turns to His Apostles and asks: “Who do people say that I am?” He doesn’t ask what people are saying about His preaching or His miracle-working or His impact on the culture; He asks who they say He is. Saint John’s Gospel commences with a magnificent assertion regarding, not the teaching of the Lord, but rather His being: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…and the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us.” In his letter to the Philippians, Saint Paul writes: “Though He was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped at,” implying thereby an ontological identity between Jesus and the God of Israel.  Following these prompts—and there are many others in the New Testament—the great theological tradition continued to speculate about the ontology of the Founder. Councils from Nicea to Chalcedon formulated ever more precise articulations of the being, nature, and person of Jesus, and the most significant theologians of the early centuries—Origen, Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Augustine, etc.—tirelessly speculated about these same matters. This preoccupation with the being of Jesus signals, by the way, a major point of demarcation between Christianity and the other great religions of the world. Buddhists are massively interested in the teaching of the Buddha, but they are more or less indifferent to the ontology of the Buddha; no self-respecting Muslim worries about the existential make-up of Muhammad; and no Jew is preoccupied with the ‘being’ of Moses or Abraham. Father White points out that the time-honored practice of ontological speculation regarding Jesus comes to a kind of climax with the meticulously nuanced teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the High Middle Ages.  However, commencing in the eighteenth century with the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christology took a decisive turn. Attempting to make the claims of the Christian faith more intelligible to a modern audience, Schleiermacher explained the Incarnation in terms of Jesus’ relationship to and awareness of God. Here is a particularly clear articulation of his position: “The Redeemer, then, is like all men in virtue of the identity of human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of His God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him.” Armies of theologians—both Protestant and Catholic—have raced down the Schleiermacher Autobahn these past two hundred years, adopting a ‘consciousness Christology’ rather than an ‘ontological Christology.’ I can testify that my theological training in the seventies and eighties of the last century was very much conditioned by this approach. Father White strenuously insists that this change represents a severe declension in Christian theology, and I think he’s right. The abandonment of an ontological approach has myriad negative consequences, but I will focus on just a few. First, it effectively turns Jesus into a type of super-Saint, different perhaps in degree from other holy people, but not in kind. Hence, on this reading, it is not the least bit clear why Jesus is of any greater significance than other religious figures and founders. If He is a Saint, even a great one, well people can argue so is Confucius, so is the Buddha, so are the Sufi mystics and Hindu sages, and so in their own way are Socrates, Walt Whitman, and Albert Schweitzer. If Jesus mediates the divine to you, well and good, but why should you feel any particular obligation to propose Him to someone else, who is perhaps more moved by a saintly person from another religious tradition? Indeed, if ‘God-consciousness’ is the issue, who are we to say that Jesus’ was any wider or deeper than Saint Francis’ or Mother Teresa’s? In a word, the motivation for real evangelization more or less dissipates when one navigates the Schleiermacher highway. More fundamentally, when the stress is placed on Jesus’ human consciousness of God, the spiritual weight falls overwhelmingly on the side of immanence. What I mean is our quest for God, our search for the divine, and our growth in spiritual awareness become paramount, rather than what God has uniquely accomplished and established. When the Church says that Jesus is God, She means that the divine life, through the graceful intervention of God, has become available to the world in an utterly unique manner. She furthermore means that She herself—in Her preaching, Her formal teaching, in Her sacraments, and in Her Saints—is the privileged vehicle through which this life now flows into human hearts and into the culture. It is easy enough to see that the transition from an ontological Christology to a consciousness Christology has conduced toward all manner of relativism, subjectivism, indifferentism, and the attenuation of evangelical zeal.  One of my constant themes when I was professor and rector at Mundelein Seminary was that ideas have consequences. I realize that much of what Father White discusses in his book can seem hopelessly abstract, but he is in fact putting his finger on a shift that has had a huge impact on the life of the post-conciliar Church.