Wicked Thoughts

Jesus read their minds, and said- 
Why do you cherish wicked thoughts in your hearts?
(Matthew 9:4)

Although Our Lord had a specific audience when He asked this question it is as apposite for us now as it was for them then. There is no record of them attempting an answer but I think it is possible for us to do so. The key words to think about, it seems to me, are 'cherish' and 'hearts'

The thoughts which we hold in the fully conscious part of our minds are open to be comprehensively analysed by our Reason. That is, we can examine them from all angles and consider their rightness or wrongness, their fitness for purpose. New ideas are easy to treat in this fashion, older ideas, which have become habitual, are more difficult to see fully because we have ceased being aware that they are ideas. Nonetheless, even with them, searching self-examination allows for their flaws to be spotted and corrected if we have the courage or imagination to do so.

This is not so with the thoughts of the heart. These exist in part below the level of our awareness, we know the conclusions but the process that led to those conclusions being reached is hidden from us. They cannot then be fully examined by Reason but they can powerfully influence what we do and say. The concealed root for many of our heart-thoughts is what Buddhists call desire and Christians lust. Although this last word is usually associated with sex nowadays it really means a strong want or longing for something attainable in this material world. When our lust for something is attached to our will so that we both desire and seek to obtain that something then our heart gives birth to its thoughts.

 We can be said to cherish them when we hug them close to ourselves despite the warning which we receive from Reason. Which is to say, because our heart-thoughts are linked to an insatiable lust and a fixed will they constantly present themselves before us (and others) as the wellspring for our actions in the world. To the extent that they do so we can apply our Reason to them and notice their wicked origins and outcomes. Yet Reason alone is powerless to defeat them because, as the Christ noted, we cherish them so.

Only the gift of God's grace through Jesus gives us the strength to defeat the thoughts of the heart. Alone we lack the strength though we may possess the desire. For most of us the last heart-thought to which we most stubbornly cling is the pride that imagines we can win our own battles with ourselves. Once we have the humility and realistic self-understanding to let go of that and allow the Holy Spirit to do His gracious work in us then we can hope to be set free from bondage to sin.
@stevhep

Catholic Scot has a Facebook page.

My *other* blog is thoughtfully detached

The picture is Bathsheba bathing from a Book of Hours in the Morgan Library 

Advent and the Problem of Suffering

All that I was, is gone, the ambition, the happiness that was mine swept away like clouds before the storm; my heart is dead within me, a prey to long despairs
Book of Job 30:15-16

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death, or mourning, or cries of distress, no more sorrow; those old things have passed away.
Book of Revelation 21:4

Whatever the reality might be the popular image of the pre-Christmas season is that it is a time of happy bustling busy-ness finally crowned with a joyful day of celebration. It may then seems perverse to consider the problem of suffering in the context of this time of the year. Perhaps you will think it less so when I mention that I begin to write this on the 16th anniversary of my mother's sudden and unexpected death on 7 December 1998. Indeed it has been my experience both personal and professional (as a registered nurse) that for a good many people the month of December is associated with either the vivid presence of actual suffering or with memories of it still laden with the power to cause deep pain.

To the extent that Christmas is a secular festival charged with no higher moral purpose than to be a cause of universal jolliness and over-consumption then the mere mention of death, pain, affliction and torment can be seen as a crime against the season. The subliminal message is 'don't rain on our parade, keep your sorrows to yourself.' This can poison Advent and Christmastide for many who feel obliged to hide what they cannot comfortably share. As my father remarked some years after our joint bereavement 'The magic has gone from Christmas now.'

Fortunately the Feast of the Nativity of the Lord is not simply a secular festival and Advent is more than a shopping and partying season. The Church sets aside a time for us to prepare to welcome Jesus. And we can give over a part of this time to considering why it is that we need Him, which of His gifts to us should most fill us with gratitude. As part of the seemingly endless Culture Wars in the USA the slogan 'remember the reason for the season' has gained some traction. To the extent that this is simply a political blunt instrument for political conservatives to hit political liberals over the head with its use is regrettable. To the extent that it reminds people that trying to consider Christmas apart from Jesus doesn't really make much sense it is useful. Nonetheless on both counts it misses a valuable point. Sin, death and suffering are the reasons for the season. Jesus came into the world to combat and defeat these enemies of ours, He is a warrior and a healer because we are wounded and under attack from without and within.

During Advent we can identify our wounds and prepare to present them to our Lord that they may be healed or, since their is no permanent healing in this life, at least bound up. It is always useful when asking for gift to ask ourselves why we want or need it. It is no sin to want a new toy or a little taste of luxury or something beautiful but impractical. The innocent  little pleasures of life in moderation are part of the gift of life itself and God Himself gives of them freely filling the world with unnecessary beauty. But it is in an enduring relationship with the giver of the gifts that we are most enriched whether that giver be a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend, a valued colleague or the Creator of all that is.

There is much truth in the cliché that the mission of the Church is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The temptation which she faces is to overemphasise the first at the expense of the second. A corporate body perceived to be primarily engaged in the business of benevolently consoling the suffering and vulnerable is not apt to become so estranged from the world that it becomes the object of persecution and produce its crop of martyrs. A comforting Church can become a comfortable Church and thus herself in need of being afflicted by prophetic voices which call her back to the task of denouncing the individual, collective and structural sinfulness of the world. The key note for her must be one of balance. She, and we, should recall that very often the comfortable and the suffering are not different groups of people but that both states can exist within the same person. The wife and mother who rejoices in her family may still carry within her the scars of childhood abuse. The father who lights up a room with his ready smile may never forget the brutal torture that forced him to flee his native land.

The theme of balance too applies to those of us who suffer. To endlessly chew over and rehearse in our imagination the same little list of sorrows affords us no benefit, to try to repress and suppress memories of pain does us real harm. Advent and the Christian life in general affords us the opportunity to recall our afflictions in the context of the coming of the one who is our healer. They no longer remain our private property but a become a fully shared experience since the Jesus who was born in poverty and died, abandoned, on a Cross enters into all our anguishes and casts the light of hope upon them. Our hunger will not be assuaged by a six-course Christmas dinner but it will be by the coming into our life of God's Son, Mary's Son, Jesus our Saviour.

We are beset by dangers on every side and for Christians who do constantly recall both their sufferings and their Lord there is a special one. It is a feeling that if they still experience pain, if they are still afflicted then it means that somehow they are not good enough Christians, that if only their faith was deeper the pain would go away. Well, Jesus was a good enough Christian and His pain only ended with death. The Book of Job with which I began this post tells of a man who was so righteous that even God Himself praised Him. Yet Job suffered for reasons neither he nor we can fully understand. Stuff happens. The healing which Jesus brings is real healing but it is not always one that we can fully understand or appreciate in this life and may well leave a residue of physical or emotional affliction that never departs from us. That is not a failure of faith, or a failure of God for that matter, it is a truth which we cannot yet understand but which one day we hope that we shall.

Another thing worth recalling about Job is And cruelly he smote Job; smote him with the foul scab from head to foot,  so that he was fain to sit him down on the dung-hill, and scratch himself with a shard where he itched. (Job 2:7-8)  Job endured what he had to endure but also employed a shard to help deal with the sufferings he was experiencing. So too we should make use of whatever tools are at hand to help us in our need: medicines, therapies, doctors, nurses, counselling, whatever. It is wise to find a way through Christ, with Christ and in Christ to endure what must be endured. It is foolish to endure what we can honourably avoid unless we choose to do so as a voluntary sacrifice.

Don't forget to read my Christmas fable Adoration of the Pangolins for free on Wattpad.

Follow @stevhep on Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr. Follow Catholic Scot on Pinterest.
Like the Catholic Scot Blog page on Facebook.
Some of my previous blogs have been collected into This Contemplative Life also free on Wattpad.

Advent- The Final Countdown

                                           Hans Memmling- Last Judgement Triptych 

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.
1 Thessalonians 4:16

In the secular West there are a number of beliefs which are considered so ridiculous that no persons pretensions to intellectual respectability will be accepted if they admit to accepting those beliefs On religion the default position is agnosticism and, increasingly, atheism. A sort of bloodless Deism which asserts the existence of an abstract First Cause who by no chance intervenes in the universe which it has created is about borderline acceptable in a patronising sort of way. To assert the truth of things like Heaven, Hell, the Resurrection or the Second Coming of Christ and Final Judgement is to consign yourself to the realm of the witless, the uneducated or the credulous. Some Christians, ie liberal theologians, who desire both to be intellectually respectable and belong to the Church or one of the ecclesial communities of the Reformation will suggest that these things are merely symbolic or metaphorical or they will simply not mention them at all and hope that no one notices. The season of Advent presents a particular challenge for such people since the Parousia or Second Coming is one of the main focuses of the Churches liturgy at this time.

The feeling of all these, from atheists to liberals, seems to be that such beliefs were rational enough in more ignorant times but that now 'science' has conclusively disproved them. Of course, science has done no such thing, nor can it since they lie outside of the scientific domain. These beliefs are, however, incompatible, with an outlook called 'scientism' which suggests that everything is within the domain of science and that what cannot be proved by it or aspire to being proved by it cannot be true. The crux of the matter is what one believes about the nature of God. Where one takes as a starting point either that there is no God or that God does not intervene in the universe then it follows that none of these things can be true. If, on the other hand, one accepts the notion of an interventionist God then there is nothing intrinsically improbable about any of these things. They are not a necessary deduction which flows from such a belief, however, we can only know about them (or think we know about them) if one of the forms of intervention which our Deity initiates is a specific revelation of Himself and of His purposes. Science, as such, can neither prove nor disprove any of these postulates therefore scientism concludes that they must not be true but scientism cannot prove its own postulate that everything falls within the domain of science so its opinion is only an opinion and may well be a wrong opinion.

While it is not possible apart from revelation to say very much about how or why an interventionist God might intervene if we once accept in full any single part of that revelation then it becomes possible to infer much of the rest. With the doctrine of the Incarnation this is certainly so. The two central features of this doctrine appear to me to be-
1) Jesus is fully divine and fully human.
2) The life and mission of our Lord necessarily took place in the context of the Jewish people and their covenant relationship with God.
Knowing this we can go on to deduce the universal reality of sin, the necessity of redemption and the final, complete and irrevocable victory over sin and its consequences effected by Jesus. We can also deduce that from a human point of view this remains 'work in progress' since sin continues to hold dominion to a greater or lesser extent within each human heart and the world as a whole. Since this is so it follows that to complete what might be called the visible part of His mission Jesus shall return and put all things to rights. Therefore it is purely irrational to celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas but to deny, downplay or ignore the Parousia unless you deny the doctrine of Incarnation and suppose that our Lord was simply a wise Rabbi. Christianity is a coherent structure you can reject it in total or accept it in total but you cannot accept it merely in part unless you wilfully ignore the intellectual and philosophical inconsistencies which flow from such a position.

So, Advent is a time of preparation for the threefold coming of our Lord: past, present and future. We commemorate his historic entry into the world at Christmas, (although strictly speaking His Incarnation was effected at the Annunciation, human life begins at conception) we strive to welcome Him into our hearts at this moment in time and we look to His return and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. Very often the two things, Parousia and Last Judgement, are considered as one. However we can separate them out to an extent. In this life Christians encounter Jesus under more or less veiled forms, in the Gospels, in the Sacraments, in our neighbours, present but hidden in the life of the Church, in our prayers, in our hearts and so on. One day we shall encounter Him as He is, human and divine, and we shall do so face to face. This will not be a different Jesus from the Son of Mary, from the teacher who walks through the pages of the Gospel, from the One we encounter in the Eucharist. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. The most important question when that encounter takes place is not 'will I be punished?' or 'will I be rewarded?' It is 'will my heart leap for joy, will my love for Him burst forth from me?' If you love Him with a perfect love then you will be content whatever His judgement on you might be. The purpose of Advent, the purpose of the Christian life is simply to prepare for that encounter so that we will say 'I love you Not my will but your will be done'

Follow @stevhep on Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr. Follow Catholic Scot on Pinterest.

Like the Catholic Scot Blog page on Facebook

Read my Christmas fable Adoration of the Pangolins on Wattpad

If Only You Knew...

Alessandro MORETTOLombardy 1478 /1518 – Brescia 1554

Christ and the woman of Samaria[Cristo e la Samaritana]c.1515-20

Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God"
John 4:10

This Gospel fragment forms part of the dialogue between our Lord and the Samaritan Woman which is given in the fourth chapter of the Gospel According to St John. The more famous second half of the sentence goes like this "...and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”  A great deal has been said about the living water and rightly so but we are in danger of overlooking an important point if we focus too exclusively on it. What Jesus gives us in this sentence is a model for contemplation, of 'the gift', acting as a springboard for action, 'asking', which produces a reaction, 'He would have given.' We live in an active world and contemplation is often sidelined as unnecessary or even self-indulgent but here it is presented as foundational to developing and enriching our relationship with God and moving it out from the purely personal into the realm of practical activity be it ever so small.

There are three obvious questions which arise from our Lord's words. What is the gift? How can we know it? What difference will it make? In many parts of the Christian Scriptures we see reference to the gifts of God, the plural being used because the gifts are many. Here there is but one gift but it is the root and source of all the other gifts. That is to say it is Himself. God gives Himself entire and whole as a gift to humanity (or Man for short.) It is the essence of a gift that once given it belongs to the recipient to do with as they will. Having given Himself into the hands of Man Jesus was and is used or misused as each individual man or woman chose or chooses to use or misuse Him. He did not refuse the humiliation of being born into poverty, becoming a refugee, being scorned and cursed, being arrested, tortured and executed. Nor does He now refuse to be rejected. But what is the value of the gift of a man, even if He be a God, who allows us to do what we will with Him?

It is customary to think of the giving and receiving of a gift as a single transaction which confers an absolute dominion upon the recipient but it is not always so. Sometimes we can only enjoy the gift to the full if we resign our dominion over it. A child is a gift and we can only make that gift flourish if we allow its needs to override our needs and if we not only make sacrifices on its behalf but do so gladly and cheerfully. Moreover the gift becomes greater still if we sacrifice not only to meet its necessities but to meet its superfluities as well, to bring a smile onto their face, to bring a light into their life how many parents go the extra mile and more besides. Friendship too is a gift and this can only be enjoyed to the full if it is reciprocated. The more we respond to the gift with a counter-gift the greater the gift becomes. So our Lord comes to us as a gift which we can ignore or despise or cherish and love. If we do the first it does us no good, indeed it does us harm not only in eternity but here and now in time since each time we harden our hearts we darken our own lives. If we do the second we become rich, and the more we do it the richer we become.

So how can we come to know Him, this gift which is so powerful to change lives? Christianity proposes many ways, Scripture, Sacrament, prayer and so on. There have been millions of words written on the subject and I do not propose to add to them here. Instead I will look at what are the barriers that prevent us knowing Him. The Samaritan Woman stands in a sense for all of us but she is a person in her own right and with her own history. By considering the barriers that she considered stood between herself and Jesus we can perhaps learn something about our own case.

Without wishing to belabour the obvious two important facts to consider about the Samaritan Woman are 1) she was a Samaritan and 2) she was a woman. The hostility between Jews and Samaritans was proverbial, Jesus later made it a subject of one of His most famous parables (Luke 10:29-37) and, what is less well known, not long before telling the parable He had rebuked two of His Apostles, including the author of the passage we are now considering, for wanting to destroy a Samaritan village (Luke 9:51-55.) So this hostility was near universal felt by both the good and the bad and on both sides. The Woman's first words to our Lord are an expression of surprise that He should speak to her at all, but He did. It may be no profound thought to us now that ethnicity is no barrier to becoming a Christian however revolutionary it may have been in the beginning but this does not exhaust the significance of the Samaritan-ness of the Woman. As the subsequent dialogue revealed there was a religious difference. As is often the case to belong to a particular ethnic group inevitably meant also to belong to an associated religious faith. The Samaritans rejected the Temple in Jerusalem and most of the Books of the Jewish Bible. But, in the end, this proved no barrier to the Woman recognising Jesus for what He was and believing in Him. Within the scope offered to her by her religion she was able to perceive that a Messiah would come and that He would have certain characteristics. In her encounter with Jesus she had her horizons broadened but still some of the necessary groundwork for accepting Him had been done through her own religion. Saint Augustine wrote

"you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you"

  Every serious endeavour of the human mind, whether it be a philosophy or a religion, contains within it either a reflection of this unquiet longing or a perversion of it, as in Nazism, The materials exist so that when anyone from such a tradition is called they will find something to understand and respond to in that call. It is true that to know Him more perfectly and be refreshed by Him more fully it will be necessary to leave that tradition behind but nonetheless neither non-Christian faith nor anti-Christian philosophy creates an insuperable barrier to beginning to know Christ.

Again, it may be no profound thought to us that both women and men are equally invited to participate in the Kingdom of God (which doesn't necessarily mean participating in identical ways) however revolutionary that may have seemed at the time but this does not exhaust the significance of the Woman-ness of the Samaritan. Jesus and she engage in a lively discussion about the Jewish religion. Historically, and still today, the characteristic Jewish way of coming to a conclusion or not coming to a conclusion about the meaning of the Torah was to have arguments. This was classically how Rabbi's operated and before that how they were trained. It is the form which we find embodied in the Talmud the Jewish summation of how Jews should live in the world. Jesus often engaged in this way with the Pharisees, the Sadducees the Herodians and His other educated opponents. Here He is doing it with a woman something that the Yeshiva, Jewish schools for studying the Talmud,which use the Chavruta method did not allow for more than a thousand years after this time. The point here is that Jesus was not only affirming that women were equally invited to the Kingdom but also by arguing as an equal with a person who not only had not studied the Torah but in all probability could not read or write was affirming that lack of education was not a barrier to coming to know Him and understand Him well. Moreover, it is likely enough that the Woman had internalised the belief that she was of less intelligence than men, here Jesus is affirming that to know Him lack of intelligence alone is not a barrier. For us the Samaritan Woman stands for all those who are looked down upon because they lack academic qualifications or because they are not conventionally intelligent and she demonstrates that wisdom can flourish wherever there is a heart and mind willing to accept it.

Another fact to emerge from this conversation is that the Woman was what a less politically correct generation would have called a 'notorious sinner.' Liberal opinion would no doubt suggest that having had five husbands and living in an informal civil partnership with a sixth significant other life partner was not prima facie evidence of sin. I don't intend to argue the point (although Liberal opinion would be wrong) because the barrier I am looking at here is the one which the Woman would have assumed existed on the side of Jesus. From the get go she would have assumed that she could not get to know Him because she was a Samaritan, a disbeliever in the Temple Cult, a woman and uneducated and relatively less intelligent. The one barrier that she could not have imagined existing was her life history which she thought unknown to our Lord. Whether she considered it sinful or not she would have known that He would and for that reason alone would not have anything to do with her. But Jesus revealed that He did know and that He still wanted to give her the gift of Himself. For us the significance is this; many people know that the Church regards as unacceptable some of the ways that they lead their lives and therefore they make no move towards it expecting rejection. The Church rejects no one, she is kind to all as Jesus is kind to all. She proposes as He proposed that some things are right and some are wrong and that persistence in wrongdoing will keep you at a distance from Him, you will not come to know Him so well as you might, but nothing you have done will stop Him loving you and showing you kindness and as with the Head so with His body the Church.

So, the gift is God and the only barriers to us knowing it are those we choose to erect. What difference does it make? In part the answer is given by our Lord Himself, He will give you living water, in part you can deduce the benefits from what I have already said. In the end though as you can only eat something  by eating it or love someone by loving them you can only know the difference that being in Christ Jesus makes by being in Christ Jesus. Lower the barriers, allow yourself to be flooded, drown in the ocean of Christ. And then you will know.

In the figure of Mary, the mother of Jesus, we can see one who knows the gift, accepts the gift and displays to the full the effects of the gift. Our Lady accepted the gift as her child, for whom she made sacrifices. As her friend between whom and her love flowed and grew from perfection to perfection. With Him she walked the way of the Cross and through love shared His agony. She set no barriers to Him nor He to her. And, to end as we began, Mary was a contemplative, her world changing Yes to Jesus, her life as mother, teacher, companion, friend, advocate were all preceded and accompanied by a pondering in her heart of the things of God and the needs of her neighbours. Contemplation was the wellspring from which action came. Action brought forth the reaction from God. In the world of things actions bring forth equal and opposite reactions in the world of Spirit actions bring forth reactions a hundred a thousandfold greater than the the original impetus  so generous is our God and as no actions were more responsive to the love of God than those of our Lady so more grace has been poured upon her than upon any other mere creature of God. May she convey our prayers through her grace filled hands to Jesus her Son that we through her intercession can share in the joys of the Father's Kingdom.


Follow @stevhep on Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr. Follow Catholic Scot on Pinterest. Like the Catholic Scot Blog Page on Facebook.     
          

Gays, Abortion, Women's Rights- Is the Church Out of Touch?

                        Image: Gustave Doré - 'The New Zealander' illustration from 'London: a Pilgrimage' by Blanchard Jerrold



There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable....Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
Thomas Babington Macaulay 

The position of the Catholic Church on many of the more contentious issues of our time is very clearly laid out and easily accessible. Notwithstanding which most of her critics seem to rely upon second- or third- hand summaries of them provided by enemies of the Church whenever they decide to comment upon them. I do not propose here to enter directly upon a discussion of the merits of the Catholic point of view, instead I will focus on a secondary argument which is often deployed. This is to the effect that by taking the stands which she does the Church is rendering herself out of touch and irrelevant in the eyes of the public and above all those of the youth. The customary counter-argument is to point out that those Christian communities which have taken on board the opinions of the age in matters like LGBT rights are declining at at least the same rate as those which reject them. Even if this is true it is insufficient since it places too much reliance upon passing events which might after all change in the future. Instead I will suggest that this charge against the Church rests upon a number of assumptions which are inherently false. Specifically I mean:
-Ascribing too much importance to the Zeitgeist.
-Subscribing to the notion of inevitable and irreversible progress.
-The illusion of permanence
-A misunderstanding of the nature of truth.

Firstly, by zeitgeist is meant "the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time."
It seems to be the case that this defining spirit in most Western countries and in the chattering classes of other countries includes a commitment to a whole canon of issues such as free access to abortion, ordination of women, the idea that same-sex relationships are more or less identical to heterosexual ones and so on. The Church by taking a distinctive stand on such matters stands accused, in the words of British Prime Minister David Cameron, of failing to "get with the programme." I think it is quite accurate to say that Catholicism is out of sympathy with the zeitgeist in some parts of the world but that is less of a problem than her opponents imagine.

Except in quite exceptional circumstances history is made by activist minorities. Most people most of the time are intensely absorbed in their own concerns. They tend to express opinions on broader matters about which they care little through the simple process of repeating what others have said. As an example I will look at the change in reported social attitudes towards same-sex relationships which has occurred in the UK during the course of my lifetime. When I was younger the prevailing feeling was that these were, on the whole, A Bad Thing and people tended to feel mildly hostile to them. Within that consensus was a minority who were very strongly hostile and another minority who were either homosexual themselves or very strongly supportive of homosexuals. Today the prevailing feeling is that these relationships are A Good Thing and that people tend to feel mildly positive about them. Two different cohorts of the population here are worth thinking about. Those of my generation (I admit to being 51 at time of writing) have mostly got with the programme. However, even the most committed liberal optimist would probably not suggest that in each of the several million people in question this 180 degree change was effected after a period of soul searching and deep thought. In most instances they have simply trimmed their sails to the wind on a subject that doesn't deeply interest them. The cohort of the young, as you would expect, is thoroughly imbued with the zeitgeist. However there is little doubt that in most case they hold as firmly to it as my generation held to theirs which is to say hardly at all. What has happened over the course of some three or four decades is that power and influence has slipped out of the hands of one activist minority and fallen into the hands of another. That is how history happens. To rest any kind of prediction about social attitudes going forward, however, on the zeitgeist is simply to mistake a possibly temporary victory for a fundamental change of some kind.

The idea of 'Progress' is itself part of the zeitgeist in much of the world. It rest also on the more secure foundation of being a philosophical conviction which is at the heart of the Left, Social Liberal weltanschauung. Briefly the idea is this; civilization progresses from a lower state to a higher one over time. This does not just mean that it's technological level continually rises, it means that its core values undergo a continual evolution towards ever more perfect expressions of the human spirit. The perfectibility of Man is an article of faith of this creed. Since Man can become perfect it follows that human societies can become perfect and that, led by wise liberals, it definitely shall become perfect. History becomes an unfolding map recording humanity's gradual progress towards its final goal. Since Progress has its enemies, reactionaries who cling to the old ways for self-interested motives, its advance takes the form of a series of battles some bloody, some in the realm of ideas. Despite the odd defeat along the way the line of march is inevitable and irresistible. This set of ideas, this sunny optimism, was the openly expressed view of many, such as the Science Fiction author H.G. Wells, at the beginning of the 20th century. The events of those troubled hundred years and since have rather silenced these transports of delight. Probably most contemporary Social Liberals if challenged would state that victories were neither inevitable nor irresistible. Nonetheless the notion that they actually are both is a deep rooted emotional truth for the Left. Ask them to envisage the world in a couple of centuries from now and they will reproduce a version of today's Sweden or Holland only more so. Societies where old folk hold leaving parties before visiting the neighbourhood euthanasiast, where promiscuous sex without biological or emotional consequences happens all the time and (more commendably perhaps) where healthcare is free and first class at the time of need, where poverty, unemployment and wars are things of the distant past as is religious belief in all its forms. Essentially it is a working out to the end of the impulse which was commenced by the the French Revolution in 1789.

There are several drawbacks to this vision. The most important one is this idea of the perfectibility of Man. It is in some ways a mutation of the Christian idea of the redeemability of Man. This holds that each person without exception is capable of being redeemed by the saving power of God and transformed into a new creature, a saint, who then, among other things, contributes to society in a generous and self-sacrificing spirit. The necessary corollary to this belief is that each person stands in need of redemption, that without such a transformation Man, wounded by the effects of Original Sin constantly yields to temptation and sins most grievously against their neighbours and themselves. The Liberal idea decouples Man from personal, internally experienced, concupiscence and lays the blame for imperfections in individuals primarily on external pressures usually caused by reactionaries. Remove the imperfections from society and you will remove the imperfections from man. This contributes to inevitable and irresistible progress because as each generation has one or more shackle removed from it its successors born into the new more perfect world and no longer subject to the external pressures of reactionaries on this or that issue as it is removed will no longer act imperfectly with regard to, say, race, sex, sexuality or the like. They will then resist any attempt to rollback history and the world can prepare to move on to the next level up by defeating the next enemy along in the chain of progress. In this scenario the Church, it is argued, so long as it remains attached to the values of a previous epoch will be left behind in the slipstream of progress and disappear altogether. Only if it attaches itself to the chariot of Progress does it have any prospect of survival.

The basic problem with this theory is the inadmissibility of it's central premise. Man is not perfectible. However society is ordered, whatever institutions are created or destroyed, however many reactionaries are defeated and despatched to the archives each individual human person from the moment of birth will be subject to the power of temptation. Selfishness, self-centeredness and narrowness of perspective are not impositions laid upon people by their environment, they are an inescapable part of human nature. They can only be defeated by a conscious personal act of the will prompted by the grace of God. That means, for the purposes of this discussion, that no political victory is ever final no triumph is irreversible. 'Progress' is a chimera which is every bit as likely to vanish away to the same place that the 'Divine Right of Kings' has already gone to. The failure of the Church to jump into the progressive bandwagon is not the one thing guaranteed to ensure it vanishing into oblivion, it is rather one of the things ensuring that it will do no such thing whatever may happen to that set of French Revolutionary ideas which are not even three centuries old yet.

The illusion of permanence. Another facet of the human personality is the persistent illusion that the way things are is the way that things will be. In the middle of summer it is difficult to imagine winter and vice versa. The 51 years which I admit to have been tumultuous ones in the history of humanity. I grew up in a world in which the Soviet Union and its allies were seemingly a permanent feature of the world and it seemed likely that their number would grow rather than diminish. A world where South Africa was ruled by only whites, where Israel was at war with its neighbours, where telephones were immobile, computers filled large sized buildings, Popes were always Italian, televisions were black and white, India and China were minor regional powers with small economies and so on and so forth. All but one of these things has changed beyond recognition. But where the map of the world has changed the map of the mind remains the same. We still expect tomorrow to be pretty much the same as today unless we are unfortunate enough to be in a war zone or fortunate enough to be about to give birth for the first time. One of the more powerful forces preventing people from turning to the spiritual is the illusion that what visibly surrounds us, the things of time, really matters and that what is invisible, the things of eternity, doesn't. We seek to transform the place in which we find ourselves into a permanent home and invest all that we have into making it perfect, believing that perfectibility is both possible and desirable. This is a transposition of the error of liberalism into private life. It is the fruit of an earthbound hope this earnest striving to make the space we inhabit into a paradise because we believe it possible to do so because we think we can make the transient permanent. One of the products of this illusion is that our vision of the world going forward is that it should and will contain the elements of the world as it now is. And to those who support the ideals of 'progress' or who accept the current zeitgeist the future, in the West at least, is one that contains free abortion on demand, artificial contraception, 'equal marriage' and so on for no more powerfully cogent reason than that that is what the present contains. And since the Church does not accept these things she will not be part of the future unless or until she 'gets with the programme.' I feel here that simply to state the case is to undermine it. Nothing is permanent, all things must pass. The programme can be interrupted.

The nature of truth. I never tire of restating this proposition- the Church is not the advocate of a philosophy, she is the steward of a Divine Revelation. What she proposes for belief is the truth about God and the things of God which she has received from God Himself most fully and completely in the person of Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary. Jesus Christ, yesterday, and to day; and the same for ever. (Hebrews 13:8) That being so her propositions though they may vary in form as the centuries roll by cannot, will not and should not vary in content. The world may believe what it will but where the beliefs of the world contradict the truths of Revelation then the world is wrong and the Church is right. It would be a grave dereliction of duty for the Church to turn aside from the straight path to pursue the world through its twists and turns of fashionable belief and practice. More than that it would be a great act of folly. If the truth is indeed truthful then it will, in the end, always prevail. To attach herself to a chariot heading for the cliffs is no act of wisdom. There have been many epoch's in human history when the Church has been marginalised or subject to sustained assault. It is another cherished illusion of the Liberal Left to think that the history of the West consists of a period of unbroken dominion by Catholicism or its variants over society from the time of Constantine until the advent of universal education, the advance of science and the first triumphs of the spirit of the storming of the Bastille began to undermine her. Far from it, the Church has weathered stormier times than this without the opposition of these factors which are neither necessarily enemies of Christianity (education and science are positive goods) or of enduring significance (other -isms than liberalism once seemed unstoppable.) No, the Church has this promise behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. (Matthew 28;20) and this I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18.) As long as the Church is in touch with the faith of the Apostles and true to her Divine Master then she is on the course marked out for her from the foundation of the world. She will neither disappear nor become irrelevant because Christ will do neither of these things and the Church is the Bride of Christ, His destiny is her destiny, thanks be to God.

Follow @stevhep on Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr, follow Catholic Scot on Pinterest, like the Catholic Scot Blog Page on Facebook

Christian Meditation- Part Three

When I go into my house, I shall repose myself with her: for her conversation hath no bitterness, nor her company any tediousness, but joy and gladness.
Book of Wisdom 8:16

I also have had empty months, and have numbered to myself wearisome nights. If I lie down to sleep, I shall say: When shall arise? and again I shall look for the evening, and shall be filled with sorrows even till darkness.

Job 7

In Part One and Part Two we looked at going into our heart-house, reposing with Wisdom and entering into conversation with her. Here we look at the two things specifically excluded from the conversation, bitterness and tediousness. Why is it important to look at what is absent? Well, in a sense, these two things are unknown to Wisdom since she has no experience of them herself. They are, however, known to and by us. Since it is a conversation and not a monologue we must leave these things behind  if we would converse with her. That is, meditation is a process which changes us. Wisdom does not come to resemble us we come to resemble her. Therefore the roots of bitterness and tediousness within ourselves must be removed or at least rendered harmless if we would grow close to this most welcome of guests in our heart.

It seems to me that the two principle sources of bitterness are sin and death. It is no coincidence that the further the West has distanced itself from Christianity the more it has repudiated the notion of personal sin and sought to put death out of sight and mind as much as possible. It might, in polite circles, be borderline acceptable to suggest that we experience bitterness because others have sinned against us but not because we ourselves have sinned. The reverse, however, is true. The sins of other people may cause us to suffer, to suffer terribly, but suffering is not bitterness. If the experience of suffering alone caused bitterness then all sufferers would be bitter but not all are. Bitterness is a fruit of sin Thy ways, and thy devices have brought these things upon thee: this is thy wickedness, because it is bitter, because it hath touched thy heart. (Jeremiah 4)  

In the UK at least it has always struck me as a complete waste of time for street evangelists to shout out invitations to passers by to repent of their sins. Mostly because these passers by for the most part only have a vague idea of what it is they are being invited to repent of. We need to understand what this thing is before we can escape from its grasp. Christianity holds that the purpose of our individual existence is to love. Love is not a solitary pursuit, it needs to have an object. Nor is it an abstract notion, it requires to be expressed. We are called upon to love God with all our strength and to love our neighbour as ourself, these are our objects. Love as an active force in the world takes the form of service and self sacrifice, that is its expression. Sin consists of a radical refusal to feel that love or to express it. It is a form of selfishness that sees self-gratification as the primary motivation for any action. As an aside I should say that atheism is not necessarily a sin as such. If one seeks for God honestly and sincerely but cannot discern Him that is not a refusal of love it is a search for it. If, however, atheism comes from a refusal to search born out of a fear of what might be found then it is a sin.

It is a curious thing that the more one dedicates one's life to self-gratification the more bitter and alienated one is likely to become. This is because we are designed better than that and we are acting contrary to our design specifications whenever we sin. Those things which we gratify are our bodies or our emotional whims. They are only parts of ourselves. Yet to be happy we must satisfy the whole of ourselves, mind and body, spirit and soul, and only a life lived in conformity to our true nature can achieve this. It is also important to remember that why we do what we do is as important as what we do. It is common enough for people who live lives of service to feel at least as bitter as those who are self indulgent (hence the Daily Mail) but that is because they resent serving. They do what they do for any number of reasons but not primarily out of a freely given love which neither asks for nor desires anything in return.

What has this to do with meditation? Wisdom whom you encounter is a servant, her service is love. To understand her you too must be a servant. In meditation you bring the whole of yourself, you cannot pose as a loving servant for twenty minutes a day and learn the secrets of Wisdom as if she were fooled by your pose. The further you are from sin the closer you are to God because the more you resemble Him. And the more you resemble Him the more intimately you can be joined with Him.

Another potent source of bitterness is death. Considered as a finality death robs us of those we love and brings to an end all our own hopes and dreams. It gives a futility to all that we do. All things must pass away so time spent doing anything other than eating, drinking and making merry is time wasted. Why sow for another to reap? Why build for another to tear down? Actually, death as such need not have such an impact. Even many people who have little or no belief in an afterlife do not find it a bitter thought that they will die. They invest their hopes for the future in their children or their community or their country or an ideal society which they devote their lives to creating. That is, they serve, out of love, and so rob death of its bitterness. It is only sin which gives death its sting. If self-gratification is everything then death is the end of everything and constitutes nothing but loss. In meditation it is no bad thing to remember that our time is limited and that we would do well to make the most of it. It is an introducing of bitterness into a conversation where it has no part if we seek Wisdom because we wish to avoid death.

The chances are that if you have read my blog thus far then you already have a pretty good idea of what tediousness is. There goes ten minutes of your life that you'll never get back again. And that is the essence of it. Tediousness is a function of time. Any experience unduly prolonged becomes tedious. This applies to meditation considered as an exercise. It does not apply to our dialogue with Wisdom because this is a leaving behind of time and an entering into eternity where Wisdom dwells. In Part Two I referred, by way of a couple of hobbits, to 'living on the heights'. These are the heights which I had in mind. The period of time you set aside for meditation may be twenty or forty or sixty minutes or whatever. Some of that will be 'warming up' and some will be 'warming down', perhaps all of it will be, but at some point the grace of God may reach out and draw you into a dialogue with Himself. That may be for only a moment or maybe for much longer but time ceases to be relevant during that experience because you have left it behind, you have no consciousness of it and little awareness of much else either. There is no tediousness in eternity.

There is a common experience in Christian meditation called the "Dark Night of the Soul." Tediousness is the common lot of our species but the meditator can divide her experience of it into "before the divine encounter" and "after the divine encounter" phases. That before needs little describing, we all know what it is. That after is indescribably dreary and dark and dry. It feels like a desert without end. There can be days, or weeks or years when we enter into our heart-home and repose ourselves and wait for our hidden guest, Wisdom, to appear and she chooses to make absence her mode of being with us. It would seem that our last state is worse than our first. But it is not so. Our encounters have taught us to know Him better and to love Him more, we are assured of His love for us, we have solid memories of all that we have experienced with Him. Deprivation of the light touch of His presence in the form of Wisdom is a period in which we realise that all that we desire is Him and comes from Him alone. Our encounters were not the result of our skill in the techniques of meditation or a reward for our virtues. They were pure gift, wholly unearned by us. The Dark Night is the season where our root of bitterness is burnt out tediously to prepare us for that which Wisdom will give us in her own time, and that unreservedly. In the meantime all we can do is wait and all we have to sustain us are faith, hope and love.

In Part Four I hope to look at joy and gladness.

Follow @stevhep on Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr and Catholic Scot on Pinterest

Pointless Images

36 Bend my heart to your instructions, not to selfish gain.

37 Avert my eyes from pointless images, by your word give me life. Psalm 118/9 (New Jerusalem Bible)

In an era where English was used in a more elegant fashion the translator might have written "incline my heart" or possibly "sway my heart". What is at issue here is a change of direction in our life's journey and our willing acceptance of a guiding force or power to be the focal point of our heart compass. To talk about a heart swaying is to acknowledge the always real possibility of first bending one way and then bending back upon oneself to return back whence we came, and beyond, upon the road we so need to abandon. To talk of an inclination is to consider that whatever weaving goes on the final destination towards which we aim remains constant. Simply to bend suggests the adoption of an awkward and difficult to retain posture. Which may not be entirely inappropriate for the plea that David is making here is for assistance in doing something that we cannot do ourselves alone.

The word "heart" is rich with meaning and evocative power in the context of Sacred Scripture and Christian tradition, the Orthodox talk of "prayer of the heart", the Catholics of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Blessed John Henry, Cardinal, Newman chose as his motto cor ad cor loquitur, "heart speaks unto heart." The heart is the true centre of a person. It is their essence, that within them which points always towards the true, because it is always itself true. In fact, the mystics would say that it is God Himself since only He is ever true and pointing towards truth so that our own heart, the wellspring of our individual life, is God. He is within as well as without. This would mean that heart speaking to heart is not two hearts but one which nonetheless in a divine paradox is not a monologue but a fruitful dialogue. The mystery at work here is that of a unity of being containing a multiplicity of persons. We are each within God and He within us so that we are one. We are each created uniquely by the One to abide within Him in just the fashion that we are suited to and no other. Our individual personhood is not lost in unity, it is fulfilled.

When David, then, talks of our heart being bent by God towards God He is not referring to that in us which is always inclined in that direction. He is talking of the imagined heart, the simulacrum of a heart, that we create and establish as a pointless image for our eyes to gaze upon and our desires to follow. This is ever bent in an awkward posture since we have created it, however unconsciously, with the express purpose of turning ourselves away from the light which disturbs us and towards the gloom where all is cool and not at all challenging to our sensual desires. In a sense he is asking that we be un-bent.

To the contemporary mind bending to instructions conveys the unpleasant, apparently pointless, image of the individual exchanging freedom for servitude. Of all the illusions we cherish that of absolute individual autonomy is perhaps the most precious to us today. We demand our rights a hundred or a thousand times before we place the same pressure on ourselves to fulfil our obligations. Or, at least, we appear to since the world only functions as well as it does, and we within it, precisely because so many of us fulfil our obligations and discharge our duties a hundred or a thousand times more frequently than we evade them. In truth most of us most of the time do the right thing because it is what the heart impels us to do even while our head, our vain imaginings, pushes us in a different way. What David is praying for here is just this, to unite our thoughts and our imagination to our heart. The instructions we seek are the words which will express to our mind what the heart already knows to be true.

It is, nonetheless, the case that when we come under these divine instructions that we constrain our actions or potential actions and must do real violence to our desires for selfish gain. We embark upon a path of struggle. It is a commonplace of spiritual writers to say that in service is our real freedom but we cannot pretend that this is any other than a freedom which is experienced as a constraint, a gain which feels like a loss. The wound that Original Sin has made in our natures allows us to desire as good things that which harms us and to experience as harms those things which are good. This is why David calls upon the assistance of the good God to make this submission to instructions, without Him we cannot follow the path that leads to happiness. He it is that strengthens us to see that submission, service and self-forgetfulness, those paths that lead away from the pursuit of moment to moment pleasure, is the one road that leads to happiness.  If we seek pleasure alone we do not seek happiness, if we seek happiness who knows what pleasures we shall find along the way?

Among the distractions from that one road which assail our heart are those pointless images of which David speaks. It may be a metaphor for the things which blind the eyes of the heart, but, there are too very many actual images, pointless and aimless, which attract and hold the eyes in our head. It is an often used cliché, sometimes employed even by the fiercest of those partisans of absolute individual autonomy, that we are "bombarded with images". And it is true but not the whole truth. Frequently, daily, hourly, we choose many of those images with which to bombard ourselves. We choose what pictures will distract us. We choose what images will strengthen our resolve to commit actual sin and give us new and varied pleasures of selfish gain. It is not a wholly free choice but a choice it certainly is. Whether it be the Shopping Channel or the Pornography Channel it is a means to reinforce the inclinations we wish to reinforce and drown out the heart voice that calls for us to gaze upon that beyond images which contains all images as realities. The Children of Israel rebelled by creating out of their own resources a Golden Calf to worship. I heard an Anabaptist theologian defining worship is "giving your undivided allegiance to". Like the rebellious Israelites we also give our allegiance to what we produce out of ourselves which is a roundabout way of giving our allegiance to ourselves alone. They are pointless images because they are as insubstantial as our own ego's which a moments careless driving or a day's illness can destroy utterly.

So what we need is life and, moreover, a life which will endure the greatest of traumas and disasters and triumph even over the apparently final drama of death. David asks for that single word of God which is life itself. He did not know what that word was when he asked for it. He did know that there was just such a word and that God would one day speak it and liberate His people by it and through it. And He did. The word is Jesus and praised be His name.


     

Desire, the powerful enemy of the soul

Reflection on The Letter of James 1:13-16

¹³No one, when tempted, should say, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one. 
¹⁴But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; 
¹⁵then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death. 
¹⁶Do not be deceived, my beloved.

There is a popular school of thought which suggests that the major world religions are basically moral codes, guides about how you should live your life, with supernatural bits more or less artificially tagged on in order to reinforce the point. Certainly history can show us examples of rulers of states or heads of families who, irreligious themselves, encourage religion in lesser mortals as a way to ensure their obedience and compliance with the rules. No doubt too there are many practitioners of religion, including religious leaders, who embrace their faith first and foremost out of a love of order, hierarchy, obedience. I think these all miss the point.

Virtue and morality are not burdens that we take upon ourselves to please a demanding and vengeful God. Vice and immorality are burdens that we shed in order to travel more easily towards a realm of perfect love and pure light. The desire for self satisfaction through possessing for oneself material objects or intense sensual experiences or other persons produce more fetters for our bodies and souls than any number of self sacrificing or self denying acts. Jealous anger, frustrated desire, contemptuous disregard for the needs of others these are the things that make of our days a torment and of our desires a prison. It is only when we leave them to one side that we can truly begin to experience a sense of freedom.

Religion, in the Christian sense, is primarily about a relationship of self giving love and the more freely and fully we can give it then the more fully, and fulfillingly, can we receive it. Each desire for selfish goods is narrow and circular, beginning and ending with ourselves, and so limits our potential to receive what is wide. It is not by taking on a moral code that we can come to know God, it is by knowing God that we can take on a moral code which aids us to know Him better and love Him more, a love primarily expressed through serving and loving our neighbours whom He also loves with a perfect love.

The mystical Theologia Germanica has this interesting passage  

If there were no self-will, there would be no proprietorship. There is no proprietorship in heaven; and this is why contentment, peace, and blessedness are there. If anyone in heaven were so bold as to call anything his own, he would immediately be cast out into hell, and become an evil spirit. But in hell everyone will have self-will, and therefore in hell is every kind of wretchedness and misery. And so it is also on earth. But if anyone in hell could rid himself of his self-will and call nothing his own, he would pass out of hell into heaven. And if a man, while here on earth, could be entirely rid of self-will and proprietorship, and stand up free and at liberty in the true light of God, and continue therein, he would be sure to inherit the kingdom of heaven. For he who has anything, or who desires to have anything of his own, is a slave; and he who has nothing of his own, nor desires to have anything, is free and at liberty, and is in bondage to no man.

This, I think, clearly makes the point that the primary cause of our spiritual sufferings is not that an unjust God forbids us to be gluttons or serial adulterers or possessors of unjustly acquired wealth. The primary cause is that we desire to possess when happiness, in truth, consists of letting go. This is the clear example that Jesus sets us, as laid out in Philippians 2 by St Paul-

 ³Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 
⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,
   did not regard equality with God
   as something to be exploited, 
⁷ but emptied himself,
   taking the form of a slave,
   being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form, 
⁸   he humbled himself
   and became obedient to the point of death—
   even death on a cross. 

The image of God the Son leaving behind the glory of heaven to become not only a human but a human born into poverty is a sign that we too need to leave all to obtain all. A similar image is also, perhaps, contained in the story of  Prince Siddhartha leaving his palace and kingdom in order, eventually, to become the Buddha. The one desire that brings us happiness is the desire to love perfectly and to be perfectly loved. All other desires are lesser and will lead us not to lesser happinesses but to greater unhappinesses.



Note. The title of this piece is from a line spoken by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita 3:43 "Know Him therefore who is above reason; and let his peace give thee peace. Be a warrior and kill desire, the powerful enemy of the soul."
All scripture quotes are from the New Revised Standard Version.

La Bête Humaine

This report on the school shooting in Toulouse is worth reflecting upon

"According to eye-witnesses, the gun then jammed, temporarily putting a halt to the rampage but the killer swiftly changed weapons and headed into the school. He grabbed Miriam as she tried to escape, grasped her hair and shot her. Then, as she bled to death on the floor, he lifted up her head and fired two additional bullets." 

 Miriam was an eight year old little girl. Her killer, an adult man. held her by her hair as she tried to run away and shot her in the head. He was carrying a video camera around his neck at the time in order to film his actions.

If one human is capable of acting in this fashion then all humans are, perhaps, also similarly capable. This suggestion is so revolting that faced with crimes of this kind we instinctively recoil from the notion and say "No, this man was no man but a monster, a beast, a madman!"  In saying that we say nothing. He was not (I use the past tense as he himself was shot in the head) anything other than human and if he was mad, well if one human is capable of becoming mad in this fashion then all humans are, perhaps, also similarly capable.

All selfishness is radical, that is, all selfishness comes from the very root of what, who we are. Selflessness too is radical. In most of us most of the time there is enough of the latter to wage a lively combat with the former. Yet victory or defeat is never final while we live. What Catholics call Original Sin is never vanquished in the living although God in His mercy always gives us the weapons to best it in any and every given situation. We are not compelled to accept these weapons but the more we reject them the more we find other weapons in our hands. The desire to hurt, even to hurt harmless little girls with long hair, is nothing more or less than the prolonged and anguished cry "Look at Me!" Pride makes us selfish. The pride that says we are the best, or the most totally right or the most totally right-on. It is a long way from eight year old little boys pulling the pig tails of their schoolmates to grown men holding those same tresses to welter them with blood. Remember though that even a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.