A Lenten Meditation

What prompts people to move from mediocrity (or worse) toward a radical reversal to the morally good and the best?

Supposing, of course, the illuminating grace of God (available to anyone who really and honestly wants it), evidence indicates that there are almost numberless reasons why. Christ surely is the most powerful of all the reasons. Despite the faults of individual members of the Church, who fail to live up to what they profess, thoughtful people recognize that the only fair way to judge any institution is according to its principles and the example of those who live in accord with them. That simple fact points to the sheer goodness and beauty of the saints, those who live heroically well what Catholicism is and teaches.

They are prime illustrations of the evidential power of beauty.

Unexpected Meditation XXII

The mystery is not that our desires are so universal and all-consuming, although by this, we know we are alive and are being driven by something beyond us. Nor is it just that we have so little time, even if we are allotted the full span of four score years.

The mystery is rather that some things do satisfy us. And because of this, we begin to suspect that there is a real connection between ourselves and the world, neither of which we made, that there is a satisfaction for what is infinite in us.

Unexpected Meditation XXI

Most of the truly great things that men have ever done go unrecorded. We should not delude ourselves that the storehouse of goodness is exhausted by what little we know.

Unexpected Meditation XX

Many of the happiest moments in our lives are experienced when we are not doing just what we wanted to do. This tells us that happiness or salvation or whatever we want to call it comes to us not as a result of our efforts so much, but as gifts, ours to be sure, but gifts still.

Unexpected Meditation XIX

Chesterton once remarked that
mailing a letter was an irrevocable and,
therefore, essentially romantic act.
Letters and cards - instruments of romance.

Unexpected Meditation XVIII

Gabriel Marcel: There has been a general "disappearance of the sense of hospitality today, at least in the countries which have been submerged in technical progress. We ought, of course, to be accurate in our way of stating this: to be sure, famous visitors, well-known scholars, writers, or artists are usually very well received in all countries. But by the sense of hospitality, I mean above all that sort of piety which is shown in the East to the unknown guest, because he has entrusted himself to a man and his dwelling."

Unexpected Meditation XVII

Loneliness is an intrinsic aspect of healthy personality. There is and must be in all of us somewhere an interior, deep loneliness. We cannot escape this. All of our relatedness to others, good and necessary though they be, will never erase the basic loneliness that is also about us.

Loneliness, then, is the sign that we are never satisfied with any earthly love or work, a sign of the dignity of our creation. This too is why we must be somewhat skeptical about all enthusiasms and friendships which are conceived in terms of removing this fundamental loneliness. Should they succeed, they can only end up by making our lives more shallow. We are made for something else, yet this too.

Unexpected Meditation XVI

Sometimes even pain cannot be trusted. Christianity in its mystery maintains somehow that pain is redemptive. How different it seems if it is. Still, the pain, the suffering, remains. We are not told it will be otherwise, in spite of all the utopian promises which charge - and haunt - our world.

Unexpected Meditation XV

As both Plato and Aristotle said, young people are incapable of really studying ethics. They lack experience and insight into what they themselves have done. They cannot yet imagine what they will do, they and those they love.

Unexpected Meditation XIV

Friendship is most difficult because it does not in fact last, at least not in the way we thought it would, swore it would, when we were younger. Aristotle already noted this in his Ethics, but he is hard to believe when we are young. We change. Our fiends change. Friends must grow proportionately together, though perhaps not in the same ways. And when we or our friends take certain options, certain choices, we can no longer abide with them, since friendship is primarily a sharing of truth and goodness. The ancients were mostly right. I suspect that if by the time we reach fifty we have two or three friends, we are lucky.

Unexpected Meditation XIII

We are a tragic race. And this is true as much of our comforts, passions and affections as it is of our unexpected, unjust, unwanted deaths. But we are also a funny race. It is often more difficult to know which is more problematic to come to terms with - the fact that we die or the fact that we laugh. I am inclined to suspect the latter.

Unexpected Meditation XII

Sometimes we merely receive, unable to give back.
This often approaches the highest moments of our existence.
We should not disdain our limitations.

Unexpected Meditation XI

The few things we need to be satisfied should be sought out and accepted. Yet, the abundance of the universe is not to be conceived as somehow a sort of divine trap, better not given at all. How little we need is one of the great wonders of our species. How much there is given is another.

Unexpected Meditation X

Physics and religion both sound like gibberish if you do not know the basic axioms, or take the time to know the basic axioms. The tragedy in believing or seeing religion as mere gibberish - that is, the tragedy of not taking the time to know its basic axioms - is that the act of doing so ultimately separates one from the personal love of others: if one knows the basic axioms, one would know why.

Unexpected Meditation IX

Intelligence is not the ability to read.
Intelligence is the ability to read between the lines.
That is what "intelligence" means: inter legere. Read between the lines.

Does that make Intelligent Design (ID) a reading of design between the lines?
As good a definition as I have seen.

Unexpected Meditation VIII

Beware the rage of the placid,
for it smolders long after more lively flames have died.

Unexpected Meditation VII

Between two armies is a dangerous place to graze your flock.

Unexpected Meditation VI

We need solemnity. However, solemnity is not a need. It is a response. For a priest: to walk slowly about the Altar is not just a rubric. It is an awe. And so it is.