No, this is not about how British and American and Canadian and Irish and Welsh and Scottish English differ.
This is about the difficulty of Christians talking to each other and for people of different faiths to speak to each other.
For instance, “original sin” is a blocker. Sin means for most people something terrible someone has done. So Catholics get asked why they believe babies are morally defective or blemished! When say, something like myself, tries to say that the doctrine of original sin means that the world we orginate from  is not the world God intended…seemingly obvious enough…they don’t believe me because of the word “sin.” Then, in the best medieval tradition, the best western medieval tradition, I should say, I try to explain that what they they are confusing is this obvious condition of limitation with what is called actual sin. Actual sin is a morally, freely, chosen defective deed. This takes an informed conscience, a developed mind, a free act. (Of course, it gets worse when we talk about serious sin, venial sin, mortal sin, etc etc…because for some sin is sin and that is all that counts.)

Then I get asked if I believe that the human race is “fallen.” Well, there are Christians who interpret that word to mean to mean that all human beings are going to hell unless they explicitly accept Christ as their savior. Dr. Billy Graham was interviewed by Larry King one night and Larry King said, “Dr Graham, you preach that unless a person accepts Christ as their savior, that person is going to hell. I have not accepted Christ as my savior. Am I going to hell?” And, of course, Dr. Graham, a thorough evangelical Baptist, said, “Yes.” Larry King knew he would say that and simply moved on to the next question.
So we Catholics can say that the human race has fallen from where God intended it to be but this by no means fallen in the sense that it is on its way to hell unless an explicit act of faith in Christ is made.
So these are not complicated words but they divide us and can otherwise confuse unless we take care.

Tags: hell, language, original sin, Religious division, sin

In discussions of faith, it seems to be a constant that conscience as the basis of religious faith gets overlooked or is even replaced by some other principle. So one more time, let us hear Cardinal Newman…

“I add one remark. Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please,—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.

So indeed it is; did the Pope speak against Conscience in the true sense of the word, he would commit a suicidal act. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet. His very mission is to proclaim the moral law, and to protect and strengthen that “Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world.”

Tags: conscience, faith, Newman

Pope John XXIII, “good Pope John,” called the second Vatican Council on Oct. 11, 1962. He died a year later in June of 1963. Ancient history now, I suppose, but I remember exactly where I was on both days. I was in French III at Punahou when Maryknoll Brother Venard rang the parish bells to celebrate the opening of the Council. I was in study hall in the old Cooke Library at Punahou when Brother tolled the bells again so I knew the gravely ill John had died.
John has now been beatified and they chose October 11 as his feast day rather than the date of his death. So this Sunday is the anniversary of the Council and a celebration of this wonderful man. From the day he was buried in the crypt of St Peter’s there have always been people praying at his tomb, leaving candles and flowers. Today he has a shrine upstairs (John Paul II is now in his old grave) and there are always people there praying.
The month the council began, the Cuban missile crisis started and we in Hawaii, an A-1 target, did not know if we were going to be alive from one day to the next. By 6 AM every morning all during the crisis all the votive candles in my parish church had been lit.
John was a man of hope. His encyclical, Pacem in Terris, Peace on Earth, is still a classic and quite relevant. You might read it for what he has to say about health care if for no other reason.

Tags: Cuban Missile Crisis, Pacem in Terris, Pope John, Vatican II

The chaplains of Wesleyan University—Rabbi David Teva, Sister Marwa Aly, Pastor Joan Burnett, and myself—are offering a six session non-credit course on Mondays…Oct 5, 12, 19///Nov. 2, 9, 16 at 4:15-5:45 PM. We plan a panel, discussion with snacks, student journaling, covering love of neighbor, pursuit of happiness, the identity of women, and the controversial texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

This will be a first for all four of us at Wesleyan. Last semester, Sister Marwa and I offered a delightful seminar on Mary, the Mother of Jesus, from the Bible and the Qu’aran. So now the four of us will wade into this hoping that the example of dialogue we give, the questions we respond to, and what the students take away will add a pinch or two a more peaceful, compassionate world.

Tags: Dialogue, Wesleyan chaplains

The book of Numbers is about the numbers of Hebrews that went with Moses across the desert to the promised land. It is a delightful book.
Part of the delight is how Moses handled the organization of this great crowd of ex-slaves. Foundational to the organization was a sense that Moses was a prophet…a leader who, for all his faults, the Spirit raised up most unexpectedly. Moses is the archetype prophet. And although he is the archetype, he will not get into the Promised Land. That is a whole other meditation.
What concerns us here is that God has Moses gather 70 potential leader prophets into a tent where some of the Spirit given Moses will be shared out among this leadership. Two miss the meeting and received the Spirit anyway and start prophesying. Moses staff people object. Moses says, “Would that all the people of God were prophet!”
Moses is eager to share the glory and the burden.
We know in group dynamics that a whole group can go down the drain if there is a bully there beating out people who might have the answer but who do not get a chance to get the idea on the table.
In the Church we can ask ourselves what if, for instance, a huge number of, say, Zen Buddhists, wanted to join the Church. What would be do with them? Could we use their gifts? Would they have to turn into clones of us so that all we got was more workers but no new ideas or experiences? What if there were a huge group of people who learned Hebrew and had studied the Jewish scriptures and then decided to come into the Church…what would we do with them?They would know the Bible Jesus knew and a language and a set of ideas that Jesus knew. Would it mean nothing to us? We have not bothered to learn Hebrew. A translation is good enough for us. Of course, we do not know Greek either and so the Gospels are kept at a distance too. Do we need to have great intelligence and mastery of languages to be a Christian? Well, of course not, but wouldn’t it be great if we had room for and  could make use of people with so many gifts?
John Henry Newman was criticized because he made so few converts. He said that was not his job. He said his job was preparing the Church to receive converts.

Tags: gifts, Moses, Newman

I wrote this as a pre-bulletin for the Catholic Community. The letter of St James, (3:16-4:3) is the second reading for September 20, 2009.
You are another generation at war.
Lives lost and resources wasted are the standard costs. But without a draft and taxes to pay for the war, we all of us, can ignore the war right now. So two thousand years ago the letter of St James asked a question not about partisan politics, but about a constant scourge we seem unable to avoid. When the latest war started (some years back since this one has lasted longer than World War II), the French bishops issued a statement that began “To wage war is to be defeated at the start.” There are no winners. Each war leads to another. The present Middle East crises date back to “peace” settlements from World War I. (See the last scenes of the movie Lawrence of Arabia…The Claude Raines character says, “Well, we will have a British oil company with an Arab flag on it.”)
The letter from James says in answer to the question about the origin of wars and conflicts, “…Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? You covet but not possess. You kill and envy but you cannot obtain; you fight and wage war. You do not possess because you do not ask. You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passion.”
Consumerism is a passion that costs money and causes war.

Tags: consumerism, Lawrence of Arabia, Letter of St James, War

That is an unattractive stark title about a two edged sword cutting across most camps.
Jason Byassee in 22 September issue of Christian Century reviews Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s Atheist’ Delusions. One of Hart’s arguments is summarized as “paganism, whether ancient or modern, has no grounds for such tongue clucking [about the failures of religious people] because it has no morality to betray.”
And so it seems. Part of the contemporary ethos is a belief that everything is relative, that right and wrong are just social constructs. Then along comes something like the sex abuse of children and that gets universal condemnation. But then there is this case: we are part of a 1000 person village, people of all ages rounded up by an evil dictator and forced into a huge pen with armed guards pointing guns at us. The ultimatum is that we sexually abuse three of the children and then we are all free, otherwise we all die. What do you think the vote would be?
Right now only 25% of the American public says that torture is always wrong. Americans used to be the good guys and we blanched when we went to the movies and our heros, men or women, fell into the hands of police who said, “vee haff vays uf maykingk you shpeek.”
In one Catholic blog, ostensibly pro-life, the blogger said he could not at that point comment on whether torture was always immoral. He said he had not read enough about the Catholic position. I recommended he look into the Universal Catholic Catechism from which he took his other positions. It is very hard to maintain a consistent sense of absolutes when it is our lives that are at stake.

Tags: absolutes, David Bentley Hart, Jason Byasse, torture

Edith Wharton looked the very essence of a high society grande dame of 1900. Willa Cather for all her western and midwestern novels dressed fashionably and spent her last years in New York City. Both wrote books that are still companions revealing to me with empathy and deep insight the place of suffering, the cruelty of mistaken choices, the desolation that any hospital chaplain sees every day and must confront with honesty and hope.
Wharton had great homes and was a great writer but never found the love of her life. When she died her friends saw that inside a gold ring she wore were the words “Ave crux, spes unica.” This is from the Catholic liturgy. Hail cross, our only hope.
Willa Cather’s book called Death Comes for the Archbishop is one of the best things on the interior life, the motivation, the obscure life of self sacrifice, of a priest. Both Cather and Wharton were writing about figures they had access to through empathy and imagination. They knew more with less experience than those who brush against suffering all the time but who have no imagination and no empathy.
I write about all this because September 14 is the feast of the Holy Cross. It is a huge day shared by the great Christian traditions East and West.
I found this from John Henry Newman. He proposes that resignation rather than sanquine hope best suits the human condition.
I call resignation a more blessed frame of mind than sanguine hope of present success, because it is the truer, and the more consistent with our fallen state of being, and the more improving to our hearts; and because it is that for which the most eminent servants of God have been conspicuous. To expect great effects from our exertions for religious objects is natural indeed, and innocent, but it arises from inexperience of the kind of work we have to do,—to change the heart and will of man. It is a far nobler frame of mind, to labour, not with the hope of seeing the fruit of our labour, but for conscience’ sake, as a matter of duty; and again, in faith, trusting good will be done, though we see it not. Look through the Bible, and you will find God’s servants, even though they began with success, end with disappointment; not that God’s purposes or His instruments fail, but that the time for reaping what we have sown is hereafter, not here; that here there is no great visible fruit in any one man’s lifetime. Moses, for instance, began with leading the Israelites out of Egypt in triumph; he ended at the age of an hundred and twenty years, before his journey was finished and Canaan gained, one among the offending multitudes who were overthrown in the wilderness [1 Cor. x. 5.]. Samuel’s reformations ended in the people’s wilfully choosing a king like the nations around them. Elijah, after his successes, fled from Jezebel into the wilderness to mourn over his disappointments. Isaiah, after Hezekiah’s religious reign, and the miraculous destruction of Sennacherib’s army, fell upon the evil days of his son Manasseh. Even in the successes of the first Christian teachers, the Apostles, the same rule is observed. After all the great works God enabled them to accomplish, they confessed before their death that what they experienced, and what they saw before them, was reverse and calamity, and that the fruit of their labour would not be seen, till Christ came to open the books and collect His saints from the four corners of the earth. “Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived,” [2 Tim. iii. 13.] is the testimony of St. Peter, St. Paul, St. John, and St. Jude.

Tags: Cather, cross, Newman, Wharton

I was walking in a gallery with a Mandarin speaking student. He looked at the English label identifying a ink painting from ancient China. He got rather sad at the “translation.” “Three pines by a river” was an accurate word for word translation but he said it missed almost everything of the Chinese title. There were three trees and not two or one and that “three” meant something. They were pine trees and not, say, maples or bamboo. And that meant something. These trees were by a river, not a little stream or a pond. That meant something also. They were by the river and not far from the water. That also meant something. So the point I was making about translating the Bible is easily illustrated by the difficulty of trying to translate three simple words attached to a picture. “Snow Country” by the Japanese novelist Kawabata is one of my favorite novels. The opening scene of traveling north into snow country is incredibly delicate. When I saw a literal translation of the first chapter I got a good lesson in Japanese. There was practically nothing there. The translator had had to put in the details that I loved and which would be evident to a Japanese reader but were there as allusions but not literally. So the crossing over of cultures and languages is like crossing the red sea.
There was a Japanese Catholic priest who was raised a Buddhist and then converted. He said he nearly went crazy reading the Bible in translation. The Japanese translation was not based on the Hebrew and Greek texts but on an English one. So the Japanese was several layers away from the original. It was nearly impossible for him to make his way through those layers. He learned Greek and Hebrew and did the translations himself into Japanese and that saved him, enriched him. His Christianity did not have to have a layer of western thought on top of Greek and Hebrew and then into yet another mentality.
Later in a very austere plain house of prayer he gave retreats that were completely original. The retreatants would spend their time writing in old style Chinese like characters the opening of the Gospel of St John. They would do only one word a day. If they could only spare three or four days for the retreat they only got to meditate on three or four words. A thirty day retreat would get them into the text but it would still take more time to finish. One character at a time is a Chinese and Japanese discipline because to write the character properly takes great attention, concentration, so that the writer with a brush can enter into the reality of meaning.
We would think it very strange to spend a whole day writing one word and meditation on that word. Is this because we understand so clearly the English translation of John’s opening, “In the beginning was the Word” ??? I don’t know anyone who ever said that they understood “beginning” or understood “Word.”
A silent, respectful “chewing” on the text of the Bible might lead us closer to the Word that was with God from the beginning…

Tags: Bible, Japanese, Kawabata, Mandarin, translation

I was living in Hawaii 9/11/01. The attack was on a Tuesday. Thursday evening the secular Oratory met as usual. In that small group and in that parish so far from New York City we found that one couple had a son going to work at the World Trade Center at the time of the attack. The subway train kept going and did not stop until it reached 42nd Street. There was no explanation but he looked downtown and saw the horrible sight that he had just missed being a part of. Another woman’s God child was killed in the attack when she was caught in the lobby where she was to meet other people who were being rewarded by their company with a seminar at the World Trade Center. Another couple in Hawaii had a son working just a few blocks down the street and he could see everything and eventually had to flee the collapse and the debris. So in this small group so far away there were these three. I had a school mate who had just gotten promoted to a chef’s position and was in the restaurant. It cost her her life. Can any of us think that we live isolated lives?
Now again thanks to Congressman Wilson of South Carolina we have a country that thinks mistakenly that the health care package will allow illegal aliens to get access to a doctor. As I said in a previous post, we are facing disaster again if someone sick but illegal cannot get to a doctor and they have something like swine flu. I think we should bring back those medical disaster movies. We are all linked and if we do not know this now we will find out to our great sorrow later. It is really only a matter of time.

Tags: 9/11, health care, plague