I wonder if my generation is one that must openly admit that it has failed? It seems to me that the generations ahead of mine were proud, even cock-sure that that they had done a great job and rather expected a generation like mine not to do as well. Maybe I have internalized that.

But I think more likely the discouragement is  based on an objective assessment. After all, the generation ahead of mine turned back Fascism and Japanese Imperialism. Winning a world war against such evil is a great accomplishment and that it was not done perfectly or even well in many instances does not dilute a single bit what they did.
My generation has contributed two presidents, both born the same year as myself: 1946. Of W. Bush, the less the said, the better. Of Bill Clinton, his economic policies have proven to be disastrous even though they were bi-partisan and continued under W.They only seemed to bring prosperity. Instead they amounted to a chain letter of IOUs with no collateral.

The historian Alan Brinkley has said that has been 40 years since the US Congress has done anything positive or taken on any large restructuring of American society. We have trillions of dollars tied up in wars that no one would know if we would know or could know if we won. The world recession cum depression will keep us on the brink or push us over for decades more. Obama’s generation will have to very lucky to hold down the damage. My generation is still in there blocking and not providing alternatives.

With no winnable wars, no money, no health care, and the climate in deficit, it would not be unrealistic to write off the efforts of the first baby boomers to do anything much.

Tags: baby boomers, failed generation

Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian Jew, writer, and survivor of the Shoah, and Nobel Prize winner in literature, turns out to have been a teen age friend of Abraham Golek, a Polish Jewish friend who died last November in Israel. Abraham was a wisdom figure in my life since we met in 1990. I have kept all the emails from him and his wife and I can remember almost everything he ever said to me…funny, wrong, and profound…His wife Josette is also a friend, of course, she is French Algerian and profoundly spiritual, joyful, honest, energetic.
It turns out that Imre Kertesz and he were teen age friends in Auschwitz. There is an interview in French with Kertesz where he talks about the capacity for retaining humanity, joy even in those camps. Their friendship was part of that joy. The choice of Kertesz was criticized because he was rather unknown. But the prize recognized a profound and unique contribution to literature and human life by a man who surived the worst of Nazism and continued faithful to his writing when he was virtually exiled within his own country by the Communist regime that followed World War II.
How unreal our lives are in comparison with these two men who prevailed, became creative and life giving, and lived long lives.

Tags: Golek, Kertesz, Nobel Prize, Shoah

Being a Wesleyan University chaplain draws some serious questions from people who have a sense that modern universities, especially Wesleyan, are “too” liberal and therefore unsuitable for religious people. Thomas Merton, Trappist, peace advocate, contemplative, became a Catholic while a student in the 1930s at Columbia University. It was then and is now, a challenging and creative, productive place, the very model of a modern major univerity and located in New York City no less.

Merton would have found even the modern Wesleyan too tame compared to Columbia in the 1930s. The diversity required of a university makes it possible for the mother of universities, the Church, to find a home. And what educated person can ignore the relevance of so much art in so many fields, so much literature, so much philosophy, so much engagement socially as well as personally within such an ancient and still abiding conglomaration of individuals, cultures, and communities?
Merton was born in 1915 {January 31 is his birthday} and died in 1968. If students today find him hard to read it is not because he is a relic but because he was ahead of us even now and because he encompassed so much in his truly catholic Catholicism. One student told me that he found Merton fascinating but that Merton was too much for him because of all the cultural references in so many different fields. Merton was the kind of person that university officials dream of attracting. Indeed, check out Columbia University’s website and search for famous alumni. Columbia is very glad to claim him today.

Tags: culture and faith, Merton, university

I am alive! But after a liturgical pile on in December…Advent liturgies, Our Lady of Guadalupe (twice…one on Friday in Spanish with a lovely play…and one in English on Saturday), then Immaculate Conception, then more Advent, then Christmas, then Holy Family, then January 1, and then Epiphany, I started to get a bad cold! I went right from the plane to bed when I got to St Benoit and then after a week of my male pride not curing me, I went to the doctor and got great results and then it was time to come back!
The monks in St Benoit were full of colds. No flu but just a persistent cold that headed like mine to bronchitis or sinusitis. Minor really if you do not need sleep or lots of time breathing!
Anyway, back in action and I am happy to hear from people who noticed that I was gone.

For several years now circumstances have deprived me of family, friends, parish, my own space and place. Only last Christmas was I able to be at “home,” but health did not allow much. The “gouvernante,” Judy Ryan and the dogs last year did their best but I am certainly now weaned away from not only Christmas celebrations but any kind of a celebration that is public and national. Mass is good enough, trying to stay at being a priest is good enough, and if a celebration of a wedding or a baptism comes along that is wonderful. After Christmas I hope to have the dogs with me and I am grateful to the people helping me with that. The house I am in has been rather in need of repairs…lamps and light switches shorting out (including the light in the shower! Thomas Merton, here I come!), toilets that do not flush, sewage lines about ready to back up, and no money for anything that draws electricity. It is a very Franciscan Christmas with a load of Masses. I have had to turn down four more requests for Masses to keep the number of Masses under 14 for the week.
So the more austere the season, the more suited for pilgrims and the less settled, the better so it seems though I am very tired of not having Pua and Angel there so I hope to be a St Roch or St Peregrine with dogs in tow. Dogen, the Buddhist teacher, said the best place to meditate was in your heart. The best place for Christmas is where?

A Christmas Carol says that it takes getting the pudding scared out of us in order to appreciate Christmas. I was reading the life of the founder of the hell fire and damnation preachers, the Redemptorists, and saw that they were specialists in using the scare the pudding technique. Then there was something on Andrew Sullivan about “loss aversion” and why people who could do something do not do it and why people who say they believe in something do not act on it. What a season! Add this to the Afghanistan business and the fact that we are going to imprison people forever without a trial even though Guantanamo is closing (sometime!!!) and you have Hal Weidner the Scrooge this Advent.

Tags: Advent, Dickens, Guantanamo, Scrooge

In thevirtualoratory.com  I posted a brief review of a book called Winter, a Spiritual Biography of the Season, a collection of very short essays by writers ranging from Kathleen Norris to Basho. Even people in warm climates face interior winters of discontent that resist the sun and beauty leaving hearts buried in darkness, covered over by clouds that no sun penetrates despite tourist posters to the contrary. It seems that even the best American efforts to cope with the season finally run out of fuel: Thanksgiving to Christmas, to Super Bowl gives way to the bleakness of credit card bills and Lent. We want winter to go fast, the financial crisis to melt away, Easter to come quickly, and we know that this will happen but maybe only in faith.

Tags: Easter, Lent, Winter

Royalty is a hot button issue in Europe because the Church often identified itself with the power and glory of monarchs. Supposedly this was for the protection of religion but in always involved the destruction of religion. It took a long time for the Church and much blood before the simplicity and vulnerability of Christ before Pilate began to be the norm. Even now, the Church alliance with right wing politics is a constant temptation.

The reactionary, anti-Jewish, anti-Vatican II wing of the Church is often royalist or fascist in politics. The feast day was instituted by Pius XI precisely to fight off the right wing that thought a Hitler or a Mussolini…the LEADER, the DUCE…would be better than communism. A false choice led to a tragic alliance that alienated workers from the Church and the destructiveness of two world wide wars.

The French who know something of this problem published this essay in La Croix, the Catholic daily of France.

La porte du Royaume s’ouvre pour nous dans le baptême et les sacrements. Mais l’entrée effective n’est pas à chercher seulement dans nos églises ou dans le secret de notre prière. Elle s’opère aussi dans le concret de notre vie, dans le vif de notre actualité traversée par ses misères et ses espoirs.
Le Royaume est présent et en construction dans chaque écoute patiente, chaque sourire encourageant, chaque fardeau partagé, chaque regard respectueux et aimant, chaque geste de paix et de réconciliation… Le passeport en est l’amour et le service au nom du Seigneur Jésus. Nous sommes les ambassadeurs de ce Royaume…
Le trésor du Royaume, ce sont les pauvres et les humbles ; ce sont tous les êtres humains pour lesquels le Christ Jésus est venu servir et donner sa vie.

Tags: Church, Kingdom of God, politics

The Church liturgy reflects the natural reality of the northernish part of the world…darker, too dry or too wet…colder. Can we make it through the long winter? Will spring just bring more disaster? The scripture readings from Daniel, the Gospel readings about the end of time, the Second Coming…try to cross out the happy shopping, the parties, the Super Bowl and the bitty bowls all around it. But, of course, all this caves in when the bills come due in January and February.

But in paschal faith, there is death before Easter. We are being transformed, seemingly brutally. But we are not destroyed. We are fulfilled. All the warnings about the passing of time, the coming of darkness, the risk of faith, are not to frighten us, but to make us wise.

Tags: Advent, depression, Easter, faith

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