Lectio Divina: The first attempt.

God was funny today.  He likes having “told you so” jokes at my expense.

I am listening to a Spiritual Theology class by Dr. Brant Pitre.  He finally has me convinced that I need to study scripture every morning.  So, finally, I actually do it.  My wife and I set our alarms for 30 min earlier than usual.  We got up and read today’s gospel (not together).  It wasn’t very long, so I just read the whole chapter (Mark 4).  For the past week, I have been hearing Dr. Pitre liken meditating on scripture to that of the parable of the sower.  If you don’t meditate on scripture, your soul will be like the path, the rocky soil, or the thorns.  Do you know what Mark chapter 4 is?  Yep… The sower.  I actually laughed out loud when I opened the bible.

The joke didn’t end there.  Yesterday I was telling my wife about how the Church uses the hemorrhaging woman to “define” the Sacraments:  Power that flows forth from the body of Christ.  I said yesterday, “I don’t remember where that is in the bible, I will have to go find it.”  One of the footnotes from Mark 4 talked about how Jesus followed the mustard seed parable with 4 miracles.  So, I flipped the page to see what they were.  Sure enough, there was the hemorrhaging woman.  I lol’ed again.  Needles to say, I think he hooked me into this morning lectio divina thing. I probably read too much for a lectio divina, but I’m still figuring out exactly how these 4 steps work (read, meditate, pray, contemplate).  It was good either way.

Through the eyes of Mary

What a morning indeed.

I've been praying the Rosary every morning lately. Well, not every morning, every morning commute in the car (5 out of 7 is about a C, you have to start somewhere). God has been lovingly granting me little insights each day. It always happens on the fifth mystery, no more, no less.  It happened for many days in a row.  I wondered if it was ok to ask for them. So, one day I did.  As anyone could have guessed, that was when I didn't get one.  In a way, God showed me by his perceived absence that I should not be saying the Rosary for me, I should be saying the Rosary to worship God. If he decides to speak back that's great, but what I need is to long for him.  You learn longing by absence, not presence.  In the same day that I didn't get an insight, I listened to a talk that explained exactly why.  And, Dr. Pitre also gave something to try in my next Rosary. Yesterday, I gave it a go. I tried to picture the joyful mysteries through the eyes of Mary.  It was very cool to try and put yourself in Mary shoes through the joyful mysteries.  Then, Tuesday came… The sorrowful mysteries...

In the first mystery I tried to imagine watching my own son's agony in the garden.  To have a child who is sick, and you be completely helpless, is one of the worst feelings you can experience as a parent.  My heart sank.  When I came to the second mystery, the scourging, I didn't just imagine my own son being flogged. Putting myself in Mary's shoes was in adequate. I put myself in my wife's shoes with Mary. The way a mother and a father love their child is different.  For my wife, their pain is her pain, their tears are her tears, their cries of agony are her cries of agony.  They are almost united, it is so beautiful.  The next two mystries came and went just the same. Jesus' agony was Mary's agony.  I saw it through my wife’s and Mary’s eyes and I could feel it through my wife's and Mary’s pain. Then, the fifth decade came. 

I imagined watching my son being murdered on the cross for my sins.  That definitely was heavy.  Just when I thought that was bad enough, it came. That is not what Mary felt at all. She didn't watch her son be murdered for her sins, she didn't have any sins. She watched her son be murdered on the cross for the sins of others, for my sins.  She watched as her innocent son endured a horrific death out of sacrifice.  She watched as the nails were driven into his hands instead of mine.  She watched as his love for me poured out of his side...

That was the end of my dry face.  I now understand the title “Our Lady of Sorrows.” She loves her son so much, and her Son love me so much.  To Mary, “Behold, your son.”  And to John, and all of us, “Behold, your mother.”

Sanctity of Life Month

Being sanctity of life month, I felt compelled to share something that came to me in prayer this morning.

Earlier this week I had to give a presentation on the Trinity.  No problem, right?  Wrong.  Like everyone else, I find this challenging. I recite the whole “person vs nature” thing, but I didn’t have any substance beyond that, so I had to do some research. I think it can be briefly summarized as follows: person answers the question “who?", and the nature answer the question “what?” Some What’s also have a Who and some do not.

What is a rock? A rock.  Who is a rock? They don’t have a who.Who is that? Bob.  What is Bob? A human.  Who is urging me to pray? The Holy Spirit.  What is the Holy Spirit? God.  And so on…    

That was completely insufficient to explain the Trinity, but that isn't where I wanted to go with this either.  Instead, I want to talk about abortion.  In this discussion on abortion, we spend a lot of time trying to answer the question of “Who is it?"  The Dr. Seuss quote comes to mind: "A person is a person no matter how small.”  But, we don't have human dignity and human rights because we are a person, we have human dignity because we are human!  It is the “what” that matters, not the “who”.  So instead, we should focus on "what is the fetus/embryo/zygote?” It is human.  When does it become human?  At conception.  If we then ask the question: How many cells do you need to be human? No matter what somebody answers, you would've been half as many some time before and did the “what” change in that time? No. You can repeat this all the way until you are one cell.  All that changes after that is the age of the human.  The life begins at conception, because you are human at conception.  We believe in true human rights, because that is "what" we are… Human.

I had heard this general argument before from Trent Horn, but I had never connected it with the definitions that outline the Trinity.

Judging

There are three or four things that commonly get lumped together in the same concept. The first is the "our judgment," the judgment by Jesus, our particular judgment and our final judgment. The other two, are "using judgment," and finally "judging others." They're all quite distinct and yet somehow we hear "don't judge me," so often. I am sure that volumes and volumes could be written on this topic. I will not do it justice here, but I will try and sort it out a little bit. 

1) Our judgment: Particular and final. The particular judgment is the judgment that we face the moment we die. The time when Jesus judges us according to our works as Paul says in Romans 2:6-7 and Galations 5:19-21 (among others). Those who have done good go to heaven, and those who have done bad do not. At this point we either go to heaven, hell, or purgatory on the way to heaven.  The final judgment comes at the end of time, when all is finished. The final judgment isn't really an encore of judging, but rather, when we get to see the final outcome of all of our actions over the course of time. Our actions produce such complicated results that nobody knows this except God. The final judgment is where we get to see the ramifications of our decisions throughout history. 

I think it's a bit interesting that people often say "Jesus is my judge, not you". Of course Jesus is our only judge. No one on earth has the power to send anyone to heaven or to hell. When we say "don't judge me," it has a completely different meaning.  In addition, because Jesus judges us according to our works and what we know, whether someone goes to heaven or not might be more complicated than we realize. When he said "don't judge others," I think it was a warning not to compare ourselves to others. We do not know what is in their hearts, and what it took for them to do a certain action. It may be a far greater step toward God for someone, who was raised believing that torture is a good thing, to simply "not torture someone" than it is for someone who was raised with the truth to perform some good work. We shouldn't look around at the evil in the world and think "we are good, we will make it into heaven because we are better than them." This is the wrong attitude. God wants us to give all of ourselves to him. Let us not forget the line in the Our Father prayer, "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." We will be shown forgiveness as we forgive, and we will be judged according to what we know. 

2) Using judgment. As Jesus said that we are supposed to pick up our cross and follow him Daily.  We must use judgment on what actions to take and which ones not to. We can do this from a completely objective point of view by using the church and the Bible to tell us what actions are right and what actions are wrong. However, we don't live in a bubble. We live in a complicated world. We must use judgment to look around and see what actions are right and what actions are wrong. If we see someone doing wrong, we must think to ourselves, don't do that. This is not judging them for what they are doing, this is merely using judgment for what we should not do. We often hear the phrase "love the sinner hate the sin." We don't have to condemn people for their actions but we do need to condemn their actions. The phrase "love the sinner hate the sin" is a strange one, but it is correct.  I think CS Lewis said it very well, (paraphrased) "There is one person that we know that we love no matter what sin they commit, ourselves. We love ourselves, but hate our sin. And Jesus said to love others as you love yourselves that means love the sinner but hate the sin."  Let us not forget the golden rule, "Treat others as you want to be treated."  I think loving the sinner and hating the sin is the most reasonable place to begin.

3) Judging others. Let's take a look at Proverbs 27:5, "better is open rebuke than hidden love."  When we hear that open rebuke is good, it means that we should like it when others rebuke our sin. If we are doing something wrong, we should like it when we are called out on it.  Of course, we don't.  It is embarrassing to get called out and our first reaction is to defend our actions.  But, if our goal is to follow Jesus and to follow his commandments, then we should like to be let known when we are not doing so. We want to conform ourselves to Christ, and if that takes someone else letting us know the way in which we are not conformed then we should enjoy that rebuke,  not put them down with some empty phrase "how dare you judge me!"  If we are being judged by men, then we should pay attention to what we are being judged for. Jesus will be our judge someday. We might as well get a little bit of practice here on earth. 

Is it actually okay to judge someone? I think the answer here is somewhat complicated but in the end, yes, I think it is okay to judge someone's behavior. The means are important, however.  We must do everything out of love for our neighbor.  If we mention it to them, we must have their best interest in mind and not 'lord it over' them. Moreover, we must not do it being a hypocrite.  Let us not forget the phrase, "when you point a finger at someone, three point back at you."  Think about that.  Although being a hypocrite is actually objectively irrelevant (we can know that something is wrong and do it anyway, i.e. sin), our message will be ignored.

In Matthew 7:3-5 we see the following:

"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the plank that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye."

In the story of the plank, God says "how can you get this plank out of someone's eye when you have a plank in your own eye?" This is clearly condemning hypocrites, that is, don't tell someone that they are sinning if you are committing the same sin. The more interesting part is that I think many of us do not realize how that story ends. Jesus says first take the plank out of your own eye, and then help them get the speck out of there.   He doesn't say ignore their speck, he doesn't say ignore your plank, he says get the plank out of your eye, and then help them with their speck. He wants us to help others remove the specks from their eyes, but we can only do this effectively if the plank is not in our own.  Not only are we hypocrite, but we do not have credibility. The world has trouble seeing things objectively, and they need to rely a lot on the credibility of the source. It is, after all, through credibility that we have the church and the Bible and well, everything we know about anything. We must maintain our credibility if we are going to help our brother and her sister.  We are our brothers keeper. 

In summary. Do not judge others to heaven or to hell, and do not expect to find anyone in either place when you die.  I imagine that there will be surprises.  Worry about yourself and how you will be judged with regard to this. Do not perform the great comparison of who should be in heaven, and who should be in hell. Only the church was given permission to bind and lose, not us. We are free to look around the world and use judgment on how we should behave. We are free to see actions and choose not to do them ourselves. We are free to judge others actions without judging them.  If we are going to let someone know that what they are doing is wrong, we must not be a hypocrite and do it with charity. Everything must be done in love, for love, and with love.