Although the personal relationship of the theologian with God is a reality wider than prayer, since it necessarily involves the entire Christian life, nevertheless prayer is its conscious heart. The fourth-century theologian Father Evagrius of Pontus had a saying, “If you pray, you are a theologian.” The saying has been, perhaps, a little overexposed and not a little misunderstood. The term “theologian” here carries a somewhat specialized meaning. It really means someone who contemplates God as the Trinity. But at least we can echo Evagrius and say, “If you do not pray then you are not a theologian.” It is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for becoming a theologian (in the non-Evagrian sense) that one has some kind of prayerful quality to one’s life and thought. How we should understand this is a delicate business. Clearly, it is not the case that if we flop down in a church for half an hour a day we shall emerge from the pew reborn as a latter-day Duns Scotus. But continued exposure to God and a God-centered vision of reality brings a greater quality of intuitive ability when it comes to theological judgment. In other words, if two people who differ on some aspect of theology share a comparable theological culture, but one prays and the other has stopped praying, it is the one who still prays that we should be well advised to follow.

-Aidan Nichols, O.P., The Shape of Catholic Theology, p. 26

Deus est nobis refugium et virtus,
adiutorium in tribulationibus inventus est nimis.
Propterea non timebimus, dum turbabitur terra,
et transferentur montes in cor maris.
Fremant et intumescant aquae eius, conturbentur montes in elatione eius.
Fluminis rivi laetificant civitatem Dei,
sancta tabernacula Altissimi.
Deus in medio eius, non commovebitur;
adiuvabit eam Deus mane diluculo.
Fremuerunt gentes, commota sunt regna;
dedit vocem suam, liquefacta est terra.
Dominus virtutum nobiscum,
refugium nobis Deus Iacob.
Venite et videte opera Domini,
quae posuit prodigia super terram.
Auferet bella usque ad finem terrae,
arcum conteret et confringet arma
et scuta comburet igne.
Vacate et videte quoniam ego sum Deus:
exaltabor in gentibus et exaltabor in terra.
Dominus virtutum nobiscum,
refugium nobis Deus Iacob.

* * *

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved;
God will help her right early.
The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Come, behold the works of the LORD,
how he has wrought desolations in the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear,
he burns the chariots with fire!
“Be still, and know that I am God.
I am exalted among the nations,
I am exalted in the earth!”
The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge.

O Mary,
bright dawn of the new world,
Mother of the living,
to you do we entrust the cause of life.
Look down, O Mother,
upon the vast numbers
of babies not allowed to be born,
of the poor whose lives are made difficult,
of men and women
who are victims of brutal violence,
of the elderly and the sick killed
by indifference or out of misguided mercy.

Grant that all who believe in your Son
may proclaim the Gospel of life
with honesty and love
to the people of our time.

Obtain for them the grace
to accept that Gospel
as a gift ever new,
the joy of celebrating it with gratitude
throughout their lives
and the courage to bear witness to it
resolutely, in order to build,
together with all people of good will,
the civilization of truth and love,
to the praise and glory of God,
the Creator and lover of life.

Through Christ our Lord,
Amen.

(Composed by John Paul II)

* * *

Can we, as followers of Christ, be certain of our salvation? Or, put another way, are we assured eternal life in heaven by virtue of our Christian faith?

Since the Protestant Reformation, a significant number of Christians have answered this question with a resounding “yes.” And not without reason: many passages of Scripture (John 5:24, Romans 10:9-11, and Acts 16:31 in particular) appear to provide support for the position that faith in Christ is an unshakable guarantor of salvation.

In approaching the topic at hand, we must first ask ourselves: what is belief? Speakers of modern English primarily use the word to designate a position held, usually with a degree of uncertainty, in relation to the truth or falsity of an idea. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary well sums up our understanding of the term:

believe: v. 1 accept that (something) is true or (someone) is telling the truth. 2 (believe in) have faith in the truth or existence of. 3 have religious faith. 4 think or suppose.

To believe something, then, is to have arrived at a particular cognitive state. The metaphor of travel is apt. Before we believed one thing, and now we believe quite another; in the meantime, we have journeyed from one cognitive state to another, from point A to point B. This is also true, of course, if one moves from unbelief to belief: for unbelief is, in itself, a type of belief.

What happens en route is opaque in the sense that belief is, to a certain degree, abstract: we cannot examine a man’s beliefs in the same way we can his kidneys (to the distinct discomfort, I might add, of many strict materials). At the same time, the process isn’t entirely obscured from our sight. If nothing else, we can describe the change that takes place and debate its causes.

Consider the case of a friend of mine who was raised a Young Earth creationist. For the first 21 years of his life, he held to the view that the Earth was created by God 6,000 years ago in a literal six-day event. Then an acquaintance gave him a copy of The Language of God by Francis Collins as a birthday present. After reading the book, my friend realized that being a good Christian didn’t necessitate ascribing to Biblical literalism. One belief gave way to another, and he came to accept the prevailing scientific consensus on the subject (while remaining a Christian, of course).

Point A: literalist hermeneutic. Point B: theistic evolution. What happened here? Again, we cannot describe my friend’s changing beliefs in terms of size and shape, texture and consistency. We can, however, say something about what precipitated the event itself. The catalyst, in this instance as in many others, was trust: for most of his life, with respect to the world’s creation, my friend trusted his parents. Then, for a number of reasons—The Language of God was the straw that broke the camel’s back, not the sole determinant—he decided that his mother and father weren’t reliable authorities on the subject after all. He didn’t need to earn a degree in geology or genetics to reach the conclusions he did. It was, rather, a question of discernment: seeing in the position held by Christians such as Francis Collins a much more coherent and logical approach than what he’d grown up believing, he decided to trust a different authority, and his beliefs changed accordingly.

When we say that we believe in Christ, we indicate that a similar transition has taken place. Before we came to faith, we placed our trust in any number of other authorities: the religious traditions in which we’d been raised; political ideologies of every shade and hue; not least, the selfish and materialistic culture that crushes in on us from all sides. And, of course, our parents or guardians, who most often were simply trying to raise us right in a troubled and unforgiving world.

Then we encountered Christ’s witnesses on Earth: in the Church; in the Holy Scriptures; and, not least, in the altruism and sacrificial character of individual Christians both renowned and anonymous. Most of us haven’t met Our Lord in the manner of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, but this isn’t a prerequisite to belief. We have come to understand who is speaking authoritatively on the nature and purpose of existence: moved by grace, yet acting of our own free will, we have given our intellectual assent to the faith transmitted to the Apostles. We have said “yes” to Christ; hearing His word, we have believed.

Thus, we have established what it means, at least on the level of cognition, to believe in Christ. But the question remains: is this the saving faith spoken of in John 5:24?

To translate is to paraphrase, and proper Scriptural exegesis inevitably compels us to look at the text in its original language. For this reason we must turn to the Koine Greek of the New Testament in order to fully understand the words of Christ words to the Jewish leaders quoted at the head of this essay. The words “believe,” “believer,” and “belief,” which we encounter with frequency in English translations of the New Testament, are renderings of the Greek word pistis and its derivatives. There are two important points to be made with respect to this term.

The first point concerns its tense. The specific word used in Christ’s discourse here is pisteuôn, which is a present active participle; what this tells us is that belief is not something that occurred once in the past and has been cemented forever. Rather, it is an ongoing process, a continuous activity. Christ does not say that he who heard His words and believed in Him at one point in time has eternal life. No, belief is a gift to which we must cling once it has been given to us. We have passed from point A, a state of unbelief, to point B, a state of belief. Now we must stay there.

I’ve heard it said that moving from point A to point B and then back again is impossible: that we either cannot lose our faith once we have it; or that, if we cease to profess faith in Christ after having done so in the past, this means that we never had faith in the first place. I would object to the former contention on the grounds that it’s simply preposterous. The Christian message has been believed and then rejected by a disheartening number of men and women throughout the centuries. Dan Barker (the charismatic preacher-turned-atheist who recently co-wrote a book with Richard Dawkins about losing the faith) and Bart D. Ehrman (the professor of Religious Studies at Chapel Hill who used to be an evangelical and now considers himself an agnostic) are recent high-profile examples; and, for many of us, apostasy of this sort is closer to home. The latter contention, that to lose our faith means that we never had it in the first place, is highly suspect on account of being impossible to argue with. Perhaps it’s true that Barker and Ehrman and our friends and relatives didn’t actually believe in the first place; but if it looks like a duck, and talks like a duck, I’d be inclined to say that it’s a duck. (Not to mention that it’s a case of circular logic. “Why did he lose his faith?” “Because it wasn’t genuine!” “Who’s to say his faith wasn’t genuine?” “Well, he lost it, didn’t he?”)

The second point arises from the multiple meanings attributed to the word and its place in the context of early Christianity. Pistis, according to Strong’s Greek Dictionary, means first and foremost “to have faith (in, upon, or with respect to, a person or thing)”; this is consonant with the usage of the term already described. Yet a further definition is given as well: pistis also can be understood as the act of “entrust[ing]” or “commit[ing]” oneself to someone or something. We encounter a similar drift in the German word belieben and its Old English counterpart beliefan, both of which convey notions of allegiance and preference. This connotation is almost entirely lacking from the word’s modern English equivalent, but it must be taken into account in whatever consideration we give the its use in the Gospel and epistolary writings.

Christianity was, at the outset, a Jewish phenomenon. The question of intellectual assent to God’s existence is a pressing concern at the present time, where outright atheism is fairly common (at least in the West), but it was not the chief concern of historical Judaism. Reading the Hebrew Scriptures, we see Israel falling away from God time and again: her unfaithfulness is such that the writer of Isaiah compares the Jewish nation to a whore. Yet each time Israel fell, it was into the arms, not of unbelief, but of other gods. God punished Israel for worshiping wrongly, not for failing to worship at all; his chief concern was idolatry, not skepticism.

A similar mindset could be imputed to the Gentiles living contemporaneously with Christ. The pagan philosophers who disbelieved in the old gods nevertheless attacked Christians for not taking part in the emperor worship and traditional religious cults of the Roman empire: the followers of Christ were condemned as atheists, not on account of disbelieving in the supernatural but rather for refusing to follow the gods in a socially acceptable fashion. Well-educated atheists participated in the imperial cult as a matter of loyalty to Rome; practice was divorced from belief. The Church taught its follows to do otherwise: what we do with our bodies can say as much about our beliefs as what we do with our minds. In any event, where one’s allegiance lay was the issue at hand, not the question of belief in general.

Now, I am not in any way saying that Christ was speaking only of following in John 5:24 and not of the necessity of intellectual assent. If Peter’s choice to leave his nets and follow Jesus in Mark 1:18 is a turning point, his affirmation in Mark 8:29 of Jesus as the Christ is even more so. Allegiance is, however, a component of saving faith, as the parable of the sower, found in all three synoptic Gospels, would seem to suggest:

“The sower sows the word. And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown; when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word which is sown in them. And these in like manner are the ones sown upon rocky ground, who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy; and they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are the ones sown among thorns; they are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world, and the delight in riches, and the desire for other things, enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. But those that were sown upon the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” (Mark 4:14-20)

While we may be fairly certain of our faith in and allegiance to Christ at the present moment, the same cannot be said of the future (which the present is rapidly becoming): where will we be tomorrow, or in ten years, or on our deathbed? Hopefully, we will end our lives in a state of grace. But the danger is ever-present that we may find ourselves beset by “trouble and persecution” and fall into despair or be led away from God by sinful pleasures; either way, we would be rejecting the grace Christ merited for us on the cross. The writer of Hebrews bears witness to the presence this danger in the early Church:

For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they then commit apostasy, since they crucify the Son of God on their own account and hold Him up to contempt. (Hebrews 6:4-6)

Since we cannot be absolutely sure that our belief, in both senses, will last, it’s possible to say that we cannot be absolutely certain of our salvation. We don’t know the future, after all.

* * *

For many Christians, the prospect of not having this assurance means a constant state of fear: we must live with the possibility that we may one day find ourselves judged and found wanting; that, having called out “Lord, Lord” all our lives, we will ultimately be told, “I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers” (Matthew 7:23b).

But if we seek assurance out of an abject fear of eternal damnation, what does this say about our understanding of God? About a year ago, Fr. Alvin Kimel of Pontifications posted an excellent article entitled “Disbelieving the Predestinarian God,” in which he touches on the impact of predestinarianism on popular understandings of God in the West. He writes,

I do not believe God to be the absolute predestinarian of Augustine, Calvin, Beza, and Bañez. I do not believe God to be a God who has eternally decreed, before prevision of irrevocable rejection of divine love and forgiveness, the eternal salvation of some and the eternal reprobation of the rest. I am convinced that for all of his greatness, St Augustine went tragically astray on this matter of predestination and that his theory has had pernicious repercussions on the spiritual lives of Western Christians. The theory of absolute predestination calls into question, at the most fundamental level, the identity and character of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

…

The God and Father of Jesus Christ intends the eternal salvation of every human being he has made and will make, without exception. If God did not die on the cross for the sins of mankind, then he does not truly desire “all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” and the Apostle Paul is made a liar (1 Tim 2:4). If God has unconditionally reprobated just one person, then God is not absolute love. If God has chosen to rescue from the damnable mass of humanity only some but not all, then he is not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The God who, in Fr. Kimel’s words, “saves and damns in absolute, inscrutable determination,” is clearly visible in the life and thought of Martin Luther, prime mover of the Reformation. Luther suffered from what is known as scrupulosity: he could never accept that he was forgiven, no matter how many visits he made to the confessional. A distorted view of God leads inexorably to a distorted view of salvation; and Luther’s theological musings, out of which grew the doctrine of sola fide (justification by faith alone) so important to most forms of Protestantism, reflect this anxiety. Assurance of salvation is, for many, a matter of self-assurance above all.

* * *

Where are we left, though, without this assurance? As already noted, the journey to Christian faith is marked by trust in the word of Christ as spoken through His living witnesses. Yet our faith chiefly concerns not an idea but a person. We must learn, therefore, to trust not only in Christ’s witnesses but in the person of Christ Himself. And what are granted, in response to this trust, is what St. Paul identifies as the theological virtue of hope (1 Corinthians 13:13). This hope springs directly from the nature of God. Near the end of the same article quoted earlier, Fr. Kimel describes his conception of God and why, though not assured of his salvation, he is not afraid of death:

There are many days, too many days, when I do not know if I believe in God, when I do not know if God exists. But I do know whom I struggle to believe. He is the God made known in Jesus Christ. He is the God who is a holy communion of absolute love and gladness. He is the God who searches for the one lost sheep and upon finding it hoists it upon his shoulder and restores it to the flock. He is the God who turns his house upside down until he finds the one silver coin he has lost. He is the God who was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities; by his stripes we are healed. This is the only God worthy of our belief.

What sort of assurance do we have, then? I cannot know with certainly that I will, in the end, be saved. What I do know is this: that God loves me, deeply and passionately, as He loves each and every human being; and that he wills my salvation, as He wills that of all men and women. If I lose my salvation, it’s not because God wasn’t looking for me; it’s because I ran away from Him at full speed and never looked back. As Pope Benedict has stated in his most recent encyclical, Spe Salvi, “To come to know God—the true God—means to receive hope.” If Christ is our hope, then we have all the assurance we will ever need.

Born February 23rd, 1929; Died December 5th, 2008

Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Te decet hymnus Deus, in Sion,
et tibi reddetur votum in Ierusalem.
Exaudi orationem meam;
ad te omnis caro veniet.
Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Thulcandra is not a political blog, nor will it ever be. I have opinions, which I like to hope are well-formed, on most of the important issues presently under discussion in our society; at the same time, I tend to approach temporal power and its associated mandates and limits as a necessary evil rather than something to be gloried in for its own sake. All of this is a fancy way of saying that, although I care (deeply, in certain cases) about what happens in the political sphere, I take little pleasure in debating the subject: the task is more of a cross to bear than anything else.

So it’s only out of profound distress and a genuine sense of urgency that I venture to post something here on the subject of Proposition 8: distress on account of the confusion, on the part of both sides of the argument, surrounding the question of same-sex marriage; urgency because of the need for Christian unity on this particular matter, which is sorely lacking at present.

I voted Yes on Proposition 8. I have my doubts as to whether my reasons for doing so will be convincing to anyone, but hopefully I can at least help the folks who read this blog (all five of you) to understand why I voted as I did.

* * *

First of all, I would like to point out that state-recognized same-sex marriage would have ramifications beyond a simple extension of certain legal benefits to homosexual couples. At stake here is also the right of individual citizens and private institutions to refuse, on philosophical or religious grounds, to recognize same-sex marriage as marriage in public discourse. Implicit in all the talk of rights and basic freedoms is a desire to equate this refusal with racism–and, furthermore, to equate vocalized moral objection to sodomy with hate speech.

The crucial difference between the two is that racial discrimination, no matter what our friends over at Bob Jones University may think, has no basis in Christianity or the other Abrahamic religions. The belief that homosexual behavior is sinful–which, I may add, is not necessarily equivalent to homophobia, though the two unfortunately coincide quite often–does have deep roots in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, extending beyond the realm of culture into each faith’s underlying theology; the only way to justify homosexual behavior in any of the these religions is to either not think too hard about the subject or perform an unacceptable number of philosophical and linguistic backflips along the way.

So the question, then, is this: what happens when an elementary school teacher doesn’t want to be forced to teach the legitimacy of same-sex marriage to his or her students? Public schools, at least in California, tend to employ standardized curricula. (I should here point out that, from what I can tell, the choice of which system to use in the district is generally made by a committee rather than by parents and educators.) I worked for a time in the Oakland Unified School District; there, lessons in reading and writing were taught through the Open Court system. In this curriculum, stories and their accompanying exercises are grouped into themed sections–friendship, city wildlife, etc. The contents of these curricula are more or less non-negotiable: teachers must assign certain stories to be read, with the students’ progress measured, to a significant degree, by related in-class activities, tests, and homework.

With the sort of pressure that LGBT rights groups exercise in the political sphere and the aforementioned role of committees, it’s not that hard to picture a situation in which a reading curriculum comes to include a story about a child with two daddies or two mommies. A teacher who doesn’t want to include this story in his or her lesson plan on for moral reasons could be threatened with a reprimand from the school board at the very least, legal prosecution for discrimination and hate speech at the most. This violates the fundamental rights both of individual teachers who don’t want to be made to teach something disagreeing with their religious beliefs and of parents who don’t wish to have their children indoctrinated in school.

(This would constitute indoctrination, by the way. It’s one thing to teach children that homosexuality exists; this is an indisputable fact. The moment one crosses the line into saying that homosexual activity is morally acceptable, one has arrived at a doctrine: this view is just as much the product of a particular philosophy as its converse. An analogy can be found in the teaching of evolution in public schools. Darwinian evolution is an empirical reality, while Darwinism, the belief that evolution is blind and the universe purposeless, is a doctrine. One should be taught as a matter of fact; the other, as a matter of personal belief, should not be.)

Also at risk are the rights of private institutions, religious institutions in particular, to both profess and act on their beliefs. When recognition of homosexual relationships in the legal sphere reaches a certain stage, priests and ministers could be taken to court for preaching the tenets of their faith; this has already happened in Canada. Furthermore, private institutions would have to comply with the state’s definition of marriage or risk lawsuits and the loss of their tax-exempt status. The roots of this trend can be seen in the case of Catholic Charities of Boston, which ended up closing down its adoption agency in 2006: in refusing to adopt out children to same-sex couples, the charity as a whole was putting itself at risk for legal action, not only from LGBT advocates but from the state itself.

* * *

In the arguments against legalized gay marriage, then, the issue of Church and State is at the forefront, in the sense that the State should not be able to infringe upon the right to freedom of religion. At the same time, Prop 8′s success does not represent an infringement upon the State by the Church. The real question here is not to what extent Church and State are separate but, rather, of what the American democratic system is founded upon in the first place.

Recall what is probably the most famous sentence in our nation’s political literature: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Of course, in pondering this statement, one must remember that most of the founding fathers were not Christians but deists. America was founded, not on specifically Christian principles, but rather on a sort of Enlightenment-era humanism.

These were, however, men who undeniably believed in God, albeit a deistic one, and hence in a natural order. Look at the wording in the sentence quoted above: we have rights, not because the founding fathers took a vote and decided that we did, but by virtue of being human. Which is to say that our rights precede democracy and are its cause–not the other way around.

Along the same lines, the right of a man and woman to a legally recognized marriage can be said to be derived from the right of a man and woman to marry according to natural law. The law does not justify marriage; marriage justifies the law. This, and the aforementioned sentence from the Declaration, were involved, explicitly or otherwise, in the push to strike down miscegenation laws in the middle of the 20th century: Americans of different races should have the right to marry, not only because nonwhites should be treated as human beings “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” but because a man and a woman, regardless of racial differences, have a fundamental right to be married to one another (with the obvious exception of cases involving close degrees of kinship). Here, natural law precedes and supercedes civil law.

In light of this, the question is not so much whether California citizens had a right to take marriage away from homosexual couples but, instead, whether the state had a right to allow same-sex marriage in the first place. If the foundations of democracy lie in rights bestowed upon us, then it’s not in the State’s jurisdiction to take rights away from us; by the same token, though, it’s not within the power of the State to give us rights that we didn’t have in the first place. In this light Prop 8 is a restriction designed to keep the State from overstepping its boundaries–in this instance, in the matter of giving rights rather than taking rights away.

Of course, I don’t think that Proposition 8 solves the fundamental problems that allowed this situation to develop. Marriage has been understood for thousands of years as a covenant made between a man and a woman, with mutual self-surrender and the generation of offspring as complementary and inseparable ends. In modern society marriage is viewed as little more than a legal contract, or at best a public declaration of love. The notion of covenant has disappeared almost completely from our understanding of marriage. So has the notion that childbearing is a necessary intention behind this union. The former is a mainstay of human societies around the world; the latter, at least in the sense of sex being intrinsically connected with the creation of new life, is simply a fact of biology. (The need to maintain that connection is, by contrast, a religious and philosophical matter.) In short, our concept of marriage is highly distorted, and it’s only in this sort of situation that same-sex marriage could even be thought of as marriage in the first place.

* * *

So that’s my take on Prop 8. If anyone has any thought to add or questions to raise on this subject, by all means, be my guest. The rules for combox discussions on this blog are to be found in my first post. In short: no profanity and ad hominum arguements, no conspiracy theories, and as few punctuation and spelling errors as humanly possible.

Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dēlē iniquitatem meam.
Amplius lavā me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo mundā me.
Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognōscō: et peccatum meum contra me est semper.
Tibi soli peccāvī, et malum coram te fēcī: ut iustificeris in sermonibus tuis, et vincās cum iudicaris.
Ecce enim in inquitatibus conceptus sum: et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.
Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti: incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi.
Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundābor: lavābis me, et super nivem dēalbābor.
Auditui meo dabis gaudium et laetitiam: et exsultabunt ossa humiliata.
Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis: et omnes iniquitates meas dele.
Cor mundum crea in me, Deus: et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis.
Ne proiicias me a facie tua: et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me.
Redde mihi laetitiam salutaris tui: et spiritu principali confirma me.
Docebo iniquos vias tuas: et impii ad te convertentur.
Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus, Deus salutis meae: et exsultabit lingua mea iustitiam tuam.
Domine, labia mea aperies: et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.
Quoniam si voluisses sacrificium, dedissem utique: holocaustis non delectaberis.
Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus: cor contritum, et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies.
Benigne fac, Domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion: ut aedificentur muri Ierusalem.
Tunc acceptabis sacrificium iustitiae, oblationes, et holocausta: tunc imponent super altare tuum vitulos.

* * *

Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love;
According to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!
For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight,
So that thou art justified in thy sentence and blameless in thy judgment.
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.
Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Fill me with joy and gladness; let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice.
Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.
Then I will teach transgressors thy ways, and sinners will return to thee.
Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation,
And my tongue will sing aloud of thy deliverance.
O Lord, open thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.
For thou hast no delight in sacrifice; were I to give a burnt offering, thou wouldst not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
Do good to Zion in thy good pleasure; rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, then wilt thou delight in right sacrifices,
In burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then bulls will be offered on thy altar.

For those of you who, after the last post, were eagerly awaiting on-the-minute updates about my trip to Spain, I have good news and bad news. The bad news—let’s get that out of the way first—is that I’m no longer in Spain: I returned home a little over a week ago. So, at this point, any news you hear about the time I spent there will be old news.

I will, however, be giving a full account of my stay over the next few days and weeks, which is the first bit of good news I can relate. The second I hinted at in the last paragraph with the words, “at this point.” If all goes according to plan, I may well be returning to Murcia within the next month or so in order to study and hopefully work at UCAM.

If this hope turns into a reality, I will, of course, post something to that effect on Thulcandra. For right now, though, you will have to content yourselves with what has already transpired.

Day 1: With bags in hand, as ready as I would ever be for the grueling 19 hours of transit time (layovers included) needed to take me from northern California to Murcia, I bid my parents farewell and made off for my terminal. After a painless jaunt through security, I started the first part of my journey: SFO to Heathrow, the longest of three flights.

I generally don’t do well with sleeping on planes, so I quickly set about looking for something with which to occupy my time for the 10 hours that would follow. Fortunately, I had brought enough reading material to keep me busy (including a Spanish grammar workbook (which, of course, I barely touched). In addition, I had at my disposal the British Airways movie library, ready to be mined for entertainment, or at least close approximation thereof.

Now, the process of selecting an in-flight movie is quite different, at least for me, than that of picking out a title at Blockbuster. With a movie rental, I am paying for a particular film, and I naturally want the viewing experience to be worth my while. With an in-flight movie, I have essentially paid for all of the films already. Normally, faced with that, I simply pick the film from which I expect to receive the most enjoyment. On occasion, though, I use transoceanic flights as an opportunity to watch a movie that I decisively wouldn’t spend my money on given the chance. This was one of those flights, and upon being given my dinner (a truly dreadful pasta dish, tortellini in a cream sauce ruined in ways I don’t wish to recall: thank you, British Airways), I plugged in my headphones and started watching The Da Vinci Code.

Now, before this point I had been intending for awhile to either read the original novel or watch the filmed adaptation, mostly so that I could see for myself what all the fuss was about. This, particularly on account of its alleged attacks on orthodox Christian belief. (A pet peeve of mine is when Christians protest a piece of popular culture purely on account of hearsay. If something is reputed to be an attack on my beliefs, I want to see it for myself. That way, I am in position to not only judge its merits and demerits for myself but to speak or write about the object in question from personal experience.) In the case of The Da Vinci Code, I was already well aware of Dan Brown’s, shall we say, inventive understanding of the early Church; thus, I was prepared for whatever kind of pseudo-historical nonsense the film had to throw at me.

What I wasn’t prepared for was its attitude toward the Church as a present-day institution. Watching the film, I at last understood why the story had caused such an uproar: The Da Vinci Code is as viciously anti-Catholic as any Jack Chick tract and just as subtle. (If you aren’t aware of Chick, Catholic Answers has a comprehensive report on his life and work, insofar as such things can be known.) It’s all there—the Roman Catholic Church portrayed as a corrupt institution founded by power-hungry, sexually-repressed misogynists bent on hiding the true Gospel in order to further their own worldly ambitions; the depiction of its leadership as spiritually and even physically deformed; and, of course, the heroic freethinking rebels risking their lives in a fight against the established order for the sake of truth. I thought that the Catholicism-as-ultimate-evil crowd was limited to a few nutty, backwoods fundamentalists, but it would appear that I was wrong. In any event, I was highly disappointed: not so much with the movie itself, which I was expecting to be terrible (which says a lot, since I usually enjoy the movies that I go into with low expectations), but with the millions of people around the world who have let themselves be entertained by something so clearly bigoted, not to mention idiotic. The Church has much to do; so do our history teachers.

But this post is about my trip to Spain, not my experience of watching The Da Vinci Code. Those of you who know me well know that this sort of topic shift is common for me; I’ll do what I can here to stay on track. (If not, then I’ll at least try to keep things entertaining.)

So back to the plane ride itself: I managed to actually sleep for about three hours, a first for me on an airplane. This was fortunate, since it gave me the energy to navigate Heathrow airport, my first stop. And when I say “navigate,” I’m not being facetious. Heathrow is enormous, and traveling from arrivals to departures took about a half-hour. I didn’t think it would be possible for me to dislike any airport more than LAX; then again, LAX doesn’t require one to take a subway from one terminal to another (and between subsections within the same terminal). Finally, I arrived at the correct gate, annoyed but not otherwise the worse for wear. Two hours later I departed for Barcelona.

The flight to Spain was dominated by a half-dozen or so Englishmen, traveling together as a group, who created an incredible amount of noise on the plane: shouting (and occasionally swearing) across the aisles at one another, hitting on the stewardesses, and guffawing loudly, they created quite a spectacle. It was difficult to know whether to be annoyed or entertained; I experienced a little of both. Apparently, the flight crew was similarly ambivalent: clearly amused, one of the older attendants also warned them against behaving similarly at their destination, lest they get into trouble. I had the distinct impression that they knew each other from the military, or prison, or some combination thereof.

Whatever the case, I had to follow them through customs, since all of us fell into the category of foreigners outside of the European Union. During this time one of the men said something—I didn’t catch what it was, exactly—that angered another member of the group; the resulting stream of profanities issuing from the latter’s mouth was enough to shock even me (and I went to an all-boys high school!) and prompted a young woman walking behind us to request that he be silent. Fortunately, he more or less complied, and the rest of my journey through that particular airport was uneventful. After another, shorter layover, I boarded the prop plane for Murcia San Javier, an hour-long flight from Barcelona.

Coming into MJV I had my first experience being a confused foreigner after discovering that I lost my baggage: waiting by the claim for about five minutes after everyone else had retrieved their bags, unsure of exactly what I should do, one of the airport workers walked up to me and started speaking in Spanish. I, of course, had no idea what he was saying, and said something to that effect—or at least I think that I did. He sighed, walked away, and found someone with whom I could speak in English. She helped me figure out how to file a lost baggage report; I still don’t have my bag, though, so this may have been for nothing. (Before returning to the States, I did find out where it was, though, or rather a friend of mine did. He eventually traced it to the Madrid airport, which is apparently the eventual destination of all luggage lost in Spain. As things stand, they’re going to ship it back to California. Hopefully, this will actually come to pass, and I’ll be able to get my dress shoes back.)

By this time it was ten o’clock in the evening, and MJV was getting ready to close. I carried my two remaining bags out onto the sidewalk adjacent to the taxi lane, sat myself down, and waited for my friend José to pick me up as arranged. It was a warm night out; and the temperature, though not optimal, was far from unpleasant. Then again, after almost a full day on planes and in airports, I would have taken the Siberian tundra for the fresh air.

It would be another hour-and-a-half before José arrived—he had been occupied picking up another international student at Alicante, another airport close to the city of Murcia—during which interval I had just enough brain power left in me to beat a few more levels of Super Mario World. After being introduced to the other passengers—another Spaniard, and two Italians—we drove to a nearby town for dinner: tapas, which were brought to our table just after midnight. (The timing was fortuitous, since I had arrived on a Friday evening, and almost every dish in Spain contains ham.) Somehow, I managed to last until around 1:30, by which time we had made our way to Guadalupe and José’s family home, where I was to stay for the first four or five nights. But my time there, those first few days in Spain: that I will leave to my next entry.

I launched this blog last September with only the vaguest notion of what its contents would likely consist of. Yet, in the course of looking back on what I have written here over the past 10 months, I have made a rather horrifying discovery.

Thulcandra is, to a painfully obvious degree, the blog of a Catholic convert.

Frankly, I shouldn’t be surprised by this. Faith, for better or worse, is a topic for study as well as a way of life; and I have an unfortunate tendency to focus on the former at the expense of the latter. This is partly the result of fear and human weakness—it’s much easier for me to think about religion as a concept than to actually approach the Divine face-to-face—but I can also lay part of the blame on how my mind works (and has worked for as long as I can remember): thoughts tend to bounce around in there and drive me crazy until I make them concrete, either in a spoken conversation or on paper. Having been conceived a mere five months after I entered the Church, I would be slightly skeptical about the authenticity of Thulcandra‘s authorship if it hadn’t become a sand trap for my ongoing musings about Christianity.

Following the example of my favorite writers in the field, I have tried to make my observations personal rather than abstract, propositional rather than polemical. Still, without a doubt, this site fits the mold of a convert blog almost perfectly. Focusing intently on theology and praxis and aesthetics of a specifically Catholic nature, I’ve tended to neglect anything even remotely outside the immediate sphere of religion.

From a certain point of view, there’s nothing wrong with this. There are many Catholic blogs out there, quite of few of them worth more than a passing glance. A web journal is something of a work in progress and usually works best when its author stays on topic; there’s a reason why books on the Napoleonic wars don’t have chapters devoted to horticultural practices in 13th-century Japan.

At the same time, if one is truly a Christian, then nothing that one writes can be totally secular or divorced from faith. If there is anything I have learned from my struggles with Christianity over the majority of my life (a story which, to the joy of some of my readers and the consternation of others, I will perhaps one day recount), it’s that religion cannot be compartmentalized and remain meaningful. There can be no division of worlds within ourselves: the Christian and secular selves, with the former attending Mass and praying the rosary before bed and the latter acting independently, in our careers or political leanings or wherever. Either we are Christian or we are not; either we live as Christians or we don’t. There can be no middle ground, for to be on the middle ground is to be lukewarm and thus to be rejected—figuratively speaking, to be spit out—by God at the Judgment.

That’s the first thing I’ve learned about faith in the relatively short time I’ve been alive. The second thing I’ve learned is quite different and balances out the first: although one’s religious inclinations must permeate every aspect of his life and being, one doesn’t necessarily need to spend every moment concentrating on the content of his faith in a conscious way.

Belief is indeed central to being a Christian; if we act outside of faith in Christ, we act in vain. Yet believing is not simply an act of intellectual assent. Faith is as much a matter of rosary beads clicking between our fingers and our knees aching during the consecration as it is about doing intellectual backflips—much more so, if we’re lucky.

Moreover, it’s something that moves beyond our life in the local parish into the day-to-day. Wherever we go, whatever we do, our faith must be apparent. This transcends the actions that cultural anthropologists have come to define as religious; indeed, any competent cultural anthropologist would recognize that, in the majority of cultures that have existed throughout our history, the line between the sacred and the secular has been so blurred as to become meaningless. (Certainly, this doesn’t entail a leveling out of sacred and profane: there have always been holy places where heaven and earth were thought to touch. But when every part of one’s life is simultaneously caught up in the here and now and in the reenacting of one’s tribal mythology, it’s hard to define the two categories as separate after the manner of us moderns.)

This is a long way of saying that I’m changing Thulcandra‘s focus, or at least making a conscious effort at greater thematic diversity here. I will still write about theology and Church matters from time to time, but I intend to devote a significant percentage of my upcoming entries to recounting my adventures in Spain.

Oh, right. In case you weren’t aware, I’m currently living abroad. I’ve been here almost a month as of this writing, studying Spanish at the Catholic University of Saint Anthony in Murcia, the capital city of an eponymous region in the southeast. I don’t know how long I will be here, though I hope to stay for awhile yet. I don’t plan on making Thulcandra into a travel blog, and I will keep its religious iconography and overall theme intact. Yet the content will be more focused on my day-to-day life than has been the case thus far, with stories and pictures forming the bulk of what I write.

There is much to do here outside of posting updates, but I will definitely write my first entry about the trip sometime in the near future. Stay tuned.

Of the many battles raging within the increasingly beleaguered Anglican Communion today, women’s ordination is perhaps the most conspicuous. In saying this I do not mean to imply that the question of whether women can be validly ordained as priests is the pivotal issue facing Anglicanism in the 21st century; its allowance is merely a symptom of a more general breakdown in agreement within the communion’s ranks about what is and isn’t orthodox Christianity. Nor am I asserting that the subject has garnered a more significant amount of media attention than have others. Even the Episcopal Church’s 2006 enthronement of Katherine Jefferts Schori as the first female Anglican bishop received far less coverage than its appointment of Gene Robinson to the same office in 2004.

Rather, what I intend by my words is simply that a person’s gender is far more readily apparent than his or her religious beliefs or sexual proclivities. In the Anglican Communion, where liturgy is still of paramount importance in many sectors, the beliefs of priest and congregation don’t necessarily become transparent (with notable exceptions) until one hears the homily or attends a Sunday school class; the Nicene Creed sounds the same whether one affirms its doctrines in a traditional manner or not. If this is the case with doctrinal adherence, how much more so with sexual orientation-which, unless it’s the flagship issue of the priest or parish in question, may not be mentioned at all? The sanctioning of women’s ordination wasn’t the only revision in doctrine and practice to have occurred in the Anglican Communion in the 1970′s. Yet it must certainly have been the most visible sign that a change had occurred.

For this and other reasons, then, the years immediately following the Episcopal Church’s 1976 General Convention were a time when a significant number of priests and laity left mainstream Anglicanism, finding refuge in the various continuing Anglican movements or else converting to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. The Continuum doesn’t, to my admittedly rather limited knowledge, have a liberal wing advocating women’s ordination: considering its origins, a movement in that direction would be highly unlikely. Likewise, I haven’t heard of any similar rumblings within the Orthodox churches (though, again, I’m no expert on such matters by any means).

Then there’s the Roman Catholic Church, which has had, for several years now, a small but vocal contingent of believers actively campaigning for the cause in question. Every so often religious and secular news outlets run stories about illicit ordinations of women-usually performed by unnamed bishops in non-Catholic settings-provoking the usual expressions of dismay and glee from traditional and progressive Catholics, respectively. The Vatican has always been dismissive of these ordinations’ legitimacy but apparently considers the underlying sentiments of their participants to be subversive enough to warrant an apostolic letter and several official excommunications, among other measures taken.

Several authors far more learned than myself have written extensively on this subject. I am neither competent to do so nor desirous of diving into its murky theological waters. If I were to intentionally arouse the consternation of my audience, I would want the topic of discussion to be something I knew more about.

That said, I would like to preface what follows by pointing out that women’s ordination should only be an issue for Christian communities professing to believe in the sacraments. When I was still a Protestant, I believed that the pastor’s primary duties were preaching and pastoring. Since I didn’t doubt the competence of women in either capacity, I had trouble seeing what all the fuss was about with regards to whether a woman could pastor a church. I’ve since come to understand that the question of whether women can be priests is, at least in theory, a question of ontological ability, not fitness for leadership.

So the issue at hand is whether women are able to be validly ordained and confect the sacraments. What I’d like to point out here is this: the reason feminists are up in arms about not being able to consecrate the Host or hear confessions isn’t because these are enviable tasks in and of themselves. The life of a priest, as that life is intended to be, isn’t something one wishes for; it’s a calling. I, for one, admire those who’ve taken on the cloth. I am not, however, covetous of the task to which they’ve been assigned.

A Catholic priest is said to be acting in persona Christi-that is, standing in for Christ, the High Priest-when he performs his duties as priest. What was Christ’s life like while He was here? It was not a life of earthly glory, of political influence or ostentatious wealth. No, His life was short and filled with pain. He was rejected by much of His family and friends; in the end even those who had loved Him as teacher deserted Him, and many (though certainly not all) of his own people cried out for his execution. He was hated for who He was; ultimately, he was killed for the same. This is what being a priest entails-not that this will necessarily happen to every man who becomes a priest, but that is what one opens oneself up to in taking that path.

So why the fuss over an all-male priesthood? Two reasons immediately come to mind. First of all, this particular issue fits in uncomfortably well with Western culture’s traditional exclusion of women from certain roles, especially those requiring education and entailing leadership. The second and more important point is how these two phenomena, the unfair banishment of women from the public sphere and the justifiable restriction of the priestly life to men, have been intertwined in the course of history. From the time of Constantine to within the last 150 years, the Church has held an incredible amount of temporal power: the authority to coronate or depose emperors, for instance. When being a Catholic priest has meant an opportunity to influence whole nations, to live in wealth, to obtain pleasures undreamed of by the average peasant, of course there have been those who have taken on the role with the wrong intentions. The upshot of this has been a power structure-an earthly authority-dominated by men.

Yet this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. If one is offered a bishopric, one is expected to decline first, then accept: the desire to progress through the ranks of the Church is actually considered to be sinful. A friend of mine, a Jesuit seminarian, once told me that the Church has been at its best historically when under siege. There have always been saints, of course: no amount of corruption in the earthly organization could destroy that. Yet now we are likely to see popes and priests in high places who live as saints on earth, whereas by the time of the Renaissance-think of Alexander VI, the paragon of a corrupted clergy-that idea had become almost laughable.

My point in saying all of this is that, in terms of earthly glory, there shouldn’t be any difference in being a man versus being a woman. As priests men are indeed given a level of authority in the Church that women aren’t. But what kind of authority is it? For 99% of clergy, it’s the authority to counsel tormented souls in the confessional and see the dying off to the next life. At the highest levels, it is the authority to combat heresy on the level of proclaiming dogma, the authority to bear the weight of Church unity on one’s shoulders and suffer on its behalf.

None of these are terribly attractive duties. There is definitely glory to be had in them, but it’s the sort of glory that is fundamentally mixed with pain.

We are all called to serve God in this life. Hand-in-hand with this is a call to suffer, to complete the work of Christ on the Cross. At its heart a priest’s life is a life of suffering, an agony allotted specifically to men. I am in awe of the way a woman’s body can bear and bring forth new life, yet the task of childbearing is not one I envy women in the least. Whether we are priests, or else husbands and wives, monks and nuns-whether we are consecrated virgins or lifelong wanderers uncertain of our vocation until death: each of us is granted a special pain through which, if we accept it, we will be redeemed. The least we can do in these short lives we’ve been given is to not covet the pains reserved for others