Spiritual Self Experimentation

I am going to do some self experimentation to try to develop some virtue. Yes it's time to use science as a means to holiness. To biblically proof text what I'm doing Paul tells us to,
"Test everything; retain what is good." (1Thes 5:21) and that is what I'm going to try to do. Seth Roberts in this 10-minute talk has two main points when doing self experimentation.

1. You learn by doing not over thinking an experiment. You will learn what’s wrong with your experiments by starting to do them.
2. When you do something, do the smallest easiest thing that will help, that will tell you something you don’t know.

The problem that I want to address is my lack of progress in holiness. Every time I go to confession it is the same sins that occur at about the same incident of occurrence. This has been happening for the past 8 years and it is amazing to me how consistent my confessions have been. When I was younger I always thought that with age comes wisdom and holiness. All I needed to do was to go to church on Sunday and try to be a good person and I would continue to grow. It hasn't been working out like that.

So here is what I am going to do. Every night I am going to do an examination of conscious, record my sins using a short hand that no one but me will understand , and pray an act of contrition. In a month, I am going to go to confession and I will see if I made progress. I can tweak and tinker from there. There are a lot of types of spiritualities and devotions that I want to try out but for now I am going to stick with Seth's point number 2.

Conversion: We have to change...not the Church

I really agree with what is being said at the first part of this song. We are called to be changed by Christ. I am still in the process of conversion to the Catholic Church.

The Divine Spark

There is just something about this performance that I really like. The music is beautiful but the playfulness back and forth and the creative interchange just adds another dimension to it. I don’t know how you can watch this video and not see the Divine spark in man.

The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God. G.K. Chesterton

Silence

Music is everywhere. Long live it.

Just give me five minutes without it; that's all I ask, perhaps all I'll need to bring it back into being for myself. Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor's home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical "negative space." Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time. Link

I find myself seeking music out like it’s a compulsion. I think it is away of avoiding the reality of my aloneness and my dependency on God.

The Meaning of Death

The question of the meaning of death is also the question of the meaning of life, the greatest of all questions. Don Quixote is talking about this when he tells Sancho Panza about the look he saw in the eyes of the soldiers who lay dying in his arms; the eyes seemed to be asking a question. Sancho asks, “Was it the question ‘Why am I dying?” and Quixote replies, “No, it was the question, ‘Why was I living?’”

Because of death, the question of the meaning of life leads to one of two answers. Because death exists, because life ends in death, because the final fact about life is death, life is either startlingly more meaningful or startling less meaningful than we usually think. For if even death is meaningful, then life is startlingly more meaning-full; than we usually think; and if death is not meaningful, then life, is the final analysis, is not meaning-full. For death is the final analysis. If there is nothing at the end of the road, then the road leads nowhere, points to nothing, means nothing. No compromise is possible on this, the ultimate question: Is life as a whole, life in the long run, meaningful or meaningless? Life cannot be meaningful in the short run and meaningless in the long run, because the long run is the meaning of the short run. “One foot up and one foot down/ That’s the way to London Town” -if there is no London, or if it’s not worth going to, then there’s no reason to put one foot up and one foot down.

So life is either totally meaningful or totally meaningless, depending on what death is. Therefore we have better try to find out what death is. Peter Kreeft, Love is Stronger than Death

Being Catholic: From the Heart

Being Catholic: From the Heart, by Bishop Gordon Bennett

When I was Teaching high school English, I used to assign my students a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne to read and discuss which was titled “Ethan Brand”. The story is about a young man, the title character, who deliberately embarks upon a search for what he called the “Unpardonable Sin”. His journey involves, not a descent into unbridled pleasure or overt selfishness, but rather in desiring to know everything there is to know. Hawthorne skillfully describes how this young man gradually evolves from a sensitive and caring person into what Hawthorne describes as a fiend. He writes that Ethan Brand became a fiend “the moment his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect.” His education, because it neglected his spiritual nature, had as its greatest fruit - the Unpardonable Sin.

Let me quote from the story: “so much for the intellect! It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother, he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment and, at length, converting men and women to his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study.”

I used to teach this story as a kind of warning to my students of how important it was for the head and the heart to grow together, and this was a warning that students who were as privilege and gifted as my students were needed to hear. I was trying to help at the expense of disowning their own hearts. It was a way of asking them the question Jesus posed to the rich young man in the gospel: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” I loved giving that lecture and facilitating that discussion! It was a last chance to harangue my students about the importance of claiming their hearts, of paying attention to their inner longing, which are the prelude to discovering the presence of God. It was really trying to tell them that, in life, the heart of the matter is the matter of the heart.

The heart of the matter is the matter of the heart.

I had, of course, hoped that Ethan Brand would never have been on the list of those persons my students would choose to emulate.

But then, a few years later, when I was principal, I actually met Ethan Brand.

His real name (not really!) Was Kevin, 16 years old, bright, talented, handsome, athletic, a student body officer - and, apparently, a drug dealer. This last activity came to my attention through parents in his neighborhood who told me that, although Kevin never sold drugs at school (which would have been cause for expulsion), he was selling them to the kids in his neighborhood. The parents said they hd talked to Kevin’s parents but had been unsuccessful in convincing them that their son was really doing this.

I called Kevin into my office, partly because I thought he should know what was being said about him, and partly because I wanted to put him on notice that, if anything like that happened at school, he would be dismissed. To my surprise, he admitted that he was, in fact, selling drugs to his peers, that he was keenly aware of the repercussions which would attach if he was to do so at school, and that he had not qualms whatsoever about continuing. When I expressed some curiosity about why he would do this since he was obviously wealthy and did not use drugs himself, he gave and answer, which reminded me of Ethan Brand. Kevin told me he sold drugs because he was fascinated by the effects they had on other people and that he enjoyed the power he had gained over them.

Try to keep myself from doing something irrational, I began informing him, with as much genuine passion as I could muster, how his insensitivity to others had already ruined lives and could possibly even cause death. I tried to explain to him how what he was doing was beyond the pale of acceptable behavior toward friends or even enemies.

As I was talking, I saw something happening to him. He eyes locked into mine. His face reddened, his jaws shut tight, his eyes filled with tears. But I made the mistake of reading remorse when what he spat out at me was pure rage. He said: “I’m sorry I ever came to this damned school.” Being totally confused, I asked him to repeat what he had said, and he did, with even more energy than before: “I’m sorry I even came to this damned school.” When I asked why, he stunned me with his answer: “Because,” he said, “if I had gone to a public school, like I wanted to, I wouldn’t have had to worry about saving my soul.”

If I had gone to just a public school, I wouldn’t have to worry about saving my soul. ~Bishop Gordon Bennett, "Being Catholic: From the Heart"

“Ethan Brand” by Nathaniel Hawthorne


I got this from William Trentman from Utah's 44th Annual Pastoral Congress

THE BATTLE OF PRAYER

The best part of the Catechism is its section on prayer. This quote from the Catechism helps put things in focus for me.

THE BATTLE OF PRAYER

2725 Prayer is both a gift of grace and a determined response on our part. It always presupposes effort. The great figures of prayer of the Old Covenant before Christ, as well as the Mother of God, the saints, and he himself, all teach us this: prayer is a battle. Against whom? Against ourselves and against the wiles of the tempter who does all he can to turn man away from prayer, away from union with God. We pray as we live, because we live as we pray. If we do not want to act habitually according to the Spirit of Christ, neither can we pray habitually in his name. The "spiritual battle" of the Christian's new life is inseparable from the battle of prayer.

With our culture that has so many things to distract us, how can the spiritual battle and the battle of prayer be recognize as reality?

I think the answer to this question can be found in the beatitudes.

Fulton Sheen's Wartime Prayer Book

Here is a really great prayer book for our soldiers in Iraq. Bishop Fulton Sheen compiled it. Here is one prayer that is in the prayer book.

PRAYER IN TIME OF WAR

O God, who bring wars to nought and shield by Thy power all who hope in Thee, over-throwing those who assail them; help Thy servants who implore Thy mercy so that the fierce might of their enemy may be brought low and we may never cease to praise and thank Thee.

O God, who hast dominion over all realms and all kings, who by striking heals, and by pardoning saves: stretch out over us Thy mercy, so that by Thy power we may enjoy peace and tranquility and use them for our healing and amendment.

Through our Lord, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Link-Extracts of the Book
Link- To Send Prayer Books to our Soldiers!

Insults into Opportunity

Make a sacrifice by not saying the nasty word or answering an insulting remark. For in that way, we lower ourselves to the vulgarity we condemn. No one will ever get ahead of us so long as he stays behind to kick us. (Fulton Sheen's, Wartime Prayer book)

This is where we can gain some gracious merit in apologetics. When we do not return evil for evil we are in a way being an image of Christ. We are able to take the insult and offer it up as a “sacrifice”. The Internet is a poor medium to convey sacrifice and love, which are primary to Christianity. We need to rejoice when given the opportunity.

Martyrdom and Apologetics

In the end, of course, only the saints and the martyrs make converts in any number. I see now what is meant when it is said that the seed of the Church is the blood of the martyrs. If the heart hath reasons that reason knoweth not of, then it must be said that the best apologetical approach to the non-Catholic is martyrdom, for the economy of the Incarnation is the begetting of love in loving unto death, in dying that others may live. Then, too, there is another thing. There are the doubting Thomases, with their congenitally curious fingers. There must always be fresh wounds for the satisfaction of these doubting digits.

Ah, yes, asks the Catholic, but have there ever been so many doubting Thomases as there are in the world today? Perhaps not, replies the non-Catholic, but have there ever been so few martyrs? But viewed from their point of view or ours, the fact stands-the world is agonizing in spiritual starvation. Can the soul of man best be fed with Catholic apologetics? Or with the Word of Love?

“And my speech and my preaching were not in the persuasive words of human wisdom,” said St. Paul, “but in showing the Spirit and the power” (1 Cor. 2:4) (Clare Boothe Luce)

The one thing necessary for effective apologetics is being a saint. If we are saints then the rest will follow. This is basically what I am learning. I really should change this blog from The Art of Apologetics to The Art of Sanctity. We can have arguments that move mountains but without sanctity what does it profit? May God give me the Grace.

"Though beheaded, and crucified, and thrown to wild beasts, and chains, and fire, and all other kinds of torture, we do not give up our confession; but, the more such things happen, the more do others in larger numbers become faithful." (St. Justin Martyr)

Apologetics in Community

An interesting question to ponder as an Apologist is why do people believe what they do. What mechanism does God use to reach those without faith? Typically, in apologetics the tool that is most often used and focused on is rational arguments. In reality, faith is rarely the result of rational arguments, although it does play a part. The key instrument that God uses for conversion is sanctity in community. Jesus said the following…

This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:35)

People will know that we follow Christ if we have love for one another. In Jesus’ prayer to the Father he asked the following…

I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. (John 17:20-21)

The love and unity in the body of Christ, through the Spirit, to the Father will produce belief. I would think that the inverse is also true, that our lack of love and unity produces skepticism in the world. If community is important to belief, then apologetics cannot be done in isolation. For online apologetics this is a challenge. How do we bring nonbelievers into the Christian community when the Internet is a barrier to authentic community? At the very least we must go out in pairs (Luke 10:1-12) to do apologetics if not with a close community of online Catholics who have the unity of Christ’s love for one another.

In our apologetic efforts, when possible, we should first invite the nonbeliever to be a part of the Catholic community and then from within this context teach and defend the Truth. This would make it possible for others to see the love and unity that we share. This has to work better than the direct approach of trying to argue someone into the faith and never getting to the point of witnessing to the unity and love we share in the body of Christ.

Can I get a Witness!

Avery Cardinal Dulles

In a revealed religion such as Christianity, the key question is how God comes to us and opens up a world of meaning not accessible to human investigative powers.

The answer, I suggest, is testimony. Revelation, as God’s word, is a form of divine testimony. Faith is by its nature an acceptance of the word of God, the witness who can neither deceive nor be deceived. God’s word comes to us through human witnesses: the prophets and apostles, the inspired authors of Holy Scripture, and the tradition of the Church, which faithfully passes on and interprets what it has received from Christ and the apostles.

From its beginnings Christianity has been propagated through the living testimony of believers. (The Rebirth of Apologetics)

This is missing in a lot of online apologetics. To rely solely on abstract reason is limiting. It is only a small portion of the evidence that there is for the faith. Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” The reasons of the heart are vital because it is the intimate encounter with God that cannot be put into words. Cardinal Dulles is right about giving our testimony. To give our testimony is to share the reasons of the heart. It gives witness to the love of God we have through Christ our Lord.

Prayer and Fasting: The Weapons

…his disciples secretly asked him: Why could not we cast him out? And he said to them: This kind can go out by nothing, but by prayer and fasting. (Mark 9:24-26)

I really enjoy thinking and debating about the faith. It is rather like a hobby to me. Prayer and fasting are things that are not as entertaining. It is a sad thing to admit; I am moved more by entertainment than by love. Prayer and fasting is what I need most. It would turn my faith from a trivial hobby into a love affair with God. Jesus, grant me this grace.

This has to be the foundation of any apologist. We are called to be saints. And without striving to give our whole hearts to Christ, we are just playing soldier. Our nation has this demon, the type that can only be cast out by prayer and fasting. Let us heed the call for Christ our King.

Confirmed to be a Soldier of Christ

I must rely on the supernatural to defend the faith well. Through the sacrament of Confirmation I received the strength to be a soldier of Christ. The Holy Spirit and His grace have been given to me, in a more complete way, to fight for the faith of Christ. I have been given the Holy Spirit like the Apostles at Pentecost. I have received the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Wisdom
Understanding
Counsel
Fortitude
Knowledge
Piety
Fear of the Lord

I need to walk in faith and confidence that the Grace that I received through the Body of Christ is sufficient to conquer the enemies of the Church. I have been marked with the permanent seal of the Holy Spirit and I must live this truth. I must fulfill my baptismal oath. I am a soldier of Christ.

Novena to the Holy Spirit for the Seven Gifts