Eucharistic celebration demands a self-examination

Raymund Schwager writes on the drama of the Christian Life in his book, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation (pp 228-229)

Whoever eats of the bread and drinks of the cup unworthily will be guilty of the Lord's body and blood. Let everyone examine himself, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For whoever eats and drinks without discerning the body of the Lord, that person eats and drinks judgment upon himself. Because of this some among you are weak and ill, and not a few have passed away. But if we judged ourselves, then we would not be judged. (1 Cor. 11:27-31)

The eucharistic celebration demands a self-examination. If this is not carried out in sufficient depth, then there necessarily results an involuntary process of self-judgment, which according to Paul reaches even into a person's bodily existence. The liturgy is, then, not only the performance of a drama; as effective representation it releases a process of judgment and provokes decisions which reach into the inmost depths of the participants.

The Human Person comes to be deprivatized & socialized

Raymund Schwager writes on the drama of the Christian Life in his book, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation (pp 218-221)

If an actor plays his part well, he steps with his whole existence into the service of the character he is to represent. This does not make him a puppet, but his own experience with its hopes and sufferings, its dreams and disappointments is expressed in a transformed way in the person who appears on the stage. The actor puts something of his own life into the service of the figure whom he has to play. Certainly, in his performance he always remains in the role, out of which he must regularly step, in order to live his own life with his own responsibilities. But his service in the role has a great symbolic power.

Christian life can be understood from the viewpoint of this parable...

Even if a good actor puts everything into his part, his own life remains more important. It was different with the fate of Jesus. His human life had no aim of its own beside his mission. It was a matter of being the living flesh and dramatic instrumentality for that threefold life which had gripped him. A similar task stands before those who are ready to follow him. Given the spontaneous urge to live, all of us start with our own wishes, aims, and plans, and these, while preserving the person's own imperious will to life, can often be built into collective projects within history without any very great difficulty. Self-will thus appears as service. Christian faith demands, however, a different service and therefore includes a fundamental conversion. The decisive thing is the question of the whole understanding of life and the readiness ultimately not to live one's own life any longer, but Christ's, and to allow oneself to be led by the Spirit. One's own life becomes then a living instrument on which the melody of a higher life can be played. Such a conversion can naturally not be the fruit of one individual decision, but involves a lifelong process.

From the insight that the innermost dimension of human life is the divine life bestowed on humankind, H. U. von Balthasar distinguishes between spirit-subject and person. He ascribes the spiritual individual to the creation, while he defines personal existence by means of the supernatural mission and participation in the trinitarian life of God. In the case of Christ, from whom Balthasar draws the theological concept of person, this distinction can be established fairly easily, even by means of church doctrine (anhypostasis of human nature). However Balthasar tries to understand all human persons from the viewpoint of the supernatural mission, according to the archetype of Christ: "But in Christ there is hope to be no mere individual self, but to become a person of God, with a task likewise defined through Christ." Since the Christian task is always aimed at the others, together with supernatural personal existence, according to Balthasar, there is at the same time implied a community among humans: "The human self, becoming a person theologically through an individual calling and mission, comes to be simultaneously deprivatized and socialized; it is made into a space and bearer of community."

...

In all this, the human person should not be understood as a fixed quantity, closed in on itself, which can be changed only from outside. It is in its whole being oriented toward God and has as a creature something indeterminate in itself. It is of itself not finally self-determining or autonomous, but - despite its subsistence - must at the same time in its innermost being be thought of on the model of "material" which is in need of further determination. By receiving divine life it is, therefore, not alienated from itself. Existence in faith does not mean playing a role which is strange, but being addressed by the role received (mission) in the indeterminacy at the center of one's person and challenged to a new self-determination and freedom made possible by the Holy Spirit.

Is it real? Or is it ... a Hoax? Or Memorex? Or Photoshop? Or Myth?

The video in my previous post I think is too important not to comment on it further. Below I have included the link to Father Barron's sermon that the video was drafted from.

Father Barron's sermon regarding the difference between myth and Gospel or as he titles it, The Resurrection of Jesus is Not a Myth

Please give it a listen and understand I fully support his argument, however I believe that sermons like this no longer open the hearts of many people today, just look at this, another intuitive observation from Father Barron.

I want to take off on the last sentence in his last article: "The great good news is that this choice of his cannot be undone by any choice of ours." I BELIEVE THIS, but I seriously do not believe that most, whether non-practicing Christians to even many who will be sitting in pews this coming Sunday, believe it! At least at the level of conventional culture and its education over the last 50 to 60 years. People of the 'West' have been influenced and have bought into such drivel and myth that we have closed ourselves up and are no longer able to hear what Father Barron is alluding to. It may still be scandalous to some but it is time to bring faith and reason together and get to a serious level of talk about violence or what Girard/Bailie talk about when they refer to the mimetic interplay.

There no longer is any excuse not to connect-the-dots between violence, religion and truth!
Let me refer a little to Violence Unveiled by Gil Bailie:

Participants in Western culture have lived for so long under the influence of the biblical ethos that it is difficult for us to fully appreciate its uniqueness. So pervasive is the concern for victims it arouses that there is a tendency for us to think of it as either a natural, universal emotion or a personal moral achievement for which the individual can take credit. Were either of those assumptions the case, Nietzsche would have been simply wrong about Christianity. He wasn’t simply wrong. He was mad. He was totally wrong, but he wasn’t simply wrong. The Christian gospels have done what Nietzsche accused Christianity of doing, though not for the reasons he alleged.
Whatever “natural” empathy for one another we may have under any given set of circumstances, an empathy specifically for victims as victims is a cultural and not a natural phenomenon. Not only is it not a natural emotion; in many cases it is not even a welcomed one. Those in whom this empathy awakens often try to suppress it in favor of more practical and conventional loyalties. Nietzsche was able to see that in those cultures influenced by the biblical tradition this empathy for the victim had gradually become a major historical force, one that was throwing conventional culture into disarray.

Bailie goes on:

We have been unable to recognize the clumsy attempts to revive the sacrificial ethos of pagan antiquity in our world because we haven’t fully understood the anthropological patterns to which these attempts conform. When we catch glimpses of these anthropological patterns, we blink in incredulity or we think them the product of the rich imagination of archaic peoples.

The fact is:

The generic term for the systematic misrecognitions that have veiled the victim’s face and silenced the victim’s voice is myth. If we live at a moment in human history when “history” is no longer able to screen us from the apocalypse, no longer able to explain away the violence it documents, it is because in our day “history” is exhausting the last vestige of its mythological power. In the foreseeable future, neither religious mystification nor the solemn and quasi-religious causes of “history” will sufficiently veil our violence from our own eyes, nor keep us from seeing the faces of our victims.

Fundamentally, human history is a struggle between myth and Gospel. Literature, as it has developed in Western culture, is neither myth (muthos) nor truth (aletheia), it is the textual arena in which the two struggle for the upper hand. What myth conceals, what literature alternately conceals and reveals, and what the Gospel decisively reveals are the social dynamics that produce what Girard calls “the essential complicity between violence and human culture.”

All this means is that myth is still operating at the foundation of our institutions influencing us (as in this post) and is at the heart of what Jesus is saying here:

John 8, 43-47: “Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word. “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. “But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me. “Which one of you convicts Me of sin? If I speak truth, why do you not believe Me? “He who is of God hears the words of God; for this reason you do not hear them, because you are not of God.”

I want to close with a couple quotes from another Girardian, Raymund Schwager and his book, Banished from Eden - Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation:

"... in the history of humanity, and above all in the history of the Christian message, there appears a dramatic struggle between contending powers, a struggle which in modern times has not abated but has even increased in somewhat more subtle forms. In view of this dramatic struggle we need, on the one hand, a cool clear-sightedness, which does not close its eyes before whatever is hostile and try to argue it away; on the other hand, faith in a real redemption is necessary, so that in the long run negative mechanisms will not be taken for natural occurrences which would be totally unchangeable."

(Read this post)

"In light of the world-spanning media and economic forces, counter-institutions are necessary that are likewise world spanning and are based neither on money nor the fashions of the media world. The Church as such a counter-institution is of course often helpless and powerless; yet it keeps fundamental alternatives open and so, in spite of problems in its own ranks, resists the tendency to gradually substitute marketing strategies for democracy, which in subtle ways revert completely to the friend-enemy distinction. The doctrine of original sin does not create our political problems, but it certainly circumscribes the greatness of the task. It enables us to judge which proposed solutions are realistic, and thus guards us against counterproductive and better consequences of utopian experiments while making clear that only a faith that can move mountains will be able to bring about genuine improvements in history."

(Review here)

Dorothy Sayers & Raymund Schwager?

Reading the Meditation of the Day in the Magnificat this morning I was struck by how Dorothy Sayers captured the major essence of Raymund Schwager's book that I have been promoting here for all to read, Banished from Eden - Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation.

I the image of the Unimaginable
In the place where the Image and the Unimagined
are one,
The Act of the Will, the Word of the Thought,
the Son
In whom the Father's selfhood is known to Himself,
Speak to Man in the place of the Images.
You that We made for Ourself in Our own image,
Free like Us to experience good by choice,
Not of necessity, laying your will in Ours
For love's sake creaturely, to enjoy your peace,
What did you do? What did you do for Us
By what you did for yourselves in the moment
of choice?
O Eve My daughter, and O My dear son Adam,
Try to understand that when you chose your will
Rather than Mine, and when you chose
to know evil
In your way and not in Mine, you chose for Me.
It is My will you should know Me as I am -
But how? for you chose to know your good as evil,
Therefore the face of God is evil to you,
And you know My love as terror, My mercy
as judgment,
My innocence as a sword; My naked life
Would slay you. How can you ever know Me then?
Yet know you must, since you were made for that;
Thus either way you perish. Nay, but the hands
That made you, hold you still; and since you
would not
Submit to God, God shall submit to you,
Not of necessity, but free to choose
For your love's sake what you refused to Mine.
God shall endure, and what man chose to know
God shall know too - the experience of evil
In the flesh of man; and certainly He shall feel
Terror and judgment and the point of the sword;
And God shall see God's face set like a flint
Against Him; and man shall see the Image of God
In the image of man; and man shall show
no mercy.
Truly I will bear your sin and carry your sorrow,
And, if you will, bring you to the tree of life,
Where you may eat, and know your evil as good,
Redeeming that first knowledge. But all this
Still at your choice, and only as you choose,
Save as you choose to let Me choose in you.

Who then will choose to be the chosen of God,
And will to bear Me that I may bear you?

Dorothy L. Sayers (+ 1957) was a renowned British dramatist, novelist, poet, and Christian essayist.

As daughters and sons of those very first humans, "O Eve My daughter, and O My dear son Adam," we continue, in this generation, to feel the weight of "what you did for yourselves in the moment of choice?" Read Banished from Eden to grasp the mimetic weight of choice.

The 0.1% Solution - a comment on a post @ Reflections on Faith and Culture

Gil Bailie's post The 0.1% Solution over at his blog "Reflections on Faith and Culture" provides another chance to advocate Raymund Schwager's book, Banished from Eden.

Gil touches on the issue of suffering and the relieving of suffering from a Christian perspective. On the level of mimetic theory we may see other issues at work - both levels unveiling a satanic element for sure.

3 quotes from R Schwager's Banished from Eden pg 154 and 155 and 149:

The seduction of the human project of "self-deification tends therefore to move towards animal life and even ends by seeking the divine in what is lifeless."

"F. Tippler in his "Physics of Immortality" presents a physics in which he tries to explain God and the resurrection of the dead by physical formulas. He delineates a vision of a life that extends gradually in a digital fashion from our planet into the whole cosmos. Is this life anything more than the most complex, mechanistic information? In Girard's analysis of the logic of desire the imitator imitates his model and the model his imitator, until both appear indistinguishable from an observer's point of view. According to this logic, the living yearns for the lifeless and the lifeless for the living, until both are indistinguishable to everyday eyes."

"In a world of deception and suffering "every individual is necessarily threatened and profoundly intimidated. All therefore spontaneously seek good repute, appreciation, and honor in order to feel secure. However, a humanity requiring that each person support and make himself secure through others locks itself in its own prison, and in this situation true faith is impossible (John 5:44). By this reciprocal search for honor and recognition humans balance themselves through one another and thus shield themselves in a self-sufficient way against God. A satanic tendency arises, of which individuals may be largely unaware and in which they become entrapped."

The Gift of Self - Freedom & Love

Gil Bailie, starts off in tape 6 of his series The Gift of Self with the following remark pertaining to his book, Violence Unveiled;

In the book that is being made ready for publication, I argued that we live in a world where we are less and less able to resolve social crisis violently because the Gospel revelation has shorn our violence of its sacred pretension and without an aura of sacred surrounding it, violence can never be a source of durable cultural stability.

It all has to do with one of the two revelations that is overtaking us in our world: one is that conventional religion and culture is intertwined with violence and the second is that the self is constituted by its relation to the other or to others or to The Other.

The first 5 tapes of the series Gil takes up the first revelation and now he begins to map out how the second revelation is working out in history. I will post on this later, however I felt the calling to do a little weaving of thoughts by 3 great minds here and I hope I can make clear this tapestry. I have already referred to Gil as one source - the others are Raymund Schwager, who just prior to his sudden and unexpected passing on February 27, 2004 had agreed to serve on Cornerstone Forum board; and Romano Guardini, renowned Catholic theologian and writer.

Bailie's very short summary (above) on his book is a great meditation: "the self is constituted by its relation to the other or to others or to The Other." I was drawn to see how freedom and love are linked to this meditation on the self.


In his book, Banished from Eden, Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation, Schwager elaborates on freedom and I have pulled a few quotes from (link here) Chapter 4 Human Self-Reflection and Universal Responsibility:

At the same time this insight makes it evident that freedom cannot be completely understood either from the standpoint of the isolated subject nor from that of the I-Thou relation, but must be seen in the context of human society and history in their entirety. ... Individual self-reflection, accessible to earlier human individuals within certain limits, has developed into a comprehensive process of self-reflection, which can only be fulfilled by humanity as a whole and in view of its final destination.

... it makes sense that freedom in its radical form as total self-determination cannot be a matter pertaining just to the individual or any group, but is a task of all mankind. All individual attempts toward self-reflection and freedom must complement one another toward an all-embracing self-reflection in which humanity intervenes in its own nature and determines itself with regard to its future and final destination. ... But if freedom is a universal process, it also becomes clear that each individual subject is more determined by the free acts of others than by his or her own self-determination. Freedom turns out also to be an affliction, something that the traditional doctrine of original sin has always known.

Aramis here: The modern individualistic view will never be able to see how we are interconnected. Prayer is key here. We are inter-dividual as members of God's creature and that freedom is bound up with one another. And freedom can only be brought forth in relationships as one surrenders his or her will to the Will which stands outside the mimetic whirlwind, but yet is so very near as Christ's life showed us.


Monsignor Romano Guardini writes from Living the Drama of Faith:

To love, from the human point of view, is first of all to admit the existence of a being greater than myself who demands a sacrifice on my part. To love means to be prepared to meet the Most High, not to shun this encounter, but to seek it in order to realize that it is only in the gift this encounter will involve that I can truly find myself. This attitude awakens in me all that speaks of God, and enables me to see him.

Guardini writes that being in this image of God - being in love with God is "infinitely more vital then whether this or that man exists..."

Aramis here: After going through a rocky time of my life I was invited to go to church (being a non-church-goer for most all of my life, but go figure that I could learn something from church) and what followed, looking back today, is nothing short of amazing; I came to experience love through a poverty of self. This love reached out from me and touched everyone and everything that I too touched. I came to understand that for me to continue to experience this love I had to empty all my closests out to God, and by His Gifts to me I could come to an acceptance of my fallenness, repentance and a metanoia that was embracing and at a deeper level allowing me to reach out and embrace everyone around me. I was able to share this with my wife and we have built our marriage around this love of God, that encapsulates the two of us as one. We came to understand that my love for her (and vise versa) comes from God alone and only by my being humble and open to receive this love can I pass it on to her (and vise versa).

In the end, as Howard Thurman told Bailie, "what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Are we being Christ, coming alive in freedom and love as the new creation, spreading His Love in the world?

The gift of self - freedom and love of the new creation 2 Corinthians Chapter 5: 14-21

For the love of Christ impels us, once we have come to the conviction that one died for all; therefore, all have died. He indeed died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

Consequently, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh; even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer. So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.

And all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.