Posted by
John Sullivan on Sunday, December 02, 2007 2:34:42 PM
CAPTAIN'S BLOG, STARDATE 9:
The Pope's New Letter is out, released at the change of the Liturgical Year where sadly, we say goodbye to the brilliant Gospel of Luke, and welcome in the equally inspiring, earlier Gospel of Matthew, the latter written by someone who actually spent time with Jesus as a first-hand eyewitness.
The Encylical is very hard to read ... I admit that. The bottom line to the world ... "Get a life! A real, EVERLASTING life, and quit worrying so much about if it's Romney or Rodham, Briefs or Boxers, Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays! ..."
Like those who constructed the rambling original Greek scrolls of New Testament scripture, where people would have to try to figure out where quotes and sentences end, Pope Benedict XVI writes with the goal of sending out words that will survive the test of time, that to today's generation seem to be directed towards people on another planet. Of course, it is because he is a long-term thinker, and knows that in time, this will be an underground letter where the biggest argument about it will be if the world will have to read it in Manarin or in Cantonese. But his self-contained answer is, "Don't worry about it. In time, this too will pass." This is clearly a letter from a man who knows he does not have long, and he is expressing some of the revelations that God is bringing to him through his own prayers, and he is taking this opportunity to share his findings with others.
He will go on for paragraphs putting forth a position, and then reveal that he was just quoting someone else, and then he goes to war in putting everything he had just said ... just quoted ... to shame.
But when the official Vatican release comes on line (I have only seen the leaked version - I am not sure that the Bishops - the intended audience have seen this yet) ... I am sure it will be more clear who is speaking when.
The Pope spends a lot of time on this process, which he simply calls Prayer, with humorous references to the excesses of the litanies in the past which spent too much time on mindless recital, and not the true process of opening oneself up to God.
This is a BRILLIANT work of art in which the Pope observes life, perhaps interprets it, and then gives meaning to it, for anyone and everyone, in every situation.
He spends a great deal of time offering good advice, both pragmatic and practical. In a third-person way, he gets into the mind of the average modernist, humanist, secularist, and athiest, and admits that there is a good reason these people exist and think the way they do. He even spends a great deal of time explaining their very positions with great credibility, only in the end to shoot down each and every one of those theories.
The Pope admits that the world "is going to hell in a handbasket," but then spends a great deal of time speaking about past generations who were witnessing the same things, and reaching the conclusions - only to ultimately be proven wrong.
The framework should have probably started with an underlying theme found only later in his letter ... with the observation that to each of us, everything is centered on "me" and what "I" know, experience, and observe in the course of our lives. He calls almost everything that happened before in history "external" to our lives, yet he spends a great deal of time speaking about the lives of those gone with some expectation that we are already familiar with them. Most readers are probably not, and this is why most of the Encyclical will fall upon deaf ears.
His point, of course, was that history is directly responsible for the world that is ours when we arrive as individual life on this planet, yet we need not feel that we are slaves to history. Our lives are our lives. He then spends considerable time speaking of "structure" built up around us - most of it thankfully external to us as well. Such "structure" provides and dispenses, and some cases rations or denies "our daily bread", and he is of course speaking of the increasingly efficient economic machines that thrive through the miracles of increasingly complex technology.
Then there are the structures that are within Churches and Charities themselves which as he warned in his first Encyclical can too easily be reduced to mere "structures," mechanical dispensers of food, clothes, and medicine. He certainly don't consider Robin Hood and Friar Tuck patron saints - he tell us that when Jesus fed thousands, no one who was rich had their food stolen at gunpoint in order to feed the poor.
Human "progress," the religion of the secularists and the heart of political "progressives," is at best "incremental" change towards improvement, and the Pope does not convince us of long that even he believes that "lasting peace" in this world is anything but an ignorant, foolish dream. He did not tell us, but perhaps he should, that our nostalgic memories of Bethlehem are completely delusional in many ways. Even the arrival of God on Earth did not prevent the Roman proxy to the region, King Herod, from slaughtering perhaps thousands of innocent toddlers in and around Bethlehem before Jesus the human child learned to crawl across the room. What kind of God would allow such a travesty to happen, to speak nothing of the Islamification of the Holy Land? A God who allows for human freedom in this existence, which the Pope makes abundantly clear is in and of itself a tool which is neither ultimately good nor evil, but capable of being used for both. He points out that Churches and governments both in the course of human history have decided to exercise conflicting and in many case self-destructive forms of the word "freedom," and he carries on a theme from John Paul II's many Encyclicals that celebrate liberty as an excuse to, in paraphrase of J.C. Watts, "do the right thing when no one is looking."
Without expressing it clearly enough, the Pope's theme is that each generation in human history has grasped for the same goals, from the colonialization of society towards huge infrastructures and cultures and cities and nations that may last across several generations before at last fading into irrelevance, collapse and ruin, and on an individual basis, a deeply seeded desire within all of us to both be happy and free, and usually equating happiness with freedom. This is perhaps why Jesus never spent much time on the geopolitical questions of his day, because Jesus knew that historical preservation of the passing world is, in many ways, a complete waste of effort. This must have seemed insane to the Jews, whose Zealots wanted Jesus to rise as the leader of a rebellion against the occupation force worse than any other, the Roman Empire. Jesus knew that in only a few decades, everything in Jerusalem would be in smoking ruins, and the Jews would be exterminated from their own city. In a few decades, everything of this omnipresent Roman Empire would be in disarray, ruin, and collapse.
Perhaps today Jesus would remind us that all of our technological and culturals marvels ... our subways, our airports, our nations, our music, our economies, our launch pads, and even our skyscrapers will be laid waste by the sands of history to come. It is the human thing to do, to try to craft immortality out of the stones and sands of Earth. Long ago, when the first Vatican Basilica fell in upon itself, humanity's answer was to go into deep Church debt to construct something even bigger and better which will, of course, eventually prove less than immortal.
But of course, the Pope does keep things in perspective. In the view of human history, few of us watch the airplane we are on go into a skyscraper, or the skyscraper we are in set ablaze by a jetliner. Few of us watch an atom bomb fall into our skies from above and explode, turning even elementary schools into fiery tombs. We of course lament the human loss in these events more than all, but what seems so shocking to us even more than anything else is when our human creations ... the things prove to be as mortal as we are, not eternal by any stretch of the imagination. When the human devices made to lift us into space and hold air pressure through a fiery reentry fail, or when the human devices made to suspend our offices hundreds of feet over the ground, or when the human devices made to hold us safely thousands of feet in the air fail, we are reminded that sometimes, our human progress is no less mortal than we are.
Yet, the entire Insurance industry survives on the bet that our "things" will outlast us. His whole point in the Encyclical is on his bet that human souls will outlast even the world. He finds human structure, from Islam to the popular Protestant fractures of the day to even the trappings of his own Church to be in a constant state of decomposition and mortality. He not only says this is true today, but it has always been, is now, and shall ever be so long as humans are on the planet. Again, he returns to a focus on the individual, and the everyday strugles of life, which he states emphatically must be practically faced without escapism. He notes through life, everyone is in search of a comfortable life with "happiness," for themselves - a "good quality of life," is what the individual seeks, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He condems the goal of sacrifice today simply for the promise of a better today and tomorrow for others - the central philosophies of many religious and secular movements, for in practice these have led to failure, a removal of human freedom, and a far worse life down the road to everyone involved. If the Pope were to put a name on "the Beast" of the Apocalypse, it would be this illusion contained within the promise of "a better tomorrow," that in turn guarantees total ruin and destruction of every victim of this "Beast," and in time, the death and destruction of the "Beast" itself after a limited amount of time.
Again, the Pope internalizes the argument to the self-aware living human, and what we want out of life. He expertly delivers a message already contained in the Bible - the way to true happiness is to not live a "happy" life, but rather a "blessed" life that in truth is best experienced when someone with two coats gives one to someone with none, not because of "external" forces requiring one to do so, such as taxes, but rather because of a "blessed" application of human freedom.
The Pope's message provides very little practical advice for anyone just trying to be "successful" or "happy" in this life. On the contrary, the Pope does not condemn this human yearning for happiness and love - he simply concludes that these things are admirable so long as we can become greedy enough to realize true happiness and love that simply does not exist in "the real world" is in fact achievable, and the only way to truly become aware of happiness and love is to see beyond "the real world," and through prayer, to seek an "eternal world" that will survive us and everything around us. Yet, he warns us not to fall into the trappings of Catholic or other religious cults, that seek to evade life's realities. Jesus endured "the real world" even onto the Cross, and we must live our lives in this world in a practical way in "the real world."
Yet, he says that within us, we can often be "so full of ourselves" that God literally can't enter our lives, because we have made no room for Him. Yet, in a process of prayer that allows us to pour out some of the junk in our lives, or to simply enlarge ourselves to make room for God, He can live this "real world" with us, helping us along every step in the way, to know real happiness on Earth when we see it, to help us to share this joy and hope for happiness with others, and best of all, realizing in confidence that happiness is right around the corner in a certain afterlife that will exist long after everything else is gone. It almost seems that God actually enjoys "the real world," and after all, it was all created to please and entertain, and perhaps to disappoint Him from time to time. Jesus came with a heavenly message - not to become embroiled in geopolitics - Jesus knew it was all short-sighted vanity to even waste any time worrying about human inventions like the Roman Empire. Thus the same goes for China or the United States - in time they will be gone, in a pile of decomposing destruction and ruin. But human nature and the hope of life after death - that's what Jesus was all about, and in fact, why He was here for us then, and God willing, should we accept the mission, here for us today.
So says the Pope. I agree. Against all of this, the "modern" world view is about as irrelevant as the Roman Empire, in time, came to be.
Personally, I hope this Pope Benedict survives to write many more letters. Amidst the competing opinions of the free market of ideas, his often seem to be the most clear - once you get through the sidebars.
Pope Benedict XVI's impractical advice to "The Real World" is very good advice to the humans now living in it.