Once again, on Maintaining our Focus on Christ in the Face of the Demonic

[[ Dear Sister Laurel. I wonder if the way you described praying before and after watching the news means you are not sufficiently tuned into God's will or God's way of thinking. Don't you know that we are bound for heaven and can't be too concerned with temporal matters? Aren't you supposed to be about that because you are a hermit? Also, I wondered why you used the term "demonic" to refer to President Trump and what he and those working for him are doing if you don't usually refer to this? Isn't Trump the one whom God elected? Aren't you allowing yourself to be a bit consumed by temporal (political) matters to call Trump et al "demonic"? One person I listened to today said that perhaps this means you are not trusting God enough to do the best for us. (You are the only diocese hermit I know who wrote about what she referred to). She reminded us that God will never abandon us or let us be bereft and she should know because she suffers terribly, is tested by Satan all the time, and also is a consecrated hermit!]]

Thanks for your questions. I am assuming you are referring to today's Gospel reading in asking me about God's way of thinking. For those who have not read that lection today, it is Mark 8:27-33 and focuses on Jesus' admonition to Peter's reaction when Jesus lays out how he will have to suffer. Let me say that in the situation in the US, I believe I am seeing things as God sees them and that it is precisely so I can continue doing that (and do it even better) that I practice a period of quiet prayer before watching the news and a period of lectio afterward. I encourage others to do the same because I believe this can be helpful for remaining in Christ and allowing our minds and hearts to be filled with the Holy Spirit and not drawn into the destructive, narcissistic orbit or emptiness of the singularity we know as Donald J Trump. Certainly, I trust God is doing his best for the entire United States, but that is not the same as trusting that President Trump's election was something God accomplished or willed.

Granted, God allows human free choice, but simply because God permits something human beings choose to do does not mean God approves of it, or even that it comports with God's will. God does not prevent child abuse, or childhood deaths to cancer, for instance. He did not prevent the last Holocaust* with the torture and murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Catholic priests and religious, et al, but none of these could even remotely be considered the will of God --- even if we see God eventually bringing about a greater good out of all of this. If we begin to think this way we are really suggesting that we should do more evil so that God may do more good! Paul confronted this very question when he observed first that where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more. Then he posed  the question, "Does this mean we should sin all the more so that grace may abound all the more?" to which he responded emphatically, "God forbid!" The first way of seeing the permissive will of God is, I sincerely believe, a human way of thinking. Paul's question and response represent God's way of thinking!

In the Markan reading, Jesus knows he is going to be crucified and die --- not only a horribly inhuman way to die but incredibly shameful as well because it represents the apotheosis of godlessness. Peter, as a good Jew, could never have conceived of God's own Messiah suffering and dying in such an ignoble way (or even in a noble way like that of Socrates, for instance)! It is still hard for us to accept that God wills to love us so exhaustively and generously that he will take on our sin and the reality of godless death itself so these things cannot continue to separate us from his love. But to take further steps and suggest that God willed Trump's presidency so that people might suffer and learn to think as God thinks moves from thinking as Christians dealing with a valid understanding of God's permissive will to idolators serving a monstrous abomination. 

I am not consumed with political matters, or rather, I am concerned with these because I am first and last concerned with the Kingdom of God and the Kingship of Jesus which is a Kingdom of justice, mercy, love, truth, and fathomless meaning. When I look at what is happening here in the USA, and abroad through us as well, what I see is vast senseless damage, much of it apparently irreparable because lives will be or have already been needlessly lost. In Acts of the Apostles, a book my Scripture class is reading now, we talked today about the primary Spiritual value that threads all through Acts, namely that of speaking boldly (parrhesia). This form of speech is about proclaiming the Gospel, of course,  and it means speaking truth to power, proclaiming the Kingship of Jesus, and unmasking the blasphemy of those (including Trump himself) who would like us to believe we have another King who is similarly anointed by God. Because those filled with the Holy Spirit speak out in this way I cannot keep from saying as clearly as I can, we don't have such a system of governance and we can't believe or ask fellow citizens of the world to believe that we do. We Christians have only one King and that is the risen Christ who sits at God's right hand (meaning he is present in this world and reigns with the power that comes from God).

The very fact that I take Christ's Kingship seriously with the kind of faithfulness and commitment it calls for is the reason I MUST also pay greater attention to Donald Trump's idolatrous excesses. Am I consumed with Trump or with politics? No, and I am trying to remain centered on Christ and all his resurrection and ascension mean for our world precisely so I can be appropriately informed without losing my Christian identity at the same time. If your hermit friend wants to criticize me for this, she is welcome to. She might choose to focus on an otherworldly "heaven" while denigrating the new heaven and new earth inaugurated with Jesus' incarnation of the Word of God, in his resurrection and ascension, she can do that too --- though not, I think, if she wishes to honor the Incarnation appropriately. Similarly, she might put up video after video speaking about how frequently she deals with Satan or sees Satan behind every bush or in every person who simply disagrees with (or, alternately, mirrors) her, and she is free to do that too, though I believe that trivializes the weight and extent of the evil the truly demonic represents. What she is really not free to do is to suggest that because I identify the Donald J Trump/Elon Musk duo as a demonic reality in the Tillichian sense of that term, I am not trusting in God sufficiently or thinking as God thinks! Those are judgments only God can make.

As I noted in my last post, I use the word demonic rarely, cautiously, and in a highly theologically nuanced way. My world is not peopled as some persons' worlds are reportedly peopled with demons or Satan who is always about tripping us up, making us ill, etc. However, I recognize what Paul referred to as powers and principalities that are still at work amongst us. I recognize that there are idols and idolatrous movements afoot that some**, I believe rightly, call Anti-Christ because of the degree of hatred these manifest and the degree of power and damage they intend to wield and do to those they are called instead to love as themselves. Absolutely God will never abandon us or leave us bereft!! He will fill us with the Holy Spirit of both Father and Son, the Spirit of comfort and courage, and he will expect us to do what Peter and Stephen, et al, do in Acts of the Apostles. Namely, he will expect us to speak truth to power, proclaim the Lordship of Jesus boldly, confront idolatry and blasphemy with the power of our own knowledge, hope, courage, and love, and to love one another not only with the gentleness of doves but to do all of this with the shrewdness of serpents!!

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* Though I have a minor in holocaust studies, I heard a figure I had never realized before last night. It was not only striking, it chilled me to the bone because I had already thought it had been unimaginable that our constitutional republic could be dismantled so quickly as has happened thus far in Trump's administration. The quote referring to the Third Reich and the German Republic was the following: [[The Nazis took 1 month, three weeks, 2 days, 8 hours, and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.]] Consider that. Please consider that.

** I have been referred to Matthew Fox's book here on Trump and MAGA by a bishop whose theology and spirituality I generally respect. The title is Trump and the MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ. I have not yet read it. It referred to these entities before the last election so it has not been written in light of the last month of willful, careless, and cruel destruction at the cost of the least and most helpless. I suspect Matthew Fox's position would be even more emphatic now.

A Little on Paul's Law of the Mind and the Demands of Doing Theology

[[I was informed that a hermit colleague has been blessed with a spiritual gift, a spiritual phenomenon.  I am rejoicing over this news!  This particular hermit has in the past has seemed more leaning to the laws of minds; thus I have been praying for some time for the Holy Spirit to reach into the hermit's soul and inflame it with a touch of God's law of love, of the supernatural realities which soften us and remind us that the temporal is passing but the realm of the Spirit is eternal. . .]] cf.,. . . Hermit Rejoices for entire post.

I always gratefully accept prayer on my behalf and thus count on others to hold me in prayer. Beyond that it is always good to hear that my life has brightened someone's day in some small way. Still I admit I am stunned when someone presumes to pronounce on the state of my soul and though this occurs much less rarely, I am surprised when anyone's spirituality involves anti-intellectualism. When they misinterpret my own definite intellectual bent as being somehow opposed to a vital spiritual life which is relatively untouched by God's "law of love" even as they try to justify these errors in religious terms my surprise is compounded. What I sincerely hope readers recognize is that such anti-intellectualism is incapable of dealing adequately  with reality. This is so precisely because it is incapable of loving in the "shrewd but gentle" and compassionate way the Gospel calls for! That is especially true when St Paul is misread in the process -- as the above post does and as its author has consistently done in the past when commenting on Paul's "law of the mind" or his teaching on law and Gospel.

What is the Law of the Mind according to Paul?

Paul refers to the law of the mind in Romans, but we must be very clear that it is 1) in the singular (it is not "laws of the mind" or laws made up by human minds!) and 2) that it is not something Paul criticizes. It is, in fact, an enemy of the law of sin: [[For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my  members.]] (Romans 7:22-23) The law of the mind which Paul refers to is that deepest and truest reality within us that says we are made for God. It is the truest inner moral compass and drive which contends with the more superficial law of sin dwelling in our members. Together with the will it is that dimension of our existence deep within us that is linked to our natural impulse to love God. As Paul says above, it is the "law of the mind" that actually delights in the law of God because, of course, it delights in truth and meaning and beauty! It is this fascination by and delight in truth, beauty, and meaning which opens each of us to fuller expressions of the law of God, the law of Love.

It used to be kind of faddish in spirituality to encourage people to "get out of (their) heads and into (their) hearts." (Let me be clear: there were and are excellent reasons for this too, but it was sometimes encouraged by directors whose strongest function was not their intellect and who may even have distrusted it to some extent.) Because my own intellect is an especially intensely pivotal dimension of the way I relate to God and his entire created reality I am very fortunate to have a director who understands the importance of a strong intellectual life and knows full well what it means to have God reveal Godself via a person's intellectual life.

Consequently, one of the most important truths I have had reaffirmed throughout the inner work I have done over the past 8 months or so (I am in the 9th month of that work) is the fact that my intellect is a precious gift of God and the faculty through which God most often graces and has graced me with his self-revelation. Does my mind require the love of God to truly function well? Of course! It is MADE FOR the love of God! It is empowered to function rightly through the grace of God! So of course my intellect and the law of the mind is God's good gift to me (indeed, to all of us) and it has been a source of awesome nourishment to me --- and to those I minister to.
 
Trusting the Process and Doing Theology:

That said I should also emphasize that of course our intellects are not the whole of the way we relate to God or receive God's revelation of Godself. The law of love is imprinted on intellect, will, spirit and sensibility --- all of them. And all of them are meant to function together accordingly in what constitutes what the NT calls a purity or singleness of heart. I have reported here that quite often in these last months my director has encouraged me to "trust the process". Trusting the process did not mean the intellectual pieces of things could be demeaned or ignored -- nor did this ever happen ---but that in some things it takes the intellect time to catch up with the other pivotal centers of human functioning and that can be challenging for me. More, the intellect needs to build on human experience and be grounded in it while human experience needs to be rendered articulate in the various ways this occurs and to the extent this is possible, through the work of the intellect.  While all this can be challenging for one who depends on a strong intellect anti-intellectualism is ruled out of court.

The bottom line here is that far from being something that draws me away from God it is and has always been the activity of "doing theology" --- and here I mainly mean academic and systematic theology --- which most often brings these three dimensions of my being together; it is thus the "place" where I am most profoundly touched by the Word of God or the presence of the God who speaks to my heart from within. Many people fail to understand that doing theology in a serious way is never "merely" an intellectual exercise. That is true because doing theology means being a person of prayer as well as of study, a person of compassion as well as of the capacity for intellectual insight and systematization, a person of heart as well as mind. It means being a person who loves God and the mystery of God's creation, being fascinated with these realities, concerned for them and in fact responsible for the struggle to understand and to articulate their truth for those who need it. It also means knowing from the very first day one walks into a theology class (and possibly before one even does this) that one's efforts will always fall short and quite often fail very badly.

On the Holocaust and Doing Theology:

This was brought home to me in my first introductory course in theology. Not only were we faced with the rock bottom theological datum of a literally incomprehensible and ineffable God (the infinitely fascinating and awesome Mystery around whom we literally cannot get our minds and hearts) but our professor pointed out emphatically that anyone wishing to do serious theology needed their work to be capable of doing justice to the tremendum we call the Holocaust or their theology was, at best, unworthy of the name. In this latter case we cannot do this unless theology engages and depends on one working with their whole self! Moreover it will not happen unless our theology is profoundly historical and critical, not only in our reading of Scripture but in our approaches to doctrine, law, and anthropology as well. Again, our approach to theological and spiritual realities must be informed by both our hearts and our intellects. Jesus, of course, said the same thing when he counseled us to be gentle as doves and shrewd as serpents. And yet again, we know that our efforts will ultimately fail because of the incomprehensible Mystery which is the focus of our efforts and the finite nature of our own minds and hearts. This does not mean we are relieved of the necessity of doing theology; instead it spurs theologians to humility in an enterprise they are summoned and even impelled by God himself to undertake for the sake of his People but also for the sake of his entire Creation.

Paul's "law of the mind," again, is that deep and dynamic reality which delights in and is profoundly fascinated by the law of God. It does not in the least allow the kind of anti-intellectualism present in the post cited above. Faith requires both our heads and our hearts together; it cannot exist otherwise precisely because as Paul Tillich insightfully characterized it, it is a centered act of the whole person and a state of being grasped by an ultimate concern. Such a state of being grasped means being taken hold of in our entire being so that every locus and focus of human functioning (intellect, will, spirit and sensibility) is empowered by and responsive to the God who demands our whole self and promises us everything we need for the completion we and our world are made for.

N.B., The painting (print) above is one I got for Christmas this year. It is Brother Mickey McGrath's, Madonna of the Holocaust and is something that moved me profoundly not only because of conversations I had with Brother Mickey on the Theology of the Cross while he was here on sabbatical in November, but because of the story I told above about my intro to NT course and the challenges of doing serious theology. I think it is an awesome symbol of an historical-critical theology which is a matter of both heart and mind.