Thursday, July 29, 2010

Recommended Listening - Jónsi

Jónsi is the lead singer of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. The soundscapes he has created have given me some of the most numinous auditory experiences I could ever imagine having.


Wednesday, July 28, 2010

My Journey of Faith: Part Two

Let me preface this section by saying that this leg of my spiritual journey was a desert, and despite their role in making it so, I love my family dearly and have long since forgiven them. Nevertheless, to adequately tell this story, all things here must be included.

My adolescent life could be described accurately as tumultuous.

My parents divorced when I was nine, and I had six addresses in a span of seven years. My mother behaved as if she saw her divorce as a casting off of the shackles that bound her to her former mundane roles as stay-at-home mother and housewife. In many ways it was, and she wasted no time bringing around a new boyfriend that would, a handful of years later, become my step-father.

The newfound freedom my mother enjoyed did not include a lot of child-friendly fun. She and my future step-father would go out together, sometimes all night, sometimes without leaving my brothers or me a clue of where they were or when they'd return, and often they would return drunk, yelling at each other, yelling at us. This was what we grew accustomed to over a span of seven years. If my parents' divorce had put in me a suspicion of authority, the next seven years continued to erode what trust was left in me.

There were at least two bright points that are crucial, however, to the rest of this story, and I'll mention them both at once.

The first crucial item is that my step-father is Catholic. He has not always been the best witness to the faith (have any of us?), but he is a mass-going Catholic, nevertheless, and because of this, I attended Mass sporadically during my teenage years.

The second crucial item is a conversation that I had with my mother, one day when I was fourteen. I don't remember the whole context, but I remember standing in the entrance to the kitchen, as my mother sat at the kitchen table, drinking either diet coke or sweet tea, and her saying to me, "Jake, I've raised you and taught you what I believe, now your salvation is your responsibility."

This mini, personal, pseudo-confirmation ritual had a great impact on me. I often wonder if, because my brothers did not get the same release, it somehow gave them greater reason to rebel against faith. From then on, however, my salvation was mine to "work out with fear and trembling."

It was also at this time that conversations about religion and faith began to take place among my friends at school, and I remember first articulating what amounted to doctrinal differences with my peers when it came to the question of the "Perseverance of the Saints," or, as they would have put it, "Once Saved, Always Saved." I rejected this, though, among my friends at this point, mine was a minority view.

The very general faith I possessed was slowly becoming more specific, but I did not attend services regularly, I did not read the Bible often, nor did I identify myself as any specific type of Christian. I merely prayed, as I always had, in the same, conversational manner, thanking God for what was given, asking for blessings and protection of loved ones, sending messages to deceased loved ones, telling him that I loved him.

Meanwhile, at home, my parents spiraled deeper into alcoholism, and while we had ignored for so long the mental damage that we were made to suffer, when the clear and obvious threat of physical harm not only presented itself but was actualized, we left. On 30 November 1999, after returning from a school function, my brothers and I grabbed our things, and left. My father's house was a safe haven - one we'd initially rejected because of the relationship one forms with a stay-at-home mother, then later one we rejected because of our established friends and school, but one we weren't going dismiss any longer.

Each night for months forward, on the hide-a-bed in my father's basement, I fell asleep crying and praying into my pillow desperate and anguished pleas for help and mercy for my brothers and myself. When I remember those nights, I can feel the tightness in my jaw, the sting in my eyes, and the cool sheets in between my tightly clenched fingers as I sobbed my petitions and wondered in between them why we had to hurt so much.

This crisis stripped from me every familiar support. Despite being safe and loved in my father's house, I felt forsaken. If God was going to answer me, it was going to be in a manner that would be new, and therefore visible.

More to come.


The Great "Perhaps"

"It may be appropriate at this point to cite a Jewish story told by Martin Buber; it presents in concrete form the above-mentioned dilemma of being a man.

An adherent of the Enlightenment [writes Buber], a very learned man, who had heard of the Rabbi of Berditchev, paid a visit to him in order to argue, as was his custom, with him too and to shatter his old-fashioned proofs of the truth of his faith. When he entered the Rabbi’s room he found him walking up and down with a book in his hand, wrapped in thought. The Rabbi paid no attention to the new arrival. Suddenly he stopped, looked at him fleetingly and said, “But perhaps it is true after all”. The scholar tried in vain to collect himself—his knees trembled, so terrible was the Rabbi to behold and so terrible his simple utterance to hear. But Rabbi Levi Jizchak now turned to face him and spoke quite calmly: “My son, the great scholars of the Torah with whom you have argued wasted their words on you; as you departed you laughed at them. They were unable to lay God and his Kingdom on the table before you, and nor can I. But think, my son, perhaps it is true.” The exponent of the Enlightenment opposed him with all his strength; but this terrible “perhaps,” which echoed back at him time after time broke his resistance.

Here we have, I believe—in however strange a guise—a very precise description of the situation of man confronted with the question of God. No one can lay God and is Kingdom on the table before another man; even the believer cannot do it for himself. But however strongly unbelief may feel itself thereby justified it cannot forget the eerie feeling induced by the words, “Yet perhaps it is true.” The “perhaps” is the unavoidable temptation which it cannot elude, the temptation in which it too, in the very act of rejection, has to experience the unrejectability of belief. In other words, both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide away from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt, for the other through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man’s destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty. Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication. It prevents both from enjoying complete self-satisfaction; it opens up the believer to the doubter and the doubter to the believer; for one it is his share in the fate of the unbeliever, for the other the form in which belief remains nevertheless a challenge to him."
- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction To Christianity

Sunday, July 25, 2010

My Journey of Faith: Part One

Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan spoke of conversion as a wholly unrestricted state or moment of being in love. To Lonergan, the convert, at the moment of conversion, is "a subject held, grasped, possessed, owned through a total and so an other-worldly love." Conversion experiences are not merely moments that dapple our lives, but even the processes of falling in love again and again.

Stories of conversion are the heavenly romances of our faith. The Old Testament speaks more to us of people answering God's call, the New Testament tells us of this, in addition to Paul's dramatic conversion. The stories of the saints, especially St. Augustine's conversion story, as well as more modern Christians, like John Henry Newman, C.S. Lewis, and numerous others, continue to share with us the power of love to surround and transform our very being. I'm going to begin my story at my very beginning. I hope that someone, if only in some small way, might be encouraged or helped by it, as I am encouraged reading the stories of others.

Before I was born, my mother prayed for the privelege of having a child. I'm not exactly sure of her exact words, but the story she tells is that she even prayed for my face to have certain characteristics... That the life in my grandmother's eyes would be in mine, that I would have a face like my granddad's, and so on. My mother, in these prayers, promised to dedicate me to God should she be so lucky that they be granted.

Whether by chance or providence, when I was born in the wee hours of a Late-May Saturday in 1983, the sparkle of my grandmother's eyes, and my granddad's nose and jawline were mine, just as my mother had prayed. And I was dedicated to God.

I was Christened at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Vandalia, Illinois, not long after I was born, but it was my mother who took the responsibility of attending church most seriously. My father, having grown up quite poor, felt uncomfortable in church, among people he viewed as cut from a different, wealthier cloth than he. My mother, however, despite not coming from much means herself, did not, and made certain that as I, and later my brothers, grew up, we were involved in the life of our small country church.

As far as raising me to be Christian, by the time I have memories of church and prayer, my parents had done an outstanding job - my prayers to God, as far back as I can remember praying, were conversational prayers. I didn't have a living great-grandpa, but I figured that God must be something like that, but stronger, and a whole lot older. When I imagined God it was always as the Father, alternately appearing as an elderly, bearded man (similar to Santa Claus), or as Michael Landon, after I had watched enough "Highway to Heaven." When my grandparents died, I asked God to care for them and to tell them I said "hi."

My creed, until age 9, written as I approximate I may have articulated it, were I that age:

I believe in God the Father, who made everything (even dinosaurs!).
I believe the stories in the Bible are true and that it is God's word, and God knows everything (he's smarter than Dad)!
I believe in Jesus, His Son, who loves everyone.
His mommy was Mary and her husband was Joseph
We celebrate his birthday at Christmas and give gifts like the three wise men did.
Jesus had twelve disciples and taught good things and did miracles.
Jesus died on a cross and came back to life three days later
So that good Christian people can go to Heaven,
We celebrate this on Easter.
He went back up to heaven but will come back again someday.
People should be baptized, and then they can take communion.
I believe in the Holy Ghost
I believe that the Devil and Sin are bad.

My parents divorced when I was nine. My grandfather had just passed a way a year earlier. We stopped going to church because my mom feared being shunned, judged, or treated with intolerance; perhaps she felt ashamed, or feared the gossip mill would smear her name in our small town. I realized that when my parents promised me that they'd love each other forever, it was a lie. I also knew by this time that Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy were also lies. I didn't understand what was going on, I knew it wasn't my fault, but I at that point learned that my parents were fallible in ways that could hurt me.

It was a horrible couple of years that I came through alright, despite developing a keen suspicion of authority. Nevertheless, I kept praying. It surprises me that the existence God never crossed my mind as something that may have also been a lie. In retrospect, I'm not certain why I didn't doubt, except perhaps that God, to me, even at that time, was just as real as the ground beneath me or the sky above me - a fundamental fact of the universe that seemed silly to deny.

...It wasn't really until I was fourteen that I had to begin to ask questions of my faith.

More to come.

Recommended Listening - Audrey Assad

Audrey Assad is a convert to Catholicism (like me!), and a wonderful musician making her way up in the CCM world. This song has grabbed me by the heart this weekend:




Thursday, July 22, 2010

Simulacra and Sacramentality

An excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, and I thought that occurred to me on a re-reading:

The Presence of Simulacra

“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth that conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

--Ecclesiastes

Art cannot transcend artifice. Although art mimics reality, anything that is representative as real is still understood as to be a facsimile. Plato holds that appearance of reality can never truly merge with reality (Ibid 159). However, it would seem that the world that has fostered the growth of postmodern thought is not functioning within Plato’s belief. American culture even seems to thrive upon the suspension of belief that lets us live within a fantasy world similar to a television show. Almost any appearance of reality can easily be accepted as authentic reality in our society, for enough time, at least, to justify our shiny new convertible. Over time, these justifications and ideas become our reality, our values shift and adapt to this new reality that was once just an image on a billboard or in a magazine, or some statue in a plaza.

Film and cinema have also blurred the lines between the real and the imitation, being mediums that can show us both pictures of reality and images of fantasy that to the viewer may appear one and the same if the frame of reference is skewed or removed.

Photography, which I will discuss further in the next chapter, started as a means to record and study the real, and the content of a photograph was considered “real” and “true” by its viewer.

“Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images, murderers of the real, murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity.”

Baudrillard fears the aforementioned tendency for an image to oppose what he terms an “intelligible mediation of the Real.” (Baudrillard, Simulations, 10.) A critic of postmodern art, Baudrillard warns of absolute reality being reduced in some way to a mere visual signifier that speaks to it’s own existence. If that which gives order to representation is reduced to representation (which is then subjectively perceived), Baudrillard argues that the entire system of order and the rubric upon which interpretation stands now falls away to a simulacrum – a representation that does not refer to reality, but another imitation.

The simulacrum, a meta-representation, then, has the power to subvert the object. However, it also possesses the power to convey meaning, perhaps even adding meaning to the signified by virtue of its own existence as a simulacrum. In the film Waking Life, Caveh Zahedi and Daniel Jewell discuss what Andre’ Bazin calls the “Holy Moment,” a moment of awareness that acknowledges the divine presence within the other. As they converse, however, they are actually on a movie screen, their conversation a film being watched by Wiley, the main character within Waking Life. So the film that we watch, in essence is the simulacrum, an object that gives reference to a reference to this conversation between Zahedi and Jewell. However, instead of being inert, we find that the simulacrum, the film that we are viewing, is actually the vehicle for meaning (Waking Life).

So here we have at least one example where simulacra can convey meaning that seems valid. Because of this instance, which I consider to be a positive use of simulacra, I am inclined to apply Baudrillard’s warning subjectively, as would seem suitable, given that his arguments are placed within the framework of postmodernism that visual culture theory works from.

Despite a willingness to apply scrutiny with subjectivity, one must continue to be conscious of the presence of simulacra, as without an awareness of their occurrences within our culture, Baudrillard’s “collapse of meaning” may be more likely to occur.



Food for thought:

A true sacrament is that which actually participates in what it represents in a real way... not merely symbolic. If we lose our sense of sacramentality, then our rituals become simulacra, and Baudrillard's "collapse of meaning" becomes a real danger to our faith and praxis.

St. Catherine on Dominican Preaching

Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., lectures on St. Catherine of Siena and Dominican Preaching: