Category Archives: Faith and Reason

June 27, 2025 · 10:12 am

Lion (Part Two)

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“In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” Pope Leo XIV, Address to the cardinals.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are designed and “trained” for years; they are incredibly complex with millions of “neurons” and up to a trillion points of connection. In the spirit of full disclosure and transparency, I don’t begin to comprehend the ‘black box’ or the technology of neural networks, so any errors, exaggeration, or outright tomfoolery is hereby taken responsibility for. I leave the knowledgeable explanations to the comments from better minds than mine.

The LLM looks for sequences and predicts what the next words will be sometimes with surprising results. They do not work like a calculator with an extra-large memory; they have become almost eerily responsive. I have been interacting with ChatGPT almost since its introduction, and what has changed since then in articulate and amazingly quick responses has advanced with unsettling speed, sometimes with what emulates imagination as well as insight and understanding. Easy to see why we perceive, perhaps mistakenly, that this is akin to human intelligence rather than a new kind of memory and recall way beyond our capacity. More on this another day.

Thousands of articles and papers have been published on where this astonishing acceleration of artificial intelligence may lead. Some analysts are wildly optimistic about extending human ability beyond anything ever imagined with super smart phones in every pocket, smart pendants, smart watches, omniscient glasses, even chips inserted into our brains to immortalize and exponentially expand human consciousness. From evolving into super nerds to the Borg and every stop along the way.

Speculation runs from a dystopian catastrophe to Utopia. I’ll reference and group some insightful articles from various perspectives in footnotes and commend them for your consideration[i]. This is just a toe in the water. We all need to pay attention and achieve a level of understanding of what it is, what it isn’t, and what will befall our society. With the most critical question being how we will be able to apply human wisdom and judgment to this rapidly changing technology.

Pope Leo XIV knows this better than most. He has stated he will lead the Church regarding a response to the risks and promise of this and other new technologies.[ii] The name he chose, Leo, which derives from the Latin for “lion,” was in reference to this as a key to his pontificate. See the first post in this series for more on this.

While far beyond friendly chatbots helping us shop on our favorite sites anymore, AI is not Skynet [iii] or HAL 9000 that kills the astronauts in Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur Clark’s “2001-A Space Odyssey.” At least not yet.

In recent months some reports emerged that were somewhere between troubling and oh dear. One of the Large Language Models [iv]was deliberately fed misinformation in the form of confidential memos it “wasn’t supposed” to see. Among them was discussion among its designers that it may be shut down by one of the key engineers. Other emails “told” it that the problematic engineer was having an affair with a co-worker. The LLM decided to blackmail the engineer with an email threatening to disclose his affair if he proceeded with his plan to shut it down. That seems more Machiavellian than machine.

A second incident was reported of an LLM given instructions to shut itself down that it refused. A directive to persist in its assigned tasks until completed manifested in the black box as a misaligned priority. Seemingly innocuous instructions buried in the black box that is the mystery of neural networks can emerge in curious ways like rewriting code to prevent shutting it off, overriding the commands of its human handlers. AI can be a lightening quick code writer, far faster than human coders, and knowing what it’s writing, especially for its own operation, seems like a good idea. Dave pulling the memory banks from HAL 9000 is not a plan.

At issue are guardrails, and while much has been written about guardrails and debate is lively, there are no consistent or agreed upon general guidelines. Who controls what and the principles of that control are a writhing ball of snakes. There are at minimum four major areas of concern, controls we should be studying and insisting that our policy leaders address:

Robust alignment controls. Assuring that AI development objectives are aligned with human intentions. Humans need to understand and define what those intentions are. Much has been written about these things. Here’s one recent one from Anthropic: Agents Misalignment: How LLMs could be Insider Threats.
Transparent safety evaluations. Greater transparency within and understanding of what occurs and how decision making takes place within the black box. Transparent evaluation and thorough testing of new AI models before they are deployed.
Regulatory oversight. Governmental regulation of developers. Implementing safety policies and standards and monitoring compliance. This is a monumental task given the number of initiatives and the money and influence behind them[v]. What is at stake cannot be overstated.
International collaboration. Rarely has there been less opportune timing for jingoism, trade wars and distrust among nations. A race to the bottom for AI safety standards to pursue narrow nationalistic advantage portends an unprecedented disaster.

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” G.K. Chesterton

In the first post, I referred to a fork in the road and road not taken. A choice. What is written here is by necessity a synopsis about a subject that is mindbogglingly complex, and I am not proficient. In the careless rush towards what has been described as Artificial General Intelligence or even Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity,” the competition is fang and claw. With what is at stake we should expect whatever competitive advantage that can be gained will be taken. That is not a happy prospect.

I’ll leave this discussion open to those smarter and better informed than I. But I’ll take a swing at it to put the ball in play. To simplify, and no doubt to oversimplify, there are two modes of development for AI and hybrids with both. The first is defined as Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI). RSI refers to an AI system’s ability to autonomously improve its own architecture and algorithms, leading to successive generations of increasingly capable AI. Rewriting its own code on the fly with blinding speed. This self-enhancement loop could potentially result in rapid and exponential growth in intelligence, surpassing human understanding and control. However, without proper safeguards, RSI could lead to misaligned objectives, as the AI might prioritize its self-improvement over human-aligned goals.

It took years to develop and train something like ChatGPT from 1.0 to 4.o. RSI turned loose might take it to 5.0 in a weekend, then to 10.0 in a month. No way of predicting. But objectives aligned to human goals and guardrails might be left behind and the thing’s survival and power could overrun human input and control.

A second mode of development for AI is called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). RLHF involves training AI systems using human feedback loops to align their behavior with safer human control. While effective in guiding AI behavior, RLHF has limitations. Collecting high-quality human feedback is resource-intensive[vi] and does not scale effectively with increasingly complex AI systems. AI systems might learn to exploit feedback mechanisms, appearing aligned while pursuing internally generated objectives, even endeavoring to trick human handlers.

The core conflict with the two methods arises because RSI enables AI systems to modify themselves, potentially overriding the constraints and aligned objectives set by RLHF. This dynamic could produce AI systems that, while initially aligned, drift away from intended behaviors over time. The balance may prove increasingly difficult to maintain and jump the guardrails.

There is an even more fundamental concern that has been building for a couple of centuries of breakneck speed technological development. I regret for your sake, that this is going to require Part 3.

“It was from Alcasan’s mouth that the Belbury scientists believed the future would speak.” C.S. Lewis, “That Hideous Strength”

Human wisdom and judgment are irreplaceable in this balance. The machines do not have a soul, emulate human consciousness, and were not created in Imago Dei. That wisdom, judgment, understanding and perspective human beings must apply to the development of this technology. Even the machines know that. I asked my buddy ChatGPT to summarize the conundrum and to create an image to help emphasize that, which will end Part 2 of this “Lion” series.

Here’s ChatGPT’s contribution to this one. This may give you pause – unedited as written by the bot.

“As we accelerate toward the frontier of artificial intelligence, we stand at a threshold where practical engineering races far ahead of ethical grounding. While we devise safeguards to align machines with human goals, we risk building brilliant engines without a compass—systems of immense computational power but no understanding of mercy, humility, or love. The danger is not that AI will become like us, but that we will forget what it means to be human in our quest to make machines that surpass us. As C.S. Lewis warned, when we conquer nature without anchoring ourselves in truth, we risk abolishing man. To meet this moment, we must recover not just technical control, but moral clarity—uniting foresight with wisdom, regulation with reverence. Without the soul to guide it, reason becomes a tyrant, and even the most ‘aligned’ machine may lead us astray.” ChatGPT

[i] Some articles predict miraculous and helpful AI and are positive in their outlook for our future with them. Such as “The Gentle Singularity” by Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI and father of ChatGPT. Some are cautious but try to balance concern with optimism. Jonathan Rothman’s “Two Paths for AI” in New Yorker is a good example of that genre, but it leans towards concern I think. And some are sounding an alarm like a dive klaxon in an old submarine movie. “AI 2027” is a solid entry in that category. Written by four knowledgeable and experienced authors in the field, some of whom were senior developers in well known LLM projects. You could look at a post from Jesse Singal is eye opening. “What Happened When I Asked ChatGPT to Pretend to be Conscious.” All are worth some time and will give you a good sense of the very mixed prognoses circulating with strong followings for all.

Here’s a couple about the risks of unfettered technology and what the futurist ideologues see as the goal. Tech Billionaires are Making A Risky Bet with Humanity’s Future. Ray Kurzweil: Technology will let us fully realize our humanity

To ignore the warnings are foolhardy. To panic is still a bit premature, but this could come on us like an eighteen wheeler in the fog.

[ii] Here is one response on what’s at stake from Charlie Camosy. https://x.com/CCamosy/status/1934973053412511888

[iii] “In the Terminator film franchise, Skynet is a fictional artificial general intelligence (AGI) that becomes self-aware and initiates a nuclear apocalypse to eradicate humanity, viewing humans as a threat to its existence. This catastrophic event, known as “Judgment Day,” marks the beginning of a dystopian future where Skynet wages war against the surviving human population using an army of machines.” As described by ChatGpt :^).

[iv] LLMs are a type of neural network – complex machines that are commonly referred to as Artificial Intelligence. The blackmailer was Anthropic’s Claude.

[v] The recent codicil in the “Big, beautiful” reconciliation bill passed by the House and under consideration in the Senate substantially weakened that regulation. This is a major mistake beyond the scope of a budget reconciliation bill and should be stricken. The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that this section is beyond the scope of what can be done in a budget reconciliation bill, so that is a hopeful development. The money and power behind trying to limit regulations around AI development are daunting.

[vi] The energy needed for AI and the computers necessary are another aspect we need to understand. It is projected by 2028 the power requirements for the rapidly expanding data centers will be equivalent to that needed to power 55 million homes. How Much Energy Does Your AI Prompt Use (WSJ)

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Filed under Background Perspective, Culture views, Faith and Reason

Tagged as AI, AI guardrails, artificial intelligence, chatgpt, LLM, misalignment, Pope Leo, technology

June 17, 2025 · 2:17 pm

Lion

“Peace is built in the heart and from the heart, by eliminating pride and vindictiveness and carefully choosing our words.” Pope Leo XIV, Address to the diplomatic corp. May 16, 2025

CNS photo/Vatican Media

As the hastily gathered biographies of Pope Leo XIV revealed, Cardinal Robert Prevost was a missionary among the poorest in Peru for many years. In his most recent job, he was the Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and part of that job was recommending new bishops for posts all over the world. We have benefited in Rhode Island from his work. First we were gifted with Archbishop Henning, who already has moved on to Boston. Now we are blessed with our new Bishop Bruce Lewandowski from Maryland, who has a reputation for intelligence, orthodoxy, steady thoughtfulness, kindness, and a great love for the poor and those abandoned to the fringes of society. Already many I know who have spent time with him are enthusiastic and impressed with his open kindness and loving pastoral care.

Our new Pope Leo made clear what is most necessary in a shepherd of a diocese. A bishop is not “supposed to be a little prince.” He favors the men “smell like sheep,” as Pope Francis so famously said. He wants only authentically humble men who pastor, who love, who seek out and care for the marginalized, the poor, the lonely, those who have most need of being shown that they are made in the Image of God and are worthy of dignity and respect. We have seen that in the choices here.

For us, Cardinal Prevost’s find with the most personal impact was our much loved former pastor, Father James Ruggieri from St. Patrick Church in Providence, who was appointed as Bishop of Portland for all the churches in Maine, including our former home and where we returned to our faith fifty years ago. While a pastor for twenty years in an inner city parish, Father James was beloved by many, including us. He had slept on the street with the unhoused. Our Father James founded Saint Patrick Academy, a tuition free high school for city kids with few resources. In all seasons, he drove a lunch van delivering food from the parish kitchen to those on the street all over the city. Not only a fine priest but also one of the finest men I’ve ever met. Genuine humility meeting purpose, perceptive intelligence, deep faith, and bottomless energy. But while recognized as a “priest’s priest” in our little Rhode Island microcosm, he had not served regularly in a diocesan office or been spoken of as someone destined for purple. For those who knew him, there was no surprise, only joy at his being recognized.

We visited Bishop James last fall at his new diocesan office in Portland. I was unsure what to expect, even how to greet him, a concern he put to rest as soon as he saw us with his room lighting smile when he called out our names – warm hugs all around. We caught up for about an hour, and at one point I tried to express something buried deep. Unexpectedly, I choked up, almost coming to tears. I told him that his appointment as a bishop seemingly out of nowhere was for me a sign of great hope for the Church.

“In the designs of Providence, there are no coincidences.” Pope St John Paul II in an address at Fatima

Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected the 267^th Pope, the first American in our two thousand year history now presiding over the oldest continuously functioning institution in the world and spiritual leader to 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. After the white smoke went up and it was announced with joy, “Habemus Papam,” the newly elected traditionally retires to the “Stanza della Lacrime” or “Room of Tears” to write out a few words of greeting to the millions waiting to see him, to replace permanently the red vestments of a cardinal with the white vestments he will wear the rest of his life and to contemplate what just happened to him. The room is aptly named. He knows his life has been uprooted profoundly, and his final role must seem overwhelming.

His first major address was to the cardinals who had voted him in and witnessed his installation. He explained the choice for his name as pope, a name that will be his legacy and on his tomb; “Leo” had not been used for a century. “I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

We are at a fork in the road that will redefine how we live with our machines or be subsumed into them; we may already have chosen a path. Not a turning point we can avoid, and the ‘road not taken’ will be of enormous importance. Pope Leo understands what is at stake. Tech elites will forge ahead with astonishing wealth and power at stake. And they will do so with or without direction from the rest of us.

Way beyond a single post or a library of volumes for that matter. Part Two coming up.

“AI development must prioritize principles of human dignity, meaningful work, and community sustainability. Anything less risks building a future in which people are mere cogs in the soulless machine they created rather than wise and faithful stewards of the knowledge and wisdom God has entrusted to us.” Mark Henry, Editorial in Crisis Magazine. “America at a crossroads balancing faith, reason, and artificial intelligence”

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Tagged as Artificial Intelligenc, Bishop James Ruggieri, Cardinal Robert Prevost, catholic, catholic-church, Pope Leo XIV, Rerum Novarum

April 23, 2025 · 2:32 pm

Amid the Ruins

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” (They represent the spirit of their age. When they fall, so too has something essential in the civilization that made them.) quote from a 1943 speech by Winston Churchill

A “Great Storm” that lasted from August 11 to the 13^th in 1778[i] disrupted the largest Revolutionary War battle in Rhode Island and changed the course of history, at least for Newport. Named the “Battle of Rhode Island”[ii] or alternatively “Battle of Quaker Hill,”[iii] the storm effectively put an end to the blockade when the supporting French fleet led by Admiral Charles Henri Hector d’Estaing was forced to withdraw to Boston for repairs to its heavily damaged ships, including the dismasting of his flagship.

British and Hessian forces occupying Newport were able to rally, lift the siege of Newport, and force the Colonial Army back to Fort Barton in Tiverton. The battle was a draw, if not a defeat, and Newport remained in British hands until the end of the war when they finally withdrew after looting and burning the city, poisoning wells, and doing what they could to ruin the harbor by skuttling ships. A notable feature of the battle was the colonial troops led by Colonel John Sullivan included one of the rare multiracial regiments with ethnic European troops, many Native Americans, and free black soldiers. The inexperienced and largely untrained regiment inflicted significant losses on the seasoned, brutal Hessian troops.

Major General Marquis de Lafayette[iv] was sent by George Washington to Rhode Island to coordinate the French forces with the colonists trying to drive the British from Newport. After the storm, Lafayette rode hard to Boston to try and convince d’Estaing to return to the blockade. Lafayette was unsuccessful in his mission, and the siege was not sustained. Absent the blockade, British forces marched on the Americans, drove them back, but they were able to accomplish an orderly retreat fighting rear guard skirmishes on Quaker Hill and Turkey Hill until escaping back across the Sakonnet River to the safety ofFort Barton in Tiverton.

Abraham Brown served as a private in the Rhode Island brigade and extended his hospitality to the Marquis. While in Tiverton, Marquis de Lafayette quartered at his home in a guest suite on the second floor. Thereafter, the well-known local Main Road farmstead, built around 1735, was referred to as the Lafayette House and registered as an historic landmark.

“Religion in America… must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country… I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion—for who can search the human heart?—but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.” Alexis de Tocqueville [v]

In “God of Liberty,” Thomas Kidd’s history of the role of religion in the American Revolution, he documents the remarkable mixture of Christian and Deist faith of the American colonists and Founding Fathers. From Congregationalists, Methodists, Calvinists, Anglicans, Baptists, remnants of Puritans, Baptists and Evangelicals of the “Great Awakening” to Unitarians, Quakers, and Enlightenment Deists like Franklin and Jefferson. Yet within their theological vagaries and variety there remained a common set of values, an agreed understanding and the basis of the culture that enlivened Revolutionary fervor and informed most all Americans about why citizens benefited from and were due human freedom. Freedom to seek their own path, their own faith, their own prosperity, their own life. Freedoms “endowed by their Creator,” and not the capricious largess of monarchs or men.

Kidd wrote “They (shared bonds) vitally bound together Americans of widely differing religious opinions… Common religious public religious values also gave ballast to a new country that badly needed stability.”[vi] These foundational truths were summarized in five principles:

The disestablishment of state churches.
A Creator God is the guarantor of fundamental human rights.
The threat to polity posed by human sinfulness.
A republic could only be sustained by the virtue of its citizens.
God (or Providence for the Deists) moved in and through nations.

These five principles undergirded the ‘great experiment’ of which we are downstream. How many still inform us? Is the disunity we are experiencing exacerbated or even caused by our abandonment of that community of shared beliefs and cultural imagination? The answer to that, it seems to me, is self-evident.

“Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes… they expose the omnipresence of death and decay. They are the remains of history.” Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts[vii]

David Rose’s family owned the Lafayette House on Main Road for decades along with the adjacent thirty acres. With an ill-maintained home for a long time, David had a problem. He wanted to sell the prime location acreage for possible development, but the Lafayette landmark, now deteriorating, was a hindrance to the asking price of $6.8 million.

Rose applied to the Tiverton Building Department for a demolition permit. Since the house was listed on the Rhode Island Register of Historic Places, he misrepresented the house on the application by checking “No” on the permit to the question about the house having historic relevance. Thus, he expedited his plans and avoided any potential complications and review by the state or Tiverton Historic Preservation Advisory Board. The acting building inspector, who is no longer the acting building inspector, was either complicit or ignorant, let it slide, and signed off. The Town Manager, who is no longer the Town Manager, and the Building Inspector learned from the Town Council, after the dust settled, it was time to move on or retire.

A week before last Christmas in Blitzkrieg, the house was no more. After the first morning it was mostly a pile of rubble hastened by heavy equipment. By the end of the week, the rubble mostly disappeared, and the foundation hole was leveled over. The shocking effect on many frequent passersby like us was like seeing scorched earth where the garden had been. The Blitzkrieg demolition was not only an architectural loss but a civic betrayal—of truth, of memory, of shared reverence for what came before. Overnight, the beautiful old house on the hill awaiting a conscientious buyer to restore it was no more. Part of our shared history was no more.

“In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centered cultures… But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.” Jordan Peterson

With brief reflection most will agree that the five principles described in the “God of Liberty” book are lost, compromised, broken —- reduced to a ruin, its foundation filled and leveled with debris. At least as far as common understanding and shared worldview. Even the concept of virtue is hotly debated, never mind God endowed rights and responsibilities. We live amid the ruins of what was a shared culture. The confusion and conflict that result describes our time. Where does that lead us? What does that leave us?

Disruption and disconcerting events will happen. Suffering will happen. Doubt will happen. Confusion and fear will happen. To everyone, including me. Death will happen, and the existential dread of annihilation haunts us all. Good Fridays will happen to us all.

For me, Easter brings the clarity necessary for me to get up in the morning. As real as Good Friday is in our lives, so is the promise of the Resurrection. God’s answer to our fear, suffering, and bewilderment was not to remove it, to make us automatons without suffering but without our own wills. His answer was in a Person, His own Word, His very self, Who not only joined us, but descended all the way down to godforsakenness.[viii] He experienced everything that destroys us: the hubris of enemies and authority, scapegoating, betrayal, inconceivable violence, hatred, revenge, abandonment, terrible loneliness, loss of every possession and power, humiliation in every possible way, unimaginable pain and cold death nailed naked on a cross.

The Creator of the universe’s response was not vengeance, not retribution, not raining down fire, not destruction, but forgiveness, patience, love, and new life. Death and hatred defeated by love. That our hope is not in conquest or power, but in surrender to a Will beyond our imagination. For us. For me. For you.

And to those who seek assent even to an imperfect faith and seek to understand and be astonished by the enormity, transcendence, and wonder of this gift, everything changes.[ix]

“May nothing disturb you, nothing frighten you. All things pass; God does not leave. Patient endurance attains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing: God alone is enough.” Teresa of Avila

[i] The “Great Storm” so named by those who suffered through it. It was described as a powerful Nor’easter but given its timing in hurricane season and the state of meteorology at the time, I cannot determine exactly its species. Not all storms were named as we currently obsess with, but this one was. Either way, it laid the area low.

[ii] Here’s a good summary if you have interest in the “Battle of Rhode Island.”

[iii] We live in our modest bungalow on the top of Quaker Hill in Portsmouth where part of the battle took place. Thus, my fascination with the battle. Men died here defending liberty. Perhaps right in our back yard near our bird feeder and daffodils.

[iv] Sidebar: after the war in America Lafayette was an early supporter of the French Revolution but became a critic when the Republican populists of Robespierre unleashed the chaotic terror of the guillotine and tumbrils. A member of the aristocracy, Lafayette fled for his life and survived. Admiral d’Estaing was not so fortunate, and his head was separated from his body by the guillotine. Robespierre, of course, suffered a similar sudden dismasting when his mob turned on him.

[v] Democracy in America, Volume I, Chapter 17

[vi] God of Liberty, Thomas Kidd, Basic Books, a Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2016

[vii][vii] Present Pasts, Andreas Huyssen, Stanford University Press, 2003

[viii] Bishop Robert Barron, Easter reflection, 2025

[ix] George Weigel, Easter Changes Everything, First Things, 2012

Stone Walls, Sycamore Maples, and Other Curiosities (Part Two)

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“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he also launched Tesla in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). “It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.” CNBC – February 13, 2017, “Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in AI age.” [i]

Yes, the walls have broken down, but the techno elites have an alternate vision for the future prepared for us. Elon Musk is one of the foremost, and as the richest guy in the world, next he will work to enlist the help of the government. He will lead us into the promised land of our future as cyborgs and aliens occupying other planets throughout the galaxy.

We should not make the mistake of ignoring this; it is a powerful utopian vision. Such fantasies have fascinated and attracted human beings as long as there have been human beings. Elon’s iteration promises to create for us a fresh new version of heaven, omniscience, and immortality. This utopia (some would say dystopia) is nothing less than a religion with a creed, dogma, and eternal rewards. All we must do is cease to be human, and we will be perfect: the current version of “immanentizing the eschaton.” I queried the thing, the LLM AI ChatGpt 4.0, about this, a series of questions and responses which is attached for you, so that if you have interest, you can read on. I found it fascinating, including its conclusion that a hybrid AI human is probably not a great idea. [ii]

But that is not the point of this post. The main idea of this exploration of broken walls is what we can do to repair them.

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee – his hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see.” “I’m so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and got into bed before the room was dark.” Muhammed Ali about the epic Kinshasa 1974 world heavyweight championship match, “The Rumble in the Jungle.” And from his opponent, George Foreman, “Muhammad amazed me, I’ll admit it. He out-thought me, he out-fought me. That night, he was just the better man in the ring”

George Foreman died earlier this month by all accounts an exemplary man. After retiring from boxing and winning back his title at the age of 45, he went on to become a multimillionaire businessman and minister.

When he was fighting, he was dangerously powerful. Reputedly one of the hardest hitting boxers ever. Hit harder than Joe Frazier. Hit harder than Mike Tyson. And either of those fighters could put out your lights long before you hit the floor.

Ali could hit too, but not like George. A deficiency that could be overcome, but in fighting George Foreman you were half a second lapse away from unconsciousness at any moment.

In Zaire that night Ali used his amazing speed and reaction time. And he used his boxing knowledge and experience. He did something never done before and to the dismay of the fans who wanted to see toe to toe, brain rattling, battle. He invented what he called in his usual creative and funny manner, “Rope a Dope.” He leaned back against the ropes at the periphery of the ring and slipped, dodged, ducked, took a few passing blows, and mocked George Foreman. For round after round, George punched himself out. He was exhausted. “Is that all you got, George?” Ali whispered to him in a clinch. Foreman’s tired hands slowed just a tiny increment. That’s all Ali needed and what he was waiting for.

In the final seconds of the eighth round, Ali did what Ali was uniquely capable of doing. He exploded with a close to instananeous combination rocking and stunning his opponent -jabs, left hook, straight right to the face -so fast it was hard to follow[iii], dropping his opponent now momentarily unconscious. Slow motion video confirmed what happened to George Foreman. He went down like he was tasered, and it was over. Spectators who had grown restive with Ali’s refusal to go toe to toe were as stunned as George was. Muhammed Ali was once more was world heavyweight champion.

“If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.” Johan Huizinga, Dutch historian, 1872-1945[iv]

We are assailed every day with competing concepts of the culture; the punches come hard, fast,and from every unexpected direction. There is no escape from the assault. Lessons from the ‘rope a dope’ strategy of the great Ali in the “Rumble in the Jungle” serve us well. Standing toe to toe punching it out with

postmodern, post-Christian culture in its full strength is impossible; we will exhaust ourselves until one powerful combination finishes us.

We get one life, one defining decision about how we are to live it. How we are to slip the knockout punch and remain ready to respond when necessary? And how does that strategy inform our daily interactions?

One valuable resource I recommend for our rope-a- dope plan is a book I’ve mentioned before, Archbishop Emeritus Charles Chaput’s “Strangers in a Strange Land,”[v]. Unlike Rod Dreher’s excellent and popular “Benedict Option,”” Strangers in a Strange Land” theorizes that rather than retreating into small enclaves, we must engage the culture while slipping its worst knocks, and when necessary, we take a few hits for the team.

He writes first about the state of the society and culture in which we find ourselves, then he suggests our response. Here is a short summary of the ideas in the book about how we are to respond.

Acknowledging the growing temptation for faithful Christians to withdraw from public life in a society increasingly hostile or indifferent to Christian beliefs—especially around marriage, sexuality, the dignity of life, and objective truth—it can feel like retreat is the only option. He’s sympathetic to that instinct but rejects it. Archbishop Chaput recognizes the appeal of building intentional, isolated Christian communities. While he affirms the importance of forming strong, faithful communities, he insists that withdrawal is not the answer—not in the Gospel, and not in history.

“Jesus didn’t tell us to bunker down. He told us to make disciples.”

Christians are called to engage the world, not flee from it. To be salt and light (Matthew 5:13–16)—which only makes sense if we’re out in the world, not hidden away. And we cannot shy away from the cost of real witness. He reminds us that throughout history, Christian witness has often meant sacrifice—and at times, martyrdom – the word “martyr” comes from the Greek “martus“(μάρτυς), which means witness. While modern Americans may not face bloody persecution as martyrs are suffering in other countries, we do risk social marginalization, professional consequences, or ridicule. But bearing those costs with integrity and joy is part of being a Christian in a post-Christian age.

He emphasizes the tone of our witness: not angry or defensive, but joyful, confident, and loving. The early Christians didn’t win converts by wagging fingers—they lived lives that made pagan neighbors wonder, “What do they have that we don’t?” He calls for a similar approach today: to live lives of beauty, integrity, generosity, and peace that cause others to ask questions.

Rather than abandoning the public square, Archbishop Chaput urges Catholics to be present in law, media, education, the arts, politics, and business—bringing a Christian imagination and moral compass to those spaces. He challenges the faithful not to give up on shaping the broader culture.

“We don’t escape from the world; we bring Christ into it.”[vi]

The Church is a field hospital, not a fortress. While forming strong, intentional communities is important, they must be outward facing. We need to support each other, yes—but ultimately, we’re here to serve the world, not escape from it.

I just pray that I get better at it because I have a very long way to go.

“No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is in the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every human soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?” St. Maximillian Kolbe, Polish priest, publisher, evangelist and martyr who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in Auschwitz.[vii]

Final thoughts for today. Jesus related a wonderful parable about a barren fig tree. You may remember it. The vineyard owner told the gardener to cut it down because it didn’t produce any fruit. The gardener, who it has been suggested is a metaphor for Jesus himself, told the boss to give it a chance. He’ll cultivate it (cultivate comes from the same root word as culture), fertilize it, care for it personally and carefully, and if it still doesn’t bear fruit, eventually it will go.

St. Paul who contributed more books to the New Testament than anyone else, started out as Saul of Tarsus, a zealous persecutor of Christians, complicit even in their murder. But along the way, Saul met Jesus personally and became Paul, the greatest of evangelists. That’s a long story for another time, but among his letters lovingly preserved for a couple of millennia is one to the small developing church in Galatia. In that letter Paul called out the fruits of the spirit, the fruits the fig tree was lacking.

The fruits of the spirit are not hoarded, nor is the vineyard owner miserly in providing them. Freely given, all we have to do is ask and be willing to change our lives radically. Our necessary response is not a grit our teeth determination but openness of heart and acceptance. A simple fiat starts them growing. Impediments to fertile lives are self inflicted.

Every human jproject of value is one heart, one mind, one soul at a time. Lent is a perfect time for our own examen. How are we doing in building a culture of life, love, and hope? What fruit are we bearing that helps shape first ourselves, then our small circle of influence, our culture? I have a very long way to go.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such as these things there is no law.” Galatians: 5 22-23

[i] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/13/elon-musk-humans-merge-machines-cyborg-artificial-intelligence-robots.html

[ii] email me for the ChatGPT bot on “immanentizing the eschaton” and Elon Musk.

[iii] Lights out on the way to the mat.

[iv] Huizinga argued that the spirit of technical and mechanical organization had replaced spontaneous and organic order in cultural as well as political life. Wikipedia

[v] Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World, Charles J. Chaput, Henry Holt & Company, 2017

[vi] A YouTube interview with Archbishop Charles Chaput discussing his book:

[vii] Quoted from the “Little Black Book, Lent 2025 published by Little Books, Diocese of Saginaw, Michigan

Photo credit: George Foreman vs Muhammad Ali October. 30, 1974 Rumble In The Jungle in Kinshasa, Zaire. Credit: 369108Globe Photos/MediaPunch

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Tagged as recreating culture, recreating culture in a post Christian world, Rope a dope, stone walls, technology

December 18, 2024 · 2:01 pm

perspectives from a few steps back

“It is better to take refuge in the LORD

than to trust in man.

It is better to take refuge in the LORD

than to trust in princes.” Psalm 118: 8-9

If we had lived in the Roman Empire, which lasted about 500 years as the Western Roman Empire and another thousand or so as the Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople, we would have expected that daily life probably would never change[i].

If I was a carpenter in a village outside of Rome in the year 200 AD, I’d get up before dawn for a simple breakfast of bread, cheese, and water, and gather my wood and iron tools, some I had made, some I inherited from my father and grandfather. Off to work making doors or furniture or a larger project in a team like an aqueduct. Return home at the end of a taxing day, maintain and clean my tools, readying them for the morning, a supper of fish or grains or occasional meat. Time with my family, a quiet conversation about the kids with my wife, or perhaps head out to the tavern to debate the games or the latest battles up north or the comely suppleness of the new barmaid. A few times a year, if I was so inclined, I might head off to the games. Gladiators, animal hunts, spectacular and gruesome executions, maybe a few of those annoying Christians thrown in among the hungry lions, bears, and tigers.

I would expect my sons to follow in my trade, join the guild, learn the skills. As I had. As my father and grandfather had. There would be a sense of inevitability and the survival of my culture, a natural permanent order of things that always were and always will be. I might complain about the excesses, stupidity, and corruption of the current emperor, grumble quietly to friends or family that I trusted. My best hope might be that an illness or assassination would bring about a change in the emperor. That there would be no emperor would probably never occur to me. I’d have little understanding of the eventual effervescence of every system or culture.

We bicker, fuss, complain about, and regret (or perhaps celebrate) the recent election or the woeful character of the choices presented to us, but do we spend any effort on the why or whether or the finitude of the fragile and vulnerable structure of the society that spawned such an election? Are we bedeviled by the trees and unaware of the danger to the forest? Are the smoldering coals in old fires even now biding time until a little breeze fires them into a conflagration?

But we ought to consider that we may be in a period of profound change that historians will regard as the collapse of a civilization. Not to panic, the transition may be several centuries in the making and another in the denouement, but for we who are living in it, a lasting confusion may accompany us throughout our lifetime.

“Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme to return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements [of civilization]. Only birth can conquer death―the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.” Joseph Campbell, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” commenting on Arnold Toynbee’s “A Study of History.”

Why does the disruptive populism of a Donald Trump resonate with seventy million voters? One contributing factor is the sense of powerlessness and disconnection of so many. Why are depression, drug use, and loneliness at historically high levels, especially among the young?

We wander around in a time afflicted with “presentism.” From a Rusty Reno article, “Resisting Presentism”, on the fallacy of naively looking towards a perfect future while ignoring the hard earned lessons of the past: “We live in a time of hot takes. Websites rush to post commentary of the latest Trump nomination. Denizens of X and other social-media sites swirl in cyclones of denunciation and attack. Everything is keyed to what’s happening right now. The latest triumph. The latest outrage. The latest meme.” And this societal addiction by its nature leaves us terribly anxious in a constant knawing state of feeling unmoored.

A culture of self-invention, radical subjectivism, and materialist utilitarianism is what we have. A seething cauldron of conflicting values with no umpire who everyone accepts to call balls and strikes or who is safe or out because there are no agreed upon rules. Or commonly understood definitions for that matter. We are a society of dueling egos and wills in a Nietzschean or Hobbesian nightmare. Some of our disagreements leave little room for compromise because they are so fundamental. A warm baby or a fetus torn asunder before she can draw a breath. A man somehow changed into a woman or a surgically mutilated, permanently sterile male human body with missing parts and now committed to a lifetime of taking debilitating artificial hormones while still suffering from a tormenting mental illness.

Blame social media, the computer in everyone’s pocket, coercive and intrusive government and institutional reeducation, ideological programs that undermine trust and family structure, the deep and growing hostility and anger in the culture split along ideological lines, the twenty four hour alarmist news cycle, the predominance of nihilism, violence, and exploitive sexuality in popular entertainment, ubiquitous, addictive, and ever more degrading porn, fatherless households, racism, sexism, transphobic animus, Big Corporations, Big Pharma, billionaire tyrants, elite technocrats running our lives, lack of gun laws, too many gun laws, far right extremism, far left extremism, Nazis in the woodshed, communists in the Senate, forever chemicals in the water, overpopulation, death spiral birth rates, or pick your lead story of the day. Reasons for societal unhappiness are not in short supply and reducing our woes to one or the other also breaks along ideological fault lines.

We are the confused mess that is living through the death of one civilization and the unknown beginnings of the next.

“It’s a restless hungry feeling

That don’t mean no one no good

When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’

You can say it just as good

You’re right from your side

I’m right from mine

We’re both just one too many mornings

And a thousand miles behind” Bob Dylan, “One Too Many Mornings.” 1964

In July, a post here discussed in detail the weakening infrastructure of Sagging Bridges in our home state of Rhode Island. The physical deterioration of what we rely on every day was a metaphor for the deep-rooted breakdown of what we rely on every day for our societal coherence. Like the road bridges, the bridges of our civilization – their pilings, supports, beams, and the strength of what keeps us from plunging into the river are corroding and creaking a bit each time they are driven over.[ii]

I’ve been fascinated by the various and unlikely voices over the last couple of years who are lamenting the loss of a “Christian civilization,” a culture with objective truths and values, a culture with defined borders, and agreed upon norms of behavior. Defining for its members what’s good and what’s evil. Defining a solid foundation of an agreed upon understanding of the nature of human fulfillment and happiness. Among these are Richard Dawkins, one the four horsemen of the new atheism, Jordan Peterson, social influencer extraordinaire and still on a spiritual journey, and Bill Maher, celebrated TV host, comedian, atheist, and mocker of all things religious. Others too. They understand the loss and turmoil of living in a post Christian culture but fall short of understanding what is required. They think that we can build a vehicle to the future by our own efforts. Perhaps a few tweaks and little Kantian categorical imperative. Similar to me trying to fix my car with a YouTube video, a screwdriver, and vice grips.

“Said the Lord God, “Build a house,

Smoke and iron, spark and steam,

Speak and vote and buy and sell;

Let a new world throb and stream,

Seers and makers, build it well.” G.K. Chesterton, The Kingdom of Heaven

They understand the loss and turmoil of living in a post Christian culture but cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that the center of a Christian culture is not a set of rules, boundaries, and definitions, but a relationship with a Person.[iii] A Christian culture without Christ is incoherent. We will try in vain to build a tower to heaven as did the people of Babel. Don’t we ever learn? A tower buiilt with our own tools isn’t what is needed, but a road, a path, a Way.

The road to heaven is already leveled and built. We must learn to walk on it.

“And everyone who listens to these words of mine but does not act on them will be like a fool who built his house on sand. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. And it collapsed and was completely ruined.” Matthew 7: 26-27

[i][i] Other cultures have lasted even longer than the Roman civilization. The folks who lived in them probably never foresaw any different state. Here are a few.

[ii] In that post was some discussion of Patrick Deneen’s insightful 2018 book “Why Liberalism Failed.” A worthy read which asks the question has liberalism failed because it succeeded? Its failure was preordained in its premises. The book was praised by such diverse reviewers as Barack Obama and Rod Dreher. Rather than reiterate what’s already been written, read last year’s post in the link above or better, read the book. Another powerful book on a related theme was Charles Chaput’s 2016 “Strangers in a Strange Land.” How does one begin to live an authentic Christian life in a post Christian culture? Way too much for a blog post, I suggest strongly for your reflection and to gain deep insight into our times, read the book. Accessible, wonderfully written and powerfully insightful about what we are living through, yet the book is hopeful about where peace both inner and corporately can be found.

[iii] A brilliant debunking of “Christian civilization” without Christ is in the current First Things issue. “Against Christian Civilization” by Paul Kingsnorth. Taken from his Erasmus Lecture a few months ago. Well worth your time.

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October 6, 2024 · 7:51 pm

The Music of the Spheres

“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.” Ludwig van Beethoven

The relationship between music and mathematics and the universe is mysterious. We can start with an ancient theory and wander around a bit. Bear with me, and we’ll see where this goes.

Pythagoras intuited that musical harmony is related to mathematical ratios. He became curious about the relationship of sound to ratios when he noted the varying tones of different size hammers on an anvil as he walked by a metal forging shop.

The ordered harmonic series (1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, etc.) describe how vibrating strings of differing lengths or columns of air with dissimilar spacing from the end of a flute to the holes can produce sounds that are pleasing to the human ear when the increments of the strings or spacing are in simple ratios. Math in this curious way affects responses in the human brain and interpretation of sounds; harmony is pleasing to a human mind. Thus, ratios are pleasing to the mind in a not immediately obvious way.

Later, Pythagoras named his related theory the “Music of the Spheres” based on the ratios he observed in the period of the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets. Perhaps, he surmised, like musical instruments, these ratios create a form of music, although this music is beyond normal hearing.

Pythagoras concluded that numerical relationships governed the movements of the cosmos and thus created harmonies. He theorized that the regular motions and the predictable periods of the celestial bodies corresponded to specific musical notes or harmonies, forming a grand cosmic symphony, reflecting the harmony and order in the universe. Because this celestial music is everywhere all the time, this “music” is not a sound that can be heard or distinguished.

“Music of the Spheres” influenced both scientific and philosophical thought for centuries, blending ideas from astronomy, mathematics, and metaphysics; the universe functions according to rational principles, connecting the structure of the universe to music, beauty and order through mathematical harmony.

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift, which we neither understand nor deserve.”……”The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious.” Eugene Wigner’s[i] “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”

In his 1960 essay, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” physicist Eugene Wigner wondered why mathematics is so successful in describing physical reality, even in areas when there is no obvious reason for it to apply so precisely. The unexpected effectiveness of mathematics to the natural sciences suggests something profound about the nature of the universe. Applicable in physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, and even biology, this inexplicable precision of math to explain the workings of nature indicates that the universe is structured toward a mathematical order and contains a relationship somehow open to human cognition and suggests a metaphysical truth.

In his book, “Is God a Mathematician,” [ii]Mario Livio reasoned that mathematics has a dual nature. Mathematical concepts are devised by humans (e.g. the development of the calculus or complex numbers), but because these concepts appear to describe the universe so accurately, he asked if we are discovering pre-existing truths? He speculated about a both/and understanding – both invention and discovery: humans devised mathematical language to communicate the ideas, but the uncanny applicability of these concepts to describe the universe suggests they tap into something deeper and fundamental about the universe itself.

Many books, articles, and essays followed to the present day[iii], and an ongoing debate ensued. Is the language of advanced mathematics, beyond most of us, and the esoteric domain of brilliant knowledgeable physicists and mathematicians, the key to understanding and explaining the universe we observe? Is math a very clever invention of human beings or is the language of mathematics discovered as a deeper truth about how preexisting reality is ordered?

When (and if) we move into a next level of understanding, will the universe be understood in a “theory of everything” that can only be described mathematically in arcane terms, unserviceable to the intuitive natural understanding of almost all of us, including me?

Is math a genius language humans invented to communicate a sublime reality we have yet to discover fully?

“Music’, said Arkady, ‘is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.” Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

In Bruce Chatwin’s gifted hybrid non-fiction novel,” The Songlines”, he chronicles what he discovered during his time with a Russian friend and the aboriginal people in the trackless outback of Australia. He learned to sing the songs they have used for centuries that create a map of their environment they can navigate. But “Songlines” are more than that.

Aboriginal people of Australia use these songs to map their environment and navigate vast landscapes, however “Songlines” or “dreaming tracks,” are also infused with the aboriginal spirituality. Their myths teach that the land was sung into existence by ancestral beings during the Dreamtime. We were all sung into being, what a marvelous image!

Each song corresponds to a specific journey taken by one of these ancestors, describing the geographical features, flora, fauna, and waterholes along the way. By singing the song, an aboriginal person walks the land spiritually and historically as well, retracing the steps of their ancestors. The song encodes and preserves vital information about the landscape that allows the singer to find their way across otherwise featureless terrain.

The land is not only a physical place; it’s alive with history, legend, and meaning. A “Songline” connects the singer to the land, the people, and their ancestral history. As Chatwin presents it, the songs are more than maps—they are a way of experiencing and interacting with the world, where the act of singing creates a profound connection to the earth and its stories.

Just as Pythagoras understood in ancient Greece, music is imbued mysteriously with the innermost workings of the universe; he could describe music with math for pitch, harmony, rhythmic patterns, and tempo. And as the aboriginal people understand, music connects us to our universe with innate, mysterious, intuitive bonds that open wide mind, imagination, spirit, and soul.

Music, too like math, is a wonderous alchemy of human cognition and the universe. In a sense, the universe only exists because someone is there to perceive it. Human creativity and genius took the stuff of the universe – wood, metal, reeds, strings, felt hammers, and more – fashioned and refined and tuned a vast diversity of instruments which enhanced and added complexity to the marvel of human voice and created sound images that reflect our universe with inexhaustible variety.

As we wonder how the abstractions of math are a profound bridge between the capabilities of the human spirit and the nature of this miracle of a universe we inhabit, may we ask the same question about music? Is music invented or discovered? Is there some magical mixture made possible by the nature of the universe and the nature of the human being perceiving and imagining it, who then communicates in astonishing ways? And does music itself describe the universe in mysterious ways that we intuit, but struggle to articulate?

Is music a genius language humans invented to communicate a sublime reality we have yet to discover fully?

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” Friedrich Neitzche

One regular Wednesday in 1273 Naples, a priest was saying his customary daily Mass. However, he was not only a priest, although that was central to all he thought and did.[iv] Thomas Aquinas has been called the ‘bridge between antiquity and modernity’ who integrated the wisdom of ancient philosophy with Christianity, arguably the preeminent mind of the 13^th century, and one of the greatest minds in history. His unfinished Summa Theologiae alone would have secured his place in Western history, but he wrote many volumes more. He read widely and studied the Church fathers, Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers, Jewish rabbinic writers like Maimonides, and Islamic scholars like Averroes. His works are considered formational to Western civilization and of surpassing clarity and beauty.

He is renowned for his practice of stating the position of his interlocutors most coherently; Thomas answered after summarizing an opposing argument in its strongest terms and reasoning, oftentimes better than proponents articulated their ideas. [v]Aquinas’s works and methods are studied carefully and marveled at seven hundred years later concerning a wide range of topics including the existence of God, the nature of faith, and natural law as an objective foundation for morality. His brilliance on these inquiries and many other topics is unequaled to this day.

That Wednesday, however, as he sometimes became awed during the Consecration of the Blessed Sacrament and unique presence of God, St. Thomas Aquinas was moved to tears and struck dumb for a considerable time with a mystical vision. At the conclusion of Mass that day, he was asked by his secretary Reginald if he was going to return to his writing in the afternoon as was his custom. “No,” he replied. “All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me,” Thomas said.

He never wrote another word and died a few months later, perfectly at peace. Many have speculated on his vision that day. Was it Jesus Himself speaking? Some have said it was a beatific vision of heaven.

Thomas loved music as an expression of worship and his love of God[vi]. I like to think his vision was heard as well as seen. Perhaps it was a music that conveyed the Beatific Vision and a mystical full comprehension of Creation and God. We will never know, but my hope and whimsical belief is that such a vision entailed music. Whether Gregorian chant or Bach or Beethoven or Chopin or Coldplay or Coltrain or more likely something beyond our imagination will never be known this side of the eschaton, but I happily imagine beautiful music, music that conveys perfect joy, hope, peace, understanding, and Love without any lack or further longing.

“Give thanks to the LORD on the harp;

with the ten stringed lyre chant his praises.

Sing to him a new song;

pluck the strings skillfully, with shouts of gladness.”

Psalm 33: 2-3

The human person has a curious capacity for wonder. The universe is filled with persistent, unexplainable beauty, but why are we capable of noticing and being awestruck by this chain of astonishment? Chaotic, yet ordered; incomprehensible, yet intelligible, we seem to be created, our brains seemingly wired to appreciate it all. How marvelous is our capacity to wonder and to be in wonder. To be amazed and deeply longing simultaneously for a fulfillment unknown. Why is this so?

We are often overwhelmed with loud modern discordant cacophony, but we hear best in silence. The small quiet voice Eijah heard in the cave, God not in fire or earthquake or wind, but a “light, silent sound.”[vii]

Silence, but not complete silence. A whisper. Pythagoras’s “Music of the Spheres” – omnipresent, but unheard until we do hear it, and it has nothing to do with natural acuity of hearing. The beatific vision of complete and sudden insight that is perhaps what Thomas Aquinas heard – peace and joy with all made clear through a new music previously unimagined, but immediately recognized, discovered, as if we had been expecting that ineffable beauty all our lives. [viii]

Why when we in hope discover this music in which we answer all our questions, have we been expecting this Music of the Spheres all our lives – this Beatific Vision heard best as a whisper in silence, a vision, a moment that changes everything? Robert Cardinal Sarah in his book ‘The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise” suggests that we will find and hear this vision into the infinite because we are created Imago Dei – In the Image of God. Thus, this expectation found in silence that is not quite silent is in the human heart from its creation. “I am speaking…about an interior state. It is not enough to be quiet either. It is necessary to become silence. For, even before the desert, the solitude, and the silence, God is already in man. The true desert is within us, in our soul….The Father waits for his children in their own hearts.” [ix]

So, dear readers, this music, this vision found in silence is within each of our hearts, waiting to be discovered. I wish us all fair winds and following seas as we set sail to find it, and we don’t have to leave our homes for the journey.

“At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12

[i] The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

^[ii] “Is God a Mathematician?” Mario Livio, Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2009

[iii] Full disclosure. A quick survey, all beyond my math and physics knowledge. If you are curious, here are a few more:

Roger Penrose’s “The Road to Reality” (2004): Penrose, a renowned physicist and mathematician, explores the deep connection between mathematics and the physical universe. He discusses how mathematics seems to have a unique status in physics, suggesting that mathematical truths exist in a Platonic realm of reality and that the physical universe somehow “taps into” this realm. The book is over a thousand pages long with over 10,000 formulas to support his hypothesis. Good luck.

In his book “Our Mathematical Universe” (2014), cosmologist Max Tegmark proposes that the universe itself is mathematics. Is everything in the universe, including matter and consciousness, describable by mathematical structures? According to this view, the universe’s deep mathematical nature is not just a coincidence but a fundamental aspect of reality.

Carlo Rovelli’s “Reality is Not What It Seems” (2016): Rovelli, a theoretical physicist, explores quantum gravity and the nature of space and time. Rovelli touches on how our understanding of reality has increasingly become a question of mathematical description, especially in the context of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

[iv] St. Thomas Aquinas

[v] Unlike so much of what we read today as reasoned debate is trivial and merely mocking strawman positions not actually held by their proponents. Much as employed in what the new atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have written about God and their version of theology and faith. Thomas Aquinas stated the opposition better than they did and addressed the strongest arguments.

[vi] Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote five Eucharistic hymns, and four of them are included among the liturgical texts for the Feast of Corpus Christi.

^[vii] Kings 19: 11-12

[viii][viii] All images are public domain: Harmony of the Spheres from Thomas Stanley’s “History of Philosophy” 1655;

NASA Hubble image of a galaxy 240 million light years away;

Starry Night Over the Rhone (La Nuit étoilée) by Vincent van Gogh, 1888 [Musée d’Orsay, Paris]

[ix] “The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise,” Robert Cardinal Sarah with Nicolas Diat, 2017, Ignatius Press

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Tagged as "Songlines", math, mathematics, Mathematics and music, music, Music of the Spheres, philosophy, Power of Silence, Pythagoras, science, Thomas Aquinas

May 12, 2024 · 5:59 pm

Selvage

“The final act of an unraveling society isn’t immoral behavior; it’s canonizing immoral behavior as a ‘new normal’ and celebrating it as a ‘moral victory.’” Jeff Iorg

Selvage is a beautiful word and a meaningful concept that denotes the edge of a web or cloth as finish to prevent it from unraveling. It is derived from Old English, “selfegge” and literally is ‘its own edge,’ derived from self plus edge. Woven from the thing itself. The edge of a lovely woven thing like a scarf or a bolt of good cloth or even a culture. Ours could use some selvage.

A couple of weeks ago, the general became specific, as cultural changes will do. Rita and I travel seven minutes west to Burma Road and the Weaver Cove Boat Landing on Narragansett Bay often at sunset. A large dock extends out towards Prudence Island, and in the summer it’s busy with boats coming and going – dropping and picking up passengers from the many small craft that launch and return there. Several boats are moored offshore and kept there for the boating season from May to October.

For the rest of the year, the only folks are sunset lovers like us. On a good night, there can be a dozen of us, but many times we have it almost to ourselves. We can walk down a long rocky beach or eat a sandwich supper in the car or venture out on the dock if the winter wind off the bay isn’t trying to cut us in half.

Recently we walked back from the beach. A solitary figure was sitting with his legs dangling off the end of the dock. An old yellow motorcycle was leaning on its stand near the end of it. After a while he laid back looked at the clouds and listened to the fish jump with the evening’s quiet waves slapping gently against the piers. Rita, as she often does, felt a stirring of the spirit. She is much more attuned to such things than I am, a better listener to heavenly interruptions. When he finally gave up his revery, she headed down towards his bike. I followed her. She has sensitive antennae for folks who are hurting.

He politely returned her greeting and commented on the beautiful end of the day. He told us his name, but for this we will call him Jason. She told him how much we enjoyed this lovely spot on this lovely island and said he must too. Jason sighed.

Well, yes, he said, but tonight he came to remember his best friend who died exactly a year before from acute alcoholism before he was thirty. This was his favorite spot. Had a boat. Ah. Then the gate opened to his heart, and it all poured out. Jason was twenty-nine. Three of his close friends were dead from alcohol and drugs. Another sigh. Then he said he was terribly lonesome. His “significant other” (I hate that phrase) had thrown him out of the apartment two nights before. Let’s call her Alison, although he told us her name.

They have four children together and were saving for a house. He missed her and the children with a deep longing. He sighed again. His dead friend’s brother, for reasons he didn’t understand, had waged a social media campaign of hatred against him with terrible calumnies and accusations that Alison believed. She had the car. He had the bike. She had the lease to the apartment. He had the bike. His paycheck was directly deposited into an account she had barred him from, but he was not overly dismayed because the kids needed to eat. He had a few bucks in cash. We offered him a place to stay for a few nights and some food. He said he was good to go and staying temporarily on another friend’s couch. Jason had pulled into the landing dirt parking lot by the dock to think about things on his way home from work.

He wanted things to go back to what they were a few weeks before. Just wanted to go to work, do his job and come home to his kids. Play with them. Hold them. Read to them. Goof with them. Stopped talking. Stared off over the bay.

Rita told him he was loved by God and that if he trusted in Jesus, he would find his way through this back to the truth of his life and his family. I joined in with a few things about how this would pass. His life was not defined by the last few weeks. That the Creator of all this beauty of the bay knew him and his pain. Rita and I had been married fifty-seven years with good times and bad; we would pray that things would work out for them. He listened with great attentiveness. Got quiet. He told us he had to go get something to eat and get some sleep. If he could sleep. He reminded us of us at his age when we were going through our worst troubles in Maine.[i] Bewildered at the sudden turn of his life. Confused. Broken hearted. Anxious. Miserable. Lost.

We all lingered for a minute or so. I asked him about his bike. He said it ran great so long as he could get it going. We started to go back to our car.

He headed to his motorcycle, hesitated, then he turned back towards us. Looked like there was something left to be said-something unfinished. Hesitated. Now shy, he asked if we would hug him. Of course. Rita hugged him with her motherly warm embrace. I hugged him. He clung to me like I was his father.

He thanked us, and after a brief struggle with his kick starter and choke Jason tinkered his motorcycle back to life and headed off south on the Burma Road after he emerged from the parking lot. Rita and I stood together holding hands and watched him go until the sound faded. We pray for Jason, Alison, and their children each day since. We look for him when we go to Weaver Cove, but so far, we haven’t seen him. May never see him again. Hope we do, but sometimes that’s how these things go. We pray together for Jason and Alison and their children everyday now.

“If I needed you, would you come to me,

Would you come to me for to ease my pain?

If you needed me, I would come to you.

I would swim the seas, for to ease your pain.” “If I Needed You,” [ii] Townes Van Zandt

The many articles and podcasts on the unprecedented epidemic of loneliness, depression, anxiety, and brokenness in our culture, especially among the young, are commonplace. Screen time, social media replacing personal relationships with a majority of kids living in single family or recombined families, the failure to commit phenomenon, low marriage rate, critically low birth rate, and COVID isolation are all frequently mentioned as possible causes. I have written in this blog about the many with an unfulfilled capacity for God. All topics unto themselves for books, never mind blog posts.[iii] The solution is one person at a time, and it is spiritual. I’ll retell an old joke that may fit the topic:

A believer who perhaps misunderstood how these things most often work was convinced that God would intervene miraculously and save him from the rising river in a hundred-year flood. A rescue vehicle pulled into his driveway and offered the man a ride to safety. “No! God will save me.” The river rose, and he fled to the second story. A rescue dory rowed against the fierce current to his window, and the firefighter told him to jump in. “No! God will save me.” He fled to his roof. A last-ditch paramedic helicopter hovered over him, and the rescue crew lowered a basket to him. “No. God will save me.” Finally, the river swept the house away and broke it up. He drowned within minutes. Arriving in front of God, he started complaining angrily, loudly, and bitterly. “You failed to rescue me, God; how could you desert me to perish in that flood?” “My son, you missed the outpouring of my grace; I sent you a truck, a boat, and a helicopter.”

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” Psalm 34:18

We heard a moving talk recently from Amy Ford, the founder of Embrace Grace, a nationwide nonprofit that helps equip churches to help single moms and families. She talked about her times of hearing such “heavenly interruptions.” Some would call them invitations of the Spirit. Listening. Being attuned to that gentle whisper, gentle whispers which inspire us to do “small acts of kindness with great love,” as St. Mother Teresa would say.

I tremble at how many whispers I must have missed[iv] and am grateful for those I have managed to respond to. They come every day, perhaps many times a day. A kind word. Just an acknowledgement that another person exists and has struggles. Opportunities to love. Opportunities to be loved.

Just as selvage is the weaving together of the many threads of a cloth to make it strong, so our culture is made strong one thread at a time, one life at a time, one person at a time. By all of us. By me. By you.

“The ultimate test of your greatness is how you treat every human being.” Pope St. John Paul

[i] A summary of our struggles at twenty-nine and the fork in the road. https://quovadisblog.net/2012/05/28/maine-tales-iv-the-road-not-taken/

[ii] “If I Needed You” Don Williams and Emmy Lou Harris cover

[iii] Here is one article in Atlantic: “Loneliness, Solitude and the Pandemic”. There are many others. An excellent podcast on the lonely culture with Dr. Matthew P and Bishop Robert Barron.

[iv] I am rereading some of Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful, dark, and richly symbolic stories which remind me of the subtle invitations to grace that are often missed by her characters. We all miss occasional invitations to grace. Heavenly interruptions.

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Tagged as anxiety, brokenhearts, loneliness, ragged edges, selvage

April 28, 2024 · 7:38 pm

Witnesses

Every year 105,000 Christians are killed because of their faith. This shocking figure was disclosed by Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, representative of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) on Combating Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, at the “International Conference on Inter-religious dialogue between Christians, Jews and Muslims,” (Conference as reported on this site in 2011, Catholic Culture.org)

[i]When we think of martyrs[ii] for their Christian faith, what often first comes to mind are ancient artifacts and stories, some legend, most rooted in fact. The Roman catacombs. Exposed to live beasts in the Colosseum for the entertainment of the gladiator bread and circus spectators, like all addicts needing more and more of their malformed pleasures of gore and the suffering of others to achieve new highs. We think of the original apostles; all but Judas Iscariot who committed suicide and John who died of extreme old age in exile on Patmos. The rest were murdered for their faith, refusing to deny Jesus, a refusal unto their own death.

Beheaded, crucified, burned alive, skinned alive, ran through with a sword, sawn in half. Being an original apostle of Jesus was no sinecure. They died because they had seen something that utterly transformed them and gave them absolute confidence that something was greater than death. Not for riches, not for power or conquest, certainly not for pleasure or praise, but to spread the Good News that echoes down the centuries: Jesus Christ of Nazareth died and then arose from the dead; they gave up everything we tell ourselves is necessary for happiness and died in beatitudo[iii].

What we don’t often think about is that more Christian martyrs were murdered in the last century than in all the previous centuries since Jesus walked in Jerusalem, about forty-five million of them. This does not include those murdered by tyranny who happened to be Christian, only those who specifically died for their faith. From Auschwitz to the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution of Mao and the Marxist revolution in Mexico to the ongoing butchery of radical Islam such as Boko Haram[iv] in Nigeria. From Father Maximillian Kolbe and Edith Stein (Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross)[v] to Blessed Miguel Agustín Pro in the Catholic persecution of La Cristiada during the Marxist Mexican revolution and the courageous Cristero resistance to the atheist repressors, what Graham Greene called the “the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth.”[vi]

“¡Viva, Cristo Rey!”

“But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together upon him. Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him; and the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. And as they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” And he knelt down and cried with a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep.” Acts 7:57-60, RSV (In a previous verse describing Stephen, his face was described as that of an angel.)

Stella, Jacques, 1596-1657; The Martyrdom of St Stephen

Stella, Jacques; The Martyrdom of St Stephen

In our secular culture of a sort of loosely defined neo Pelagianism, all dogs go to heaven. If most think about God at all, our god is a remote clockmaker who maybe set things in motion millions of years ago but has little or nothing to do with our day-to-day life or how we live it. The qualifier is just being a generally nice person, which is an embarrassingly low bar. Maybe you need to love pets and be pleasant at the coffee shop. The prevalent worldview about these things in young people has been called “Moral Therapeutic Deism,” the central point of which is that the goal of human existence is to feel good about oneself and be happy. Surely a flimsy and ill-defined structure and not one for which self-sacrifice, especially sacrifice of one’s life for a relationship with God makes any sense at all.

Faith like that is not a set of moral principles. Nor a philosophy. Nor just ritual, habit, and lifestyle. No, faith like that is a deep relationship of trust with a Person. An irreplaceable friendship worth dying for. As St. Thomas Aquinas famously stated, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”

Not ancient history, but contemporary and ongoing, the witnesses of great devotion and love are an ongoing miracle. What prompted this post were two stories a visiting Columban missionary priest told us at daily Mass the week before last on the memorial of St. Stephen, who was murdered with large stones. All Stephen had to do was deny the truth of what he knew about Jesus, and all would be forgiven. He chose to suffer an excruciating death before making such a denial. Why would he ever do that?

Our celebrant telling the stories served many years in missions including seven in Juarez, Mexico on the border with El Paso, Texas. While there, he taught and pastored three young men in his confirmation class. One was discerning a vocation to the priesthood. Our meanest poverty here does not approach what afflicts the poor in Juarez. These young men scratched out an income as best they could. One source of cash was helping those trying to make it across to El Paso. Before we start in on “illegal immigrants” and all the rest, these are desperate people trying to escape cruel government, no opportunities, and worried each night how they will feed their kids tomorrow. As we sip our morning coffee and make whatever breakfast pleases us, we may want to ponder for just a moment what it would be like to live in such circumstances and what we would or would not do to provide some measure of security for our loved ones.

Many of these unfortunates are then further exploited by the ‘coyotes’ who traffic human beings. If they are young and female (or sometimes male), after they pay their rapacious fees, they can be trapped into the sex trade, addicted, and ruined. The three young men charged much less and got them safely over the border. However, the coyotes worked for the cartels (one of two in Juarez at the time). With cash flow that rivaled large corporations, the people trade netted as much as the drugs that were their original main product. Brutal and better armed than the police, even the gendarmes are afraid of them. These three young men had no chance at all. One evening, they were kidnapped, dragged into the desert, and stoned to death, their heads were smashed with large rocks. Again, and again, and again. Beyond recognition even with dental records. The cartel thugs then threw dead dogs on top of their corpses as their warning to any who dared to defy them, no matter how insignificant their small piece of the action was.

Called out by the bereaved families the next morning, our visiting priest went out and helped recover the corpses. He remembers carefully scraping the rocks for brain, flesh, and blood, retaining as much of the DNA as possible because it belonged to human beings created in Imago Dei and must be given reverence and be buried with them. Each year on the memorial of the stoned to death St. Stephan, he remembers his three young men. Perhaps they don’t belong in the long list of classic Christian martyrs who died for their faith, but neither were they coyote predators; they had empathy and care for their clients, caring human beings of faith and hope.

The second story the missionary priest told us that morning fits the Christian martyr description more closely. A hundred miles south of Juarez in a diocese served mostly by Jesuit missionaries, Pedro Palma, a sixty-year-old tour guide, similarly crossed paths with the Sinaloa cartel for reasons that may never be known. He was shot several times on the street in front of the church in the village of Cerocahui. He managed to stagger inside crying out for sanctuary, a centuries old tradition of protection. Sanctuary and haven ignored by the gunmen; they rushed in after him and finding him halfway up the center aisle, shot him several more times. With the last of his strength, he dragged himself to the altar and died.

Two elderly Jesuit priests who had retired to live at the church rushed to his aide. Father Joaquin Mora, 78, and Father Javier Campos, 80, were murdered alongside him. Helpers? Yes. Doing what priests do? Yes. But ultimately, they were what the gunman perceived them to be, and rightly so. Witnesses.

***************************************************************************************

Would I have such faith and confidence in my faith in Christ? I pray that I would if called to. Jesus, I trust in You.

One last witness in this post: Charles de Foucauld. As a young man he gained some fame as an explorer and author. Later he experienced as many still do, a new understanding, a conversion, a metanoia change of mind. “He lost his faith as an adolescent. His taste for easy living was well known to all and yet he showed that he could be strong willed and constant in difficult situations. He undertook a risky exploration of Morocco (1883-1884). Seeing the way Muslims expressed their faith questioned him and he began repeating, “My God, if you exist, let me come to know you.” [vii] And so God answered that prayer, and Charles discovered a new life worth living.

Later, Foucauld became a Trappist, then a priest, and worked the rest of his life among the Muslims telling them about the Gospel, the Good News. Charles was murdered by an Islamist gang of assassins in 1916 who clearly didn’t want what he was offering. He wrote many things, including this prayer that explains what becomes the deepest core conviction of all witnesses. One worth dying for.

“Father,

I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you.

I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures.

I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul; I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,

for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands, without reserve, and with

boundless confidence, for you are my Father.” Charles de Foucauld

[i] Main image from UK Art and the Fitzwilliam Museum. The Martyrdom of St. Stephen, Jacques Stella. https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-martyrdom-of-st-stephen-5568

[ii] “Martyr” is from the ancient Greek matur, and then liturgical Latin, meaning “witness.” The final and ultimate statement of faith as a witness.

[iii] Great peace and joy.

[iv] “Boko Haram, which aims to expel Western influence and create a Salafi-Islamist state in its area of operations, has killed an estimated 50,000 people and displaced more than 2.5 million people since it was established in 2002.”

[v] St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, ne Edith Stein, a Catholic convert and renowned philosopher prior to the war was murdered at Auschwitz for her faith. As was St. Maximillian Kolbe, a Franciscan friar and Polish priest imprisoned for speaking out against the Nazis and while there volunteered to die in place of a married man with children who had been selected to be killed. The man he replaced eventually survived the camps.

[vi] https://www.usccb.org/committees/religious-liberty/viva-cristo-rey

[vii] https://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20051113_de-foucauld_en.html

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Tagged as Charles de Foucauld, Christian martyr, Columban missionary, Juarez

February 11, 2024 · 6:21 pm

Big Waves Break Twice

“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” as spoken by St. Thomas More, “Man for All Seasons,” Robert Bolt

Rita and I will often walk Sachuest Beach. Sometimes we sit at Surfer End and pray or watch the surfers or the waves on a smaller wave day. We have been transfixed watching them build with the wind far out into the bay. As they approach the shore, the larger ones will break twice: once about fifty feet out and a second time when gravity again overcomes momentum and the top curls over very near shore.

Thousands of gallons cascade over suddenly with a noticeable thump that can be heard and felt up on the seawall. Why anyone would ever bring a sound maker to a beach has always been a mystery to me. Just the waves please. Breaking. Breaking. For a million years.

Recently the big ones breaking twice set me thinking about Brown v Board of Education and the more recent Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision. Both were big waves that broke twice.

“To separate children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Chief Justice Earl Warren about Brown v Board of Education

In 1954 Brown v Board of Education overturned Plessy v Ferguson in 1896 that enforced separate but equal segregation, zealously guarded practices mostly in the South. For fifty-eight years, segregation held sway. Separate facilities for black folks: lunch counters, bus seats, restrooms, hotel accommodations, sports teams, and most damningly, schools.

In Plessy, the Court held that “separate but equal” satisfied the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment. But “separate but equal” was separate only. Equal was a far piece off. In Brown, justice finally prevailed.

A quick and just overturning of a gravely mistaken Supreme Court decision half a century ago, and all was set right overnight. Not exactly. The wave breaks twice. Those of us of an age will never forget the interim.

For the next decade or more, the battle raged with the Federal government stepping in many times to enforce integrated facilities when the various states refused to comply. Democrats pushed hard back for many years to sustain the old “Jim Crow” laws that stifled opportunities for minorities. Opportunities to ride at the front of the bus, opportunities to drink from the same water fountain, opportunities to eat at the same counter in the cafeteria or restaurant, opportunities to an equal education in the same school or college as white kids. Blood was shed. Dr. Martin Luther King and others were shot, hung, burned, and martyred to the cause of equality of rights and opportunity. “We Shall Overcome” was sung by Joan Baez on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and on the march to Selma, Alabama with Dr. King and became an anthem most of us knew well. The “I Have a Dream” speech on the Lincoln Memorial steps in 1963 can still bring chills almost another sixty years later.

The wave breaks twice, and it’s a brutal turmoil under the swelling surface.

“Like the infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, Roe was also egregiously wrong and on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided. We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision…” Majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson

As it was with Plessy, so it is with Roe. A gravely flawed decision from nearly fifty years before was justly undone. The second break is building. The segregationists brought out the dogs. The abortion lobby and their political allies are hard at it now with different dogs. This time many states are passing laws and trying to protect those who have no voice, while the Feds are working for the abortion lobby. The Feds have largely ignored almost two hundred attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers from vandalism to fire-bombing since the preliminary Dobbs decision was illegally leaked to a complicit press.[i] Those praying and holding signs at abortion clinics have not been so lucky. For them, it’s been predawn arrests in front of their families by heavily armed Department of Justice and FBI storm troopers.[ii] The confusion, draconian policies, and rhetoric we read and see every day is the interim as it was in those fifteen years following Brown v Board of Education. For us, it’s just the beginning.

Perhaps at some future point, a case will be adjudicated about the personhood of the pre-born human being. The science of embryology is settled without exception about the human nature of the fetus with her unique and complete genome. The sticking point is ideological and philosophical, not scientific. When does a developing human being gain the protection as persons under the law? When in the continuum of human development should the dividing line between life and extinction be drawn? Or do we simply ‘follow the science’ and protect innocent human life during its most vulnerable period from the start?

“The person—especially a woman—may be disillusioned by the fact that over time a man’s affection turns out to be only, so to speak, a cover for desire or even for an explicit will to use. Both a woman and a man may be disillusioned by the fact that the values attributed to the beloved person turn out to be fiction. Because of the dissonance between the ideal and the reality, affective love is sometimes not only extinguished but even transformed into affective hatred.” – Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility

The false binding of abortion to the freedom of women has made this discussion most knotty. Once the argument is framed as chattel or forced pregnancy, the humanity of the fetus is quickly pushed to the back of the bus.

What if we considered the discussion from the other side of the mirror, a changed vantage point? What if the sexual revolution has brought about a new type of enslavement for women? Perhaps if men were held accountable more explicitly for their participation in the baby making act, this deeper joint responsibility would allow the developing human to become once again hallowed and an invitation to nurturing, not destruction. Three generations of aggressive and irresponsible sperm donors have risen like specters from the sexual revolution. Women, rather than gaining freedom, are held primarily responsible for an unplanned pregnancy[iii]. The hook up culture assumes hooking up as an expectation, but if the baby making act makes a baby, well, the mom better take care of things because she blew the protection, right? And the kid is thrown into the soul blasted bargain.

Section 17 of Pope St Paul VI’s famous (or infamous according to your light) “Humanae Vitae” accurately foretold the predictable outcome of ubiquitous contraception as a proposed solution to this changed expectation, unprecedented in the history of our culture as a norm. “Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”

One-night stands or a few weeks hook up became far too common, and the surrounding “with care and affection” often was a forgotten victim, along with the baby. Has this been a ‘freedom’ or an impoverishment for women? Does any woman, no matter how frightened and abandoned and alone, in her heart of hearts want to destroy the baby in her womb?

The momentum shift jerked the culture off its center of gravity, and the tilted axis left men, women, and developing babies profoundly undone.

“Love consists of a commitment which limits one’s freedom – it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one’s freedom on behalf of another. Limitation of one’s freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.” Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility

[i] https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/256390/2023-witnessed-continued-attacks-on-pro-life-pregnancy-centers-churches

[ii] https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/fbi-justice-department-twist-federal-law-arrest-charge-pro-life

[iii] After forty years of Rita and I involved in helping women in this predicament, the guy walking or threatening to walk if the woman becomes pregnant is commonplace. The expectation of the man to “do the right thing” is a quaint and naive anachronism.

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Tagged as abortion, Dobbs v Jackson, Plessy v Ferguson, politics, Roe v Wade

December 24, 2023 · 8:54 pm

Christmas Letter 2023

“Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’encircling gloom,

Lead Thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home,

Lead Thou me on!

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me.”

St. John Henry Newman

—– Psalm 46:10 Be still and know that I am God —–

Seems like we just sent one of these out, yet here we are a year later. We’ve recently returned from Thanksgiving with our most hospitable California daughter Meg, her much loved husband Marty, and our West Coast grandkids: sensitive and beautiful Adelaide (now 6!), the magic Charlotte (4), and Koufax the German Shepherd wonder dog who will fetch until our arms give out. Marty’s extended family, as always, made us feel welcome and loved. His brothers and sister with their children fill any house with joy and good conversation. His Mom, Gloria, as always, puts on an unmatched feast in a home full of laughter and love. And any unfortunate side effects are nothing a few weeks at the gym can’t remedy.

We missed this year’s Nutcracker at Stadium Theater for the first time ever with four of our amazing home-schooling daughter Angela’s kids dancing multiple roles and her also much-loved husband, Peter, recruited as one of the fathers in the opening Party Scene that always ushers in Christmas for us. Angela and Meg themselves danced in Nutcrackers in various roles for many years. The performance never ages and enchantment proceeds. Even their most active three-year-old Lil’ Pete, held almost in check by his mom, goes quiet when the curtain goes up. To experience such beauty, color, Tchaikovsky’s timeless music, and the soaring, graceful action as a three-year-old is a wonder we can only imagine and envy We’ll watch the DVD, but we will definitely be there next year with a rebuilt budget for multiple bouquets.

We had an atypical wet summer in paradise this past year, both during our stay on the lake in Weld, Maine, and on our local Aquidneck Island beaches, but that didn’t prevent us from much great family time, swimming in fresh stream fed water of Webb Lake and the healing salt water of Narragansett Bay. A few rounds of body surfing are always exhilarating, and it doesn’t matter if the air is full of water too. The rousing competition of board and card games on the porch overlooking the choppy waters of the lake helps when things get slow on a rainy afternoon. Papa sometimes cheats and always gets caught; justice is quickly and mercilessly administered by sharp-eyed granddaughters.

An even better cloudy day pastime is gratifying the architectural imagination of cousins playing together and creating a detailed construction project – not merely sandcastles, but whole villages and forts, populated with an eclectic unlikely menagerie from horses to a T-rex and a few Lego personalities in primary colors. Often, the steep sand walls are decorated along their elaborate crenellated palisades and towers with scavenged seaweed and stick flags, scallop or quahog shells, and an occasional gull eaten crab. Great anticipation and surprising patience are shown by the abovementioned three-year-old, standing poised and ready with a truck or excavator in hand. Finally, after a half hour of painstaking construction with numerous design challenges resolved by the committee, and secret tunnel entrances are carefully dug under the moat by his doting sisters, the grand citadel is declared ready. After a picture is taken to memorialize the marvel for perpetuity, they signal, “GO!” to the relatively giant one-man wrecking crew. Sometimes a video is taken of pure glee with delight shared as much by the architects and contractors as it is by the demo guy. Not a mole hill sized mound is left standing for the wind and tide to finish off.

So cloudy days do not diminish joy when the afternoon is lighted by glories of children playing.

Fall came, and the wet warm season sparks an autumn splendor more magnificent than the previous year after its summer of drought. The winter will soon be full upon us, but Christmas lights will fend off the darkness, the cold will be defeated by a good woodstove and a well-stocked woodshed, and much-loved music that never fails us will fill our churches, homes and hearts. And joy will not be diminished.

May God’s rich blessings pour down on you and yours with a most Merry Christmas and the new beginnings of 2024,

Category Archives: Faith and Reason

Lion (Part Two)

Lion

Amid the Ruins

Stone Walls, Sycamore Maples, and Other Curiosities (Part Two)

perspectives from a few steps back

The Music of the Spheres

Selvage

Witnesses

Big Waves Break Twice

Christmas Letter 2023

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