It is rare for me to take notes during Mass. But today I did. The priest began his homily by referencing a book that he then encouraged us to read. The book is by Kathleen Norris and is called Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life. The book is described on Amazon as “a personal and moving memoir that resurrects the ancient term acedia, or soul-weariness, and brilliantly explores its relevancy to the modern individual and culture.” Here is an excerpt from an excerpt on the meaning of the term and its significance in illuminating the nature of a struggle with spiritual despondency:
At its Greek root, the word acedia means the absence of care. The person afflicted by acedia refuses to care or is incapable of doing so. When life becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding, acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine: you know the pain is there, yet can’t rouse yourself to give a damn. That it hurts to care is borne out in etymology, for care derives from an Indo-European word meaning “to cry out,” as in a lament. Caring is not passive, but an assertion that no matter how strained and messy our relationships can be, it is worth something to be present, with others, doing our small part. Care is also required for the daily routines that acedia would have us suppress or deny as meaningless repetition or too much bother.
The first reading at Mass today was from Ecclesiastes:
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow. All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has already been, in the ages before us. The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.
Right after explaining acedia and reminding us of the first reading, the priest said:
“I am a celibate priest. Have you ever heard of anything more stupid than that?”
It was a striking thing to say. He continued, “Genesis tells us that we are made for community… Ecclesiastes tells us that ‘all is vanity’… I could have made a lot more money. But when you become conscious of emptiness and brokenness and then come to see this emptiness and brokenness in the light of the gospel, we begin to pray earnestly the prayer of the psalmist who prays: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
Briefly this priest discussed Alcoholics Anonymous and how the process of moving from brokenness to freedom in fellowship with others that is so emphasized in the Twelve-Step Program is really quite like every soul’s journey of return to God.
The Christian message is foolishness to the world explains St. Paul:
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom. […] For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
G.K. Chesterton, in his chapter “The Paradoxes of Christianity” wrote, “It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.
This is important to bear in mind when reading the lives of the Saints. For example, St. Teresa of Avila writes: “The Lord told me once that it wasn’t obedience if I wasn’t resolved to suffer, that I should fix my eyes on what He suffered, and that all would be easy.” This profound desire for communion with God lead her to resolve, “I need no rest; what I need is crosses.”
Searching for purpose in this life, we often aim for success of the worldly variety. Every day I am asked dozens of time what I will do next in this life. “The human mind may devise many plans, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will be established,” says a proverb.
I am a flower quickly fading
Here today and gone tomorrow
A wave tossed in the ocean
Vapor in the wind
Still You hear me when I’m calling
Lord, You catch me when I’m falling
And You’ve told me who I am
I am Yours, I am Yours
– Casting Crowns lyrics “Who Am I?”
It is easy to doubt God’s purposes. They are so foolish in a dark world that has not been illumined by the light of Christ. But Christ has come, is come, and will come again. And, as the priest today concluded, “[A life in Christ] surpasses any other ways in which we could move toward a fullness of life.”
This semester I am taking a class called “War and Interpretation”. According to the syllabus, “[…We] begin with the assumption that war is a natural human activity and, as with all such activities, has a variegated historical, political, and cultural significance. […] The objective is to provide an opportunity to engage the intellect with several distinct perspectives on a major expression of one of the constant attributes of human nature.”
While my political science degree requirements include: International Relations; Comparative Politics; and Research Methods, Henry Adams said, “Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.” My friend Thomas Cliplef says, “Generally, I find [the quantitative] side of political science very boring as it tells me nothing about the human condition in relation to politics. It doesn’t attempt to grasp the internal perspectives of the leadership or the citizens within a political community. The qualitative or philosophical side of political science does just this.”
And so, when I am annoyed with the efforts to beat out any normativity in students in a statistics class, I find it refreshing to retreat to my class on war.
Here are some of the important things that Huizinga says about play:
– First and foremost, then, all play is voluntary activity.” (7) – As regards its formal characteristics, all students lay stress on the disinterestedness of play. (9) – Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration. (9) – [Play] creates order, is order. (10) – Play has a tendency to be beautiful. (10) – All play has its rules. (11) – The function of play in the higer forms which concern us here can largely be derived from the two basic aspects under which we meet it: as a contest for something or as a representation of something. (13) – Let us enumerate once more the characteristics we deemed proper to play. It is an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules, freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility. The play-mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm, and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion. A feeling of exhalation and tension accompanies the action, mirth and relaxation follow. (132) – More often than not [the task of a hero] will be tackled as the result of a challenge, or a vow, a promise or whim of the beloved. All these motifs carry us straight back to agnostic play. (133)
Huizinga analyzes play in language, law, war, knowing, poetry, mythopoiesis [myth-making], philosophy, art, and contemporary civilization. What I found most interesting is the relationship between Huizinga’s thoughts on play and those of Romano Guardini in the his chapter “The Playfulness of the Liturgy” within his larger work The Spirit of the Liturgy. Huizinga makes very brief mention of Guardini’s work, but it was enough of a mention to spark my interest in considering the relationship between the play-element in its essence, at which Huizinga aims to strike, and the play-element in the liturgy and in the sacraments, that is Guardini’s focus.
What Huizinga seems to emphasize that Guardini does not is the voluntary nature of play. There is a strong emphasis on the freedom and spontaneity in play, combined with a lack of necessity. What Guardini seems to emphasize that Huizinga does not about the essence of play is that is it, at once, meaningful and purposeless. He says that “to be at play, or to fashion a work of art in God’s sight–not to create, but to exist–such is the essence of the liturgy.”
Early on, Huizinga discusses the nature and significance of play, from children’s games to sacred performances:
The sacred performance is more than an actualization in appearance only, a sham reality; it is also more than a symbolical actualization – it is a mystical one. In it, something invisible and inactual takes beautiful, actual, holy form. The participants in the rite are convinced that the action actualizes and effects a definite beatification, brings about an order of things higher than that in which they customarily live. All the same this ‘actualization by representation’ still retains the formal characteristics of play in every respect. It is played out or performed within a ground that is literally ‘staked out’, and played moreover as a feast, i.e. in mirth and freedom.
For such a general description, the above passage certainly coincides with the theology of the Eucharist. In the Blessed Sacrament, the invisible God takes “beautiful, actual, holy form”. According to the catechism, “the power of the words and the action of Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit, make sacramentally present under the species of bread and wine Christ’s body and blood, his sacrifice offered on the cross once for all.”
Huizinga continues:
“The rite produces the effect which is then not so much shown figuratively as actually reproduced in the action. The function of the rite, therefore, is far from being merely imitative; it causes the worshippers to participate in the sacred happening itself.”
This makes sense with the re-incarnation of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Christ becomes present again, not represented, but re-present “in the flesh” in the mystery of the Eucharist.
The congregation participates fully in the sacred happening. Consider the words of the priest: “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” After the institution narrative, the congregation says the Memorial Acclamation: “We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your resurrection, until you come again.” The priest acting In persona Christi constitutes what Huizinga references Marett as calling “‘a helping-out of the action.'”
Staying focused on why this matters at all, let’s entertain Huizinga’s conviction about the centrality of play in civilization. He says, “For many years the conviction has grown upon me that civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.” He argues this forcefully saying, “Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.”
If Huizinga is right about this, then he is offering an important insight into human nature. We humans are not only knowers, makers, producers, consumers, etc. We are players. This sort of thinking inspires me to remember what my friends and family often remind me: “You are a human being, not a human doing!” This is where Guardini’s analysis is helpful because he strikes at the nature of man as being ordered to live in relationship with God. The meaningfulness lies in the soul’s nature “not to create, but to exist” This has meaning for understanding human dignity apart from achievement.
Guardini says:
It is in this very aspect of the liturgy that its didactic aim is to be found, that of teaching the soul not to see purposes everywhere, not to be too conscious of the end it wishes to attain, not to be desirous of being over-clever and grown-up, but to understand simplicity in life. The soul must learn to abandon, at least in prayer, the restlessness of purposeful activity; it must learn to waste time for the sake of God, and to be prepared for the sacred game with sayings and thoughts and gestures, without always immediately asking ‘why?’ and ‘wherefore?’ It must learn not to be continually yearning to do something, to attack something, to accomplish something useful, but to play the divinely ordained game of the liturgy in liberty and beauty and holy joy before God.
It is natural, when discussing play, to consider what can be learned from children. “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 18:3) In discussing child’s play, Guardini explains what he means by saying that play is purposeless, yet meaningful:
The child, when it plays, does not aim at anything. It has no purpose. It does not want to do anything but to exercise its youthful powers, pour forth its life in an aimless series of movements, words and actions, and by this to develop and to realize itself more fully; all of which is purposeless, but full of meaning nevertheless, the significance lying in the unchecked revelation of this youthful life in thoughts and words and movements and actions, in the capture and expression of its nature, and in the fact of its existence. And because it does not aim at anything in particular, because it streams unbroken and spontaneously forth, its utterance will be harmonious, its form clear and fine; its expression will of itself become picture and dance, rhyme, melody and song. That is what play means; it is life, pouring itself forth without an aim, seizing upon riches from its own abundant store, significant through the fact of its existence. It will be beautiful, too, if it is left to itself, and if no futile advice and pedagogic attempts at enlightenment foist upon it a host of aims and purposes, thus denaturizing it.
These two authors may be discussing play a bit differently. I am still not sure about the essence of play, though I agree with the various characteristics that are enumerated.
With the emphasis on existence, we can return to Huizinga’s reference of Aristotle with regard to play. Aristotle, discussing music (which Huizinga places in the category of play), says that “music conduces to virtue in so far as, like gymnastics, it makes the body fit, breeds a certain ethos and enables us to enjoy things in the proper way[.]”
On this note, a friend of mine recently asked, referring to our mutual friend, why this friend would feel obligated to go to Mass every single day. “As the body needs food, so the soul needs food,” I said. Specifically, I meant the Bread of Heaven.
Recently I read a quotation from Cardinal Basil Hume in the Mystery of the Incarnation. He writes:
The meaning of things, and their purpose,
Is in part now hidden
But shall in the end become clear.
The choice is between
The Mystery and the absurd.
Participating in the Holy Mass is an opportunity to enter into the Mystery. The daily grind is what has my heart echoing St. Teresa of Avila’s words: “Lord, what can I do here? What has the servant to do with her Lord? What has earth to do with heaven?” But then, at the Mass we pray. The priest says, “And so, with all the choirs of angels in heaven we proclaim your glory and join in their unending hymn of praise…” The congregation joins saying:
Holy, Holy, Holy Lord,
God of hosts.
Heaven and
earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who
comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.
There is a distinct presence in the moment, combined with participation in eternity. The universal Church is praying and there seems to be a timelessness. Before receiving the Blessed Sacrament we say, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” Here we are echoing the words of the Roman centurion in the Gospel of Matthew. And so, from a return to biblical accounts, to “heaven kissing earth” in the Eucharist, to the foretaste of heaven through joining the choirs of angels, we participate in this “great processional order of existence in a sacred play, in and through which [each participant] actualizes anew, or ‘recreates’, the events represented and thus helps to maintain the cosmic order.”
One of my favorite parts of the Mass goes as follows:
Priest: The Lord be with you. People: And with your spirit. Priest: Lift up your hearts. People: We lift them up to the Lord. Priest: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. People: It is right and just.
What I like so much about this part is that it inspires me to contemplate the meaning of justice. Also, thinking of justice in terms of the thanks due to God according to the dignity of His Nature and Goodness inspires a good notion of justice to imitate in community with others. Pope Benedict has written some interesting things about justice and resurrection.
According to this article summarizing the arguments, Fr. James Schall writes:
As the pope cites him, [Theodore] Adorno maintains that, even though he does not believe it, the only ‘logical’ way that there ever could be true justice in this actual world would be for there to be something like the resurrection of the body. Clearly he is right. There is, no doubt, something amusingly ironic about a Marxist
philosopher appearing prominently in a papal encyclical as an upholder of the basic Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body.
At the end of Huizinga’s book, he says:
So that by a devious route we have reached the following conclusion: real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a certain play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted. Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms. Hence, the cheat or the spoil-sport shatters civilization itself. To be a sound culture-creating force this play-element must be pure. It must not consist in the darkening or debasing of standards set up by reason, faith or humanity. It must not be a false seeming, a masking of political purposes behind the illusion or genuine play-forms. True play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself, and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration.
Do we play purely? Is it true that “the liturgy has laid down the serious rules of the sacred game which the soul plays before God”? Could being “spiritual but not religious” be akin to being a “spoil-sport”? Is constituting an end-in-itself the very essence of play? If play is marked by its set apartness from ordinary life and play is a good-in-itself, then is play the aim of life? Is leisure the “basis of culture” as Joseph Pieper called it? (In the same vein as Aristotle, as Huizinga shows.) Can the play-element help us to focus on the goodness and beauty of existence? For human persons, does the goodness of our existence lie (or live?) within rather than outside of us?
“Now what is the meaning of that which exists? That it should exist and should be the image of God the Everlasting. And what is the meaning of that which is alive? That it should live, bring forth its essence, and bloom as a natural manifestation of the living God.” – Romano Guardini
This semester, I am taking a class called “Introduction to International Relations.” This class is a requirement for my degree in political science at the University of Calgary. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith makes a compelling argument against compulsory classes:
“The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability. It seems to presume perfect wisdom and virtue in the one order, and the greatest weakness and folly in the other. Where the masters, however, really perform their duty, there are no examples, I believe, that the greater part of the students ever neglect theirs. No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given.“
During this first week of classes, professors have been quick to lower the standards. Examples of this include such statements as:
“Please don’t ask me for an extension, but you will anyway.”
“Instead of refusing to accept late assignments, you will instead lose three points per day for your late assignment.”
“This was part of your assigned reading, if you bothered at all to look at it.”
“Most of you do not want to be here, but are required to take this class.”
The professors who are the most demanding consistently command the greatest respect. Additionally, as Adam Smith notes, students also tend to rise to the challenge.
On excellent professor of mine said, “In this often impersonal, bureaucratic university, I want you to know that you students in this class are my primary responsibility for this semester and that I am available to guide you to the best of my ability throughout this course.”
This comment inspires students to strive for excellence and the students have a teacher whose example is worthy of imitation.
Since I have only taken two classes in my first introductory course in International Relations, I do not know very much about this sub-discipline. And so, this brief reflection is based on my initial impression of International Relations as a field of studies.
I perused the assigned textbook. From the outset, the authors say that they prefer to use the term “world politics” instead of international relations. What is politics? Since politics is derived from the Greek word polis, politics was classically and fundamentally about the affairs of the polis, or city-state (as we tend to translate it). What then is meant by “world politics”? The term in Greek would be “cosmopolis.”
According to Wikipedia, the source of this phrase can be traced to Diogenes of Sinope who, when asked where he came from, answered, “I am a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês).”
“Cosmopolitan” is defined as follows:
“Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. Cosmopolitanism may entail some sort of world government or it may simply refer to more inclusive moral, economic, and/or political relationships between nations or individuals of different nations. A person who adheres to the idea of cosmopolitanism in any of its forms is called a cosmopolitan or cosmopolite.”
While the professed purpose of the class is to provide students with an overview of several ideologies in international relations, I wonder about the extent to which the textbook being centered around “world politics” favors the cosmopolitan one.
Very often the problems of international relations are presented as questions of “either/or” when the truer account likely involves the word “and.” (E.g., Individual AND community.) If we resist systematic thinking, we are likely to find that the good of the individual and the common good are not actually in such severe tension as we might expect.
Edmund Burke grasps this interplay when he discusses “little platoons“:
“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”
Perhaps there could be an implicit “and” between the words “world politics.” Eric Voegelin begins his six volume work Order and History as follows:
“God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being. The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience. It is a datum of experience insofar as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience insofar as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it.”
Voegelin goes on to discuss the nature of human existence acknowledging that “man is not a self-contained spectator”, [but rather…] “an actor, playing a part in the drama of being and, through the brute fact of his existence, committed to play it without knowing what it is.”
Aiming to consider how “world politics” might make any sense, I began to consider that perhaps “world”, as an abstract noun relates to the mystery, to the idea beyond our full grasp and “politics” is connected to our direct experience, to our participation in “little platoons”.
Peter Kreeft makes a helpful distinction between abstract and concrete nouns that I find relevant to this discussion. He says:
“Humanity” does not go with “God” (“God and humanity”) because “God” and “man” are concrete nouns, like “dog” and “cat”, while “divinity” and “humanity” are abstract nouns, like “caninity” and “felinity” or “dogginess” and “cattiness.”
From Voegelin talking about the “quaternarian structure” of being including “God and man, world and society”, he seems to be stressing the totality of being including the immanent and the transcendent.
On the first day of class, the professor discussed certain theories of International Relations, much like the overview given in the textbook. He mentioned such theories as idealism, realism, and Marxism. What is meant by theory? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology the word is derived from Greek and means “looking at”. Upon reading this, I immediately recollected C.S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed“. In this essay, Lewis draws a distinction between “looking at” and “looking along” an experience.
I encourage you to read the excellent two-page essay. Here is an excerpt:
As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the “true” or “valid” experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted. It has been assumed without discussion that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people, but to anthropologists; that if you want the true account of sexual love you must go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you want to understand some “ideology” (such as medieval chivalry or the nineteenth-century idea of a “gentleman”), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists.
It seems that the entire aim of international relations is to “look at” ideologies. But we are not outside of international relations and beyond ideology. We are participants in the world. What would it be to “look along” international relations? Does a United Nations bureaucrat truly “look along” INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS or, does he (at best) “look along” perhaps interpersonal relations? It is easy to employ anthropomorphic language to abstract entities, but what do we learn about politics then? What do we learn from this about human nature and the affairs of the city?
As Lewis argues, “looking along” must precede “looking at” because “You discount them [the phenomena in question] in order to think more accurately. But you can’t think at all – and therefore, of course, can’t think accurately – if you have nothing to think about.”
Furthermore, he maintains:
“[It] is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters. You go on explaining a thing without knowing what it is. That is why a great deal of contemporary thought is, strictly speaking, thought about nothing – all the apparatus of thought busily working in a vacuum.”
It is quite early for me to make any judgments about International Relations (or World Politics), but these are the initial issues that come to mind.
Rather than “either/or” approaches, let us try to insert the word “and” in order to gain a broader view.
If we are assigned the task of choosing “one system” through which to “look at” an issue in current affairs, I do not see how this would be a very profitable exercise. Eric Voegelin was paraphrased in an Introduction to his book The New Science of Politics as encouraging people with the words, “Don’t be an Ism-ist!” When it seems that International Relations becomes a course in Ism-ism, I will try to resist the constraint of system construction and adoption. It is a temptation to make this substitution for thinking.
The textbook for my class even defines a theory in this manner. It says:
“A theory is a kind of simplifying device that allows you to decide which facts matter and which do not.”
The world is more complex and we are in it and so we cannot “look at” things perfectly, but we ought to try to sharpen the vision we get through the lens of our experiences of “looking along.”
Today I was discussing war and battle with some classmates. We had been reflecting on the idea that a soldier does not choose to die for his country, but rather lays down his life for a friend, for the guy next to him. “Looking at” war and “looking along” battle offer two different perspectives and both are important to gaining insight into the broader picture.
Dr. John von Heyking succinctly says, “Politics really is about the myriad of one-to-one relationships among people getting things done; politics is about friends helping friends.” International Relations seems be to ordinary politics what macro economics is to micro economics. Ultimately, the former in both cases is merely an effort to understand the aggregate of experiences “looked along” in the experiences of the latter.
Politics is about human action. Only humans act. Relating is a human action performed between persons, not between nations.
And so ends a hasty analysis of Week 1. I invite your comments.
“My brethren, show no partiality as you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.
For if a man with gold rings and in fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in,
and you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, ‘Have a seat here, please,’ while you say to the poor man, ‘Stand there,’ or, ‘Sit at my feet,’
have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?
Listen, my beloved brethren. Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him?” James 2:1-5
In a room there is a common temptation to scan the room for the so-called important people. The failure to resist this temptation often leads to someone dismissing one conversation partner so that he or she can “work the room.”
A friend with whom I volunteered at a lofty dinner event lamented that one of the other student volunteers turned her back on her mid-sentence to shake the hand of someone who she determined to be more worthy of her time.
Sometimes it seems that adults will follow the person with the most dignified title or position in a foolish manner comparable to how small children will all chase after a soccer ball in a cluster.
The above reading challenges us to recognize the equality in the sanctity of each person. While we can respect certain offices and authorities, ultimately we should be able to shake someone’s hand in a similar spirit of respect and charity whether that person is the prime minister or a person outcasted by much of society.
Mother Teresa was able to do her good work because she said, “I see the face of Christ in one of his more distressing disguises.”
A friend of mine named Laura Locke reflects on this topic very beautifully. She writes:
“Why is it that we so often feel drawn to people on the other end of the spectrum? We give our attention to the powerful, the good-looking, the rich, the talented, the confident ones who are very successful at looking after themselves. I guess we naturally lean towards people whom we secretly strive to be – and who strives to be an outcast? But Jesus invites us to follow in his footsteps, to walk with him down the dusty back roads, seeking the people that normally garner no one’s attention.”
The gospel is filled with paradoxes. This is true of philosophy also and very untrue of ideology.
It is interesting to reflect on the different experiences of community from an informal gathering sharing coffee and donuts with strangers after church to the experience of attending a political convention which tends to consist in swapping business cards and credentials. There is something to learn from both and really from any experience with others. However, I think it is important to balance these sorts of experiences so as to not become blinded by the partiality mentioned in scripture.
At every mass the congregation says, “I confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters that I have sinned through my own fault….” Whereas, at political events we tend to essentially find a way to say, “I profess to you my colleagues and acquaintances that I have succeeded through my own achievement…”
The more that we derive our sense of identity from what we do rather than who we are, the more challenging it is for us to see the instrinic dignity of others.
Young people are often encouraged to network so that they can “get ahead”, but this seems to be a perverse notion of relationship. Instead, let us be encouraged to love one another so that we can get to heaven. I think that the authenticity of the latter will bear more fruit both in this life and the next.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) annually releases statistics on induced abortions in Canada. Alberta has the greatest disparity in Canada between clinic abortions and hospital abortions. According to clinic manager Kim Cholewa, clinics bill Alberta Health Services approximately $1,600 to terminate a pregnancy.[i] In 2009, according to the CIHI, 78.6% of abortions in Alberta are performed in for-profit, private clinics.[ii] Multiplying the cost that clinics charge Alberta Health Services to perform abortions, we have private clinics being funded to the tune of $16,534,400 for their activity based on 2009 numbers.[iii]
In addition to significant government funding to private clinics when healthcare is already consuming 39% of the provincial budget,[iv] there is also a problem with disclosure in other jurisdictions. For example, clinic reporting of both the numbers of abortions and the cost in British Columbia is voluntary. There is no legislative requirement to report, despite the clinics being funded by the Government of British Columbia. The lack of disclosure from clinics means that the extent to which the government is publicly funding these clinics remains unknown to taxpayers.
According to the CIHI report, “Hospitals are mandated by their provincial/territorial ministry of health to report all hospital activity (not limited to abortions); therefore coverage of abortions performed in Canadian hospitals can be considered to be complete. However, there is no such legal requirement for clinics to report their activity (reporting is voluntary) [and this is why data is often incomplete].”[v]
Clinics that are independent, have no obligation to report their data, and that operate for-profit should not be funded with the limited provincial healthcare dollars.
If private clinics continue to be funded with public dollars, then they should be held to the same reporting and disclosure standards as hospitals.
But I ask: How would you reallocate the 16.5 million dollars annually being spent by the Alberta government on abortions?
AmandaAction 