The Changing of the Guard and the Sacred Liturgy

The summer after my 8th grade year, my class took a week-long trip to Washington, D.C. We did fundraisers all through the previous year to gather up the money to go, and as a little history buff, someone who had been able to name all the presidents since age 6, I was just a wee bit excited. The Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence--I was in Nerd-vana!

We moved at a break-neck pace, stopping barely long enough at any place to snap a few pictures and hear a few paragraphs from a tour guide. But one of the sights that sticks most clearly in my mind, almost 20 years later, is the Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns. If you've never seen it, here's a clip.

This is quite simply beautiful. The precision of their movements is almost mechanical. Every step and gesture is crisp with solemnity and respect. And this is a perfect example of an oft-forgotten truth: solemn does not mean somber, even at a tomb. C.S. Lewis says it well in his Preface to Paradise Lost regarding the Old English word solempne:

Like solemn it implies the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary. But unlike solemn it does not suggest gloom, oppression, or austerity. The ball in the first act of Romeo and Juliet was a ‘solemnity’. The feast at the beginning of Gawain and the Green Knight is very much a solemnity. A great mass by Mozart or Beethoven is as much a solemnity in its hilarious gloria as in its poignant crucifixus est. Feasts are, in this sense, more solemn than fasts. Easter is solempne, Good Friday is not. The Solempne is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for a pomp–and the very fact that pompous is now used only in a bad sense measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of a 'solemnity’. To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people to enjoy them; in an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in, you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in. Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connextion with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar’s head at a Christmas feast–all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual… . You are to expect pomp. You are to 'assist’, as the French say, at a great festal action.

When I read this, I immediately think of the Mass (as Lewis does, when he mentions the celebrant approaching the altar). The Sacred Liturgy is intended to have just this kind of solemnity: an air of being set apart (which is the root meaning of holy). It is meant to take us outside of ourselves and into the presence of God and the communion of saints. When I run across people who complain that the Mass is "stiff" or even call it "empty ritual," I think of this passage from Lewis, and I wonder that these very same people would most likely witness the Changing of the Guard and think it beautiful for the very reasons they think the Mass not beautiful! Why is that? Why the double standard? An interesting question to consider. Thoughts?

"You are a Soul"? Nope.

There is a quote often attributed to C.S. Lewis that goes something akin to:

"You are not a body. You are a soul. You merely have a body."

Lewis never said it, but that's beside the point. I have heard and read far too many Christians repeating this phrase approvingly, tweeting it and posting it on Facebook and otherwise passing it along as some pearl of profound wisdom. But if you're a Christian, this is bad theology. Let me explain.

When you say something like "I am a soul, I only have a body," you've split the body and soul into two different things, with the soul being the really real thing, and the body to be a mere appendage or tool, a vehicle for getting around, a spacesuit to allow the soul to temporarily survive in this alien environment. You're a ghost in a machine, as Rene Descartes would say. But is that the case? Is that what things are like?

There is a profound and obvious difference between the experience of stubbing your toe and the experience of crashing your car. Your car is a vehicle, accidental to and outside of yourself; when you crash while inside of it, you feel its impact, but when the fender crumples, you don't crumple, and you don't experience a sensation of pain along with it. And when you stub your toe, your first thought isn't, "Dang, I hope the insurance covers the damage to my toe. Is the toe repair shop open on Sundays? Should I call a toe truck?" (I couldn't resist!) No, your thought is something akin to, "OWW!!! MY TOE!!!" One is related to you; one is you.

I would guess that people are drawn to this "You are a soul" phrase because it sounds spiritual and holy and ethereal and mysterious. But such thinking actually does harm to the idea of a human being. It divides us against ourselves. It alienates us from our own bodies. It destroys our integrity.

The classic Catholic definition of the human person, as laid out by St. Thomas using the philosophy of Aristotle, maintains the distinctiveness of the soul and body while insisting on their absolute unity and dependence on each other. A person is not two substances glued together, like an arts & crafts project; a person is the combination of two principles making a natural whole, sort of like a lyric and a melody making a song. The soul is what makes this collections of organs and tissues into a living human body; a body gives the spirit a corporeal existence and makes it a human soul, as opposed to some angel-like thing. A person is an ensouled body, or an embodied soul. When a person dies, and the soul separates from the body, each is incomplete. A body without its soul is a corpse, and a soul without its body is a spirit eagerly awaiting the Resurrection.

There's an important point: denigrating the body denigrates the doctrine of the Resurrection. It's amazing how often we forget it! We think of our eternal destiny as living with God forever in heaven (ideally), but for some reason there is a tendency to think of it as a purely spiritual existence. What about the "resurrection from the dead, and the life of the world to come"? Our destiny is precisely an embodied destiny, because as human beings we are by nature embodied creatures; that will not fundamentally change at the end of time. God likes what's he done with His design of us.

There is a great moral danger hidden in the erroneous view of "You are a soul": the potential of thinking,"Well, if I really am only my soul, and my body is just a temporary husk, then what does it matter to my eternal destiny what I do with my body? Why shouldn't I eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow I'll simply die and be rid of this hunk of flesh? Party time! Bring on the booze and the dames!" Certain groups of Gnostics in the early Church took to this way of thinking, and promoted (or at least didn't discourage) hedonism. Don't go down that dark road, my friends.

What you do with your body affects you, because it is you who does it. You make the decision, you do the act, you suffer the consequences. You are your body, AND you are your soul, because both are required to make you. When you die, the two are separated, and pine for each other. And on the Last Day, your soul will be rejoined to your body and you will meet your eternal destiny as you, whole, once again.

This Scares Me

I read a bone-chilling article this morning (nod of acknowledgement to Mike Flynn for posting the link). The terror began right at the headline: "So what if abortion ends life?" If you have the stomach for it, let me walk you through the main points. (Article quotations are in italics.)

In the first paragraph we read:

"I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice."

OK... what? I can't imagine what philosophical underpinnings could support this view. (She never does defend her position: lots of asserting, no supporting.) I suppose she's intentionally trying to be provocative. And if so, she's succeeded, but not surprisingly. Most morally reprehensible statements are provocative.

Next she presents us with her main principle:

"Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always."

The author merely asserts this principle without trying to prove or support it in any way, and makes the typical pro-abortion plea to "life is complicated." But let's address these "complicated" questions. How can any human being have any fewer basic, starting-point, natural rights than any other human being? What makes the mother of the unborn child "the boss" in such an absolute way? My boss doesn't have the right to kill me. Why should the mother's life and desires "automatically trump" the rights of her child? Is the child's status as "non-autonomous," presumably meaning "unable to decide or care for itself," the factor which renders it right-less? How is the child in utero any different from a one-year old (or even some 16-year olds) in that respect? Does the author think the mother's rights "trump" those of her children to the point of infanticide? I would be interested to see her explain herself--I know it's not the point of her article, but perhaps it should have been.

Well, we have to make choices, she says, and they're always difficult:

"But we make choices about life all the time in our country. We make them about men and women in other nations. We make them about prisoners in our penal system. We make them about patients with terminal illnesses and accident victims. We still have passionate debates about the justifications of our actions as a society, but we don’t have to do it while being bullied around by the vague idea that if you say we’re talking about human life, then the jig is up, rights-wise."

Here the author points out other instances in which society takes life, be it war, capital punishment, or (apparently) euthanasia, and argues that, since the conversation doesn't stop at "You can't take a human life" in these cases, it ought not stop there in the case of abortion. Which, of course, is a straw man argument, because the argument against abortion has other essential pieces to it. The major premise in the argument against abortion is not, "It is always morally wrong to take human life," but rather (as Blessed Pope John Paul II put it in Evangelium Vitae) "The deliberate decision to deprive an innocent human being of his life is always morally evil and can never be licit either as an end in itself or as a means to a good end." That's the argument, dear author, which applies to all of your above-mentioned cases, and applies differently. Address that. 

But she would rather not. Instead she'd rather continue to arbitrarily assert the rights of one person over another.

"And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing."

How simple it is to sacrifice other people's lives for your own ends! Of course, if someone were, say, to want the author's job, or her car, or her wallet, and see hers as "a life worth sacrificing," the author would naturally object that this is unfair, immoral, unconscionable, etc. Would she find any comfort in her would-be murderer telling her, "Please, understand, I believe you are a human life... but for what I want, for what I feel is right for me and my circumstances, you must be sacrificed"? Would such a statement lead her to call this a morally acceptable act? I doubt it.

It used to be a commonly accepted principle, stated in one of our nation's founding documents, that "all men are created equal." The author of this article denies that. I hesitate to speculate at her motives, but I can't help but wonder what the direction of her thinking is: does her desire to legitimize abortion lead her to conclude that "all life is not equal," or does she first hold this maxim then conclude from there that it's morally acceptable to "sacrifice" children for the sake of their mother's desires?

There seems to be a trend in some sectors of public thought away from reasonable decision-making--there is a revolt against rationality. How else can you describe an argument that says, "Yeah, this is contradictory--so what? Whatcha gonna do about it? This how I feel, so this is what I'm gonna do." Ah, there it is! The appeal to feeling and desire as the governing factor in morality! "Life is just so complicated, who can know these things, so let's do what we feel like." They've fallen to David Hume's assertion that "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions." We don't let our intellects guide our desires; we let our desires determine how we will rationalize our choices. But why bother rationalizing in the first place if reason doesn't decide the matter? Doesn't that just make it a charade? And if we let desire decide the day, then what actually ends up deciding the day is not desire itself, but the size and strength of the one desiring. Whoever can enforce their feelings gets their way. Might makes right. Nowhere is this more evident than in the statement that a mother, whose child is more dependent on her than any thing that depends on any other thing, can kill that child if she desires. Why? 'Cause she's got him right where she wants him.

This scares me. C.S. Lewis would call such thinking "the poison of subjectivism" which will "end our species and damn our souls." God forbid such thinking should become commonplace. But I fear it has.

Bigger on the Inside

If you ask a fan of Doctor Who to describe the Doctor's time machine, the TARDIS, in one sentence, they would very likely use the phrase that most characters in the show use upon first encountering it: "It's bigger on the inside." Externally inspected, it appears to be an ordinary British policeman's box from the 1960s; but, thanks to the technological feats of the people of the planet Gallifrey, inside it is nearly limitless in size, holding guest rooms and wardrobes and libraries and swimming pools and laboratories and, for an engine, an artificial black hole. It's representative of the show's whole charm: things aren't what they appear, they have a deeper secret to be uncovered--a silly little man with a blue box turns out to be a 1,200-year old Time Lord with the most powerful machine in the universe at his disposal. But to discover that, you have to trust him. You have to step through the door to learn that it's bigger on the inside.

I always thought that phrase sounded familiar. Then I remembered I'd heard it before! In two places, actually. One is in C.S. Lewis' book The Last Battle, from the Chronicles of Narnia series. The book's characters come to a walled garden, but once they enter its gates they find it's an endlessly expansive world in itself, "bigger on the inside." From the outside the boundaries of the garden could be clearly seen; but from the inside, the characters discover they can forever go "further up and further in." Lucy notes that once, in our own world, there was a cave that was bigger on the inside, too--meaning the cave in Bethlehem where Christ was born, where a little manger held a tiny babe who was the infinite God. With both the garden and the cave, you have to enter to discover it's bigger on the inside.

The other place I had encountered this phrase was in G.K. Chesterton's book The Catholic Church and Conversion. Chesterton says that the non-believer or non-Catholic will look at the Church and see an admittedly large and old human organization, but nothing more--no different from the nation of China, for example. But if you enter its doors you step into 2,000 years of tradition and belief, and a spiritual history that stretches back to the Garden of Eden; you step into the heavenly liturgy itself through the bridge of the Holy Mass; you come into the very presence of God in the Blessed Sacrament, itself an example of an apparently small thing holding an infinite reality within it. When you approach the Church and its mysteries with the eyes of faith, you are able to perceive it in all its glory and majesty and wonder. Thus, "when the convert has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside."

A madman with a blue box. A lion with a gated garden. A babe in a cave. A small wafer of bread. Each contains a secret: they're bigger on the inside. But to see it, you have to trust them.

Four Ways of Speaking

Philosophy and theology deal with thick, heavy, dense subjects. It’s hard enough half the time to understand the question being asked, let alone the answer you get: “What is being? What is nature? What is the nature of being? What is essence of nature? What is the essence of God’s nature? Is existence itself God’s nature?” I’m guessing some of you went cross-eyed and passed out briefly mid-way through that series of questions. Hope you didn’t hit your head on anything. Point is: this stuff is hard.

Some people have a talent for engaging these topics in an easy and sensible way… and some do not. In reading different thinkers over the years, I’ve developed a theory:

There are four ways of communicating:

1. Speaking simply on simple matters. This is what most of our speech is like most of the time. Simple declarative statements: “She pushed me,” “God is good,” “That’s my coat,” or “Daniel Tosh isn’t funny.” No brain-busting concepts or unintelligible jargon.

2. Speaking complexly on simple matters. Here, though, we move to a level where we’re still not dealing with brain-busting concepts, but people for some reason feel the need to gussy it up; it’s the linguistic equivalent of wearing a tuxedo to a tailgate party. You’d find this exemplified by college sophomores:

Student: “Professor, can you elucidate for those of us currently present what precisely was the major precipitating factor for the conflict in question?”
Professor: “Do you mean, ‘How did the war start?’”

A more amusing example is found in this video, where Stephen Fry plays a bombastic barber.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J691coIfFvs

3. Speaking complexly on complex matters. Now we reach the level I was initially talking about. We’re dealing with brain-busting concepts, and for many it takes a boatload of special terms, words borrowed from other languages, and circumlocutions (i.e. “my father’s parents’ other son” instead of “my uncle”) to try to get the point across. For example:

“For the very early ancient Israelites, their Weltanschauung entailed a monolatric cosmology in which other deities were recognized while only one was honored with cultic worship.”

Now, there are simpler ways to say this (“The Israelites at first believed in a world where many gods existed, but they worshipped only one”), but they wouldn’t quite capture the content in the same way. It’s no crime to write or speak this way; most of us don’t have the ability to go beyond it. But some do….

4. Speaking simply on complex matters. This level is reserved for those true geniuses who are able to speak about difficult topics in a way that’s easy to understand without leaving out anything essential. Here are some of my favorite examples:
“Our hearts were made for you, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in thee.” St. Augustine captures the essence of human desire and God as the fulfillment of that desire in one simple and beautiful sentence.

“We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” C.S. Lewis here deftly points to a truth our politicians would do well to consider.

(I can’t leave out this example from Lewis, since it’s apropos to our subject: “Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”)

"When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." There are about 10 billion G.K. Chesterton quotes I could have chosen… so, yeah, I think we need a few more:

“To say that everybody is responsible means that nobody is responsible.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

"Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?" (on motherhood)

Anyway, you get the point, I hope. Be thankful when you come across those gifted people who are able to be so clear. They sure can make life easier.