The South is in My Blood!

Continued reflections on LK 10:25 from last night's study, via Pope Benedict XVI's 'Jesus of Nazareth'.

There is a lot to be said for reflection when one reads. In fact, there is nothing to be said without it. The last time I was reading Jesus of Nazareth I found it awesome in the closest etymological sense of the word. Which was the antithesis of what I thought the first time a read it, I think I even called it 'not very profound'. Again, however, I am struck speechless and left with joy after reflecting on its contents: the Gospel.

It's ironic, really. I had wanted something akin to Ratzinger's Curia days but instead I got his "personal search for the face of Jesus". I had wanted dissertation, I received parable. It makes sense because dissertations make use of scientific (in the classical understanding of the word) structures bolted on to the deposit of faith and we usually judge them by their fidelity to that original deposit. What is more, faith doesn't demand the full reigns of man's intellect when we study theology, instead, they are shared and reason is able with some liberty to ascent with its own wings, so to speak. How else can we speak of error in the Church, other than this liberty? This is all very different when God speaks. God being the source of revelation and reason. How does God speak to humans?

Parables.

How more elementary can one speak to another than by way of analogy? By way of something one already experiences and knows of. Really, elementary in the true sense of the word -- examples are used primarily, but not exclusively of course, when the level of reasoning is in such a state of disparity. Either an expert to a novice, or an adult to a child, etc.

A few thoughts on the nature of parables: First, they assume we are both aware and unaware of the content or ground of our experience. 'Through a glass darkly' to quote St.Paul. Second, they assume some continuity between that which is being taught and that which is yet unknown. There exists a bridge, however faint it may or may not be.

So, off the bat we are already told something about our nature when God speaks of His! He speaks in parables: we are children. He speaks in parables: He is transcendent (above us). He speaks in parables, He is immanent (with us). He speaks in parables: we are able to know and love him in our everyday life!

To know God in this world? Ok, but to know God via this world? Amazingly, I think I live a life of example. This is a very Charles Williams moment for me -- 'this is thou, neither is this thou'. The world is wrapped in mystery only if it is wrapped by God.

Pope Benedict is wise to criticize all those Christians who expect God to bring to them anything other than Himself. Those nominal Christians do not deserve God if they demand anything other than Him. Two errors on different ends of the spectrum come to mind; the Protestant 'communities' that demand prosperity from God and the 'Catholics' that demand liberation from poverty. In one Christ is a good stock broker, in the other he is Karl Marx. In neither is he God. That one is materially rich or poor has no bearing on what Christ is or gives. It is always the same--Himself. 'God became man so that man may become God'. We would trade life in the Blessed Trinity for anything it seems, and do so at our own demise, cf. the Commedia. We just don't know what is ultimately good for us, we live in a world that is a secondary good, that was poured from the fount of God's love, and in a way we naturally think of this good as the primary good since we are born into it. However God has never been silent! Especially in the covenant He made through Christ -- all excuses are gone. It is in this sense that I read von Balthasar's notion:

The correct view and explanation of reality, therefore, is based neither on the human mind nor on the soul, which with their anxiety have been the actual object of most recent research; the true standard and guarantee is, rather, the Word of God, which speaks about mind and soul and their anxiety. This is our guarantee that we can gain some distance from the feverish questioning of the modern soul; from its culture, which is supposedly decadent and doomed to destruction; and from its religious anxiety and religion of anxiety, in which, paradoxically enough, the attempts to cure the patient venture into the disease and collapse into one with it, as if it were an unalterable fact to be accepted as a matter of course.

Summed up, we are anxious in this life because we are made to be son's of God. That internal locus will forever drive us back to the love that created us, as one is reminded in the first paragraph of the Confessions, 'Our hearts our restless until they rest in Thee'. How do we do that? How are we to ever achieve this task, von Balthasar time and again through my reading of him points that the answers are always in scripture. In the Word. God has answered everything. Their truly are answers and they will always demand faith, nothing less was demanded of Christ himself when he was carrying out the will of the Father. It is the nature of love both Here and There to be faithful.

As a segue, then, I would like to write about the only way a parable should be read--by faith. Benedict states it, there are a 1,000 reasons not to believe a parable, but only one to believe it. Always though, we choose not to believe the reality of a parable because we are selfish and God always demands that we give ourself. Cf. Mtt 13:13, Isa 6:9 -- that is what's meant of hardness of heart. As a proviso to all the faithful, I would say our age makes the parable even more demanding. We all insidiously subscribe it seems to one degree or the other to the prevailing philosophy of relativism and subjectivism. This is a constant battle for the faithful of our age. God cannot really be expected to have a say in the real matters of our life because there is no exhaustive proof for God and only what can be empirically proven can be counted as decisive. Everything else is relegated to the sphere of 'preference'. Thus God becomes a book we like to read and are at liberty to put back on the shelf at our own leisure -- it is unreasonable, of course, that God should make demands on reality -- he is not real. Nietzsche is right to attack this form of Christianity it is itself irrational and a crutch for people who have other gods. Much lesser gods. There are so many problems with that philosophy, on its own terms, much more than can be taken up here. Cf. Thomas Aquias, Summa Theologica, Ps 95:5 -- they have failed to see God in the world!

Parables show us that Jesus shines forth in our everyday life! He shows us the real ground of our experience and the true direction our lives must take. The only thing one needs to make sense of parables is faith. What does this mean? It means parables are God expressing his own mystery to us. People must reflect on the nature of God. Knowledge of something so high can only but demand the whole person for a requisite to understanding. This is why God stresses repentance. We always want to say no and keep to the chains of our ego. This knowledge requires that we break the chains of the "I" and enter into life as it really is outside our, little, little, constructed personal world. 'My weight is my love' says Augustine, the more I love myself the more I am closed off from everything and everyone around me. The more I love God, the more I am open to receive more than I am, to be raised up.

Finally, on to the question.

And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?

And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

Jesus uses a common example for that day in age. The roads were, and still remain to this day, a target for  thieves in the Middle East. This very fact deterred me from traveling to Mauritania when I was in Morocco. So, here we have here Jesus talking about salvation in terms of this world. Salvation? Life with God. 

Second we have the Priest and Levite, both professionals and experts themselves in salvation, walk past their fellow Jew. 

However, the Samaritan makes the beaten man his neighbor. He doesn't have to. One will remember that the Kingdom of Israel was divided and Samaritans were those who during the Babylonian exile mixed with other races and were considered heretics for a lot of reasons. They were mixed Jews who believed in the same Torah, they of course were the same tribe up until the exile. Jews did not consider them neighbors, nor did Samaritans. We have here an antecedent form of the reformation.

So, what we have here then is the Samaritan going outside the law for no apparent reason. Blood is also unclean and looked down upon in Judaism in general, cf. ritual cleanliness. But Christ says the Samaritan was profoundly moved by the sight of this suffering man. The original Hebrew has the connotations of the love a mother has for a baby within the womb. Something that cuts to the soul. 

It is Agape. Agape has incinerated the barriers of these two people. The Samaritan does not consider what he must do but rather is moved by love, his heart is wrenched open. It is soul touching. 

Benedict points out that the question of the parable thus switches here. It is no longer about the 'other', 'who is my neighbor?' It is about Me. Who am I neighbor to? Christ answers that you are a neighbor when you regard the other person as yourself.  The foreigner makes himself his neighbor "he makes himself one whose heart is open to being shaken up by another's needs". 

This compassion the Samaritan has felt has broken the "if you give, I'll give" social contract. It is very Christological, Mtt 19:30, 5:5.

How does this tell us anything of God? The Church Fathers help...

God is showing us his face in the parables. The Samaritan is Christ himself. Utterly foreign to us and without obligation to help us. The beaten man is none other than Adam the first man, stripped bear of his glory and left half wounded. Christ brings us salvation by a totally unmerited act of love. Breaking the boundaries of man and God, he brings himself to us! the clean to the unclean. The wine and oil that the Samaritan tends to the wounds of the man are the sacraments of the Church, the Inn he takes the man to the Church itself. Finally, he pays the cost -- all of what the man's fall costs. 

We can understand how God loves when we troll the depths of it ourselves by participating in the 'flash' of pure soul touching love. So quick it seems but when it does touch down it incinerates all that doesn't matter in life. 

What must I do to be saved, Lord?

Go and do likewise -- Be another Christ. Follow Christ and we will live with him. It takes faith, does it not? Faith and surely the courage the Priest and the Levite did not have in having passing by. What courage love demands to go above. When we have the courage to love like Christ heaven touches down.

Songs for Agape

This is French Quarter by The Delta Spirit who I will be off to see in Seattle Friday! They know how to live. This was written when Matt and Jon took off for a few weeks to help the relief effort after hurricane Katrina.

French Quarter, quarter to four
The town is empty like a nuclear war
The levee broke on Pontchartrain
I'm feeling blue like John Coltrane
Well, its fine baby
Oh I swear its fine, lover

Carpetbagger tried to fix my house
Low baller tried to put me out
At least I got my gospel stomp
My house fell into the swamp

Well, I need somebody to help me out
I've lost it all but I've got my health

You, you oughta know
They've been kicking me around
And I don't want to lose my own home
It ain't no joke; I was raised in this town

The south is in my blood
Its in the mud
They were clearing out my house
But I teared it all down to the stud, all this love
Is what's fixing my house, fixing up my house

I ain't no refugee, I'm a person can't you see
Lord, I'm humbled from what I see
Oh you are the one who will build me up
I've lost it all but I've got your help

You, you oughta know, they've been kicking me around
And I still don't want to leave my own home, it ain't no joke
I was born in this town; the south is in my blood
Its in the mud, they're clearing out my house
And tearing everything down to the stud
All this love is gonna fix up my house; fix up my house


Oh you, you oughta know, I've lost everything
But I still have my soul, and my home, I believe in you

You, you oughta know, I've been kicked around
But no way I'm gonna give up my home, it ain't no joke
I've been born in this town, the south is in my blood
Its in the mud, you'll be clearing out my house
You're ripping everything down to the stud, all this love, is gonna fix up my house
Fix up my house!