De Bibendo

Scene: Corcoran Commons (FKA Lower Dining Hall), Friday evening around 6:30 p.m.:
Guy 1: Tonight's gonna be awesome!
Guy 2: We're gonna get smashed!
Guy 1: Yeah!
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Every Monday morning as I walk along Commonwealth Avenue on my way to campus, I usually pass several piles of dried vomit from the revelry of the weekend. While trying to swallow down my own wave of disgust at the thought that that vomit on Monday may belong to Guys 1 & 2, I started to wonder why it is the same every Monday morning.

Why is it that Boston College students seem to enjoy getting so drunk that they have to vomit? Why do they insist on doing so not once, or even twice, but week in and week out for the entirety of their time here? What possible factor could induce them to down so much alcohol that their bodies must revolt or face damage? What appeal do repeated heavings, in the toilet, in the bushes, on the side of the road, have?

Why is the singular goal of many Boston College parties to get so tanked that when you wake up the next morning, you can’t remember what happened? Do they enjoy getting so plastered that they will jump into the next available Senior’s bed? Can someone please tell me why one can’t drink just one beer, but must drink 10 or 20?

I invite any college student who reads this and can answer these questions to post a comment and explain it to me, since frankly, I don't get it.

De Incompatibilitate Violentiae cum Natura Dei

We have all seen the tumultuous response received by the Pope's comments last week on the incompatibility of violence with God. When quoting the late 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos ("Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."), did Pope Benedict mean to say that Islam is faith beholden to the sword? Did he mean to decry all Muslims as "evil and inhuman"? Clearly, the answer is no; for just previous to this quotation, the Pope mentions Surah 2, 256 of the Qur'an: There is no compulsion in religion. It seems exceedingly clear to me that the Pope's true intentions were to set the following axiom as a starting point for his discussion of the relationship between faith and reason:

"Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul."

(Note: I highly recommend that you read the entire text of the speech, for as we all know, words taken out of context can be twisted and manipulated to the vilest ends).

Unfortunately, it seems that this message was lost, especially in the Islamic world, and it is this point which I find most puzzling. I have often in the past heard many Muslims, horrified by the continued violence that stains the sands of the Middle East red with blood, echo this very sentiment: Violence is incompatible with the nature of God. I am most frightened by the response from the jihadist groups (I quote from CNN):

"We tell the worshipper of the cross (the pope) that you and the West will be defeated, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya," said an Internet statement by the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella group led by Iraq's branch of al Qaeda, according to the Reuters news agency. "We shall break the cross and spill the wine. ... God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. ... God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen."

They are outraged that the Pope should decry the spread of Islam by the sword, and so they threaten precisely that: to spread Islam by the sword.

My real point, however, is not to point out the hypocrisy of the jihadists: their hypocrisy and irrationality is well known to all rational people of this world. What I want to stress is this theme which the Pope laid bare: Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. When we say the Prayer of St. Francis, we ask God to make us instruments of Peace - we ask him for nothing more than that he fulfill our basic Nature: we were made in the Image and Likeness of God, and so we, too, in our very nature, abhor violence and uphold peace. Unfortunately, we seem to have lost that innate desire for peace, and rather rage in war than strive to establish peace amongst ourselves and with all peoples. Have we not learned in the last 2000 years that blessed are the peacemakers? Have we not mourned the carnage of war waged through the history of the world for our own greed? Have we, a world of one common humanity, not understood that the destruction of one life is the destruction of a little piece of all?

Oremus

I just received this prayer request from Lisa, from St. Matthew's in Orange County, California:

Please pray for our parishioner John Clark, his wife Gayle, and their daughter Sara. John suffered a seizure - subsequently a tumor was discovered in his brain. The doctors have said that the tumor isn't the 'originating' place for this cancer. So they're gearing up for full body scans - the prospect of this is frightening.

Deus, qui omnipotentiam tuam parcendo maxime et miserando manifestas, potestatem medicam tuam super tuum famulum, Johannem, infunde, et solatium per gratiam tuam super familiam eius, ut, ad tua promissa currentes, et terrenorum et caelestium bonorum facias esse consortes. Per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum, qui vivit et regnat Tecum in unitate Spiritus Sancti, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.

In Principio

In an attempt to convey some of my experiences while studying last semester in Germany, I intermittently sent emails to some of my family, which found their way around various communities. Some have expressed an interest in receiving more of those email messages. Though I am no longer in Germany, I've still plenty to say, and this blog seems a much more efficient way to effect the dissemination of my thoughts (however few they may or ought to be) to those (however few they may or ought to be) interested in them.

What, then, will fill this blog? It will be, as any good blog is, a presentation of my thoughts and experiences, both quotidian and extraordinary, which have formed themselves into sentences and texts in my mind. Sometimes it will be simple observations; at others full treatises; and again, it may simply record the random events and questions which constitute my interaction with myself and the world.

As its title would indicate, this interaction consists primarily of the experiences of a faithful Christian seeking to understand his Faith and the world in which he exercises that Faith, both the internal world of his soul and the exterior world with which his incorporated soul interacts. The questions of humanity remain as they were in Homer's time: What is justice? How do we enact it? What is the Good? How do we live the good life? My Christian Faith finds these questions both asked and answered in Christ: in the manger, on the Mount, on the Cross, and out of the tomb. Humanity is fully realized in the Incarnation, and so in the Incarnation is found the resolution of humanity's doubts. Anselm proposes in "Cur Deus Homo" that the Incarnation and Christ's Obedience on the Cross were (and are) the necessary satisfaction of humanity's debt of sin against God, a satisfaction through which the Divine Plan for Man - blessedness - can be fulfilled. When God created man, He created us to be blessed; that blessed nature was marred by our sin; and in the Incarnation, the order of blessedness is returned out of the disorder of sin: it befits the true human nature to be perfectly blessed as Christ's human nature was perfectly blessed "by taking of the Manhood into God" (Athanasian Creed). To put it simply, God became Man "Ut Homo Deus": "That Man might become God."

Yet, in the world of practice, in which we men are frail and fallible, this realization of humanity is anything but simple. Paradoxically, my purely simple Faith in the Folly of the Cross has been greatly deepened during my time of study at Boston College and abroad; while my recognition of the greatest complexity of the practice of the Faith in the world has grown ever clearer. As I enter my Senior year, I perceive ever more acutely the chasm between the heights of humanity reached by the grace of God and the depths of depravity into which we fall without Him. I recognize especially that this year, my faith is stronger than it has ever been before; and that the world will test it more than it ever has before. I invite you, reader, to join me then on this journey to what ultimately we might call virtue: at one time to seek the summit of divinity, and at another to pursue the middle road between the vices of pride on the one hand and despair on the other.

Can I promise that such unity of purpose will be found in every post? No. Yet every post will reflect in some way this journey, for as God is omnipresent in and out of this world, within and outside of time, so too is one ever on the road leading either to or away from the realization of one's humanity. I can never leave the journey, even in death; but then, why would I want to?