The End of the Affair

Pope John Paul II said “Art has a unique capacity to take on or other facet of the [Christian] message, and translate it into colours, shapes, and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look or listen.” In The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene, the concept of Hell is fully presented to me as a reality of the human condition, not far and removed from us, but here explicitly in our day to day lives. Man lives out Hell as we are, here on earth, though it be a petty imitation of the total deprivation, just as our loves here are petty imitations of the ultimate love caught up in the Beatific Vision. Bendrix's life is a perfect prequel to hell, and the story of a dark and grievous division, man against God. Sheed tells us to approach the mystery of Hell “as a profound mystery- not of God's cruelty but from man's power to hate God.”1 In this, Bendrix and Sarah give us deep insight to the dregs of evil which they embrace, at least for a time, in hatred of God.

The theme of hate is present from the first page of the book, with Bendrix's assertion that “this is a record of hate far more than of love”2, a record of the denial of love. For that is what Bendrix offers God, his hatred, same as Sarah had. Both Sarah and Bendrix try so hard to chase God a away from them, they try to run in the opposite direction, but find themselves haunted by Him at every corner. Bendrix hates God for taking away what he wants most in the world, Sarah, who he is unconsciously substituting in his life for God, the answer to every longing and every thirst he has ever had. Sarah hates God for taking away Bendrix, once she has promised their affair away, howling in misery in many of her diary how much so. What she says in September is amusing to say the least, in its irony. “While I loved Maurice I loved Henry, and now that I'm what they call good I don't love anyone. Least of all you”3 Both Sarah and Bendrix are caught in their self-needs, their self wants, believing themselves sufficient in their corrupt human love, and caught up in a hatred of the one who denies them their fake drug in order for them to realize their need for him. The whole difference, then, between Sarah and Bendrix, is that while Sarah must finally give in to God, and stop running from the ultimate lover, who has her trapped. Sarah is chased away from herself by her vow. She learned what it meant to love when she met Bendrix, and then she was empty, left with nothing but Him. As she says in her diary, “You'd taken my hate like You'd taken my disbelief into Your love, keeping them to sow me later, so that we could both laugh.”4 Sarah deplores her empty self and her falseness with such fervor that she finds herself almost in the opposite of hell. Her life is a living example of purgatory: the experience of pain purging of all that was eroding at her heart. Bendrix is left still defiant and hateful at the end. As he declares at the very end; “O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough. I'm too tired and too old to learn to love, leave me alone forever”5. Why does he condemn himself to misery? Can he not see that his hatred of God is his source of misery? His hatred of God lends itself to hatred of Sarah too, the one he wished to possess, for that is what love is removed from Christ, usage and possession, just as the Wine of the Last Supper, fermented again, becomes the bitter vinegar on Calvary. Bendrix is denied Sarah, and so he hates the God who took her from him. This hatred of God, being as it is a misconception of his own self-sufficiency, reveals the true pettiness and selfishness of his love in how he tries to ruin Sarah after her death. He has to deny her saintliness, believe that “any man could have her”6, to deny his insufficiency, his defeat at the hands of a god whom he has denied. Hatred for God is everywhere in his heart at this point, and where does it lead? Misery, and were he to perish now, ultimate misery.

The doctrine of Hell, presented as it is through Kreeft and Sheed, while insightful and full of Truth, can not compare to the bleakness with which Greene confronts us. No matter how we look at it, if one really reads Greene's words, they must take part in the emptiness of Sarah's desert, the ultimate futility of her flight from God, and the vanity of Bendrix's hatred. There is an aspect, however, which may seem troubling and counter to this thesis. In Sheed, Hell is described as the choice of self-love over God's love, and thus the eternity of separation from love. But Bendrix has God's love, does he not? Bendrix has Sarah's love, and thus he is not cut off from love entirely, and he gives love, even though he tries to hate. But even in this, Bendrix is empty, for he falls into the trap of self-sufficiency. He thinks he has enough love for both their life times, when in truth, he is so pitifully empty. Sarah knew this, and knew that anything in her which was truly beautiful was thanks only to God. Bendrix must be denied everything, all of his self-sufficiency, before he can realize the hell he truly walks and lives and breathes every moment of his life. Such emotion, such passionate anger and hatred confronts the reader in a more manifest way then any intellectual recount or argument for the existence of Hell. Just as sin, when discussed intellectually, removes us from the reality of evil in man's nature, but place a person in Auschwitz, and his objections to man's degradation must fall flat in the wake of lofty and unsubstantial idealism. Truth does not assault us in the sterilized world of logic, though this is a completely valid and helpful method to approach the particulars of the doctrine. To grasp the implications of our human nature, we must see them as they are, face to face.

The reality of hell has always been very far off for me, this naive child, who does not know despair with any sense of eternity. I have never had to confront evil in any gravity beyond personal grudges and petty differences between people, children's quarrels. I never understood how one might actually be in a disposition to deny God, knowing who He is. But this book has brought to my full and complete attention the emptiness of a life lived in an apathetic hatred and denial of God and his love. When I first completed my read through of the book, I curled up on my dorm-room floor, the emptiness of the desert swelling within me, setting a taste of bile in my mouth and unspent tears on my tongue. Hell is an utter emptiness of love, and once the reality is present in the heart, we can not help but be reduced to tears, for man was not made for such, not for himself, which can not satisfy, but for God. Hell is the ultimate sadness, and the living of it here on earth is a deep sorrow, but no reason for despair. Bendrix still has hope, as do all who are still alive, and even more so, as witnessed in his last confession of exhaustion. God will chase us to the ends of the earth to save us from the fate of hell, from apathy as much as from a passionate hatred. Bendrix has hope even now, even now as the arms of God are wrapped so tightly around him he can not breath. Sarah said “I am going to rob you, God, of what you love most in me”7, but she had to concede in the end, too tired to run away at last. Bendrix's desire will not be heeded, for God never leaves us be, till we finally breath our last he will be suffocating us, so that we realize our absolute need for him. Bendrix can not see that even now, God has him. He can not run, only beg to be left alone, like Sarah begged in that church pew, chased down at last.

“Oh no, there ain't no rest for the wicked
Until we close our eyes for good.”
-Cage the Elephant “Ain't no rest for the Wicked”

1.Fulton J. Sheed Theology for Beginners p.171
2.Graham Greene, The End of the Affair p.7
3.Graham Greene, The End of the Affair p.104
4.Graham Greene, The End of the Affair p.113
5.Graham Greene, The End of the Affair p.192
6.Graham Greene, The End of the Affair p.180
7.Graham Greene, The End of the Affair p. 101

Kreeft on Saints Part 3

Sainthood is God's job description for us. It is the only job in town. It is not an option, something just for „religious people“ (whoever they are). The most important thing in the world to know, therefore, is how to qualify for this job. First, anyone can qualify. Saints are made out of sinners. Only sinners need apply. Second, no one can qualify. No one can make himself a saint. Only God can do it. Out part is to want it, to choose it, to believe it, and to receive it, and to lie there and not wriggle while Doctor God operates on us.

But though we can't do it without God, God won't do it without us. We become saints by willing to. As William Law says, it you stop to consult your own heart in total honesty, you will see that there is one and only one reason why you are not even now a saint: you do not wholly will it. We become saints not by thinking about it, and not (certainly) by writing about it, but simply by doing it. There comes a time when the „how“ question stops and we just do it. If the one we love were ar our door, knocking to come in, would we wonder how the door lock works, and how we could move our muscles to open it?

Saint Francis of Assisi told his monks that if they were in the beatific vision and a tramp knocked at their door asking for a cup of cold water, then turning away from the heavenly vision to help the tramp would be the real heaven, and turning away from the tramp to keep the blissful vision would be turning from God's face. A saint is one who sees who the tramp is: Jesus.

Kreeft on Saints Part 2

What is a saint? A saint is first of all one who knows he is a sinner. A sint knows all the news all the news, both the bad news of sin and the good news of salvatoin. A saint is a true scientists, a true philosopher; a saint knows the Truth. A saint is a seer, one who sees what is there. A saint is a realist.
A saint is also an idealist. A saint embraces heroic suffering out of heroic love. A saint also embraces heroic joy. (This is one of the criteria for canonization: saints must have joy)
A saint is a slave of Christ, a doormat for Christ, a palm branch for Christ's donkey to march on. A saint is also a conqueror greater than Alexander the great, who conquered only the world. A saint conquers himself. What does it profit a man if he conquers the whole world but does not conquer himself?
A saint is so open that he can day, with Paul, „I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content. I know how to be abased and I know how to abound“ (Phil 4:11-12). A saint marries God „for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death“. A saint is also so closed-minded, so determined, so stubborn, that he will die before comprom1ising the Truth, and will write credo in the sand with his own blood as he dies. (One saint actually did this)
A saint is a sworn enemy of the world, the flesh, and the devil. He is locked in mortal combat with principalities and powers. A saint is also a friend and lover of the world. He kisses this sin-cancered world with the tender lips of the God of John 3:26. A saint declares God's open war on this world, sinking the Cross into the enemy-occupied earth like a sword, hilt held by heaven. At the same time he stretches his arms out on that very Cross as if to say, „See? This is how wide my love for you is!“
A saint is Christ's bride, totally attached, faithful, dependent on him. A saint is also totally independent and detached from idols, from other husbands. A saint works amond money, power, pleasure as a married woman works with other men, but will not marry them or even flirt with them.
A saint is higher than anyone else in the world. A saint is the real mountain climber. A saint is also lower than anyone else in the world. Like water, he flows to the lowest places, like Calcutta.
A saint's heart is broken by every little sorrow and every little sin. A saint's heart is also so strong that not even death can break it. It is indestructible just because it is so breakable.
A saint takes his hands off the steering wheel of his life and lets God steer. This is scary, for God is invisible. A saint also has the strongest hands, hands that move through the world. He has feet that know just where to go and that move through the world with a sure sweep.
A saint does not let others play God to him, as the rest of us all do (especially in a democracy). A saint takes his orders from the General, not from the army. A saint also does not play God to others, as the rest of us all do in all societies since Eden, often in subtle ways. But saints are not subtle. Saints are simple
A saint is a little Christ. Not only do we see Christ through his saints, as we see a light through a stained glass window, but we also understand the saints only through Christ, as we understand eggs only through chickens.
The saints are our family. We are one body. They are our legs and we are theirs. As Pascal says, „examples of noble deaths of Spartans and others hardly affect us,...but the example of the deaths of martyers affects us, for they are our members...We do not become rich through seeing a rich stranger, but through seeing a father or husband rich.
Finally, the saints are our destiny, our eschatology:

And when the strife is fierce, the warefare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumphant song,
And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong,
Alleluia

I get goose bumps whenever I hear that hymn. The echoes of the song that is the saints come from Eden and from heaven, and all human happiness is an echo of that echo. When we suffer, when we despair, when we cry in rage or helplessness, when we are bewildered, bewitched, bedeviled, betrayed, besmirched, and besotted with the weight of the world, we need to listen to that echo from heaven.
The saints are present, not just past. „We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses“ (Heb 12:1) that we are never alone. We are watched and helped. Death is not so wide a river that heavenly hands cannot reach across it.

Kreeft on Saints Part 1

Why does the Apostles' Creed include „the communion of saints“ as one of the twelve articles of faith, one of the twelve essentials of our religion? Because our fundamental vocation in life is to be saints. Because, as Charles Peguy puts it, „life holds only one tragedy, ultimately; not to have been a saint.“ Because this whole world is a saint-making machine. Because the whole purpose of creation, revelation, Incarnation, Atonement, and Church is to make us saints. Because everything the Church does, from setting up bishops to setting up chairs, from raising money to raising martyers, has no other purpose than this. Because life itself has no other purpose than this.
Saints are not far-out freaks, wierdos, or exceptions. They are the rule, the plumb line, the sandard operating model for human beings. If we are not saints, we are the exceptions to the rule, whether we make up 1 percent or 99 percent of the human race.
In the biblical sense of the word, all believers are saints. Saints are not the opposite of sinners. There are no opposites of sinners in this world. There are only saved sinners and unsaved sinners. Holy does not mean sinless but special, set apart, called out of the world to the unthinkable destiny of eternal ecstasy in spiritual marriage to God Almighty.
In the popular sense of the word, sainthood is a matter of degree: a saint us someone who does something better than most of us. What thing? One thing with three sides: faith, hope and love.
The Church's language is half biblical and half popular when she canonizes certain „saints“, i.e., solemnly declares that certain known and named persons are both in heaven and worldly models for our earthly imitation. The modern world is a world without heroes. Saints are the answer. Saints are the true heroes.

Poustinia

Poustinia is "an entry into the desert, a lonely place, a silent place, where one can lift the two arms of prayer and penance to God in atonement, intercession, reparation for one's sins and those of one's brothers.... To go into the poustinia means to listen to God. It means entering into kenosis — the emptying of oneself." (Catherine Doherty, Poustinia)

To be still is a great exercise of soul, to be quiet and surrender one's mind and thoughts. Our lives today are filled to the brim with noise, and rightly so, for the mandates of this life we live demand far more rapid and attentive devotion then did the lives of our Fathers. It is a necessary condition of our time, but one that may become all consuming when considered as an end unto itself.

There is a need in man for quiet, where he may go to rest his body, weary from manual labor, and his soul, weary from the tangle of his mind. Robert Bolt once said that "God made man to serve him in the tangle of his wits" and so it is with us today, but this does not deny, nor lessen in any way our continual need for peace. We are creatures of great passion, but who become very tired, very tired indeed. Deep in his roots man has a need for the ultimate peace, who is Jesus himself, and when we try to fill our need for God with transient and unfulfilling things, he leads himself along a short route to supreme unhappiness.

For that is what a disquiet soul experiences, unhappiness. When the human person fails to reach his full potential, his conscience is fully cognizant of this, even though his consciousness may be partially unaware, and he is disturbed. Our souls were made to be a constant output of love, and when cut off from a source of replenishment, we cease being able to give. Like a stream must be fed from a plentiful source before it can water the fields and flowers who thrive on its rivulets, so we too must have ourselves a well-spring of happiness, else we become choked up and dry. Without peace in our souls we can not give it to others.

This dryness is completely abhorrent to our nature, which is to be a giver. Without giving of ourselves, we can not be who we are meant to be, and thus wither away, unable to reach our full potential as humans. We must go into the Poustinia, into the great silence, in order to find our replenishment, to find our source of life and peace. We must be still and listen to the quietness, a silent retreat to be refreshed and to offer thanksgiving to the spring of our peace.

A quiet of soul, yes, and a rest of body. We are our bodies as much as we are our souls, and they are in sorry need of rest as well, sometimes more. We have a tendency to forget the need of our bodies for rest (though we feel it most apparently), for our souls are immortal and our bodies shall die, and thus many choose to forgo the replenishment of a bodily need. What must never be forgotten is that the soul and the body are inseparably linked. Without adequate rest for the body, the soul will also be disquiet and disturbed, unable to find rest in the weariness of its fleshly self. Therefore it is necessary that one find rest for the body as well as for the soul, and continually.

Continually I say, because the human must continue to be replenished. It is no good giving him a single dose of rest and sending him on his way. Peace is not a vaccination against unhappiness, it operates in a continuous flow, or doses, so that one might never be exhausted or spent, but can give and keep giving without reserve. The well-spring of peace is never exhausted, so drink in, and drink deeply.

Why I am a Catholic

Sanity is defined as how closely ones belief of how the world operates coincides with how in reality the world works. This blog is about my beliefs on humanity and how sane or insane these beliefs prove themselves to be. To begin, an examination of my beliefs are necessary. I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, and all that it professes, because it is the only belief to answer my questions on the dignity of humans, the nature of suffering and the social nature of man, in such a way as to convince me of its truth and faithfulness to reality. Therefore I shall now examine how the Church answers these convictions in a way consistent with reality.
My first objection to Christianity came in the form of humans themselves. I had difficulty accepting the idea that man are created in the image and likeness of a god. What god is there that kills innocent children for fun? How can a creature capable of such terrible and horrid things as man be loved, even created by a being. My problem was I couldn't love man with sin, so I hated him. I found man a disgusting creature to be reviled and hated and controlled. The Catholic understanding of evil answers me with the salvation story, that man was created good, and that he fell. That sin is no real tangible thing which we humans possess, but a lack of something which compels us to act in this disgusting manner is as shocking and wonderful a revelation as one may ever find. That means that man, inherently, is not a despicable creature. It means that he is a pitiable creature, possessing the fullness of glory in him at the same moment he wallows in the mire of his own sin. I think it is only possible to truly love mankind when one has adopted this understanding of humans, otherwise one has to ignore human evil entirely, or hate humans. Some people deny Auschwitz in their minds, because they can not accept the idea of humans doing such awful things to each other. Islamic law requires the presence of at least two male witnesses to prove rape, because they somehow believe that a men can't take advantage of a woman unless she submits. This is a denial of reality, a denial of man's sinfulness, and one has to deny it in order to love man. Without a Christian love for man, which recognizes man as a sinless-created, but entirely sinful creature in need of salvation, I truly think a love of humankind in general is impossible. One has to accept that the abysses of Sodom and Divine Glory exist side by side in the human person before one can love them, or themselves.
But what about suffering? If God truly came down and died for us on the cross, shouldn't we be cured of the need for suffering? If the redemption happened, why do people still die, or did Jesus not truly conquer death? The Catholic Church answered me again with the profession of redemptive suffering. The truth is that the resurrection is not an event, it is a process, one which takes place in the hearts and minds of all human beings. This continual death through suffering is the method in which men become spiritually mature, and through which they attain salvation. Jesus says “Whosoever wishes to live must take up his cross and follow me” and then again in John, “I am the resurrection and the life, whosoever liveth in me, though he die, shall have eternal life.” The death to self and to the world is suffering, and it is suffering which brings us closer to God. Throughout the entirety of the Old Testament, the Hebrews are continually rejecting God and he then inflicts horrible cataclysms on them to necessitate their return. In the same way, all humans receive suffering as the path onwards to a higher end. Humans must continually die to their ideas, to their thoughts and to their dreams. Humans must always die every day to old addictions and to old fears, and out of the ashes there must rise a new man. The phoenix of mythology is a metaphor for the human experience, for just as the phoenix was consumed by its own flames, so too must men be consumed by their theories, actions, and desires, rise again from the ashes of his weak and former self, and rise to scale their mountains. Buddhism teaches that suffering is an illusion. Well that would be nice, but entirely foolish to believe. The murder of innocent children is no illusion, the rape of defenseless women is no illusion. It happens. Atheists have to believe that suffering has no redemption, and that the pain and sorrow and suffering people go through is all in vain. Hindus believe that suffering is the consequence of something you did in your past life, which leaves us to offer no compassion to those suffering. After all, the Jews must have “deserved” Dachau, must have “deserved” the gas chambers with this understanding. No. The Catholic world view is the only answer which adequately answers this dilemma for me.
The last issue to be addressed is the issue of Human Community and the Social Nature of man. I have always wondered at the truth of this statement, which is professed by the Catholic Church, and which I had to accept as the result of after many long years of attempting to live a solitary self-sufficient existence. But on the other hand, to what extent is man a communal being before he ceases to be an individual? I was always afraid of loosing my individuality in the Christian community, always afraid that my quirks and uniqueness would be squashed and squeezed out of me (which tends to happen in Protestant communities I have noticed). However, when I heard that the Catholic believed that the Community was the Church and that the individual was the Church, I was at the same time astonished and wonderfully pleased. This avoids entirely the error of communism, which eliminates individuality entirely. Or as C.S. Lewis says in the Screwtape Letters, the devil wants to claim all humans entirely, so that they loose their individuality. But this Christian God does not want drones, but his mystery is more fully revealed in the Christian Community, in fact, humans are meant to exist in communities, which coincides completely with the psychological and sociological habits of man, observable outside the context of Christianity. So in the Christian context, persons exist in full communion with each other, mirroring the communion of the Trinity, but retain their own individuality. Atheists have two different ways of dealing with the issue. Either the individual is the center of everything; self-preservation and all that, or the individual must always give way to society. So for Communism, the individual ceases to exist in the appropriation of goods, man is no longer degraded, because for a communist, a man's worth is dependent on his production, and if all are paid equally for production, worth is consistent across all men. The very aim of communism is the cesation of the individual. Hindus believe that man's individuality vanishes in complete Nirvana, where his soul dissolves in heavenly bliss in union with the universe (aka god). Christians would call that anihilation, for the individual ceases to exist. Buddhists too, are concerned with the individual reach for enlightenment, and views the individual as completely self-sufficient. The extreme of self-first philosophies denies the social nature of man, which is a psychological fact, and the extreme of the denial of individuality contadicts the very obvious nature of individuality itself. In other words, Catholicism is the world-view to acceptably combine both the community and the individual without loss of individuality or denying the social nature of man.
In Conclusion, I am a Catholic because Catholicism has stood before my accusations and answered them calmly and without fear. Catholicism answered my hatred for humanity with the truth of human nature. Christianity answered the problem of suffering, opening my eyes to the continuing resurrection all around me. An lastly, I came to accept Christian community as the fullness of worship and the design for human existence. All other forms of belief have paled under the microscope, and until I am presented otherwise, my chips lie on this table. I cast my vote with the Christian God.

Palestrina

There is a soul in Renaissance music, a moving spirit which captivates me. I recently bought a CD of the Choir of Westminister Abby, and as I was listening to it, emotion was just swelling up inside of me. Perhaps it is because of the innately spiritual nature of the Missa Papae, which commands the listener to participate in it's singular act of worship and adoration. Augustine was speaking the truth when he said that to sing was to pray twice. For in singing, your entire being is offered as a steady undivided focus of the will and the body. Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons said, through the mouth of Sir Thomas More, that there was a faculty in man which does not serve any of his appetites, but is the Man Himself. I believe that in music we are offering our selves, our very selves, in a very personal and willful act of love. This is Beauty we are creating with our minds and our bodies, literally becoming instruments for the glory of our Creator. I can not help but be carried off with the singers, for my soul rejoices in God my Savior, and if I do not cry out, the very rocks and stones will. Our activity in singing is a perfect example of how life should be lived at every moment of our day, in total self-giving. We must give this part of ourselves fervent exercise, so to make a final present, lived in a manner worthy of the life Christ bought for us, our blood-price.