Kenosis

Approximately 13,700,000,000 years ago, the first thing to happen, happened. According to the best current astrophysical theory, energy of an infinite quantity was emitted from a point of no dimensions. Since that point had no dimensions, it did not occupy space, and indeed, there was no space before that, and even more startlingly, there was no “before” before that, i.e., no time, no space. Thus there was no thing in that “now”, “present”.

          For any person to be able to “conceive” of a such a state, that person would have had to have had  a sensible experience of that reality prior to his/her being able to conceive of it. Thus, for a person to conceive of a “whale”, that person must have had a previous sensory experience of a whale, either in the flesh or through viewing a photo or sketch of one. A person can also construct a concept by having experienced an object in parts, i.e., one can conceive of a “flying green whale” only because one has had a previous experience of “whaleness”, “flight”, and “greenness”.

          Thus, God, if there is a God, must be humanly inconceivable, unless the “conception” was by God Him / Her self.  This is what Christians believe; That God whom we cannot conceive, conceived of Himself in the womb of a young Jewish girl with her permission, and took on all the limitations of humanness.    And when we ask “Why should we believe it”, one can only come to the conclusion that someone absolutely trustworthy has told us to believe it, and since we absolutely trust that person, we can say “I believe you.”

          But what person do we hold to be absolutely trustworthy? We might say, “Our mother”. I certainly would hope so, but some mothers are not trustworthy. Some may believe, but in light of events in their lives, they may entertain doubts. So whom would we trust then? Well after reading all about Jesus, his life, his teachings and the way he died, we might reasonably say, “Jesus”.

          And that is what Jesus apparently asks of us according to the accounts in the NT  wherein  he comes into Galilee as an unknown adult and says: “ The present moment is the right time, change the way you think about reality, for the Kingdom of God is WITHIN you. Believe this good news.” [Mark 1:14-16]  

                                                                                                                              Charlie Mc

         

         

Don't Throw the Baby Out...

Don’t Throw the Baby Out…

Many of my nearest and dearest friends have left the Catholic Church, either in rejection of its doctrine, or in pain from personal injury sustained by the ineptness or the “sins” of the leaders of the Church, or just from increasing realization that they no longer “get anything” out of continued attendance at Mass or from  the Sacrament of Penance because they “feel” like they can’t continue  to lie in the confessional or to avoid it altogether so as to be able to continue to participate in the holy Eucharist. To continue to be such  a “practicing” Catholic is to them the kind of hypocrisy  that even Jesus condemns. They at least do not apparently reject the teachings of Jesus, just those of the Church.

Other friends of mine reject the Church because they consider themselves to be agnostic [Do not know whether there is a God or not] or atheists [Know that there is no such being as God], and they consider Jesus to have been a genuine historical person, but not in any way to be considered God.

In the world today, people are saturated with media, much of it advertising some product or other which if one buys it, it will solve some or many of the problems of living. Either it will eliminate pain, or bring you success either in business or with the opposite sex or by affording comfort and security which everyone deserves. The media daily also bombards us with gory details of every act of violence occurring throughout the entire world with video. Most of the ads on the news are for upcoming stories on the news, so as to keep you from changing channels, or (God) forbid, turn off the TV and plunge yourself into one of the worst situations in which one can find oneself, silence and being solitary.

Money, food and drink, sex, lifestyle in comparison with others less fortunate have become the measuring stick for success in this life. Many of us never rest from the chase after such success, wearing ourselves out in the process and never realizing that life is not meant to be such a chase for “happiness” of that sort.

Some, when they get fired, or get seriously ill, or when tragedy strikes causing the loss of someone near and dear, they often begin to appreciate that we “can’t take it with us when we go”, or that we should take more care with each moment of time we have now, to be with and express our love to those closest to us, and perhaps to consider doing random acts of kindness for others in need. Some even consider changing their whole lives around by focusing on performing charitable works for hospitals, social services and through greater altruistic gifts. 

Some even consider being priests, nuns, ministers, rabbis, or lay missionaries in service to their fellow man. Some just make a conversion of life and dedicate themselves to being better sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers in the vocation they have been in, but previously failed to appreciate their opportunities.

Whatever your situation, it might begin to dawn on you that your dedication to following the truths about which Jesus spoke should take precedence over your reluctance to follow the false witness of others by whom you may have been scarred  in your past life experiences.

After all, one of the most common expressions put on the lips of Jesus by those who wrote the Gospels and Epistles, were words of disappointment in their failure “to get it.” So often they asked Jesus to show them a sign that he was who apparently they were expecting him to be. And repeatedly, he failed to give them a sign they could accept, but rather he spoke of things for which many considered him to be a nut. The history of the early Church was anything but a history of faithful disciples, but rather a history of repeated failures to get Jesus’ good news right. It’s understandable to get it wrong. What is unacceptable is to harden one’s disbelief into a rejection of Jesus’ good news.

And what exactly was Jesus’ “good news”? It is not really what we often consider to be the “good news”. We consider it to be the news about God becoming a human named Jesus and saving mankind from their sins through his entire life, death and Resurrection. In other words the entirety of Salvation History and the teachings of the Church.

Jesus’ “good news”, however, is not about himself and what he is doing, but rather about the Kingdom of God and where it is to be found. This is expressed to us in the first Gospel written, Mark, in the first words put on the lips of Jesus[Mk. 1:14-16]:

         

 “(Jesus) came from Galilee proclaiming the good news from God saying ‘The present moment is the right time, change the way you think about reality for the Kingdom of God is within you. Believe this good news’ ”

 As Paul said in one of his earliest letters (50’s AD):

“…for the Jews look for a sign, and the Gentiles look for wisdom but we proclaim Christ crucified; to the Jews a scandal and to the Gentiles folly.” (1Cor. 1:22-23)

Why should we, in the Twenty First Century AD, with all our current knowledge and sophistication believe such a statement of Jesus that the Kingdom of God is within us? Because Jesus told us to and I believe that Jesus does not lie! Reason and scientific knowledge cannot prove this, nor can any sign be made which will prove it to be true, no matter how hard even the Church may try to do so. It is solely because Jesus is a trustworthy witness.

Since I now believe his words to be true, I can proceed to accept his other teaching that when we pray we do not have to use a lot of words, nor make a lot of signs, but rather:

“ When you pray, enter into your private room and shut the door and pray to your father in secret.” (Mt. 6:6)

It’s only when you want to express to others anything about this interior kingdom and the importance of interiority of prayer are we forced to use words, i.e., “signs” to convey it. No matter how carefully you select the words to use, the transmission is hoppled by the need for conceptual understanding which generally demands an effort using imagery from 3-dimensions and time, and interiority, like God, is not capturable within three dimensions and time. Only in the Incarnation of God become a man is God captured thereby. But in so doing, Jesus is limited by three dimensions and time to express his reality. Thus he uses parables, miracles and human communication to convey his reality. For many, it fails to satisfy. If God truly dwells within us, then is not this the greatest treasure that any of us, and all of us, can possess.

Only belief satisfies. And Faith is a gift to pray for and be totally grateful for it when it has come.

Thus, focus on the teachings of Jesus  in the Gospels, that is the  “baby”.  Recognize that some of the examples (not all, thank God) and some of the teachings through Church history should be perhaps be taken “with a grain of salt” or perhaps  sometimes as “bathwater”, and can be thrown out. The treasure remains within.

                                                                               Charlie Mc

Astrophysical Spirituality

  Astrophysical Spirituality

                                                                               

When I was in the fifth grade, I inherited a Boston Globe paper route. I worked it both on Sundays with a red wagon as I covered all the Christian Hill and High School area of my hometown of Norwood, Massachusetts, and on weeknights with the Daily Globe delivery. By means of this income, over the next six years I saved enough money to pay for my entire first year tuition at Northeastern University College of Engineering. That may sound incredible, but the tuition for one full year in 1955-56 was $850.00. Can you believe it?    My second through fifth years there were fully paid for from the salary I earned on my co-op work jobs to which N.U. assigned me . My parents simply could not afford to help unless you consider giving me room and board free for five years pay! I do, thank you Mom and Dad.

My nighttime paper route afforded me another benefit for which my life has been enriched immeasurably. Delivering papers on  cold clear nights gave me a ring side seat to the greatest show in the Universe; the Universe itself. I grew to become a friend to the constellations, the wandering planets, occasionally some shooting stars and even on one occasion a comet. As I beheld them, I wondered what exactly it was I was seeing. I wrote away to Sky and Telescope Magazine and studied the glow-in-the-dark night sky charts until I knew all the Zodiac and the circumpolar sky, and then because I knew these stars, I began to easily discern “strange stars” moving through them which I knew and could identify because of their lack of twinkling and specific color as planets; Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. I saved up $29.95 and sent away for a small 4” Newtonian reflector telescope which I lugged up to the High School football field on clear nights and saw for the first time in my life the craters on the Moon, the crescent of Venus, the polar caps on the ruddy Mars, the unbelievable rings of Saturn; and most wonderful of all, I could clearly see the surface of the giant Jupiter, its cloud bands, red spot and the very four moons which Gallileo saw convincing him that they revolved around their planet and consequently we also revolved about the sun, which stirred up all kinds of Church resistance and censure. I was flabbergasted. It made me decide then and there that I wanted to become an astronomer.

In junior high school, I joined the AAVSO [American Association of Variable Star Observers] and I began to travel all by myself by public transportation from my home town into Cambridge and attended the weekly Thursday Night Lectures at Harvard Observatory. My mind was hungry to understand the Universe and its immensity. For the rest of my life, while not indeed becoming an astronomer, my fascination with the subject continued on into my teaching years, helping me to found an Astronomy Club and driving its young members to these same lectures for years. One night, a Harvard Astronomer, Robert Kirshner, gave us the greatest lecture I have ever heard when he broke the news to us that his team of Astronomers at Harvard had just made the greatest discovery in the history of Astrophysics. They discovered that our Universe is not just expanding, but it is accelerating in its expansion requiring a force we have never known to exist.

Our current knowledge indicates that our sun is one star of average proportions. The nearest star to our sun is 3.8 light-years away. That means that light, traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles/second [8.3 minutes from sun to earth] takes 3.8 years to get to us from this next nearest star. These two stars exist in what is called a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy, which it is estimated to contain 10¹¹  [100,000,000,000] stars. Our sun is a star 1/3 of the way towards the center of the galaxy which is  100,000 light-years in diameter. It looks something like our nearest neighboring galaxy, The Andromeda Galaxy which is 2,000,000 light years away and is the furthest object visible to the naked eye as a faint hazy patch but which is really the nearby twin of our own galaxy.

Recently, NASA sent a telescope into outer space and took a 360⁰   video of our own Milky Way Galaxy from within where we are located. We have never been able to see this before because the earth under our feet prevents us from seeing the southern hemisphere’s portion of the Milky Way. Astrophysicists estimate that the total number of other galaxies in the Universe approaches 10^{10­ ­}[10,000,000,000] with the furthest galaxies 13,700,000,000 light-years away from us. In other words, that is the estimated age of the Cosmos. Thus 13.7 billion years ago it is believed that the entire space-time/matter-energy Universe came into existence from a point of no dimensions! How ‘bout them apples!                                           

 I forgot to mention that back when I was a boy, my mother and dad indicated to me that a very important Reality in our lives was God. We went to Mass every Sunday, confession before first Fridays and abstained from meat on that day. I attended public schools but I was required to attend “Sunday School” on Thursday afternoons at Saint Catherine of Sienna Parish School. I’d like to add that I paid close attention and learned a great deal there, however that would not be true. Actually, when the bell rang for classes, I stayed out on the basketball courts outside of the school and played with the Parochial School kids who didn’t have to go to Thursday classes. I guess I believed in God, but I considered God to be really upset by my attitude and was really going to ream me some day for my pagan ways. Years later, at the completion of my last year at Northeastern, two close friends of mine a year older than me had signed up to be voluntary lay mission teachers in Jamaica, WI, under the supervision of the New England Province of Jesuits. Sounding like the grand world tour I was unable to make, I signed up to go as well. Imagine my surprise when I was accepted for the program and traveled to Above Rocks, Jamaica and met the greatest man I was ever fortunate enough to work for, Father Sylvio Garavaglia, S.J. Three years later I entered a Trappist Monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts. Although I lasted five years there before returning to the world, it was a life changing time where I learned so much more about God. I say about because I was not yet ready to know God personally with faith. That has begun to come late in life I trust. I taught Scripture, Theology, Sexuality, Chemistry, Physics and math in 35 years at a boys’ Catholic high school outside of Boston, and I learned a lot more about God but I still didn't know God in any personal experiential way. I would see other people at prayer and I would assume their posture and try to grind out thoughts about God to which I would say lots and lots of words; mostly, " Forgive me God for being such a mealy mouth faker and for doing all the bad things I enjoy doing." For five years as a monk candidate I witnessed and heard from some of the most saintly people I would ever know. I read books by Thomas Merton and thought that I actually was living a similar life. Nonsense!

Then I left the monastery, got married, we had four children, I became a single Dad , and then I began to understand what life is. It is about failing. It is about needing help. It is worrying about your children, about their children, about being a failure at helping the ones you love and nearly giving up on ever achieving success in this life, and all the time wondering where the hell is this God that's supposed to be loving us? Does this sound familiar? It sounds something like Jesus on the cross , doesn't it? "Father, why have you forsaken me?"
 

At this point in my life something wonderful happened to me. One day I began to read the earliest written of the four Gospels, Mark, where Jesus opens his mouth and speaks for the very first time and says:"Metanoiete", a Greek word which should have been translated 'Change the way you think', instead of the way Saint Jerome translated it into Latin as "Poenimine"['Repent!']. The entire history of the Church pivoted on that error. To understand what Jesus said and meant to say would have otherwise been translated:"Change the way you think about reality, the present moment is the right time, the Kingdom of God is within you, believe this good news”.

From this time on I began to take seriously the belief that God is within me, closer to me than I am to myself. I no longer considered God to be at the end of the Cosmos somewhere outside me. I began also to believe that God is within every other person as well and that God in us reaches God in the other in this way.  From now on my prayer became real, personal and interior and when I did, all of Jesus' teachings on prayer became my belief.

Just as the entire Cosmos emerged from a point of no dimensions 13.7 billion years ago, God still emerges from the hearts of each and every one of us, God's children. Scientists can try to demand that I prove this from observable data; I say that's like the egg proving that the hen that laid it exists. It is not a question of "perceiving", nor of "conceiving"; but of "believing" first, just like I first believed in God because someone trustworthy told me to, and this is what Jesus, the most trustworthy said, "Believe this good news". 

Now the whole Cosmos means so much more to me than just a big place, it is a Sign of infinite Love and Generosity and Kenosis, a pouring out of oneself for the beloved. That's us.

                                                            Charlie Mc