The Value of Monastic Life

In Challenge Weekly this week (22 August 2011), John Massam, writes in his Publisher’s Letter:

"I was brought up in a tradition that classified involvement with “worldly things” like competitive sport, the media and the world of arts and entertainment as something Christians should abstain from. The idea reflected the injunction that good Christians should be “separate from the world”… What I have come to realise is that Christians cannot cocoon themselves in cotton wool, be imprisoned in a monastery or live in a self-perpetuating community on some idyllic Pacific Island.  Our calling is to live in this world, whether it is as a professional sportsperson, a talkback host, a top-billing musician, a model or newspaper publisher, so that people know we are different.  Different but not peculiar.  A person to be respected, but not ridiculed." (my emphasis.)

La Grande Chartreuse Monastery

Now it is OK that John has had an epiphany and rejected the puritan standards of his upbringing, but he goes too far when he gratuitously impugns centuries of monastic tradition.

Firstly, monks and other religious are not “imprisoned” in monasteries and cloisters: they stay there of their own free will, dedicated to their God-given vocations.  It has been said that if God means for you to enter religious life, no one and nothing will keep you out, while if he does not mean for you to stay in religious life, no one and nothing will keep you in.

Obama and Ondimba: An Uneasy Meeting

  President Obama of the USA has taken some flak for meeting with President Ondimba of Gabon this week.  I can imagine that there would have been some tension and embarrassment in the room, but it would not have been on Ondimba’s side.

President Ondimba of Gabon

  Gabon is a majority Catholic country.  President Ondimba converted to Islam with the rest of the family when his father, then-President Omar Bongo, converted in 1973.  However, the country still promotes the Culture of Life, since this is foundational to both the Catholic faith and Islam.  As a consequence, both contraception and abortion are illegal.

  The contradiction one sees is that President Obama, who claims to be Christian (while a few conspiracy theorists suspect he is Muslim), presides over and promotes a Culture of Death in America.  Since he took office in January 2009, President Obama has been responsible for the killing of over 2.8 million babies in the US.  This amounts to almost twice the population of Gabon – including a disproportionate number of African-Americans, some of whom are descendants of the Fang tribe, which makes up about a third of Gabon’s population.

  Thus I can understand why President Obama would only allow still-photographers into the meeting.  He didn’t want anyone recording President Ondimba asking, “What are you doing to my people?”

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  Gabon is a West African country, with an area about the same as New Zealand (or the state of Colorado) and a population of 1.5 million.

Related Links:

President Obama invites controversial president of Gabon, Ali Bongo Ondimba, to the White House (NY Daily News) Slave Trade and African-American Ancestry

Catholics and Images: Response to Jeff Williams, MBBC

In his Bible Answers column in the Blenheim Sun newspaper, May 11, 2011, Marlborough Bible Baptist Church pastor, Jeff Williams, writes:

“When Catholicism says it is okay to erect images in the church building and to venerate and adore these images which includes bowing before them while the Bible specifically condemns all of this (Exod 20:4-5), guess who is wrong.”

The answer is: Jeff Williams is wrong.  Jeff’s columns are often filled with simplistic, idiosyncratic interpretations of the Bible: too many to bother responding every time.  But when he writes such arrant nonsense about fellow Christians, a response must be made.

Firstly, the Bible nowhere says that it is wrong to erect images in a church building.  On the contrary, the Bible records God requesting just that.  Since Jeff uses an Old Testament reference as his text, we shall do the same.  God asks Moses to fashion images of two cherubim and put them at each end of the mercy seat, upon the ark of the covenant (Ex 25:18-19).  This was then placed in the tabernacle of the Israelites’ tent of meeting, the equivalent of a church for them (Ex 40:2-3).  Images of cherubim were also worked into the cloth that formed the walls of the tent of meeting (Ex 26:1).

Later, God commanded Moses to make an image of a serpent out of bronze so that when the Israelites were bitten by poisonous snakes they could look upon the image and be healed (Num 21:8-9).

Later still, Solomon built a temple for God’s dwelling.  He constructed cherubim to spread their wings over the sanctuary (1 Kings 6:23-28).  The walls and doors were also decorated with cherubim (1 Kings 6:29-32).  Images of lions and oxen featured in the sanctuary (1 Kings 7:29).  God indicated his pleasure with all of this by consecrating the temple (1 Kings 9:3).

So God is quite happy with images, especially in places of worship.

Where do your rights come from?

Rights are not given to us by “the people”, the government, a constitution or a bill of rights.  If that was the case, they could then be taken away just as easily, therefore they obviously would not be rights at all.

• Every nation state that has ever existed, or will exist, has gone out of existence or will go out of existence.

• Every human being that has ever existed, or will exist, has an immortal soul that will last forever.

• The One who gives us that soul also established the natural law that gives us rights and responsibilities.

This is the basis for transcendent rights.

You have rights because of what and who you are, given by the law-giver of the natural law – Almighty God.

Have a chat with Him today and ask Him to help to form your conscience, in which lies your awareness of the natural law. You could also read some words inspired by Him, in the Bible.  Best of all, you could visit His Son, just pop into any Catholic church to experience the Real Presence of Jesus Christ.

(Thanks to Professor Charlie Rice for inspiring this note.)

You are what you eat… especially when it comes to doughnuts

Torus

   A doughnut is the classic culinary example of the three-dimensional geometric closed surface known as a torus.  Topologically* speaking, a doughnut is the same as any other object with one penetration, like a bagel, an inner tube, a hula hoop, a pipe (of any length, regardless of how many knots it might be tied into), a life-saver (confectionery or otherwise), a handbag with one handle, a car-key, an ankh, a 50-yen coin, a monstrance, or a mug.

   From the last observation comes the mathematical joke that a topologist cannot tell the difference between the coffee cup he is drinking from and the doughnut he is eating - or indeed the cigarette he is smoking (if you simplify the cigarette to a tube through which the smoke is drawn).

   Now, if you ignore the minor interpenetrations of the nose, the human body basically has one hole, the one starting at the mouth and coming out at the … ahem … other end.  So, yes, we are doughnuts!

   What this also means is that our food never actually goes inside us; it just passes over our surface, while bits of it get absorbed through that surface.  Furthermore, the trillions of bacteria that live in our gut are not really inside us, but on our surface, just like the bacteria on our skin.  We have about 10 million bacteria per square centimetre on our faces (remember that next time you kiss someone).  Overall, we have about 50 times as many cells living on us as we have making up our bodies themselves (which is about 50 trillion to start with).  It is when bacteria cross the boundary and get truly inside us that we get sick, which is why the essential treatment of wounds is to cover them up.

   As far as material food goes, what we eat becomes incorporated into our substance, so our food becomes us.  It is the opposite way around when it comes to spiritual food.  Saint Thomas Aquinas says it much more eloquently than I ever could:

The Blessed Sacrament at Tira Ora

   “Material food first changes into the one who eats it, and then, as a consequence, restores to him lost strength and increases his vitality.  Spiritual food, on the other hand, changes the person who eats it into itself.  Thus the effect proper to this Sacrament [the Holy Eucharist] is the con­ver­sion of a man into Christ, so that he may no longer live, but Christ lives in him; conse­quent­ly, it has the double effect of restoring the spiritual strength he had lost by his sins and defects, and of increasing the strength of his virtues.”  St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Book IV of the Sentences, d.12, q.2, a.11.

   One last note, “torus” is a Latin word, one meaning of which is “cushion”, which should make sense to those suffering from haemorrhoids.

* Topology is the area of mathematics concerned with spatial properties that are preserved under continuous deformations of objects, for example, deformations that involve stretching, but no tearing or gluing.  If one surface can be deformed, in this way, into another, then the two are said to be homeomorphic.  In loose terms, we say they are topologically “the same”.

If abortion is not wrong...

“If abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”  Although this “quote” is often attributed to Mother Teresa, she never said it.  However, she DID repeat often the following:  “…The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself… the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

This reminds me of another famous misquote, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted."  Although usually attributed directly to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but sometimes to a character, Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoyevsky’s 1880 novel “The Brothers Karamazov”, neither of them actually uttered it.

Nevertheless, both “quotes” relate to the difficulties we have today when we, on the one hand, try to encourage “good” behaviour in children, young people and adults and, on the other hand, deny the existence of God and thereby any absolute standards as a foundation for that behaviour.

Those we try to admonish or correct will simply answer, “Why?” (or “Why not?”)  While responding “Because I say so” in a loud voice can work with young children for a little while, it gets a bit ridiculous and indefensible when dealing with adults.  But that is essentially all society can do in the context of today’s moral relativism:  whoever shouts loudest, gains a majority and makes the rules, earns the right to arrest and lock-up those with different views, much as parents do with the “time-out” room.

Too much political and personal decision-making today seems to be about who can garner enough support to get their own way, rather than any appeal to what is objectively right and wrong.