Justice is not a mere human convention. When, in the name of supposed justice, the criteria of utility, profit, and material possession come to dominate, the value and dignity of human beings can be trampled underfoot. Justice is a virtue which guides the human will, prompting us to give others what is due to them by reason of their existence and their actions.

See Catholic Culture.org for the whole article.  Three points jump out at me.  First, “justice” is part of objective truth (“not . . a human convention”).  Second, this explanation allows room for values such as “utility, profit, and material possession” to enter into the analysis so long as they do not dominate.  Finally, justice takes into account others’ “actions.”  These points provide a solid foundation for analyzing our actions and our response to proposals seeking our support in the name of justice.

Picture perfect.  So far the creator is unidentified.  If you find out, please let me know.  I want to shake his or her hand and give proper credit.

To this lay person, it sometimes seems that doing “the will of my Father who is in heaven” is much easier for the ordained or consecrated.  They have special rules for the conduct of their lives.  The Church makes it quite clear what is expected of each.  Although the level of intensity differs, the principle is the same — the Church provides a clear structure for those it has ordained or specially consecrated.

Lay people are different.  There appears to be no such structure.  I can pray when I please or not pray when I please.  When I pray, I can pray whatever I want.  I do not have to use the Liturgy of the Hours.  I simply pray.  I spend most of my time in the workplace, hardly an explicitly religious environment.  It must be much harder for me to do “the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

Pondering this, I picked up Self Abandonment to Divine Providence by Fr. J. P. De Caussade.  Fr. Caussade died in 1751 so I expected a rip-roaring, hair-shirt wearing religiosity.  I did not find that.  Instead, I found an answer to my question.

After discussing the life of the Blessed Mother, Fr. Caussade defined holiness as “fidelity to the Order of God.”  By Order of God, he means God’s will.  Fidelity to the “Order of God” does not require extreme measures.  No hair shirt.  No monasteries.  No hermitage.  Indeed, as Fr. Caussade explains it, fidelity to God’s will can be entirely ordinary:

If the work of our sanctification presents, apparently, the most insurmountable difficulties, it is because we do not know how to form a just idea of it. In reality sanctity can be reduced to one single practice, fidelity to the duties appointed by God. Now this fidelity is equally within each one’s power whether in its active practice, or passive exercise.

The active practice of fidelity consists in accomplishing the duties which devolve upon us whether imposed by the general laws of God and of the Church, or by the particular state that we may have embraced. Its passive exercise consists in the loving acceptance of all that God sends us at each moment.

Book 1, § 3.  Using this touchstone, holiness becomes attainable for a lay person.  The duties imposed by the “general laws of God and of the Church” and the state of life in which I find myself are reasonable and certainly something that I can bear.  Although I do not execute them perfectly, discharging those duties is certainly within my current capability or within my reasonable ability to attain.  Active fidelity is within reach.

Passive fidelity is, too.  I can consciously monitor my emotions and then challenge and replace those that are not conducive to the “ loving acceptance of all that God sends us at each moment.”  Passive fidelity, I think, will take more practice, but it, too, is within reach.

Fr. Cassaude beautifully emphasizes this point even further:

Are either of these practices of sanctity above our strength? Certainly not the active fidelity, since the duties it imposes cease to be duties when we have no longer the power to fulfil them. If the state of your health does not permit you to go to Mass you are not obliged to go. The same rule holds good for all the precepts laid down; that is to say for all those which prescribe certain duties. Only those which forbid things evil in themselves are absolute, because it is never allowable to commit sin. Can there, then, be anything more reasonable? What excuse can be made? Yet this is all that God requires of the soul for the work of its sanctification.

Id. Sanctification requires only a good faith, reasonable attempt to discharge the duties of our state in life and the avoidance of intrinsically evil acts.  We must be open to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and to the workings of grace so that if God wants us to achieve a particular perfection, we will cooperate enthusiastically with the grace He provides.

The chief example of such holiness is, of course, the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph, both of whom were laypersons.  We know that they simply lived the demands of their states in life. They fulfilled their religious duties.  They lived a daily, hidden life of unsurpassed (human) holiness.  They did not, for example, angle for the prime spot in Herod’s Court.  After his marriage, St. Joseph did nothing notable except look for the lost Christ along with the Blessed Mother.  After that, he disappears from Scripture.

But, as Fr. Cassaude makes the point quite eloquently:

There are remarkably few extraordinary characteristics in the outward events of the life of the most holy Virgin, at least there are none recorded in holy Scripture. Her exterior life is represented as very ordinary and simple. She did and suffered the same things that anyone in a similar state of life might do or suffer. She goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth as her other relatives did. She took shelter in a stable in consequence of her poverty. She returned to Nazareth from whence she had been driven by the persecution of Herod, and lived there with Jesus and Joseph, supporting themselves by the work of their hands. It was in this way that the holy family gained their daily bread. But what a divine nourishment Mary and Joseph received from this daily bread for the strengthening of their faith! It is like a sacrament to sanctify all their moments. What treasures of grace lie concealed in these moments filled, apparently, by the most ordinary events. That which is visible might happen to anyone, but the invisible, discerned by faith, is no less than God operating very great things. O Bread of Angels! heavenly manna! pearl of the Gospel! Sacrament of the present moment! thou givest God under as lowy a form as the manger, the hay, or the straw.

Book 1, § 2.  Little can be added.  Wouldn’t we do well to live like this, even for a moment? Properly approached, the ordinary nourishes and strengthens us.  Were Mary’s great gifts exercised through miracles, publicity, rumors (who is this special woman?), ambition, or anything other than the daily fulfillment of the duties of her station in life?  So far as we know, she stepped outside of them only once — at the behest of the Angel Gabriel and with special transforming grace bringing her soul to complete perfection.

While I may not be able to offer an infinity of little hours, neither did St. Joseph nor did the Blessed Mother.  They lived their lives simply, full of grace, and thereby showed lay persons — especially laypersons — that holiness is for us as well.

Sometimes one runs across an article that so aptly summarizes a point of view that it takes your breath away.  That is especially so when the point of view is articulated by someone whose error is matched only by his ignorance.  An example of this crossed my path recently.

The Shroud of Turin is mysterious.  A preponderance of the evidence, if not clear and convincing evidence, supports the idea that it was the burial shroud of Christ, the shroud that covered His body at the moment of His Resurrection.  If proven, the implications are breathtaking: we would have physical evidence not only that Christ lived, but that He conquered death.

As a result, an almost panicky body of writing has developed attempting to debunk the Shroud’s connection to Christ.  Some points are worthwhile. We will never be able to conclusively demonstrate the Shroud’s connection to Christ simply because no reliable chain of evidence carries us back to the tomb.  (Of course, this is just another example of religious and specifically Christian claims being subject to higher, impossible to meet standards of proof).

The recent discovery that the Shroud’s image may have been produced by extremely intense ultraviolet radiation set the so-smart-we’re dumb set into another round of the vapors.  Perhaps one of the best examples of such hand wringing came from one Tom Chivers, who holds the exalted position of “Assistant Comment Editor” for the Telegraph newspaper.  In response to the news from Italy, Mr. Chivers quickly manned the barricades with a wonderful post titled “The Turin Shroud Is Fake. Get Over It.”  

This is quite an assertion.  Mr. Chivers, “Assistant Comment Editor,” it appears, knows for certain that the Shroud is fake .  Surprisingly, Assistant Comment Editor Chivers does not explain what the Shroud is, which you would think he would do since he KNOWS it is not what those Christians think it is.  Wow! A question that has baffled scientists for more than a century has been resolved by an Assistant Comment Editor for the Telegraph.  (Maybe the Telegraph should promote him to a full-fledged Comment Editor.)  What groundbreaking evidence does Mr. Chivers advance for this assertion? The debunked (or at least questionable) radio carbon dating from the 70′s. Oh, my, bestill my afluttering heart.  Mr. Chivers, of course, does not answer exactly how the 13th or 14th Century artist (assuming it was art — Mr. Chivers does not deign to tell us what the Shroud “is;” only that it is not, not, what those Christians say it is.)  He also notes that St. John’s Gospel mentions two burial cloths.  Finally, he states that John Calvin was skeptical, which of all things is the most revealing comment.

All of this writing, however, only the lead up to Mr. Chivers’ deepest insight.  He wrote:

“The intelligent faithful don’t need trinkets like this to justify their belief, surely?”

This is simply classic: a combined ad hominem deprecation of one’s rhetorical opponents.  Presumably, “intelligent” works both as a psychic goodie for those who agree with him (if you agree with me, Mr. Chivers implies, you qualify as “intelligent”) and a slam on those who don’t.  No reasons needed; only self-regard and the more of it the better.  The choice of the word “trinket” is even better.  No matter what you think the Shroud of Turin is, it is not a trinket — a small ornament of little value.  It is large — more than 14 feet in length — and priceless.  Perhaps, trinket means large and priceless in England.

But Mr. Chivers unwittingly stumbled on a very important point.  The point of the Shroud is that it reminds us that God became man.  God, an ineffable spirit, became a human being in a very specific place at a very specific time in history.  He had features.  He had a voice.  He was tall or short.  He was strong.  He ate. He drank.  He was one of us in all things but sin.  Why did God do that?  Why didn’t he continue to interact with us as on an ineffable, intellectual plane?  While we do not need the Shroud of Turin specifically, we did need Christ to become man.  Why?

The answer is well beyond your humble blogger.  But part of it is this.  God treats us like persons.  Mark Shea put it best in one of my favorite quotations:

For all the folk notions in the press that God thinks he is the Great and Terrible Oz, it appears the reality is something much different: God treats us, not like cringing, mindless slaves, but like persons. And persons ask questions.

Not only do persons ask questions, they relate to others concretely through sight, sound, smell, and touch.  I wonder if Mr. Chivers ever received a perfumed note from his girlfriend.  I wonder how he reacted.  Did he say, “Intelligent persons in a relationship don’t need such trinkets, surely?”  I doubt it.  I think he was happy to receive it and hold on to it because it was a concrete reminder of his affection for her.  On their most recent date, I am sure Mr. Chivers did not refuse to hold her hand, saying drily “Intelligent persons in a relationship don’t need to hold hands to know that we love each other, surely?”  I doubt there’d be another date if he did.

God’s approach to humanity is the same.  He could have remained an ineffable Spirit, complete in His perfections.  But He wanted us to love Him and if relating to us in a concrete form in a historical place and time was what it would take, then so be it.  Again, the insight is that God relates to us as persons.  He meets us much more than halfway — sort of a cosmic “come as you are.”

The answer to Mr. Chivers’ snark is this: the “intelligent” faithful do not turn the faith into a dry, inhuman intellectual exercise that demands that we cease to be persons.  For Mr. Chivers, God does not relate to us as persons, but as something else entirely — something that does not exist.  Our faith is a faith of sights, sounds, smells, and pageant of the whole human experience, concretely lived.  It is as much the stately beauty surrounding  a Carthusian monastery as it is the sights, sounds, and smells of a hospital ward in which a priest is administering the final Anointing and Viaticum.

So while the Shroud may not be the burial cloth of Jesus — we will never know for certain this side of Eternity — it is important because it is one thing among many through which God relates to us, not as automatons, but as people.  The Shroud reminds us that “smells and bells” are important and that a religion that posits a purely intellectual relationship between a god and man is a false one, no matter how intelligent the faithful are or how small the trinkets.

"Thy Face, I seek, O Lord"

The monastic life, especially that of the Carthusians and the Capuchins, has taken hold of my imagination.  No, I don’t have a desire for the specifics of the Carthusian life.  I am a lay person — husband, father, pew-dweller.  I do desire the happiness, the peace, and the apparent fulfillment in which these men live.  I am puzzled about how I, as a layman and practicing lawyer (with phones, e-mail, deadlines, demands, all of it), reach what they seem to have.  I think the key is not the specific practices.  Instead, it is making room for God and opening oneself to God’s grace and allowing that grace to transform one’s soul.  What follows is part I of a documentary of the Carthusian life.  What can I, as a 21-st Century layman, take from a 12th-Century order?  What do you think?

O dear Jesus, I humbly implore You to grant Your special graces to our family. May our home be the shrine of peace, purity, love, labor and faith. I beg You, dear Jesus, to protect and bless all of us, absent and present, living and dead.

O Mary, loving Mother of Jesus, and our Mother, pray to Jesus for our family, for all the families of the world, to guard the cradle of the newborn, the schools of the young, and their vocations.

Blessed Saint Joseph, holy guardian of Jesus and Mary, assist us by your prayer in all the necessities of life. Ask of Jesus that special grace which He granted to you, to watch over our home at the pillow of the sick and dying, so that with Mary and you, heaven may find our family

unbroken in the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Amen.

Bl. Kateri Tekakwitha, pray for us!