Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I

I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

Having spent the last week with Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, I’m now ready to give some preliminary impressions: preliminary because I’ve not read the whole thing, or even a tenth of it. But I spent an hour with it on Monday evening, and half-an-hour each morning since, and I think I’ve got the flavor of it.

Bottom line: I love it. It’s a keeper.

To recap, I got this book after praying for help from God to jumpstart in me a deep love of scripture. I want that precisely because the scriptures are a chief way God chose to use to make himself known to us. They are, in a sense, incarnational; and as St. Jerome said, ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ. Conversely, to know Christ one must know the scriptures, and to love Christ one must love the scriptures.

And Erasmo clearly loves the scriptures. It’s clear in every line. He has read them, tasting the words, chewing on the meaning, and coming to know the Lord he loves through them, and he has made his meditations available to us.

The book begins with a lengthy introduction (around fifty pages) entitled, “A Cordial Reading of God’s Word,” which gives Erasmo’s approach to the project. These fifty pages (or, at least, the thirty or so that I’ve studied) might be worth the price of the book all by themselves. Here’s a sample:

The principal care of one who would make his house within Christ’s Word must be to allow the sacred text all its importance, all its resonance, all its radiance and centrality. He will ceaselessly allow it to occupy the central “block” of both his page and his loving attention, as in those manuscript commentaries on The Book in the Middle Ages—of Jewish, Christian, or Moslem origin—which display a minimal portion of the inspired text within a solid square in the middle of the page and whose thick margins, on four sides, became more and more crowded with the glosses of scribes who prayed, studied, memorized, and recopied—in a word, celebrated—the text inexhaustibly.

Not only is the Word of Scripture central to the study of Christ, it is to be central to our lives. The page with the Word at its center and glosses around the outside is to be the model for my life: my life is to be a gloss on the Scripture.

Every page is like this: every page has some fact, some link, some relation, some metaphor, rooted in the Word, rooted in the Faith, rooted in the Liturgy, that opens my eyes and begins to lift me up to heaven. I could multiply examples endlessly, but if I gave as many as I’d like then I’d certainly be hearing from the the Copyright Cops. But here’s one more example, in paraphrase.

At one point, while talking about the importance of the Greek text, Erasmo notes that the word St. Paul uses in Letter to the Ephesians for the “offering” of the temple sacrifices is the same word Matthew uses when people “bring” the sick and lame to Jesus to be healed. The sacrificial victim must be spotless, without flaw; and when folks bring their loved ones and “offer” them to Christ, he heals them, makes them clean and spotless, so that he can in turn offer them to God. And this adds a crucial element to the scene:

The situation in Matthew is then enhanced from a merely thaumaturgic one (even if this is establishing Christ’s crucial identity as Messiah) to a cultic, mystagogical, and even eucharistic one.

Jesus is not just a magician, not just a wonder-worker: in healing those brought to him, he is foreshadowing what he came to Earth to do for all of us on the cross.

In addition to reading and studying the opening essay, I’ve been spending some time each morning with the actual scripture of Matthew and Erasmo’s meditations on it. I’ve gotten partway through verse 19 of Chapter 1, which is slow going consider that the first 16 or 17 verses are all begats. (There are important lessons in the begats!) And my experience with these shorter meditations is similar to my experience with the opening essay: on every page there’s a connection I had not made, an image that will stick with me and enrich all future readings. I hope to have more to say about some of them in coming days and weeks.

In the meantime…if anything I’ve said appeals to you, go ahead and get a copy. I think you’ll find it to be worthwhile.

Scripture Incarnate: Matthew 1:1

I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

Erasmo’s view of scripture is deeply incarnational. Jesus is the incarnate Word of God; and the purpose of scripture is too bring us face to face with Him. Though the Bible, God’s word written, is not in itself divine, still:

The written word of the evangelist: Is it not an incarnation of the spirit of his spoken word, breathed from his mouth of flesh on the roads of Palestine?

And this is why Erasmo bases his commentary on the original Greek text of Matthew’s gospel. Nothing about the Incarnation of Christ is an accident: not the time, not the place, and not the people. If we accept God’s omnipotence, then we have to say that the Gospel was ultimately recorded in Koine Greek because that’s the way the Lord wanted it. It’s worth looking at it that way, to see what we might see. (And then, Erasmo quotes a Hassidic proverb: “To read the Scriptures in translation is like kissing your wife through a handkerchief.”) Not, I hasten to add, that you need to know Greek to read this book, which is fortunate because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to read it.

Erasmo begins his commentary with the title of the work, “good tidings according to Matthew”. And here again we see the Incarnation at work. Christ is God Incarnate, the fullest Revelation of God to His people. To know the Father, we must know the Son. And the principle way we know the Son is through his witnesses, and especially through the four evangelists.

We might put it like this: Christ, God Incarnate, is the embodied revelation of God, and the content of that revelation. The Church—the Apostles and their heirs, the multitude of saints, and all the rest of us—as the Mystical Body of Christ is also in a way the embodied revelation of God, and specifically the means of transmitting that revelation. The Church says that general revelation ended with the Apostles, and this is certainly true, but in another sense revelation is continually on-going as we encounter Christ in the scriptures and pass Him along to others. The content of revelation is unchanged and unchanging, but Christ will continually reveal it to each of us, if only we let Him. Erasmo says,

We come to see who God is and experience the depth of his love only by being taken up into the faith of the saints (in this case, St. Matthew), those who proclaim to us by the witness of their life and words the reality of the God who inhabits them.

When God descends to earth and enters human history, He doesn’t do so by halves.

Quote

The written word of the evangelist: Is it not an incarnation of the spirit of his spoken word, breathed from his mouth of flesh on the roads of Palestine?

— Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol I

A Cordial Reading of Scripture

I have a dirty little secret.

I don’t really like reading the Bible all that much. I mean, I’ve read it; all of the New Testament and much of the Old, much of it multiple times. I look at a passage of the New Testament and it tends to go in one eye and out the—well, you know what I mean. And this is not a Good Thing, especially for a Lay Dominican, given that Study is one of the four pillars of Dominican life.

Mind you, I studied obsessively during my first few years as a Catholic revert. The Faith was my current interest, and I burrowed into it with vigor. But interests wax and wane, and other things have my attention at the moment.

Which is why God made promises. I vowed to love my wife when I married her, in preparation for those times when loving unselfishly is difficult. And as a Dominican I promised to continue to study the Word, in preparation for those times when other things look shinier, and when I’m tired in the morning and just don’t want to do it. And during Lent I came face to face with the fact that this is one of those times, and that I need to get moving.

At times like these, prayer is indicated: the kind of prayer where you say, “Lord, I don’t want to read your word, but I want to want to read your word. Please help!” And I’d been praying this kind of prayer during Holy Week.

So on Holy Saturday I was at Barnes & Noble with Jane, and saw a book: Volume III of Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, published by Ignatius Press. I noticed it because it had the usual Ignatius spine, and because it was HUGE, 870 pages, dwarfing all of the books around out. So I pulled it out and took a look. It was subtitled, “Meditations on the Gospel according to St. Matthew”. Not the whole gospel, mind you; chapters 19 to 25 only. Turns out he covers chapters 1 to 11 in the first volume (746 pages), and chapter 12 to 18 in the second volume (800 pages), and he still has three chapters left to go; I’m expecting that the fourth volume, if he manages to publish it, will be 1200 pages at least.

I nearly recoiled in horror, but instead I took a closer look.

It’s a verse by verse commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, beginning from the Greek text. It is intended to be a cordial reading of the Gospel, a reading from the heart. It is intended to be read in the context of the Church and its teachings. It is intended to be part of an encounter with the Living God through His Word written.

Did I mention that Matthew was St. Dominic’s favorite gospel? He carried it with him everywhere.

Interesting, I thought. If only I had the time to plow through something so big. And I walked away.

I think I got about eight feet away before I turned around and went back. When you ask God for something, it’s unwise to walk away from the answer.

Naturally, B&N only had the third volume. So I ordered a copy of the first volume (from Amazon, on my cell phone; sorry, B&N!), and it arrived today. I spent an hour during my daughter’s dance class reading the (first part of) the introduction. And I’m more convinced than ever that my running across it on Saturday was an answer to prayer.

This post is long enough; I’ll have to say more about the book in the coming days. (If I don’t, nag me!)

Papa Poverello

We have a pope!

But I’m sure you knew that already.

I liked his demeanor when he came out to give his blessing. I liked that he asked us to pray for him; he surely needs our prayers. I liked that he chose the name Francis—quite a surprise, as for the last hundreds of years popes have generally chosen the name of one of their predecessors. I don’t know whether the Holy Father had St. Francis of Assisi or St. Francis Xavier in mind, but I suspect it’s both. He seems a true son of St. Francis of Assisi; apparently as archbishop he has lived in a small apartment and taken the bus to work, which is not the usual think for archbishops.

Pope Francis is not a young man, so it seems likely that we’ll be doing this again in ten years. Maybe then I can get the Pope Dominic I was hoping for. In the meantime I like the look of him, and I like what I’ve read about him, and I look forward to hearing more from him.

God Bless Pope Francis! Viva Papa Poverello!

Belief in the Future

Some while back, author Sarah Hoyt offered to do a blog tour in support of her upcoming book Darkship Renegades. I should say, in support of her then upcoming book Darkship Renegages, because said book came out some while back while our Sarah was afflicted with the ‘flu. She asked me for a topic, and I proposed “science fiction and religion”. Here’s the post she was kind enough to send me. Meantime, I liked Darkship Renegades, the sequel to Darkship Thieves; see my review of Darkship Thieves, and if it sounds appealing go get ‘em both.

And with that, here are Sarah’s comments on science fiction and religion, with special reference to Darkship Renegades and also to A Few Good Men, a related book.

Belief In The Future
by Sarah A. Hoyt

Science fiction and religion don’t work well together. Our fore-writers seemed to hold on to the quaint notion that in a sufficiently advanced future there would be no religion. That notion was, I grant you, pleasing at least at the time, but religion and humans don’t seem to interact that way. There is no such thing as a knowledge of science vast enough that it banishes the ache of being human which religion addresses. Those who think they are free of religion are merely transferring their fervor to something else – religious, ethical – sometimes ironically the very denial of religious feeling.

And although this is by no means always true, most of the time religion is brought into science fiction it is in opposition to science, or as the foe to be conquered.

This is also not always true or a given. To some extent, early science progressed hand in hand with religion. All religions might go through an anti-science phase, or be anti-science in certain regions or times, but the same curiosity about something bigger than ourselves, in the end, extends to both religion and science.

Only, of course, religion is not logical. It is not logical because it’s not meant to be, because the questions it answers (and gets out of the way) are those that typically have no answer, like “What is the purpose of life” and “what is the sound of one hand clapping.” (Okay, the last one is not, that I know, part of any religion, but it IS the type of imponderable religion addresses.)
The problem, then, with most religion – even the most respectful – brought into a science fiction world and created by a science fiction writer is that the writer usually tries to make it logical.
Look, we can’t help it. We try to make our magic logical, we try to make our history logical, and perforce, if it’s going into a book, the religion we just created gets kicked, shoved, and made – by gum! – logical. Which means unless it’s not a real religion, but something, say, dictated by a computer, or aliens, it won’t impress any religious reader as a true religion.
I had a strong advantage in this, because frankly I don’t write in a logical fashion. No, please, don’t assume this means my world building makes no sense, or that thought doesn’t go into it. I mean that after I do all that planning work in advance, I’ve found it’s more productive to let my subconscious drop its bombs in. I’ve found that often, when I don’t know what I’m doing my subconscious does.

I have, in other circumstances, referred to this as plotting by fits of brilliance. Oftentimes those fits of brilliance end up having to be written out in the final draft. Sometimes they get left in to pad the world. And sometimes, years later, while I’m Standing On the Corner, Minding My Own Business, a forgotten bit of brilliance will explode into a full story.

To an extent that was the case with the Usaian religion in the Darkship world. I hadn’t planned on having religions. Or rather, they’re mentioned, but my main character, Athena Hera Sinistra was not, for logical reasons when you read the book, brought up religious. In fact, she makes a fine muddle of all religions in her mind.

So, there it was, in the outline of the first book, Darkship Thieves, a little scene where Athena sells a gold ring to a pawn shop. My intention was to have this be the moment when she realizes there are practical as well as ethical advantages to not conning and lying your way through life.

I wanted the shop keeper to radiate integrity, even though he deals in “shady” and his entire community is probably illegal. So it occurred to me to make him a member of a proscribed religion. Because I didn’t want to offend any existing religions, and because (though Communism is a religion in that world) I didn’t want him to be a Communist because, well… he’s a merchant and clearly a good one, so I blithely made him a Usaian. (The name coming from the fact someone had just used it, derogatorily at me.) I had great fun having Athena think the eagle is a war god, and such. Fine. A piece of whimsy. Right.

Er…

My subconscious had other plans.

I had for some time planned to write a revolution in that world. Or rather, I wanted to write several revolutions, one of them being modeled after the US. Only… Well, I believe in the constitution because while I think our system of government is horrible, it’s the best the world has come up with, as far as I can tell.

However, in a far future, when history has been distorted and vast portions of it erased, why should anyone fight for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?

And there, in my mind in both Darkship Renegades and A Few Good Men were the Usaians, who carried those principles through the ages as received wisdom and with them the certainty that G-d intends them to rebuild the republic.

We get the religion through the eyes of someone who is being converted to it. (There will be more in twenty five years, the last book – not twenty five of my years, I hope – through the eyes of someone raised in it.) So what we hear is what his mentors believe, which might not be an accurate depiction of the faith, as such.

What we do get is gloriously contradictory. While the character is assured he doesn’t even have to believe in the afterlife, later in the story there is a family ceremony to consign someone who’s died to being born again in a free land (not clear if it’s reincarnation or another world.)

Of course, every religion has the official theology, and a “low church” of superstitions and ways of doing things that have accrued as folk religion, sometimes borrowed from other, older faiths.
It is the little contradictions that makes the religion feel real.

But there is something else – through their imperfections and struggles, it is the religion that gives the characters the sense of duty and the sense of belonging to something greater than themselves.

This made up religion, born of a moment’s whimsy, gives my characters’ dignity and strength that even I can’t mock. It makes them decent, even when they don’t want to be. It lifts them above themselves.

I’m not about to convert – I already have a religion – but their religiously-formed family life and their ordered existence even in the middle of chaos, revolution and war, made me feel a kindred with them.

And in that too, their religion feels real.

Whether it feels real for others, I don’t know. But to the author, it felt authentic.

The Big Disconnect

The big conflict in the Church today, some would have it, is between the Conservative Catholics and the Progressive Catholics. These are horrible labels, which convey almost nothing of value; and every person who hears them will add his own spin to them. Few of the labels are flattering, because the folks who see themselves as being on one side too often deprecate those on the other side as being so deficient in some area as to not be real Catholics. (Though Some Pigs, I suppose, are More Deficient than Others.)

But there’s more to it than that. A large bit of it is what I was getting at in my recent posts about Misdiagnosing Your Neighbor. It’s not that I’m a Good Catholic and you’re a Bad Catholic; truth be told, neither of us is as good as we should be. Often it’s that you’re focussed on one thing and I’m focussed on another, and what we have in common is not obvious.

In Salt of the Earth, his first interview with Peter Seewald, then Cardinal Ratzinger nails it. He says,

There is a well-known saying of Karl Rahner: “The Christian of tomorrow will be a mystic, or he will not be at all.” I would not ask for so much, because people are always the same. We always remain just as weak as ever, which means that we will not all become mystics. But Rahner is correct in that Christianity will be doomed to suffocation if we don’t learn something of interiorization, in which faith sinks personally into the depth of one’s own life and in that depth sustains and illuminates. Mere action and mere intellectual construction are not enough. it’s very important that we recall simplicity and interiority and the extra- and supra-rational forms of perceiving reality.

(Emphasis mine.) Where my intellectual understanding of my faith and my physical action for Christ must come together is deep within, in my interior life. If I understand God but do not act on what I understand out of love for Him, I’m nothing. If I have no understanding or love for God, but act for other reasons, I’m equally nothing. Rather, my action must flow from my love of God, as best as I understand Him.

But that inner life is precisely what we can’t see. I can’t even see mine all that well, let alone yours. And yet it is so essential; and it feeds on both contemplation and action.

And that’s why I keep harking back to it. A holy interior life puts your understanding and your actions in right relation with each other. And that’s why we must seek Him first and other goods second.

Georgette Heyer and the Via Negativa

Recently I was reading Cotillion, by Georgette Heyer, and—

OK. Half of you are saying, “Who’s Georgette Heyer?” and the other half are saying, “Hey, you’re male.” Time for a recap.

Georgette Heyer was an author—or, so I gather, the author—of regency romances in the middle of the 20th century. Regency romances are romance novels set in Regency England, in the time after George III went made but before his death. I do not usually read romance novels, but there’s something about Heyer, as authors as diverse as Lois McMaster Bujold and Julie Davis have noted. She’s funny, she has great characters, she writes well; and when you’re in the mood for something light and frothy, they are great fun. I suspect that she is more akin to P.G. Wodehouse (though less farcical) than to the average romance novelist. And it would be hard to overstate her influence. Some years back there was a flood of novels intended as sequels or companions to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and with the noted exception of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the ones I glanced at all seemed to owe as much or more to Heyer as they did to Austen. She created her own fictional world, every bit as carefully constructed as a good science fiction or fantasy milieu, and millions have accepted it as the Real Thing. (Give her a try. Try Frederika. Or possibly Talisman Ring. Or maybe The Grand Sophy. I’ll wait.)

So anyway, I was reading Cotillion, in which a thirty-something man of property is travelling from London to the country to make an offer of marriage to a long-time acquaintance. He is not in love with her, or with anyone, but he’s the heir and it has been successfully impressed upon him that he must marry. He well likes his long-time friend, and so off he goes. On the way, he encounters a young woman of good family, great spirit, equal beauty, and little experience who is running away from home because her grandfather, the patriarch, won’t let her marry the man she wants to marry, because she is too young. What’s a gentleman to do? She has a grand strategy, but he can see it won’t answer. He can’t take her back to her family, because she won’t tell him who they are. He can’t leave her on her own; there are unscrupulous people about, don’t you know. Got to take her with him. And from there, of course, the tangles increase.

Now, here’s what led me to reflection. All of his acquaintance are wondering what has happened to him. They hear about the girl, and they all begin to jump to conclusions. Long, drawn out, extremely logical, plausible, believable conclusions, all of which happen to be quite wrong; and they go wrong for two reasons: first, they don’t have all of the information; and some of the information they do have they disbelieve. But as I say, their conclusions are, given the information they have and choose to believe, completely logical.

It occurred to me that we are in much the same position relative to God. It is possible (see Thomas Aquinas) to deduce the existence of God from first principles; and given that He exists, there are certain things that can proven about Him: that He is omnipotent and omniscient, for example. But is less obvious is that these statements are essentially negative. God is infinite, you see, not in the mathematical sense, but in the sense of being unbounded. We can put no bounds on His knowledge or His power. That doesn’t mean that we truly understand what it means to be omnipotent; we don’t. It is simply not conceivable to us.

And yet, on a daily basis we try to make sense of God, and thus to put bounds on Him. And perhaps we even reason logically, and come to valid conclusions, based on what we know for sure. But the one thing we can know for certain sure is that God eludes our intellectual grasp. This why Pope Benedict in his writings frequently refers to God as the “Wholly Other”.

And yet, all is not lost. We are doomed to intellectual failure, but we are not doomed altogether.

We cannot grasp God, not intellectually, and certainly not by reasoning from first principles. But He knows this, and He doesn’t leave us orphaned. Instead, He has revealed Himself to us, first through His history with the Israelites, and then in the person of Jesus Christ. He’s in fact told us quite a lot about Himself, and all we really need. It’s partial information, but it’s enough.

Of course, we still go astray intellectually, just as the various on-lookers in Cotillion do. But the confusion does not go on forever. In time the gentleman comes home, and the on-lookers are able to find out from him what’s really been going on. And so we can go to God; and so in time He’ll bring us to live with Him, we are allowed to hope, and we will see Him clearly, and all our questions will be answered.

Misdiagnosing Your Neighbor

God leads us to him via our interests, because grace perfects nature. And that means that even if I were able to give every thing under heaven its due importance, my own life would still emphasize certain things over others. Let’s assume* that I have reached that degree of sainthood that I am able to do this. Thus, I know that I love the object of my interest for Christ’s sake:

Other folks, however, can’t see into my heart. What they see is this:

Birds of a feather flock together, naturally, and so when it comes to my particular interests in the faith, I’m going to tend to look for and hang out with other people who look like me:

And because I like them, I may tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they have it all together:

But of course, I don’t know that for sure. And if they are in a different place than I expect them to be, they can lead me quite far astray. Do they love the poor for the sake of Christ, or do they love Christ for the sake of the poor? But probably they are OK.

But then there are those other people in the church…the ones who don’t seem to share my interests. The ones who are always talking about issues that I just can’t get exercised about. You know, the ones I suspect of being doctrinally incorrect.

Now, really, what am I supposed to do with people like this? They don’t use the same words as I do, and they don’t do the same things that I do, and they talk about things that don’t interest me all that much. How am I supposed to be sure that they haven’t run off of the rails?

Gosh, I might have to talk to them, get to know them a little, and find out what they really think. Maybe I’d discover that everything’s quite all right.

Or I could just go on assuming the worst…

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* For the sake of argument. You understand.

Christ vs. Other Things

We all love many different things. When we first become Christians, Christ becomes one of the things we love:

Over time, if we persist in following Christ, our relationship with the things we love begins to change. In particular, we begin to love Christ more than the other things, and to love them for his sake:

And in time (and by God’s grace) we begin to love all things in due proportion to their worth, and all for Christ’s sake; and some things we used to love we abandon altogether:*

But the things that we cease to love, we cease to love because we now see that they don’t deserve our love. All that is good, we will love as it deserves; and thus it is said that if we seek first the kingdom of God, all these things will be added unto us. Woohoo!

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* This is an advanced move, but one to which we should all aspire. Kids, do try this at home!