Who Am I? Discovering the Authentic Self

After I graduated from high school I decided that I was going to take a year off before I went to college. Before you get inspired by my bold, prime-time television subplot, the real reason I took a year off was for medical reasons. I tell this story to my students, especially the ones who get worried about their grades. My own vulnerability here and my story of finishing high school and college despite my setbacks sometimes helps students.

In June of 1996, between my Junior and Senior years in high school, I had a grand mal seizure. That seizure, in many ways, is the defining moment of my life. Apart from getting married, that seizure is the most important event in my life. That summer I had been having severe migraines and vision problems. I could deal with the migraines; I took a lot of naps. But the vision problems made summer baseball difficult. One Thursday night I went 0-3 at the plate; I struck out all three times. In the outfield, I couldn’t tell how far in front of me fly balls were, so I played deep and just let everything fall in front of me. I later learned that I was suffering from a type of encephalitis. My brain was inflamed…severely inflamed…and the swelling was literally putting pressure on my optic nerve and, most likely, warping my optic lenses, causing depth perception issues. The following day, when I was out with some friends, I suddenly got sick and passed out. I did not get better until two days later.

(This is a bit of a long story, so I am breaking in into shorter pieces. I am working n three other blogs so the rest of this story will come in a few days. Thanks for your patience!)

(Just taking a nap.)

Image and Likeness of God: Acquiescence and True Happiness

            We are made in the image and likeness of God, a Trinitarian and perfectly Loving community. We are made to Love and to be Loved; we are made to be Holy. But it is our fixation on material Truth that tends to prevent us from entering into a relationship with God, and if we do not have that relationship we cannot experience or know (phronesis) what it means to Love and to be Loved. I imagine God shaking His head at me whenever I am like that obstinate student. I want desperately to “understand” how to Love and how deeply I am Loved by God. I intellectually know that it is impossible for me to really “know” Love, at least in a material sense (episteme), but I persist. My own pride prevents me from acquiescing, and that makes it harder for me to actually learn what Love is. It is like that math class in college. I need to stop trying to throw that rope at other material things to make me happy. I need just tie the rope around my waist and enter into a relationship with God. I need to let Him pull me closer to Him, and the closer I get to Him, the more I can know that He Loves me, like Monsignor Buchignani taught me. The more I know (phronesis) that I am Loved, the more I know what it means to Love others. I begin to understand on a level beyond my own intellect that there is a pie that will make all of us happy, but we do not have enough rope to get it on our own; we need to let God, the piemaker, pull us into His kitchen. There, we will all know what it means to be Truly happy.

            Christian Anthropology tells us we are made in the image and likeness of God. Theology tells us that image and likeness is Holiness, the ability to Love and to be Loved, transcendently. The authentic image and likeness of the human self, then, is one who Loves and is Loved beyond any material “reason” for Love. But if this Vocation to Holiness is beyond material reason or human intellect, the only way we can know our authentic self is if God wants us to. Of course, the nature of Agape is not forceful or oppressive; God will not insist that knowledge on us unless we desire it. Sacramentality or Sacramental Vision is an act of acquiescing. It is telling ourselves that we cannot know everything, and we need to rely on God to teach us. The act of acquiescing to God, of being Humble before God, is an act of entering into a relationship with God, and it is in that relationship that we can begin to Truly know what it means to be our Authentic Self. The result of this…True happiness.

(This guy was in my yard today.)

Image and Likeness of God: Adam and Eve...again

“But Adam and Eve is not just about the Universal Call to Holiness and the necessity of relationship with God needed in order to learn how to Love and how to be Loved. Adam and Eve is really about you and me”, I tell my students, “and what prevents us from knowing how to Truly Love and to be Beloved.” The fourth thing we talk about is what causes a break in the relationship with God. Original Sin is a tricky topic to teach. This is where my students forget what I taught them five minutes before about not reading Scripture like an historical document. One student will rightly note that it seems unfair that all of us suffer from separation from God because these two people did this one bad thing so long ago. I re-teach the class. “I still think it is unfair that we have to suffer from Original Sin because of Adam and Eve.” I put my head in my hands and chuckle. Ironically, the inability to let go of reading Scripture literally is related to Original Sin. This is how I teach this: Adam and Eve are offered a material method for becoming like God. The serpent tells them that all they have to “do” is eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and they will have the same knowledge that God has. They are attempting to “know” like God knows, and maybe that suggests the sin of eating from the tree is rooted in a natural desire to be like God, but the method they choose to be like God is purely material in origin, and, as it is material, it cannot achieve transcendent. Simply put, Original Sin is putting material Truth before Transcendent truth; it is the tendency to put human will before the Will of God. Original Sin, essentially, is related to the idea that we do not need a relationship with God in order to know what it means to Love and to be Loved. All we need is our own ability. “But I still think it is unjust that we are separated from God because of what two people did a long time ago!” I die a little bit inside: “Don’t you get it? We are Adam and Eve, and every time we sin we put our will before the Will of God! We are Adam and Eve every time we say we do not need a relationship with God in order to know how to Love and to be Loved! We are Adam and Eve every time we create our own morality or our Truth. The story of Adam and Eve is True, but not in the way you want it to be True. You want it to be True in a material, historical sense so you can “understand” the facts and find some legal loophole. That is very clever, but Adam and Eve is not about being clever…it is a story about being humble before God; it is a story about acquiescing so we can experience what it means to Love and to be Loved in a way that the human intellect cannot comprehend!” Blank stare. “Thank you for helping me to explain this to the rest of the class!”

(Cooling off after a long walk/run)

Image and Likeness of God: Adam and Eve

            I was teaching about Adam and Eve (Creation) in my class once. Always, the first thing I have to do is to retrain my students how to read Sacred Scripture in a scholarly manner. I am convinced that atheists in our society are more fundamentalist in their reading of Scripture than Catholic scholars. Atheist critics of Christianity presume that all Christians look at Scripture as if it is a history book or some account of historical facts. Granted, the New Testament is considered historical and several of the books in the Israel Scriptures (Old Testament) do record historical events. But to say every book in the Bible is to be read literally is a relatively new concept in Biblical scholarship, if that is the right term. As a result of this literal kind of reading, many atheistic criticisms of Christianity are, themselves, based on literal interpretations of Sacred Scripture. Of course, Catholic scholarship does not (and never has) been so literal in its understanding of the Truth of Scripture. Don’t be mistaken; Catholic scholarship teaches that Sacred Scripture is Truth, but it is Truth beyond material understanding. The Psalm tells us that God’s Word is a lamp, and to use the Pit analogy, it can certainly be used to guide us in the pit and to help us tie the rope around our waist, but where that lamp or flashlight comes from and why it was sent to us remains a mystery. The Truth of Sacred Scripture is such a deep mystery to us that to criticize stories about Adam and Eve as not fitting geological evidence or some other scientific or material Truth simply does not fit the nature of the text being criticized. It is like using a Geiger Meter to judge a pie eating contest; the rubric doesn’t match the form. Sacred Scripture can still be True, though it is not historically factual.

My class and I read the story of Adam and Eve and we observe a few important details. First, God makes humans in His image and likeness. We already talked about how important it is for us to see this as God’s first mention of humanity. Second. When God creates humans He calls them “very good”, as opposed to “good”, which suggests a specialness of humanity. Of course, if humans are made in the image and likeness of God, then “very good” could also be read as “holy.” Humans are made in the Holy image and likeness of God. That is, Adam and Eve are made to Love and to be Loved. That is what St. John Paul II calls “original Holiness”. I ask my students a question: “If Adam and Eve are material beings and are limited to a material “Garden”, then how can they possibly know that they can Love and be Loved the way that God made them to Love and to be Loved?”  The only real response is that they have been taught somehow, and the only way they have been taught is if they are in a relationship with the One who is Love and Holiness, and the only way they can be in a relationship with God so deeply is if they have acquiesced or humbled themselves to a degree that they know, by phronesis, that they are Loved and are made to Love.  Adam and Eve have some sort of Original Sacramental Vision.

(Monk was a good dog!)

Image and Likeness of God: Love and Community

       “God Loves me,” teaches Monsignor Buchignani, and that needs to be the first thing we consider when we contemplate Faith and how we are to become who we are made to be…our Authentic Self. But before God Loves us, God Loves Himself. That is, within the Trinity, the Father Loves the Son, the Son Loves the Spirit, the Spirit Loves the Father, and the cycle continues, perpetually. A professor in graduate school taught us about the Loving nature of God. If we assume that the nature of God is this Agapic, self-giving Love that never ends, my professor asked, “Who was God Loving before He created us?” What a great question! My students actually Love this question. It is something they have never really considered. My most clever students deconstruct the question. “Mr. Smith, God is outside of time and space. Time and space are dimensions that we experience. There is no ‘before’ for God”. Despite their you’re-so-dumb-Mr.-Smith attitude I appreciate what they have to say. They are right, so I acknowledge their superior intelligence and ask them to indulge the question. If there was a time (or an eternity) where we did not exist, and if God is Love then God could not be God’s self unless there was an object of that nature to Love and to be Loved. The only logical response to the question is that before God Loved us and was Loved by us, God Loved Himself and was Loved by Himself. This is the foundation of Theological Anthropology. God is Love which means He is both Lover and Beloved. St. Augustine describes it this way. Unless God was community (Trinity), God could not be Love because Love suggests both one who Loves and one who is Beloved. Therefore, the image and likeness of God is both Love (Agape) and community (Trinity). All of this occurs before time and before space and is, further, not limited to material Truth. The nature of God, the Trinity, is transcendent. The Truest nature of Love and Community is so perfect and beyond human intellect…we cannot rely on human definitions of Love and Community. All we can really know is that Trinitarian Love is oriented to the greater community if God in the Trinity and it involves a perfect self-gift of one’s will.

(Henri keeps watch on the neighborhood)

Relativism: Acquiescence

            Moral relativism is based on the idea that that we can determine for ourselves what makes us happy. We can define Love and community in a way that will ultimately provide happiness for ourselves. I don’t disagree. We can definitely observe, study, and predict that which makes us happy and we can devote our lives to  making sure we replicate that process over and over again so we are happy as much as possible. But these definitions of Love, community, and happiness are all episteme. They are all material Truths, and, by definition, are limited to time and space. Further, relative Truths like this, based on episteme, only point to the self and the self’s intellect. Moral relativism is egocentric and does not point to transcendent Truths of the Authentic Self. Christianity claims that we are not simply material beings; we are spiritual beings as well, and, as such, we are made to be more than just our material selves. That means that if we define Love, community, and happiness with our limited intellect, then all of that Love, community, and happiness will be limited and incomplete. For my students, I relate this back to Sacramentality. Moral relativism is incompatible with Sacramentality because moral relativism does not point to anything beyond the human intellect; it is rooted in human pride and a desire to place our will before any transcendent Truth.

            I have two things at the bottom of the Pit: I have a flashlight and a few feet of slack rope (the rest of the rope goes up to God-knows what). Moral relativism is kind of like using the flashlight to find a nice piece of pecan pie in the Pit and then using the Rope to lasso it toward me. The pie only exists in relationship to me and to how that pie makes me feel. Again, this ideology of moral relativism is egocentric. That will make me happy, but if there is no more pie within the reach of the flashlight, the rope, and the material strength with which I can throw that rope, then my moral relativist mode of finding happiness will always be limited. I need to look at the rope and the flashlight in a different way. I need to think about what are all of these material things pointing to beyond my own ego and my own definition of happiness.

            Phronesis is knowledge gained through encounter with a Truth greater than I can comprehend, and the only thing that I need to “do” in order to gain that knowledge is to acquiesce to that greater Truth. Acquiescence is one of those particular words in English that I think can be taken a few different ways. Essentially, it means to submit to a greater authority. But I don’t like to teach that in my classes. “To submit” has this negative connotation to it and the sound often turns my students off to the process of phronesis knowledge. Most people, not just high school students, dislike “submission”. So, I discuss acquiescence in terms of humility and effective learning.

            The use of analogy and storytelling can be effective here. I share another personal story with my students to communicate the necessity of acquiescence if one wants to be better than what they are now. The story does at least three things in my class. First, it demonstrates an example of why one should acquiesce. Second, the act of telling a personal story where I do something wrong models humility for my students; it is an act of acquiescing, in a way, to my students. Third, the process of using images to teach a deeper Truth is analogous to Sacramental Vision. I usually wait until the next class period to reveal this act of meta-pedagogy to my students.

I tell them this story: I started my college career as a physics major. I was definitely going to be a cosmologist, and I was definitely going to unlock the secrets of the universe. That was short-lived. A few seizures and some serious brokenness of my brain and the further inability to do well in math classes hurt my prospects of being the future Stephen Hawking. I finished my first semester in college with a “C” in Calculus and decided to be an English major instead. I figured I already knew the language so I should do well enough. A year or so later, I saw that I needed to take another math class in order to meet my core curriculum requirements, and I was not going to take another Calculus class! I registered for a lower level math class, Functions Modeling Change. Piece of cake (or pie, as it were). I already knew all this stuff, and I could just sleep through class. They should feel blessed to have someone like me in that class! No humility…all ego. Okay…I did well in the class but that is not the point. I had no respect for my classmates or even for my teacher. I ignored the lessons in class and did all my work and calculations using Calculus systems that I knew from previous classes. I was arrogant. I was a jerk in class. I did not acquiesce to my professor, and, as a result, I did not learn anything new in that class. Acquiescence is the letting go of control for the sake of becoming a better human being. Acquiescence is Trusting that one who is smarter or wiser can help you to become smarter or wiser. It is assuming that there are some things beyond your own knowledge of what is right and wrong or good or bad and letting someone else guide you. It is honestly and humbly encountering one who is greater than you. Acquiescence, as opposed to ego and pride, is the best mindset to have if you want to learn and become a better human being. It took me a long time to learn that.

            While moral relativism takes the flashlight and the rope and uses them to grab on to things at the bottom of the Pit so we can be happy, Christianity teaches that we should take that excess rope and tie to around our waist. It is acquiescence to one who, as we will discuss soon, pull us out of the Pit and into Truth. Moral relativism does, in fact, reveal to us that we want Love, community, and happiness, but only as they are within the confines of human intellect and imagination. Imagine there is a type of pie that would make everyone happy! A sort of Transcendent Pie that we can only get if we are outside of the Pit. The first step in tasting that pie is to tie to rope around our waist so we can start to ascend. The first step is acquiescing to a relationship with one who is greater than we are. We cannot think of ourselves as the end of the rope; it is the One who is outside of the Pit who is doing the pulling. He is the end of the rope. Of course, as we grow in relationship with God, we learn through phronesis deeper levels of what it means to Love and be Loved…greater meanings of community and relationship…greater Truths of what it means to be happy.

(This is where the cheese is."

Relativism: Pecan Pie and Logic

I once had a meeting with a theology department where the entire agenda was on how to address Moral Relativism. Do I need to define it? Moral Relativism essentially claims what is right and what is wrong is completely relative to the person or persons involved in the action. That is, it is up to the individual to determine what is right or wrong for them as it pertains to their own subjective Truth. That means all actions are neither right nor wrong in an objective sense. People who believe this are not bad people. They aren’t malicious. In fact, I think this particular belief is rooted in an instinct to Love. I’ll explain that later. The meeting lasted for over an hour while everyone struggled to figure out the best way to teach against this ideology. Basically, we were looking for a formula that could be used to teach the illogical and irrational nature of relativism That was probably a mistake. I mean, I think Moral Relativism is rooted in an instinct to Love one another and now we wanted to tell our students to stop doing that? No wonder people respond so negatively to most lessons on Moral Relativism! Let me explain.

            First, I am logically (and morally) opposed to Moral Relativism. But I want to deconstruct this ideology. What I am writing here I do not teach in the classroom, necessarily, but I do keep this in mind when I talk about Moral Relativism. If we are made in the image and likeness of God and God is self-giving Love and community, then it makes sense that humans will have a tendency to “sacrifice” for the sake of community. That sounds contrary to the criticism that humans tend to be selfish and self-serving. Well, we are also made with an instinct to be happy, so it gets complicated. To make it simple, most people want themselves and everyone else to be happy. Here’s a stupid analogy: I Love warm pecan pie. It makes me happy. I know (episteme) that if I get a piece of warm pecan pie then I will be happy. I have control over my own happiness because I have observed, studied and I can predict my happiness. That feels pretty good. Of course, not everyone likes pecan pie (I do not know exactly who these strange folks are, but I will presume they are human just like me). Maybe they like apple pie or pumpkin pie.  But like me, they have observed, studied, and they can predict what kind of pie makes them happy. If I want other people to be happy, and I know that pecan pie is not their preferred method for achieving that happiness, then I want to make sure they have access to whatever pie they desire. That’s not a bad thing, right? I Love my friends and my neighbors. I want them to be happy, and I trust that they are smart enough to determine for themselves what will make them happy. And if apple pie makes them happy, then that is True for them. What is wrong with that philosophy? I just want everyone to be happy. This is Moral Relativism, in a nutshell. It really is rooted in an instinct to Love and to create a happy community, which is our image and likeness, after all. Of course, there is a tragic and logical flaw to this ideology and has to do with how we define Love and how we determine what we know to make us happy.

            I Love it when my students figure out that Moral Relativism is an ideology rooted in Love. It is not just an arbitrary “you do you” kind of philosophy. Their minds are open enough for me to suggest flaws in their logic. My students and people who are Moral Relativists are not stupid. They rarely make ridiculous claims like “everything” is morally okay. They know that the minute they say that “everything” is morally relative things like rape, pedophilia, murder, etc… become morally licit or acceptable. Only once have I heard someone say something so monumentally stupid. I was in college and the United States was about to invade Iraq following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. One of my classmates in a World Religions class adamantly opposed the invasion; she was a pacifist and abhorred violence of any kind. I was glad to hear someone share my own personal beliefs that violence should be avoided at all costs.  But then another classmate chimed in and made the point that Saddam Hussein needed to be ousted as he was systematically oppressing and killing of Kurds and other ethnic and political minorities. The claim was that the invasion would bring that to an end and was, therefore, the right thing to do. The first student, the pacifist, then said the dumbest thing I have ever heard. She said that they were citizens of Iraq and they were Saddam Hussein’s people to deal with as he determined. I almost threw up. This is Moral Relativism to its extreme. I know this girl in my college class was trying to defend her position that war was not the answer, but then what is the answer? If war is wrong and the oppression and systematic execution of Kurds is wrong, then what does that say about what we “know”? What does that say about what makes us “happy”? Certainly, the 8% of Hussein’s population who controlled the country would be “happy” with the oppression of the other 92%. Who are we to take their freedom to pursue their happiness away from them? If we are going to believe in Love, community, and happiness, then maybe we need to recognize that how we “know” or how we define Love, community, and Happiness is incomplete and limited to our own human intellect.

Epistemology: Meta-Cognition

A sense of meta-cognition is missing in people today. Students are not trained to be aware of what they are thinking or why they are thinking the way they are. My criticism of poorly understood or practiced Christianity is not intended to trick students into thinking I dislike Christianity or think Christianity is wrong. It is a modeling technique I use to show students the benefits and necessities of being self-aware. I know too many Christians who assume that by simply attaching the word “Christian” to their personality they are automatically right in how they see reality and justified in how they treat others. Christianity is not a possession or a skill set. It is not test of worthiness. It is not a manual or a book that we follow in order to earn salvation. Christianity is a relationship with God characterized by humility and unity, Agape. To be Christian requires, every day, a certain awareness or meta-cognition of how well we are acquiescing to that Agapic image and likeness.

            As I understand Christianity, both episteme and phronesis are need in order to respond to the Universal Vocation to Holiness, living out the image and likeness of God. I imagine all of us in the Pit together. The darkness and the misery separates us and makes it hard for us to look at each other for what we Truly are; it makes it difficult to Love and the be Loved. But if we are created in the image and likeness of a transcendent God, and if we are called to Love and to be Loved as God is, and if we are materially and transcendently True, ourselves, then that image and likeness must be made manifest both materially and transcendently. That is, we must Love God and we must Love everyone else in the Pit with us. As my student suggested earlier, Sacramental vision is thinking of episteme as pointing to phronesis, and phronesis is knowledge of the Authentic Self.

(Thinking about thinking about sleeping)

Epistemology: How Do We "Know"?

            In the modern world, since the Age of Enlightenment and the philosophical elevation of the human person, the human intellect, and autonomy, the focus of epistemology for the human race has been primarily episteme-driven. That is, in order for someone to know anything they need to observe, to study, and to predict that knowledge. The Scientific Method focuses on this form of knowledge. Episteme is fully derived from what we can call the Material Truth of the world around us. All that we can see and feel and smell and hear and taste…this is material Truth. It is the world around us and we are made, at least in part, to “know” the world in this way. And it is good! This sort of knowledge helps us to survive and to thrive as a race. It helps us to predict how the world changes with the seasons or how to adapt to response to various situations. On a personal level, this kind of knowledge helps us to see the differences and specialness of ourselves and other people and how to develop relationships between ourselves and other people so we can all survive and thrive. Episteme is good! Material Truth is good! My sharper students can see the big picture of the class and what this discussion of episteme and phronesis has to do with Sacramentality. “So Mr. Smith,” they say. Episteme is the material Truth that we can understand, and phronesis is the transcendent Truth that episteme points to?” Yes! Episteme helps us in the Pit to see things better and even to make some logical conclusions, and phronesis is the knowledge that, using episteme, I conclude must exist.

            Before the rope landed at my feet and the flashlight soon followed, I used episteme to explore what I could and to discover certain things about myself and my situation. And after the flashlight got to me and I turned it on, I was able to use my senses better. I could see more and discover more about who and where I was.

            The difficulty with episteme is it is limited entirely by the capacity of what humans can observe, study, and predict. If all knowledge was episteme, then there would be no such thing as transcendent Truth. And if there is no such thing as transcendent Truth and all that is True can be known by human observation, study, and prediction, then the smartest humans are the ones who have access to the greatest Truths. I am not afraid to make the claim that if we accept episteme as the only valid knowledge or Truth, then we are in danger of oppressing those who do not have access to that kind of Truth. This sort of epistemology actually separates people from each other as it is fully based on the intellectual capability of the individual human person. Truth becomes like a commodity that can be owned or possessed by some and desired by others.

            Christianity suffers from similar ideology if Christianity is treated more like a science than a relationship. Many Christians look at Christianity as something that if they study enough they will master it, like a science, and they will have some knowledge of God or the transcendent that others just don’t have. They lord that knowledge or Truth over others and the result is elitism and isolation. The same thing that episteme does. However, Christianity as a relationship with God does not isolate people based on their intellectual abilities like a Material Epistemology might do. Instead, it looks at knowledge and Truth as something transcendent and if it is transcendent, it cannot be observed, studied, or predicted by one person better than another; all people are equally ignorant of Truth. Instead, if knowledge or Truth is phronesis-driven, then anyone who is outside of time and space can give that knowledge or Truth (ropes) to whomever they desire. In this way, thinking of knowledge and Truth as being transcendent on its greatest level is to view all of humanity as equal, not in a material sense, but in a transcendent sense.

(He really does sleep like this)