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Modernity's False Martyrdom

6/30/2014

There are two catchphrases of college culture (although not limited to it) that dominate students’ mentality, “I don’t care what others think of me” and “I don’t give a f***.” I can’t stand hearing these things because they express a mentality deeply rooted in the culture of individualism and the culture of “meh.” The funny thing is, though, is that they have a deeper root, which is the Christian martyr mentality.

The Christian martyrs in all times and places perplexed the world around them, because they accepted their deaths with dignity, purpose, honor, bravery, and even glory. One of my favorite examples is St. Lawrence, who was grilled to death, and while he was on the flames told them, “Turn me over I’m done on this side.” When Christians were thrown to the beasts in the Colosseum to be ripped to shreds, they were often times the ones laughing at the Romans.

Martyrdom of St. Lawrence file public domain: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palma_il_Giovane_-_The_Martyrdom_of_St_Lawrence_-_WGA16903.jpg

So what’s the deal with Christian martyrdom? It comes down to love of Christ. For the martyrs, nothing could separate them from their faith, that is, being in relationship with Jesus. Nothing was worth more than that. They clung to God’s Truth and Love so firmly that they were able to detach themselves from worldly concerns that normally dominate our lives: how do I look, what do they think of me, will I get in trouble for saying this… When the world around them reacted so violently to their testimony to the Christ’s death and resurrection that they were sent to their deaths, not even the fear of pain or death affected them anymore because they were so wrapped up in God’s eternal love, and so they accepted their martyrdom willingly as the most powerful witness to the Truth. They died for the sake of Christ, the king of martyrs, who died for the sake of the world, and for the sake of his Church, the Catholic Church, so that others might be inspired to enter into that same life of perfect love.

file public domain: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean-L%C3%A9on_G%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_-_The_Christian_Martyrs'_Last_Prayer_-_Walters_37113.jpg

As inadequate as that was at explaining Christian martyrdom, lets get back to our modern phrases. Essentially, they are expressions of a false Christian martyr mentality. “I don’t care what others think of me.” That’s a strong statement to a world that certainly wants you to care what it thinks of you. It proclaims your detachment from worldly concerns. The problem is that its root is individualism, which is not transcendent at all the way Catholic Christianity is.

Catholicism accepts you just the way you are, but calls you forward toward perfection. To say I’m perfect just the way I am is a glaring denial of my countless shortcomings in how I live out my life. It leaves me no room for improvement, no way to grow and become even better, and that is not living, that is not freedom if I put that limit on the possibility of loving even more deeply. When it comes down to it, the modern individualistic expression is a copout that let’s me be exactly how I am without having to make an effort to be greater, to try harder, to love deeper.

“I don’t give a f***.” Saying that drives a person nuts who really wants you to care. Again, not at all the way Catholicism sees detachment. Catholicism cares, a lot. The Christian martyrs cared, a lot, just not about their own bodily comforts, but rather the love of God. The modern mentality of “I don’t give a f***,” is so dull, apathetic, and boring. It is truly the opposite of love. It plunges itself into the tiny, dark, lonely world of me, me, me. Love is to will the Good of the other and to do something about it; by its nature Love cannot be self-concerned, but involves reaching to someone other than myself. This saying is also a copout like the first one, it allows me to be the dullest, flattest, least dynamic person ever, and masks it as the defiance of St. Lawrence. It denies my purpose, my ultimate end, and once again denies my ability to love. It lets me get away with everything and accomplish nothing.

So we as Christians need to learn a thing or two from our martyrs about true detachment. Are we witnessing to the Truth in our detachment, or glorifying self-serving individualism and “meh”? Are we allowing the world to get away with twisting the most powerful witness there is, martyring itself for the dull, boring, and flat? Or are we calling it through Beauty, Truth, and Goodness to transcend into the life wrapped completely in the love of God? Are we wrapped up so much in the love of God that we are ready to witness to the truth of Christ crucified and resurrected like the true martyrs?

Written by:
Marty Arlinghaus

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Ideologies— The Plague of the Human Mind, Heart, Body, and Soul

6/20/2014

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Are you liberal or conservative? Are you for economic equality or for the 1%? Are you for LBGTQ or are you against marriage equality? Are you a Catholic Democrat, or a Catholic Republican?

We llloooooovvvve debating these questions. It takes up the majority of my Facebook newsfeed that has become more of an alternate front-page news source if I can get past those endless “16 things you forgot to thank your high school friends for, I will always remember number 6!” (I totally don’t remember number 6.)

These debates rage in the Catholic Church (in America) as much as they do everywhere else in the country/world. Specifically in Catholicism there’s the liberal “social justice” Catholic and the conservative “doctrinal” Catholic, fighting for control of the Church. According to this binary, label-making way of thinking, Pope Francis takes the side of the first, and Pope Benedict XVI takes the side of the second.

I think a lot of Americans subconsciously picture the liberal/conservative debate like World War II, and of course whatever side we pick is the Allies, the winning team, the right side of history, and the opposition is the fascist Nazi Axis that tried to conquer the world but is now collapsing in on itself.

How the debate actually looks is more like World War I. We dig our trenches and every now and then we try to charge across no-man’s land to storm the other side to win the war. Then, through the machine gun barrage of articles and tweets and blogs posted in the media we get mowed down by the defenders on the other side and retreat back to our own trench where we regroup and wait for the other side to attack to mow them down.

file public domain: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lancashire_Fusiliers_trench_Beaumont_Hamel_1916.jpg

The sides we take are ideologies. Neither will win. Neither has true power . Whatever gains one side makes and vice versa will be wiped out when the grindstone of time turns the Roman, oops I mean American, Empire into a fine powder in the annals of history. It will all come to nothing. These ideologies are our modern mind’s equivalent to the idols of the ancient world. We idolize these camps of thought by elevating them, and America, to the eternal, as if it will all last forever. We serve them to death, but ultimately for the gain of nothing.

Their trick is they disguise themselves as being all good by using parts of the Truth but not the whole of it. Using only parts of the Truth leads to dysfunction, decay, and suffering, but it seems good enough to bite the worm on the hook. Even Hitler made people happy by giving them some good things: for example, the Autobahn, which is the reason America has its highway system, because it’s actually a good idea. We can’t allow ourselves to be deceived by the disguise of ideologies, though. They’re the slavery of the “free” world.

If nothing we build using these ideologies will last forever, what will? Well, let’s look to something that has stood firm for 2,000 years, has seen the rise and fall of nearly every kind of power and principality, and has only grown when the powerful try to wipe it out. It’s the Catholic Church!

file public domain: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Petersdom_von_Engelsburg_gesehen.jpg

The early Christians saw right through the political customs of the Roman Empire, the Roman way of life, which was wrapped up in its mythology, and decided not to participate in it. (By that point, Ancient Roman religion was an outward show, inwardly they didn’t really believe in the gods or used them as metaphors for life lessons and interpretations.) Believe it or not, the early Christians were accused of being atheists because of their refusal to be a part of this outward show. The Christians lived outwardly according to their inward belief in the one true God, the God who is being itself, the God who is substance itself, existing through the fading of all of our puny little human inventions and actions into nothingness.

Here’s the shocking thing, though, because the Roman and Greek philosophers believed in that same God, the God who is being itself, or at least the concept of it. The Christians believed that true God above all the myths to be personal, close at hand, loving, even… becoming a human himself, dying a real death on the Roman Empire’s most effective death device of state-sponsored terrorism ever, and rising from the dead gloriously three days later. The Christians believed in Jesus Christ, the Son of the living, true God. He is true substance. Whatever is built on Him will last for eternity. Worshiping Him is uniting oneself to eternity, to freedom from the nothingness of ideologies. The Catholic Church has professed this faith in Jesus Christ for 2,000 years, since Peter said of Jesus, “you are the messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Fast-forward to 2014 to Pope Francis, the successor of St. Peter in an unbroken line of successors to St. Peter. He professes that same faith. He does not take political sides; he sees right through the ideologies of the liberal “social justice” Catholic and the conservative “doctrinal” Catholic. He doesn’t participate in that outward show that comes to nothing. In fact, he even condemns those ideologies outright. “When a Christian becomes a disciple of ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought.” –Pope Francis, in a homily given on October 7, 2013.

In reality, liberal and conservative don’t exist in Catholicism. The question is about the true God. Are we living in the Truth? Do we know the One who is forever? Have we completely allowed His Son, Jesus Christ, into our lives? And do you know who’s been saying the same thing as Pope Francis? Pope Benedict XVI. You can read it in his Introduction to Christianity, Chapter III, sections 1 and 2.

file from: http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/ratzinger_prefintrochr_may08.asp

So how about we make like Pope Francis and start following Christ? No more self-referentialism. No more ideologies. No more trenches. No more enslavement. Lets live outwardly according to the true faith that we believe in inwardly and call the world to that faith.

Verso l'alto!

file public domain: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Procession_des_saints_de_Bretagne_-_dioc%C3%A8se_de_Vannes,_cath%C3%A9drale_saint_Pierre,_Rennes,_France.jpg

Notice they're all in procession in the same direction, toward the Triune God

Pictures taken from:

http://catholicradiodramas.com/radio-productions/sermons-of-the-saints-narrated-by-frank-dugan/

Written by:

Marty Arlinghaus

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Two Books

6/6/2014

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I’m in the middle of reading this excellent book called The Frontiersmen by Allen W. Eckert. It’s a narrative of the American frontier and the men and women who conquered them. He wrote a whole series of these books but this one is specifically about the Midwest (that’s us! Woot woot!) But anyway, I’ve learned a lot about the Native Americans (mostly the Shawnees) and I was astounded by their knowledge of nature, their ability to produce all natural (and extremely effective) medicines and their efficiency in everything they did. What shocked me most, however, was the fact that the god they worshiped, whom they called Moneto, was strikingly similar to our God – the God of the Bible. For them, Moneto was the one supreme being that was all powerful, all knowing, and the one who created the universe. Of course there were many dissimilarities as well but it struck me as odd that these people, who were without Jewish heritage or influence from Christians, could come up with a god that was so similar to our God. Even a lot of the guiding rules of their religion were reminiscent of Christian morals. So how did this come about?

The answer is simple actually. God reveals himself through nature just like He does through Sacred Scriptures. As Peter Kreeft would put it, “God wrote two books: nature and the Bible. We should read them both.” When we watch the sun set on a summer evening it would be a pity to think that all those brilliant colors are simply the culmination of bazillions of ultraviolet rays coming from a burning ball of gas 93 million miles away, through our gaseous atmosphere, projected onto the backs of our eyes and interpreted by our brain. It would also be a pity to think that it’s simply a beautiful piece of artwork produced by God for us to look at. No, when we look at that sunset we aren’t simply reminded of God; we actually see God! Not God in his entirety of course (that would be pantheism) but something of the great mystery of God is revealed to us when we look at his marvelous creation; rather through his creation and into Him. When we are exposed to such beauty as a resplendent sunset, a picturesque mountain landscape, or the warmth of the beach on a sunny day, our hearts cannot help but be drawn into that beauty – and in that beauty a bit of knowledge of Something Beautiful is implanted in our minds. It should cause us to say “how beautiful you are, Lord God” rather than “what great an artist you are, Lord God.”

A sunset, beach, and mountain all in the same pic! Oooohh yeeah! 0_o

It’s like walking by a picket fence and seeing someone, through it, on the other side. We only see little slices of the person behind the fence but as we walk by we see more and more slices of that person and our mind puts them together to form an image. In the same way we can put together an image of God by reading his book of nature. Of course this image is incomplete and blurred just as our image of the person is through the fence.

However, if you know something about the Native Americans you’ll also know that they could be quite savage. They seemingly were always waging war against the neighboring tribes and when they went on these killing sprees they were merciless. Of course they aren’t the only ones who can be savage. History very clearly shows that all men are capable of extreme evil (just take a look at the 20th century). But if these Native Americans had such similar knowledge of God and similar moral standards why were they so barbaric? … It’s because they only had one book. When you read the book of nature you inevitably run into lots of animals which have a fully animalistic nature (duh!). Animals have a lot of seemingly pointless fights and they will ruthlessly kill each other in order to stay alive. Reading only the book of nature, the first book God wrote, will most certainly lead to insights of God but they will be blurred at best; like trying to seeing someone through an old window pane (before we had the technology to make them almost perfectly clear). Looking through this glass we can know that the person is there and see the person’s basic form but we won’t ever fully be able to get to know the person by looking at him through the wavy window pane. We have to go out and meet him face to face. As St. Paul said in his letter to the Corinthians, “We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face.”

To get a fuller understanding of God we must put these two books together and only then will we be able to know God really well. In the book of his Word we are embraced by His infinite love and mercy while in nature we take a glimpse at the beauty of His kindly countenance. So go outside and immerse yourself in God’s other book – and find Him in its beauty.

PS – If you found anything in this blog to be insightful or inspiring, thank God for that and not me. “He must increase; I must decrease.” Also, as Pier Giorgio once said to his friends, so I to you, “I beg you to pray for me a little, so that God may give me an iron will that does not bend and does not fail in His projects.” Verso l’alto!

Written by: Jesse Badinghaus

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