A Sensible Life

Category: Orthodoxy

A commitment to and love for orthodoxy is the root of all that flowers in ASensibleLife.com

  • Are we "Human Capital" or are we Actors Working Out our Own Destiny?

    Are we "Human Capital" or are we Actors Working Out our Own Destiny?

    The Vatican (via the VIS – can be found at www.news.va) released today comments from the Holy Father treating directly with one of the core principles of A Sensible Life: human dignity. I have not yet completed my article on the Six Principles for a Sensible Life but it is in the works and you can be sure that human dignity will be there.

    Following are the words of the Holy Father. Emphases are mine as are italicized comments.

    “Man is nowadays considered in predominantly biological terms or as ‘human capital’, a ‘resource’, part of a dominant productive or financial mechanism. Although we continue to proclaim the dignity of the person, new ideologies – the hedonistic and egotistic claim to sexual and reproductive rights, or unregulated financial capitalism that abuses politics and derails the true economy – contribute to a concept of the worker and his or her labour as ‘minor’ commodities and undermine the natural foundations of society, especially the family. In fact, the human being, …. transcendent by comparison to other beings or earthly goods, enjoys true supremacy and responsibility for himself and for creation. … For Christianity, work is fundamental for man, for his identity, socialisation, the creation of a family and his contribution to peace and the common good. For precisely this reason, the aim of access to work for all is always a priority, even in periods of economic recession.

    Responsibility is another of the Six Principles for a Sensible Life!

    “From new evangelisation of the social sphere, we can derive a new humanism and renewed cultural and prospective commitment”, the Pope continued. The new evangelisation “helps to dethrone modern idols, replacing individualism, materialistic consumerism and technocracy with a culture of fraternity and gratuity, and with mutual love. Jesus Christ summarised these precepts and gave them the form of a new commandment – ‘Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’ – and here lies the secret of every fully human and pacific social life, as well as the renewal of politics and of national and global institutions. Blessed John XXIII motivated efforts to build a world community, with a corresponding authority precisely on love for the common good of the human family”.

    I have already written elsewhere at A Sensible Life about the central theme of gratuitousness and its importance in understanding ordered relationships between man and man and between man and God. We uphold the dignity of our brothers and sisters by working to ensure they have jobs, by helping them when they are in need, by giving without expectation of return – in this way we live a culture of fraternity and gratuity. We do not live fraternity or gratuity when we abdicate our responsibility to take care of our brothers and sisters or when we attempt to pass this responsibility along to government.

    “The Church certainly does not have the task of suggesting, from a judicial or political point of view, the precise configuration of an international system of this type, but rather offers a set of principles for reflection, criteria for judgement and practical guidelines able to guarantee an anthropological and ethical structure for the common good. However, it is important to note that one should not envisage a superpower, concentrated in the hands of the few, dominating all peoples and exploiting the weakest among them, but rather that such an authority should be understood primarily as a moral force, a power to influence according to reason, or rather as a participatory authority, limited in competence and by law”, concluded the Holy Father.

    Confirmation! No superpower government is going to take on our responsibility for upholding the dignity of our brothers and sisters. We must do it. We must work to teach and convert those around us; convince our culture of the need to take human dignity seriously and, in the U.S., work to restore to individuals those freedoms and responsibilities that will allow individuals to serve each other in fraternity and gratuity.

  • Time for Silence

    Time for Silence

    Following are remarks from Cardinal Dolan of New York republished from Catholic New York (Nov. 29, 2012).  I have added emphases here and there – most notably where Cardinal Dolan speaks about the action that can take place in silence.  Too often we confuse action with activity.  Let’s allow ourselves some silence and stillness this Advent season.

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    “Who We’re Waiting For

    One of the highlights of our bishops’ meetings comes at our morning of recollection.

    It’s rather simple, but we, your bishops, observe that is probably the most effective part of our sessions.

    We gather before the Most Blessed Sacrament, in adoration before the Holy Eucharist, exposed in the monstrance. There we pray together morning prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, listen to a reflection on God’s Holy Word by one of our brother bishops, and then sit or kneel for most of an hour in silent prayer until the time concludes with Benediction. (During the entire time, 10 or 12 priests are available for the Sacrament of Penance.)

    Two weeks ago, as the hundreds of bishops were in front of Jesus in the Eucharist in silent worship, I quietly got up to go to confession. As I passed one of the helpful hotel attendants, who had been with us all week to make sure that the sound and light were fine, and who I had gotten to know, he whispered to me, “Cardinal Dolan, what are all of you bishops waiting for?”

    “What do you mean, Alex?” I asked.

    “Well, you’re just all sitting there quiet, waiting…none of you are talking or doing anything. Is something wrong?”

    I smiled and tried to explain to him that, actually, we were doing something, praying, but that this was best done quietly, with all the “action” inside of us, in the heart and soul, invisible to all but the Lord.

    “And yes, Alex, we are waiting for Someone: we wait for Jesus to answer our prayers.”

    What Alex observed about us bishops in prayer he could also claim about the next four weeks, because Sunday we begin Advent.

    Advent, of course, is our spiritual “getting ready” for Christmas. We try to squash into four weeks all the hoping, longing, preparing…all the waiting of the People of Israel, our older family members in the household of the faith.

    As we bishops were doing in front of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, we now, in Advent, wait for Jesus:

    …We wait for His grace and mercy, sure to come;

    …We wait for Him to answer our prayers, sure He will, but unsure when, where, or how;

    …We wait for reasons to explain suffering, struggle, and worries;

    …We wait for Him to call us to be with Him for all eternity.

    And, lest we forget, the Lord waits for us!

    …Jesus waits for us to open up to His grace and mercy;

    …Jesus waits for us to admit that, as a matter of fact, we do need a Savior!

    …Jesus waits for us to admit that He is the answer to the questions our lives of searching pose.

    …Jesus waits for our ultimate return to Him, for He “has gone to prepare a place for us.”

    My friend Alex couldn’t figure it out. He had watched us bishops rushing around all week, busy with meetings, committees, projects, and talking. And then He sees us quiet, not a sound, not a hand raised to ask a question, no speakers, no reports. Something must be wrong, he worried. So he asks, “What are you waiting for?”

    Really, Alex, it’s who we’re waiting for…and He will come! In the waiting is the very arrival…

    And deep down inside, cradled in the soul, where no one but the One who counts can detect, is again an empty manger where the Son of God wants to be re-born. Christmas can do that.

    “Come, Lord Jesus!”

    A blessed Advent!

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    Happy Advent from A Sensible Life, too!  Let us all make time for silence during this season of preparation.

  • Letter to Women: A Word Regarding the Real War on Women

    Letter to Women: A Word Regarding the Real War on Women

    In the 2012 presidential election cycle one of the parties (need I name names?) continues to accuse the other of waging a war on women. I recently came across an unbelievably insightful letter written by the superior of a community of Catholic religious sisters wherein the author, Sr. Anne Marie Walsh, SOLT, discusses the real war on women. The real war on women is not the one described by the Democratic Party:  the “war on women” in which the “right” of women to kill their babies is under attack and the “war on women” wherein the “antagonist” wants to withhold federal funding for contraceptives and sterilization.

    Sr. Anne Marie writes movingly of the gift that women are to our culture and she describes the real war on women:

    “There’s another country where women have been victimized by a powerful propaganda that has brought them to be ashamed of their bodies and the meaning of their bodies. Because of this propaganda, they have sterilized themselves in great numbers and had 50 million of their babies killed in the last 40 years.”

    This country is the United States of America, a country wherein a dangerously high number of citizens are coming to believe the lie “that women cannot have control of their destiny unless they can get rid of actually what makes them women.”

    “The current propaganda has been just as lethal to women and children in the US as anything that goes on in any country in Asia or Africa or Latin America. Any man (or woman) who encourages a woman to think that access to sterilization and abortion will make her equal to men, has rejected her womanhood, and therefore has rejected her as a real person.”

    Sr. Anne Marie’s letter is full of hope and optimism and serves as a call to women and men to take heart and work to rid our culture of the deceptions perpetrated against women so that “the feminine genius can then be unleashed for the building up of a true civilization of life and love.”

    Please read Sr. Ann Marie’s full letter here. I have most assuredly not adequately conveyed the importance and wisdom of her words.

  • Gratuitousness

    Gratuitousness

    The post-enlightenment world in which we live tells us that man is essentially an individual animal; that he is on this earth to serve his own needs and desires and to act to ensure his survival and that of his progeny.  His relationship and interaction with others takes the form of a series of social contracts.  These social contracts impose certain duties upon him and give him certain rights.  However, he does not give freely, he does so with the hope (or rather, the expectation) that he will receive something in return.

    Christianity and the Catholic Church vehemently reject this notion of man in isolation self-interestedly seeking his own advantage and engaging with others only to the extent that (a) his forced to do so or (b) such engagement serves his purposes.  We are called to a radically different approach to our life in the world.  As Pope Benedict states in Caritas in Veritate, “the earthly city is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion. Charity always manifests God’s love in human relationships as well, it gives theological and salvific value to all commitment for justice in the world.”

    So we if we are to engage in this earthly city in a fully human way, in a manner that lifts us above the nature of other animals, we are to live gratuitously.  This principle of gratuitousness lies at the heart of all understanding of man’s relationship with man and hence must underlie all discussion of the manner in which we create and execute those institutions and ideas that give form to man’s interconnectedness with man:  families, communities, economic systems, systems of governance.

    What does it mean to live gratuitously?  Simply said, to live gratuitously is to give freely, according to the needs of others and according to our ability and responsibility to give.  This gratuitous living, then, requires a life of reflection; a life spent seeking to understand others, their needs, desires, hopes and fears and also seeking to understand ourselves our own capabilities and responsibilities.  Interestingly, as one seeks to understand and live this idea of gratuitous giving, one begins to see a corollary human trait, trust.  As we empty ourselves in the care of others we come to realize our dependence upon others for our needs.  So, in this way of living I am called both to give freely and to receive freely.  My relationship with my fellow man becomes one of mutual self-giving.  This life of relationship differs fundamentally from the enlightened notion expressed at the beginning of this piece, the notion of isolated individuals entering into social contracts.

    The exploration of how we should live this idea of gratuitousness serves as one of the main themes of A Sensible Life.  Our current economic and political realities are rife with examples of how we are not living gratuitously.  With a little digging we can find some examples of things we are doing well.