Common Good - The Lost Jewel

From both sides of the Atlantic, observers have commented on the results that are becoming obvious within each society of the loss of people's vision that they live in a community and accept that there are limits to the freedom of  behaviour because of their respect for others.

From the United States, Rod Dreher sadly surveys the evidence that Americans have taken personal liberty to an extreme. Hi finds this especially obvious ahead of the mid-term elections: He writes:

The general feeling seems to be that personal liberty now trumps all other issues.

Who really believes in the common good anymore? We have become an atomized nation of individual consumers who believe our preferences must be indulged no matter what. It’s true of the Right as well as the Left. The main reason it’s so hard to talk about the common good is that so few people are willing to recognize an independent authoritative standard for determining that good.

He gives examples of how no one wants to be inconvenienced, even because of their own action or decision.

Think of a liberty that you would be willing to give up for the sake of the common good. Hard to do, isn’t it? We Americans have come to think of “the common good” as “maximal individual liberty.” In fact, individual liberty is a necessary condition for achieving the common good, and for that good to have meaning (because freely chosen). But in America today, it has become our idol. It has become the end of our politics rather than a means to an end. It is so in our personal lives, so why shouldn’t it be in our public ones?

 All politics is about balancing the rights of the individual against the community. Too much collective power is oppressive; too much individual power is anarchic. In a democracy, we will always be struggling with this tension. What has changed, I think, is that we have come to a point where people no longer think of the common good. This is Dante’s great lament about Tuscany in his day: that people only thought of the good of themselves and their own party or tribe. The result was chaotic, and tore at the fabric of society. This is where we are headed.

In Britain of the 1980s,  "modernity was defined by the energy of the entrepreneurial individual, set free from the bonds of tradition or social responsibility", according to Jeremy Gilbert, who is at pains to plot of path for good governance that would counter the worsening consequences of social irresponsibility arising from the breakdown of a spirit of community.

In many places in the West, a new society is apparent, one where people are merely consumers trying to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain. An effort to apply the concept of the common good will provide the needed balance in materially rich but spiritually poor societies of the First World. Further, that renewed appreciation of the fundamental principles of good governance within "advanced" sovereign states will inspire people in the rest of the world to conduct themselves as a community, rather than join the race to the bottom, which would be unrestrained freedom and total disregard of the role of government in enhancing the general welfare of all citizens.

Unimaginable Joy - Heaven

The joys of heaven are, in part, not able to be imagined because they are far, far beyond our experience. In part, also, the difficulty is that they are simply unimagined - no one yet has made the effort. But what will it mean for us to be human beings in heaven? Here is the transcript of a short talk by a theologian who is writing a book on heaven and hell. Peter Ryan S.J. identifies some elements of the existence that awaits us. However, the great love that offers us the joys of heaven demands something from us. So a lot rides on how we think of our life that will extend into a never-ending future.

God's plan is truly magnificent. Through Jesus, He calls us to cooperate with His grace, so that we will be able to enter His kingdom and enjoy unimaginable joy, for ever. He promises human fulfillment: resurrection life, fulfillment in all the human goods we naturally desire. It makes sense to understand this to include human friendship, a deep understanding of creation, human culture with music, art, and yes, even play.

God also offers us divine intimacy, intimate friendship with Father, Son and Spirit. Jesus invites us into His own divine family. Now this human in divine fulfillment is what we might call a 'package deal". God offers them together. We can't have one without the other, and to receive it we must become God-like. We can't enter His presence without cooperating with His grace, and becoming like God.

Jesus tells us how to do that [...] with His utterly radical exaltation, "Love your enemies", "Turn the other cheek", "Lend, but expect nothing back". Now, at first, this seems unreasonable. "Love your enemies?", Turn the other cheek?", "Pray for them?" But then we recall that Jesus Himself did this. He laid down His life for ... us, even while we were still sinners!

So He knows what He is talking about. He's got true credibility when He says that God is kind to the grateful and the wicked. For He is the incarnate Lord and He showed that kindness. And if we follow His example, then we will be, as He tells us, God-like, and our reward will be great. We will be, as He says, "children of the Most High", and we will be well-suited to enter into His kingdom of joy! 

Faith and Reason - Third in a Series

 Illustrations added to the enjoyment

Mr Okamoto, the insurance investigator, doesn't believe Pi Patel's account of his survival during the seven months since the shipwreck:  "For the purposes of our investigation we would like to know what really happened." Pi responds:

"I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality."

Pi obliges by giving the investigator a typical story of people treating others cruelly, culminating in murder, and mundane efforts that allowed survival. This account was accepted. As to the other account:

"In the experience of this investigator, his story is unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks. Very few castaways can claim to have survived as long at sea as Mr Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger."

That disbelief that the "boy" and the tiger could co-exist was the stumbling block. Mr Okamoto agrees that the story with the animals is the better story, but he cannot take it upon himself to accept it. Pi tells him, with tears:

"And so it is with God".

Postscript: I recommend these two interviews with Yann Martel, one from 2010, and the other from 2013.

Definition of Faith Part 2

Yann Martel has the Narrator of Life of Pi relate how despair was ready to pounce when the terrors of abandonment on the open sea - with the hungry tiger as his only companion - gripped his whole being. Though turning to God gave comfort, the Narrator is forced to recall: "But it was hard, oh, it was hard". Then comes another carefully considered definition of faith:

    "Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love [...]".

But it is often no easy matter committing to any of those elements of faith:

"[B]ut sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific, and I would not be able to lift it back up."

I enjoyed the next passage, which reflects how in valid religions a certain child-like outlook, and the admirable ability to submit to what is a truly higher authority, are essential to step beyond what imposes itself upon us:

At such moments I tried to elevate myself. I would touch the turban I had made with the remnants of my shirt and would say aloud: "THIS IS GOD'S HAT!"
I would pat my pants and say aloud: "THIS IS GOD'S ATTIRE!'
I would point to Richard Parker and say aloud: "THIS IS GOD'S CAT!'
I would point to the lifeboat and say aloud:"THIS IS GOD'S ARK!'
I would spread my hands wide and say aloud:"THESE ARE GOD'S WIDE ACRES!"
I would point to the sky and say aloud: "THIS IS GOD'S EAR!"
And in this way I would remind myself of creation and my place in it.

Martel also has the Narrator delve into the struggle of the person who commits through the deliberate exercise of faith to what is an evolving relationship with God :

"But God's hat was always unravelling. God's pants were falling apart. God's cat was a constant danger. God's ark was a jail. God's wide acres were slowly killing me. God's ear didn't seem to be listening."

Now comes an insightful outcome. For those willing to commit to this relationship with God through a previous choice, there is the possibility of the defeat of "blackness" and "despair" by "light" and "loving":

"Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed. A school of fish appeared around the net or a knot cried out to be reknotted. Or I thought of my family, of how they were spared this terrible agony. The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving."

Life of Pi is a good yarn, but also quality literature in that it reveals the nature of the human heart and, as a bonus, the way what is in our heart shapes our personal decisions, and how these go on to determine our relationships and the boundaries of our spirit.

Definition of Faith Part 1

"A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction" - Los Angeles Times Book Review of Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

A sequence of thoughts from that story that saves the reader from "dry, yeastless factuality"...

The Writer asks himself after one of many sessions with the Narrator: "What of God's silence?", and continues with the answer: "An intellect confounded yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose." Is that not a definition of faith?

The Writer speaks of the effect on him of the encounters with the Narrator:

"Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably."

Ineluctable means: Unable to be resisted or avoided; inescapable.

God the creator is our friend

The wonder of it all!  We see from human history that the creator of the billions of galaxies and the smallest particle of matter, or even of anti-matter, wants to be my friend - my friend!  This month I watched a reflection on that theme from Jem Sullivan. This is what she said in the video:

I have called you friends," says Jesus to his disciples in today's gospel [John 15:12-17]. Do we really believe the words of Jesus, or do these words go by us so quickly that we don't hear the divine invitation extended to us? God wants your friendship. God wants [everyone's] friendship! In fact,  the whole point of the history of salvation...from creation to redemption [Jesus' dying for us on the cross] is about God coming in search of humanity, that we might live in union, in friendship with God, and in union with one another.
God comes in search of humanity in the person of his son Jesus Christ, who reconciles us to God. When we reflect on this reality of faith, we are invited to respond to his divine invitation of friend ship in our daily lives. Today's gospel ends with Jesus' words to his disciples: "This I command you, love one another". To open our hearts to the love of God revealed in Jesus is to experience friendship with God. In the power of that divine love we are strengthened to love one another with the love that comes from God.

Il n'est pas de plus grand amour. This is the point of wonder: That the being who is creator is concerned with the fate and actions of each person, and comes in search of us individually and all of us together!