Pursuit of happiness clouded by unreality

Clouded reality of modern times. Graphic by Zaksheuskaya

Author and social commentator Rod Dreher is prepping his next book by studying the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. Dreher points out that "in McGilchrist's 2009 book The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World [we see] in modern times [...] a sharp increase in schizophrenia, anorexia, autism, borderline personality disorder, and other diseases associated with under-function of the brain’s right hemisphere, and over-function of the left hemisphere". 

This over-reliance on the left hemisphere is important in understanding why there is so much distress in technologically advanced societies. Dreher highlights the following section of McGilchrist's book ("hypo" means "under", "beneath", "down"), saying that McGilchrist writes that we find modern people are increasingly distressed by... 

   
Philosopher Mary Midgeley wrote an admiring review of McGilchrist's book in the Guardian in 2010. She said of it:

This is a very remarkable book. It is not (as some reviewers seem to think) just one more glorification of feeling at the expense of thought. Rather, it points out the complexity, the divided nature of thought itself and asks about its connection with the structure of the brain.

McGilchrist, who is both an experienced psychiatrist and a shrewd philosopher, looks at the relation between our two brain-hemispheres in a new light, not just as an interesting neurological problem but as a crucial shaping factor in our culture. 

[...] it is always Right’s business to envisage what is going on as a whole, while Left provides precision on particular issues. Moreover, it is Right that is responsible for surveying the whole scene and channelling incoming data, so it is more directly in touch with the world. This means that Right usually knows what Left is doing, but Left may know nothing about concerns outside its own enclave and may even refuse to admit their existence. 

Further:

McGilchrist’s suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato’s time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path. 

 Dreher notes:

The book goes on to talk about how we have created a culture that conditions us to accept alienation, decontextualization, disembodiment, and fragmentation, because that is how the left hemisphere construes the world.

That this is causing distress generally is apparent from the statements of practitioners in mental health care, such as David Rettew, M.D., a child and adolescent psychiatrist and medical director of Lane County Behavioral Health in Eugene, Oregon. He writes:

A number of mental health clinics across the country, including ours, have recently seen an influx of adolescents who are presenting with self-diagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder and claiming that within themselves there are a number of different personalities that emerge at different times. Much of this seems to be driven by a small number of influential people on TikTok who have posted very popular videos in which they describe their DID in great detail.

Rettew says it's appropriate to "worry that simple dismissals of these adolescents as simply [my stress - BS] acting out the latest 'fad' miss an opportunity to work with significant mental health challenges, even if their expression is being shaped through social media".

Here, from TikTok, is one such adolescent who says her other personality wants the pronouns of paint/paintself.

Dreher:

It seems to me that this would be an example of the kind of thing one would expect in a culture that rewards this kind of insanity. Similarly with the transgender fad, it is impossible to believe that gender dysphoria, a real psychological condition that was observed in a vanishingly small number of people until a short time ago, is in the current moment not a symptom of advanced cultural breakdown along the lines Dr. McGilchrist discusses in The Master and His Emissary. 

This thread of discovery continues in greater detail in McGilchrist's 2021 book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World:

Indeed, if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it — and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; and reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.

A reviewer of this text - two volumes long - states that McGilchrist is leading a "revolution" in regaining an understanding of who we are as human beings because we have "become enslaved by an account of ‘things’ dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, blinding us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us".   

To add to the awareness of our precarious situation under the waves of scientism, for the wont of a better term, that have been sweeping over us, I want to provide McGilchrist's own words, by means of screenshots of the Kindle version of The Matter With Things as provided in Dreher's blog here.

McGilchrist writes in The Matter of Things about the lost path to personal peace:

 

We have the cultural elite to thank for much of this mess through its acceptance of styles of thought that make each person the sovereign of what they accept as reality, and its rigid adherence to ideologies that are based more on what is fashionable than on what is logically compelling. These elements, and the moral weakness at the heart of each person, combine to exclude a greater reality, which extends from human experience, to the nature of the world that we inhabit, and ultimately, to the God who created us with the purpose of developing communion not conflict, and from that, deriving a meaning that enables us to live our life to the fullest.

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Suffering: Why does God allow it?

As I am writing this I am also observing an online conversation between two women about their health problems. One talks about coping with a gastric complaint which involves "poop" difficulties; the other about the arthritis that she has suffered from since a teenager, at one time in her early twenties causing her to be bedridden for a whole year, but now that she is in her fifties, preventing her from doing the craft work that she takes delight in when she is able.

Pain and embarrassment, poverty and disability, often multiple burdens at once, are the lot of many people, while others escape relatively scot-free. Why does God seem to impose suffering on people when he is supposed to be a loving creator?

The two women above have come to terms with their predicament, placing their lives in God's hands, accepting that God has a plan for them that takes them along the rough terrain that is a life worth living.

A copy of Francis of Assisi's crucifix icon

A man, Robert Spitzer, who long battled fading eyesight and who went completely blind aged 57, shares his personal explanation of why God allows suffering:

For many years, when my eyes would take another turn for the worse, I would go through yet another bout of frustration and anxiety—frustration, because I made the fatal error of comparing my diminished abilities with what I was once able to do—and anxiety, because I was not certain whether the new level of disability would end my productivity or people’s respect for my capacity to “deliver.” 

Let me say for the moment, that this initial negative reaction to suffering was really about perspective (how I viewed suffering and challenge), and not so much the suffering or the challenge itself. I was not able to help myself: when the next level of disability came, I looked at it from a self-centric point of view. It seemed that the shocking development of “one more dreaded decrease in eyesight” caused me, despite my faith, to turn into myself. 

Spitzer, with a typical American zero sum mindset, says he could not accept on a human level that there were benefits to what was happening to himself:

I am not a stoic. That is, I am not prone to seeing suffering as a way of cultivating strength, courage, self-discipline, self-sufficiency, invulnerability, and autonomy.

Some of this supposed value in suffering mentioned above runs contrary to my empathetic and interpersonal nature. Therefore I view them as negatives and not benefits. 

The other stoic characteristics—strength, self-discipline, and courage—can be positive, but they are not ends in themselves. They are only means to greater ends, such as contribution to others and the common good.

 However, suffering can have supernatural benefits:

[...] It taught me that the sooner I get over it by putting myself into the hands of God (i.e. looking for the opportunity in suffering that will come through His guidance), the better off I am.  

If I did not have faith in a loving God, and hope in eternal life with him, I don’t think I would have this positive outlook on suffering—and I certainly would not be able to view it as an opportunity. 

He expands on that point:

I can see positive value in suffering through the lens of love which may be initially defined as a “recognition of the unique goodness of individuals, inducing a sense of empathy and unity with them, and making it just as easy, if not easier, to do the good for them as to do the good for myself.”

Inasmuch as suffering can lead to greater humility, compassion, and empathy, it can also free us to contribute to others and the common good without counting the cost, advancing the purpose of love.

[See also Spitzer's article Why would a loving God allow suffering? ]

In an interview, Spitzer clarifies what he means by the opportunities that arise through suffering: 

“First, it taught me humility. I’m not an arrogant type but I can definitely think I’m smart. But when you bash into a few pillars in an airport, that’s a lesson in humility,” he said.

“Nobody is self-sufficient. For a long time, I was a very independent thinker. I thought, ‘I can do this myself.’ Now I can’t do it myself. Blindness helps form a communion of people around you to help get things done. It’s a labor of love and that was a blindness discovery.”

And finally, “The best thing about blindness is that you’re just going to have to trust God. He’s going to help you and take care of you in tough situations.”

For many of us, trusting God requires a new mentality. We could say that it's fine for Spitzer who is a Jesuit priest, a holder of a PhD, and a former president of Gonzaga University in Washington State, but it's hard for ordinary people.

A young woman, Sonja Corbitt, takes up the matter of the difficulty of grasping the meaning of suffering:

When God first began teaching me about suffering, I was a young non-Catholic, and found the whole subject completely depressing. As a rule, most non-Catholics have no theology of suffering. I, personally, had no handle on the glory of suffering, and using those two words in the same sentence seemed, well, stupid, honestly. I wanted the Gospel to be health and wealth and prosperity.

My analytical mind works at extremes, and I began frantically planning for the worst case scenario, imagining the innumerable excruciating ways one could be “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20).

Since I was a Bible geek, it was Revelation 2:8-10 that God used to confront me with my fear, as the church in Smyrna [in modern-day Turkey] was also in danger of the fear of suffering. Jesus personally encourages them in the midst of severe persecution and poverty.

Their works had made them spiritually rich, he said, yet they were about to suffer additional testing by Satan as a result. He adds, “Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” In other words, “You’re doing great! Now do it until it kills you and I’ll reward you!”

These remarks seemed very flippant to me, and were the cause of my fear. Jesus appeared completely oblivious to, or at least unaffected by, their total humiliation and degradation, and I secretly felt I shared Smyrna’s experience. 

An unexpected outcome when suffering is appreciated with the eyes of faith:

It seemed to me as though God did not really care that we suffer; rather, it was simply expected, and that hurt me, as I experienced some things in my childhood that were still very painful. I expressed this hurt to the Lord, and he answered me with an extraordinary thought. 

The thought is that anointing with oil had significance in the Hebrews' civic and religious life, with myrrh being the most prominent kind of oil, even being linked with the name "Smyrna". However:

Myrrh was expensive, fragrant, and bitter, as it was a symbol of suffering and death[...]

Jesus, too, would be particularly set aside and anointed with this oil, as prophetically designated by the title “The Christ” or “The Anointed One.”

Jesus does not diminish, in any way, what we endure. Our suffering is so precious, he collects and preserves our tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8). He is steeped in suffering and identifies with it as the ultimate Suffering Servant*.

I have been set apart and called to service by virtue of my anointing at confirmation. What I was invited to accept, and ultimately to embrace, is that, like the Holy Trinity I worship, I must also be awash in the anointing oil of suffering.

The Church in Smyrna knew that there is often no earthly glory in obedience. It is only for the poor in spirit. But victory, peace, and reward await, in Christ: “I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). 

Spitzer has a message for us all, as we struggle with the reality of suffering made present most graphically in the aftermath of the latest massacre of children in the United States:

[T]here can be no suffering that is completely tragic. Tragedy may exist for a while, but in the hands of God, it will eventually be turned into love, and that love will last for all eternity. Even incredible tragedies, like the death of a child, are not ultimately and completely tragic, they are only partially and temporally tragic, for the temporary loss and grief that parents would feel in such circumstances is already compensated in the life of the child by God bestowing unconditional love upon him or her in His heavenly kingdom.

Yes, God feels the grief of the loving parents who miss their beloved, and He will feel that grief for as long as the parents experience it; but God simultaneously bestows unconditional and eternal love and fulfillment on the child whose loss is the cause of that grief.

Therefore, in the Christian view, suffering is complex. It includes the genuine experience of deep grief at premature loss. It also includes an experience of faith or hope that God is already bestowing unconditional love upon this child. It also includes an experience of trust that one will be reunited with that child in the eternity of God’s unconditional love; and it also includes an experience of “peace beyond all understanding” (from the Holy Spirit) intimating that everything is going to be all right.

We carry this mixture of thoughts and emotions forward day by day, with the knowledge that God has a plan to make our suffering fruitful—if we allow ourselves to comply with what God is directing us to become. It is hard to suffer and to hope and trust at the same time, "yet it is a path to the transformation of suffering into love", as Spitzer puts it. He also cites Paul's bold words from his Letter to the Romans:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And He who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:18-27)

I hope this helps you, if in a time of need. Leave a comment, where you can challenge these ideas or ask for a prayer. Ultimately, our understanding of suffering will not be complete until we are with God in heaven and can look back at our life on earth and see the truth about events that caused us physical or emotional pain. All will be made clear when our eyes are unclouded.

* See Isaiah's Servant poems: 42:1-9; 49:1-6; 50:4-11; 52:13-53:12.

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They gave up celebrity status for God

Dolores Hart with her then fiancé Don Paterson, and in a still from a 2011 documentary on her life

Dolores Hart won over Hollywood studio executives and angered teenage girls when she gave Elvis Presley his first screen kiss in 1957 in the Paramount Studios film Loving you.  Two years later she did King Creole with Presley. She went on to act alongside George Hamilton in the 1960 MGM hit Where the boys are. 

She followed up those achievements with a Tony Award and Golden Globe nominations for her work on stage and screen. She qualified to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and continues to vote for Oscar-nominated films. But in 1963, at the age of 24, she left the glamour of Hollywood to follow God's casting call for her to live as a cloistered Benedictine nun in Connecticut.

At the time she decided to become a nun Hart was engaged to Don Robinson, a tall, handsome Los Angeles architect and businessman. Because he loved Hart, he vowed to stay true to her all his life. He never married and stayed a faithful friend.

Hart has said that becoming a nun was her answer to a personal call of love, a call that is at the centre of the person, demanding a response.

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Olalla Oliveros ... from billboards to a convent. Photo Source

Olalla Oliveros was a successful Spanish model and actress, starring in movies and advertisements throughout the country and world. It was when she visited Fatima, Portugal, the site of the famous appearances in 1917 of Mary to three farm children, that she had what she later described as an "earthquake experience". She said she received in her mind the image of herself dressed as a nun, something she said she initially found absurd. 

She eventually concluded that Jesus was calling her to give up her glamorous life and devote herself to prayer and community in the religious life. She became a nun in 2010 at the age of 36.

"The Lord is never wrong" she said. "He asked if I will follow him, and I could not refuse." She is now a member of the semi-cloistered Order of Saint Michael.

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Gutierrez, actress and environmentalist— and nun. Photo Source

Maria "Chin Chin" Gutierrez wanted to be an investigative journalist in the Philippines but moved into showbiz, becoming a multi-award-winning actress but also an environmentalist. She is now a Carmelite nun, a life focused on prayer for the world and closeness to God.

A news report notes that in 2006, "she suddenly went off the nosy show business radar and took on a more low profile persona". The report explains:

At the height of her career starring in television soap operas and her environmental advocacy, she lost her mother as fire gutted their house at Loyola Heights district in Quezon City. She suffered injuries from that incident.

Four years after, in 2010, another fire broke out in the same house.

Chin Chin said the tragedies that befell her made her more circumspect on what to do with her life. 

“By the time I reached my college years … I had to confront the question of the existence of God in our philosophy class. Believe it or not, it actually touched a core in my being. While my mind is trying to convince myself and find proof that God does not exist, does not God hear me?" 

 In 1996, she was given the Best Actress title in the first Asian Television award in 1996 and 1998 the Best Supporting Actress prize. She was also a model who graced the covers of magazines.

Even as her star shone brighter in acting, she took on advocacies such as protecting the environment.

According to a Facebook page put up by her friends, she had become a sought-after resource speaker and lecturer for environmental education, “lending her expertise to a broad range of issues related to ecology and conservation, like Ecological Waste Management, Sustainable Development, Ecology and Spirituality, The Integrity of Creation, Sustainable Consumer Lifestyles, Women and the Environment, among others.”

In 2003, she was named one of Time Magazine’s “Asian Heroes”, appearing on its cover and in 2004 she was awarded The Outstanding Women in Nation’s Service Award for environmental advocacy.

 In an article, Gutierrez said that in her heart she had received the message: “You are entering something very interesting and beautiful."

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Joseph Brom, who has a PHD in Materials Science and Engineering from Penn State University has been ordained to the priesthood for Canons Regular on May 21 at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. pic.twitter.com/rMheaSl7hS

— Sachin Jose (@Sachinettiyil) May 22, 2022

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 A person's life changes when they believe that God exists, that our destiny involves a life after death in the company of the creator of the universe, and that God loves us so much that he gave us his co-equal in the divine nature to act by suffering in our place in order to restore justice to the relationship between God and humankind.

💢On YouTube:

     Dolores Hart Oscar-Nominated Documentary

     All or Nothing: Sister Clare Crockett — a movie-length documentary 

    Meet the former NASA engineer who is becoming a nun

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American values? No thanks!

An international school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is alert to the wariness of parents over the negatives of  American culture.

Certainly the regular massacres of young people, whether in schools or in inner city neighbourhoods that have become a feature of life in the United States, won't help to make American culture attractive in the rest of the world. The Uvalde, Texas, slaughter of 19 children and two teachers two days ago only adds to the dismay felt by those who used to have a high regard for Americans, but who now view them as obese, psychologically fragile, and hyper-individualistic — the last characteristic underpinning the general inaction in controlling access to guns and in ensuring social safety.

Evil lurks in every society, but successful cultures take action to control the sources of harm. Although Vietnamese young people are enamoured of American creativity and its gadgetry, they know it's wise to hold to traditional values such as solidarity as expressed through a multitude of community-centred activities. Another value they uphold is that of education, along with the self-discipline entailed in attaining a high level of achievement. For that reason, respect for teachers is made manifest on November 20, Teachers' Day, in many touching ways, appealing to the likes of myself, a former teacher.

But let Americans tell it like it is. In response to the Uvalde massacre, Bari Weiss, a former journalist and editor on the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, now the writer of social commentary, comes down hard on Americans for the dysfunctional society they have created, both through negligence of the common good, and the pollution of morality by the institutional and corporate imposition of new sets of virtue such as Critical Race Theory and the socially transformative trans ideology.

In a column titled "American madness", Weiss writes:

The elementary school shooting in Texas is the 212th mass shooting this year. It is the 27th school shooting. It is also the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. so far in 2022, which says something because it happened just 10 days after 10 people were killed in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket. At least so far, 19 children and two adults are dead in Uvalde. Others are injured.

┅┅┅┅ 

There is a deep sickness in this country. It goes beyond our addiction to guns. It’s an anti-social, anti-human disease that has gripped our society and our politics.

A big part of that disease is how numb we have become to violence. The country has been experiencing the largest crime surge in decades. Armed robberies are up. Shoplifting is up. Road deaths are up. Car break-ins are so common in some cities that people leave notes on their windows to the thieves that nothing is inside.

But the most devastating rise has been in murders. Since the FBI started tracking the data, 2020 marked the highest single-year increase in homicides. In 2021, it went up again.

As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children in America is guns. Not cars. Not drugs. Guns. It was also the year that we had the highest rate of gun sales in American history.

 ┅┅┅┅

The social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here. The dissolution of our social ties—and with them the accountability and responsibility that an actual community demands—has allowed insanity to fester unnoticed. Lockdowns accelerated the isolation, the purposelessness, the lack of meaning that was already overcoming us.

If we insist on viewing this shooting as part of some isolated issue or species of violence, then we miss the point. The point is the country is being consumed by what Philip Roth famously called “the indigenous American berserk”. It stretches back many decades, or longer, and for ages, it was possible to ignore or compartmentalize. Now the brokenness is everywhere we look and it is impossible to unsee it.

Vietnamese parents know such a psychologically poisonous and unsafe society is not a fit model for their children. They want their young ones to be exposed to Western/American customs and manners, but they are wary because the daily news tells them of the trouble at the heart of those societies. They despair when a young person in their extended family goes too far in pursuit of "freedom" and self-invention. They enjoy the cultivation of individual talents, but a lack of restraint is frowned upon in the comment in newspapers because people share a fear for the welfare of the person involved and the risk to social relationships.

In comments made to AP News last week, before the latest massacre in Uvalde, Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and professor at Yale, said:

I think the evidence is unmistakable and quite clear. We will tolerate an enormous amount of carnage, suffering and death in the U.S., because we have over the past two years. We have over our history.

Likewise, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who studies mortality, is quoted as saying that there are profound racial and class inequalities in the United States, and Americans' tolerance of death is partly based on who is at risk. She continues:

Some people’s deaths matter a lot more than others. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in this really brutal way with this coincidence of timing.

Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University who studies the cultural politics of public health, spoke about the grotesque lack of gun control:

“I don’t think that most Americans feel good about it. I think most Americans would like to see real action from their leaders in the culture about these pervasive issues,” [...] and who adds that there is a similar “political vacuum” around COVID-19.

The AP journalist states:

The high numbers of deaths from COVID-19, guns and other causes are difficult to fathom and can start to feel like background noise, disconnected from the individuals whose lives were lost and the families whose lives were forever altered.

American society has even come to accept the deaths of children from preventable causes.

[...] pediatrician Dr. Mark W. Kline pointed out that more than 1500 children have died from COVID-19, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite the “myth” that it is harmless for children. Kline wrote that there was a time in pediatrics when “children were not supposed to die”.

“There was no acceptable pediatric body count,” he wrote. “At least, not before the first pandemic of the social media age, COVID-19, changed everything.”

This AP roundup of statistics on mass deaths in the US is an eye-opener as to how a society can become morally hardened and politicians abdicate responsibility for leading a challenge to a way of life that tolerates the loss of lives in large numbers:

💢 More than 1 million Americans have died from COVID-19.
💢An estimated 100,000 people are shot every year and some 40,000 die.
💢 Nearly 43,000 people died on the US’s roads last year, the highest level in 16 years.
💢 An estimated 24,000 gun suicides year compared with 19,000 homicides.
💢 More than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, setting a record.
💢 Let me add that there were about 629,898 abortions in 2019, a typical year.

Dr. Megan Ranney of Brown University’s School of Public Health describes a frustrating “learned helplessness”, adding that:

There’s been almost a sustained narrative created by some that tells people that these things are inevitable.

It divides us when people think that there’s nothing they can do.

It’s not that we put less value on an individual life, but rather we’re coming up against the limits of that approach. Because the truth is, is that any individual’s life, any individual’s death or disability, actually affects the larger community.

The state of personal welfare in the United States is also impacted by working conditions, with the latest attack on employees being to cynically offer unlimited annual leave, with well-endowed managers knowing the fear of losing their job will force employees into an almost nil-leave culture. A second sign of the employer versus employee conflict embedded in the US culture is the difficulty displayed again over recent months when workers try to organise for union protection.

There is much to admire about Americans, but it is clear that American culture, at home, is poisonous through its nihilism, lack of self-awareness, and embrace of toxic individualism; and abroad, it is arrogantly assertive in the typical tone-deaf manner — except for one culturally sensitive school in Ho Chi Minh City.

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Economy of Communion — people before riches

John and Julie Mundell, owners of an Economy
 of Communion business.

For more than 25 years John and Julie Mundell have worked for the protection of the environment. But the business they created to pursue that goal has a special character, being part of the network called the Economy of Communion.

First, we will get a glimpse of their business activity, then we will examine that special character, their role in creating a business that is not just a money-grubbing operation, but an environment for building their employees and contributing to their community by sharing the profits of their work.

In the northern US state of Indiana,  Indianapolis is a  city that has thrived because of its industries, which, however, have also had a negative environmental impact. It's in this context that the Mundells have pioneered environmental recovery so that their company is now active all over the United States and overseas as well.

John and Julie had long been involved in nature and began talking about starting a business that would do things differently so that the community would benefit as well as the owners. Their business, Mundell & Associates, is an earth and environmental consulting company specializing in site investigation and remediation, risk assessment, geophysics, water resource use and more.

John Mundell says of his business's specialty:

We assist our clients in cleaning up the earth, such as with hazardous waste, primarily through the groundwater. We have had a role in cleaning up Indianapolis in this way. 

Twenty years ago we started with an environmental project just north of the Indianapolis canal where we found contaminated groundwater from old chemicals that were spilled by industry. So part of our work is a cleanup project using something called air stripping, taking the chemicals out of the water. [...] We've got very clean water now that we are absolutely convinced is safe. That's good for people, good for wildlife, and it helps create this atmosphere around this canal that is one of beauty and safety.

Really the story of Mundell & Associates is all about revitalizing Indianapolis and taking land and refurbishing it, making it useful again and cleaning it up so that the next generation can use the land.

John displays the fire in his belly over protecting the gift of nature:

Things are really bad to be honest with you, and it's a serious thing that not everyone's paying attention, and so to find that vocation to live out — this idea of a united world, that we're all connected, that what I do does matter. Part of the problem that we're trying to solve is this disconnectedness, and so the striving for unity and building bridges between cultures and people who don't have and people who do have is, in my view, the solution to the whole thing.

Julie Mundell adds some context to operating a business that is oriented to a broader vision than just ensuring the principals get richer by minimizing the salaries of employees and multiplying their own incomes:

I would say making these choices added a richness and a fullness to our lives. There's things that you give up in order to dedicate your life to this kind of thing and we don't have regrets. We see where we could have done this, we could have done that, but you make choices and you find that there's good in all of them. But we really feel good about the way we've lived.

John and Julie Mundell have had their own children in mind in seeking to restore and protect nature and the gift of natural resources, but their vision also extends to the welfare of communities. This concept is at the heart of what is called the Economy of Communion, which aims to put into effect the rich vein of Catholic social teaching.

John describes the Economy of Communion

The Mundells' business expresses its "Social Mission" this way:

Mundell & Associates began its operations in 1995 as part of a worldwide economic initiative now known as The Economy of Communion. The Economy of Communion  promotes a commitment by business owners to operate their businesses both for profit and for the benefit of society. This innovative proposal was launched in 1991 by an Italian woman named Chiara Lubich, leader of a worldwide organization called the Focolare Movement.

Those who participate are concerned about the negative effects of the “culture of having” that dominates society and sometimes inadvertently marginalizes people. To promote a “culture of giving” which creates an all-inclusive, healthier, happier society, both profits and needs are shared within the EOC in an atmosphere of mutual support and trust.

The people who benefit from the profits of the businesses (i.e., those who are in need), assume an active role. Receiving takes on the same value as giving. The need is a contribution that is offered in full dignity and fraternity.

In 2014 alone the EOC’s ‘culture of giving’ provided help for about 2,000 families in need, despite tough economic conditions faced in many countries throughout the world.

Additionally, the formation of young entrepreneurs is supported through various initiatives and summer schools around the globe where participants learn about and develop business projects that bring about this new way of economic action.

Today, over 850 businesses in 60 countries participate in the Economy of Communion.

The Economy of Communion is a new paradigm for business practice. It aims to marry rational behaviour in running and protecting the interest of a business with recognition of the obligation to share the social resources generated by the business activity. The sharing is with the community through respecting the needs of the natural environment and, likewise, the needs of the human environment.

Se-Hak Chun, of Seoul National University of Science and Technology, writes in a research paper:

The  Economy  of  Communion  [focuses on]  advocating  and practising  equality  and  redistribution  (Gold,  2003).  The  EoC shares profits to eradicate poverty and reduce social exclusion. In  this  regard,  the  EoC  is  a  new  market  economy  philosophy  between Marxism and Capitalism,. [It] is grounded in a profound respect  for  the  individual  dignity  of  the  human  person  (Linard, 2003). The EoC promotes a commitment of owners (shareholders) to  operate  their  businesses  both  for  profit  and  for  the  benefit  of society (Grochmal, 2016). 

In a market economy, the firm’s goal is known as a profit maximization in an efficient way. Thus, an economic agent acts to pursue personal self-interest. However, the EoC firms [aim] to redistribute wealth according to concept of fairness (Zamagni, 2014). The EoC firms put stress on the relationship between economics and civil or social life.

The core principles guiding this fresh paradigm are  generativity,  reciprocity and gratuitousness — with the ethos of solidarity expressed at every level of commercial activity (Gold, 2004). This can be illustrated by the fact that:

EoC businesses voluntarily allocate their profits in three parts: one part for direct aid to the poor, one part for educational programs to disseminate the culture of giving, and one part to finance investment and further develop the company (Crivelli and Gui, 2014). So, only one-third of the profits would be reinvested in the business in order to develop and create new jobs (Bruni and Uel-men, 2006; Bouckaert and Zsolnai 2012). 

That might be regarded as a business-killer right there. Certainly Se-Hak Chun, without offering any comparison to typical businesses, expresses doubts about the sustainability of EoC businesses if they retain just one-third of the profit for business use.

But, in fact, conventional wisdom concurs with the EoC guideline. For example, one bank gives this advice:

The question is: how much do you reinvest? The answer is different for every business owner. Traditionally, experts recommend that you invest at least 20% to 30% of your profits back into your company. But that percentage may change depending on multiple factors, including your timeline, goals for growth and your personal financial needs.

The "needs" of the EoC business's owners (investors) are sacrificed, as Julie Mundell stated above, an example of the generous mindset necessary for such an undertaking, where redistribution of wealth is elevated above private appropriation. We have to remember that the right to private wealth, private property is not absolute, but always secondary to the needs of the community. 

In all, the Economy of Communion offers a ray of hope for all those who wish to humanize economic activity through use of rational, but at the same time, altruistic business practices, with profit redistribution, too, not just toward employees but toward the wider community as well. In addition, the EoC aims to rid society of its predicament where work is a new form of slavery and is the source of historically outrageous inequality. These areas of the modern market economy are desperate for relief.

Ω See another video featuring John Mundell, this time focusing on his application of the EoC principles to his own business. Go here.

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This woman went to an abortion clinic for an abortion. After taking the first pill she returned home with the second bill. Outside, she met a pro-life activist who convinced her not to abort. Soon she got treatment to reverse the effect of the pill and gave birth to twin babies. pic.twitter.com/V0jWLeD4Yl

— Sachin Jose (@Sachinettiyil) May 19, 2022

Proof the supernatural is a thing

Ian Norton in Jerusalem, 20 years after his miraculous escape from addiction Photo: Source

Near-death experiences are only one kind of mystical experience that open us up to how close the supernatural realm is in our life. Accounts of two other kinds of experiences have appeared in the past few days, provided by a writer, Rod Dreher, who is gathering personal narratives of people who have encountered something beyond the material world. (Dreher's work is here, but probably behind a paywall).  

The first narrative is from a British man, Ian Norton, who went to Israel 30 years ago as a heroin addict in search of more powerful drugs. After about 10 years of being put into rehab and himself trying end his drug dependency, he was one day sitting on a bank of the river Jordan, reading the verses in the gospel of Matthew about Jesus approaching John the Baptist and asking for John to baptise him in that same river.

Matthew relates the incident this way in Chapter 3:13-17:

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented.

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Norton had not read the Bible before, let alone these verses. But he felt that the devil held him in a kind of slavery and he wanted to be free of the addiction. Norton tells what happened:

I was anticipating the pains to start, and the pains were starting, from not having any heroin, no food, no money, no anything. I was like, this is it, I’ve got to break through this addiction. I had worked with doctors in Tel Aviv, but nothing was resolved. I had a hole in my life that was being filled by heroin. So I was sitting by the Jordan, waiting for the pains to begin, and they were starting to increase. I was reading Matthew for the first time in my life. I got to that point where Jesus was coming to John the Baptist.

And then the event that changed his life:

Reading that part, this cloud just appeared. It was all around, coming closer and closer. It crossed the water first, and as it came nearer to me, it was becoming more and more condensed, more concentrated. At first you could just see it. Then it was something you could taste, and you could touch — and I realized that it had wrapped itself around me. It encompassed me, and pressed in. It held me. All I can say about it is that it was total purity, and peace. These wonderful things I had never felt before were just pressing in all around me, and holding me in this state of pure love.

After four days of being held there like that, without anything, it dissipated — and I was free from the struggle with heroin, just like that. 

I came to Jerusalem, but I was still fairly weak. Morally I was flying, but physically I was weak. I had a lot to recover from. I was sitting on the street with a “hungry and homeless” sign, begging. Believers were coming up to me, sharing their testimony with me while I was begging. Soon after that, I was met by a pastor from a Messianic Jewish congregation in Jerusalem. I went to live on the premises, and I gave my life to Yeshua Jesus then, twenty-something years ago. I was baptized in that place.

Today, Norton is still clean and is working in a gift shop in Jerusalem. He told the writer something of his understanding of the character of that much-storied city:

The first thing you feel when you get here is separation. The thing that separates us from our Creator, in Jesus, are the attachments we hold to the world. I was born in London, and coming out of London, everything is so worldly. Even if you’re born again, and you’ve given your life to Yeshua Jesus, there’s still that struggle with the things of the world pulling you back to it. You come to Jerusalem, and everything is God-focused. You’re wrapped in that spirit here. Everything is focused on continuing that journey towards him. Once you’re separated from the things you hold dear, you’re open to the Spirit calling on your heart.

That certainly something people from the West in particular, but all developing countries, too, can learn. With material wealth and the culture of "busyness", everyone is in danger of losing awareness of, and access to,  "that which is ‘invisible’ and ‘everywhere’ at any point in time, provided you make the choice to see what is plain to the eye of the spirit". See this essay on how film maker Andrei Tarkovsky sought to show "how we go through our 'life on earth', which is a journey of spirit more than anything else". From that essay on the cinematic power of the Russian director:

No matter under what ideological baggage we attempt to hide, whether we call ourselves religious or non-religious, or whatever fancy label we invent to suit our whims, Tarkovsky makes us aware of our individual responsibility towards life around us in the deepest sense possible. That type of responsibility can only be spiritual because it is a commitment that transcends the limits that time imposes on human beings.

Though Tarkovsky’s movies are deeply religious – it is in the spiritual sense that we need to analyze his work, especially in a time-period where both religion and spirituality have been discredited by “Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics…crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”

A message about past suffering 

A second narrative that Dreher relates comes from a man who was sexually abused as a boy by a Catholic priest: 

My friend Michael, who is now dead, became a chronic alcoholic who compulsively sought out sex with men, often priests. Eventually, as an older man, he found sobriety.

He told me about how back in 2002, I think it was, a priest from somewhere in the Balkans came through New York. This priest was purported to have some sort of mystical gifts of healing. The priest said Mass at a big parish in Queens. Michael went to the Mass, though the priest spoke no English. He was hoping for a miracle. Michael said he waited in line to get the priest’s blessing, and made sure that he was one of the last ones. He didn’t want to be greedy.

He knelt to receive the blessing, then began making his way toward the exit. Before he got to the door, an English-speaking assistant of the Balkan priest ran to him, took him by the arm, and said, “Father wants me to tell you that the Holy Virgin saw your suffering there, at the hands of that priest. She was there with you, and suffered too.”

When Michael told me that, he was crying. Those words had been so healing to him.  

The gift of knowledge the priest had is part of the world of wisdom that God opens up for some individuals so that they can serve their fellows. In these cases, of course, we are expected to be wary until the fruits of their ministry can be observed as being clearly uplifting. 

Conclusion on near-death episodes

American psychiatrist Bruce Greyson has spent decades talking to people about near-death experiences. His book on the subject provides their stories and it covers the conjectures of scientists as to what makes these experiences possible. An interviewer asks him for his best conclusion:

Greyson knows that events in near-death experiences are impossible to corroborate. “We can’t do research on a deity,” he says, drily. But still, he finds it tough to dismiss wackier theories, even if the data isn’t there. When I ask him what his current logical understanding is, he looks resigned. “It seems most likely to me that the mind is somehow separate to the brain,” he says, “and, if that’s true, maybe it can function when the brain dies.” Then he adds, “But if the mind is not there in the brain, where is it? And what is it?”

“I grew up without any kind of a spiritual background. And I’m still not sure I understand what spiritual means. I am convinced now, after doing this for 40, 50 years, that there is more to life than just our physical bodies. I recognise that there is a non-physical part of us." 

One of Greyson's working hypotheses is that these experiences are the beginning of the afterlife. As evidence he tells how the lives of those whom he has studied have changed radically. In other words, the patient has responded by choosing to live in a different manner. A key element in the change is that they are not afraid to die, and they regard every moment as precious, impelling them to have heightened respect for the natural world and the people with they have contact. 

Therefore, there is evidence available to us that we are transcendent beings, able to rise above our material or physical circumstances. We sometimes hear such accounts from those close to us. We shouldn't close our minds to the spiritual dimension involved. If we undervalue our spiritual capabilities, if we ignore the God who made us to be restless until we are face-to-face with him, then, as one writer put it, we will tend to "undervalue one another, underlive our lives, and underachieve our destiny".

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Trans debate's style hurts women - gay stalwart

Simon Fanshawe: Does it think I'm the wrong sort of gay? Source

Because the loud voices in society are determined that we all should accept their revolution in extending the moral deregulation of society, we need to hold their agenda to vigorous scrutiny. 

The British have allies in the form of feminists Julie Blindel, Kathleen Stock, and most prominently JK Rowling, who are willing to push back. British mainstream media also haven't succumbed to the fashionable wokeism that has captured American media generally. For the British, The Times, The Telegraph, and the Daily Mail are the leaders in maintaining some kind of independence from the ideological thinking that is hardening in its totalitarianism, becoming more antithetical to the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that had allowed democracy to flourish. 

During the past week another voice has been added to those pointing out how transgenderism has set upon a revolutionary course that will only alienate those who support the dismantling of all barriers to enable homosexuals to thrive in their human dignity. 

 Simon Fanshawe writes in the Daily Mail:

I was one of the six co-founders of Stonewall in the 1980s. Along with the others, I poured all my energy into making the organisation a formidable force for gay and lesbian rights.

All that work is now in danger of being wrecked, Stonewall’s reputation [as a gay rights charity] discredited, and its credibility squandered, by trans activists — not all trans people, I hasten to add — who believe they can dictate what everyone is allowed to say and think.

He was reacting to a statement, given as part of a court case in London, when Stonewall's ‘head of trans inclusion’, Kirrin Medcalf, took the stand and declared: ‘Bodies are not inherently male or female. They are just their bodies.’ Fanshawe tells why he was so dismayed to hear that statement:

 People such as Kirrin Medcalf imagine that reality can be reshaped to fit their requirements.

Asked whether there is a difference between biological sex and gender preference, Medcalf denied it.

According to the official Stonewall position — and to disagree is to be regarded as a heretic or, in the current lingo, ‘transphobic’ — people are literally whichever biological sex they choose to be. Medcalf appears unaware of the screaming contradictions in this position.

One barrister asked pointedly about whether there are any circumstances where it would be OK to treat someone according to their biological sex.

The Stonewall employee offered that this would be OK ‘at a cervical screening service’.

So it seems that even in Stonewall’s world, there are still occasions when the reality of sex stubbornly resists the pretence.

But it is Stonewall’s trans activists, apparently, who have the privilege of choosing those occasions.

Other people don’t — and, in particular, the definition of what ‘a woman’ is must never be left up to women themselves.

This trial has become a spectacle of ludicrousness. The barrister Allison Bailey is suing her legal chambers, Garden Court in London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for allegedly curbing her work and her income because of her view that there are only two sexes.

She says she has been punished for speaking out against Stonewall’s trans policies and arguing that it is undermining the hard-won rights of gay, lesbian and bisexual people in its determination to promote its trans doctrine.

'A difference of opinion is being painted as a physical threat'

Fanshawe gives his reasons for believing that the charity he co-founded has completely lost its way: 

Medcalf claimed that Stonewall had no choice but to advise people to avoid Garden Court Chambers, for fear of meeting Allison Bailey.

Her statements were supposedly so virulent and hateful that any trans person who encountered her would be ‘at risk of physical harm’.

This is simply nonsense. Allison Bailey has never physically threatened anyone.

She doesn’t believe transwomen are actually women, and this enrages Stonewall, but it’s a world away from physical violence.

Medcalf appears to believe that words are the same as actions, that to say ‘I don’t like you’ is the same as punching you in the face.

A difference of opinion is being painted as a physical threat. According to Medcalf, any trans person encountering Bailey is at risk of attack. This is a completely imaginary scenario. 

 Nothing of this kind has happened in real life. Yet Medcalf talks as though saying these things out loud somehow makes them true.

It was former U.S. president Donald Trump who first gave us ‘alternative facts’. When people challenged his version of reality, he used any form of coercion he could to shut them up. But it breaks my heart to see Stonewall adopt the same sort of tactics.

He continues:

Stonewall was born in an era of hostility, and we had to find a way of breaking down prejudice and building alliances with our critics.

The best way to do this, we discovered, was not by screaming abuse or attempting to lay down the law. Instead, we used data and research to construct a wall of credibility.

Further:

We did it so well that the social mood changed completely, enabling gay and lesbian people to enjoy real equality — with same-sex couples eventually being given the right to marry, for example.

The problem is now the reverse of what Stonewall faced three decades ago. Society is so keen to be inclusive and to respect diversity that it is open to manipulation. Everyone is terrified of appearing prejudiced.

The wrath of Stonewall is not a thing to be lightly provoked, as Allison Bailey has found out.

Her lawyers have described this as a protection racket. I wouldn’t go that far, but it highlights a serious problem with Stonewall’s approach.

Most Britons are very happy to see trans people treated fairly and equally, with decency and tolerance. Most trans people welcome that.

'Women were often treated as airheads with nothing to contribute'

He certainly does not hold back when he states:

But a small minority of activists, including those who have taken over Stonewall, do not want to extend that decency and tolerance to the rest of the population.

Equality, to them, means imposing their views on everyone else, without debate. That should concern anyone who believes freedom of speech is sacrosanct.

It is especially alarming to women who see their safe spaces breached by transwomen with intact male bodies.

Sexual violence against women must never be ignored or belittled, yet Stonewall is saying that no one has the right to question the presence of a naked and obviously male interloper in a female changing room.

Equally, women are told they cannot object to transwomen competing in their sports, despite copious data showing that cyclists, tennis players, swimmers and others with male bodies are at a colossal advantage when competing against females.

Women who do speak out, even those as highly regarded as JK Rowling or Martina Navratilova, are told with vehemence to shut up.

It often feels as though the trans debate has plunged us back into an era before feminism, when women were often treated as airheads with nothing to contribute to social discourse. 

By polarising the debate, and treating their version of trans rights as non-negotiable, Stonewall has opened up divisions.

That makes me deeply frustrated and sad. I’ve spent my life trying to bridge those divides and build coalitions.

Now people such as Kirrin Medcalf are taking a wrecking ball to that work and squandering Stonewall’s hard-won credibility.

I wish trans activists could see they don’t need to force their views on everyone else. Their greatest strength is in diversity.

When we marched in the first Pride demonstrations, we weren’t asking to be straight — we sang that we were ‘Glad to be gay!’

Let’s celebrate our differences, not wipe out our diversity.

 'It wants to change other people’s definitions of their lives'

In a podcast interview, Fanshawe stresses how insulting to him the extremist Stonewall position is, and how revolutionary it is for society: 

I have actually been told by the previous chair of Stonewall that I had put myself ‘outside Stonewall’, which sounds to me like Stonewall had made a decision that there can be the right kind and wrong kind of gays.

When you’re putting forward legislation or policy, you then have to recognise its implications, and you have to work through those in order to convince other people that your policy would still be a good thing. The gender-ideology campaign doesn’t do that. It seems to want to change other people’s definitions of their lives. It seems to be about telling women that the group they thought they belonged to – adult human females – turns out to be a much bigger group, which has actually got a whole lot of people in it who were originally born men.

If that is the aim, then campaigners need to be pretty clear about it. But I don’t see that as a political demand in the tradition of Stonewall, which was about tackling discrimination. I see that as a revolutionary view. It’s fine to hold a revolutionary view. But it’s also not a view that is shared by the vast range of those lesbians, gays and trans people who were originally involved in Stonewall.

Stonewall has got to make up its mind whether it is the representative group of lesbians, gays and trans people, or whether, actually, it is a much narrower ideological campaign that has other views. One way or another, that decision has to be made.

In truth, the bundle of woke theories being thrust on society are revolutionary, whether on the matter of policies for eradicating racial discrimination, or in the matter of the nature of optimal family life. We are seeing heroes arise in protecting society from the assaults on reason and reality.

Note:  A ruling is awaited in the case where lawyer Allison Bailey is suing her legal chambers for allegedly curbing her work and her income because of her view that there are only two sexes. She says she was punished for speaking out against Stonewall policies when the charity was advising the law firm.

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The supernatural is closer than you think

After surviving being shot (1968), Andy Warhol vowed to go to Mass on Sundays, a vow he fulfilled. The maker of "icons" met Pope John Paul in 1980. Photo Lionello Fabbri / Source

We can break out of the natural world and enter the supernatural realm, to know the reality of how close God is to us. 

One of the most important ways in which we on earth are in communion with God in heaven is through the ceremony Catholics call the Mass. At Mass the priest brings into the world the death on the cross of Jesus Christ, man and God in the same person, and by this historical death 2000 years ago, Jesus' act of doing justice to God for the offences of all people, past present or future. God is so good, that any evil act or neglect of the good, the true or the beautiful is abhorrent by way of insult to his absolutely pure qualities. Justice, of the absolute degree, demands a punishment, a recompense for the insult.

Contrary to a lot of poor Protestant understanding of what the Church from the beginning has believed, the Mass — also known as the Eucharist — does not presume to supplement with repeated sacrifices Jesus' sacrifice on Calvary on behalf of the human race. Catholics continue what was the teaching of the Church fathers, allowing time to mean nothing as we share in the act of Christ's worship of the Father.

The sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice: “The victim is one and the same: the same now offers through the ministry of priests, who then offered himself on the cross; only the manner of offering is different. And since in this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and is offered in an unbloody manner…” (Catechism of the Catholic Church #1367)

The Eucharist is thus a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies its fruit: [Christ], our Lord and God, was once and for all to offer himself to God the Father by his death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish there an everlasting redemption. But because his priesthood was not to end with his death, at the Last Supper “on the night when he was betrayed”, [he wanted] to leave to his beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice (as the nature of man demands) by which the bloody sacrifice which he was to accomplish once for all on the cross would be re-presented. (CCC #1366) 

Matthew Becklo draws out the supernatural element of our coming together in worship:

[...] What a mountain of difference hinges on that one word: re-present. What’s being said here? Not that “every time Mass is said, the sacrifice of Christ is offered over again”. Re-presenting doesn’t mean repeating, reproducing, or redoing. The sacrifice is not being double-checked, dittoed, or duplicated to ensure completeness. On the Catholic view, it’s already complete; the ... Catechism passages make that very clear.

No—the truth is stranger than fiction. To re-present is to make present—to manifest an eternal reality here and now. “Since Jesus is divine,”  Bishop Robert Barron writes in his book Eucharist, “all of his actions, including and especially the sacrificial act by which he saved the world, participate in the eternity of God and hence can be made present at any point in time” [My emphasis - BS].The Catholic Church teaches that this is precisely what the Mass does: makes present, from eternity, the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ on Calvary.

And while the manner of presentation is different, the sacrifice remains the same. [...] The Mass is the cross re-presented—not on our own initiative, but on the initiative of Jesus; not through our own work, but through the work of Christ; and not to try and supplement the perfect offering of the only begotten Son as if God needs it, but to participate in that offering and apply its fruits down the ages because humanity needs it.

Can the sacrifice of the Son to the Father be perpetuated mysteriously through time? Can Calvary suddenly be made present, mystically but truly, in another place—say, Santa Barbara, California? Can the faithful then radically unite their lives to it, not just spiritually but physically? [...] Protestants and Catholics are not split on the completeness of the sacrifice of Christ; we are split on the metaphysical depth and breadth of that one sacrifice. 

Becko captures the meaning of Mass beautifully when he states that "the Mass as a single, trans-historical sacrifice across time and space", a concept that may make the typical modern-day materialistic person balk. His idea in full:

The idea of the Mass as a single, trans-historical sacrifice across time and space may be difficult to conceptualize, much less accept. It may run so counter to a million other beliefs and intuitions that it just looks and feels grotesque. Fair enough. But [...]

Therefore, let Protestants understand that for Catholics "the Eucharist is not an invitation to surpass the unsurpassable sacrifice of Christ".

On the contrary, it’s a far more mysterious and beautiful invitation: to surpass the dimensions of time and space and participate, body and soul, in the New Covenant. And this invitation is not a medieval corruption; instead, it stretches back to the Apostolic Fathers and indeed to the Last Supper, where (as Scott Hahn, a former Protestant pastor, has pointed out) the Lamb of God fulfills and transforms all Passover sacrifices; sacramentally anticipates the definitive sacrifice of Calvary; and then commands his disciples to continue to do likewise among themselves (Luke 22:17-20). And so they have, in awe of the inexhuastible mystery before them. As Bishop Barron puts it in Eucharist: “Those who are gathered around the altar of Christ are not simply recalling Calvary; Calvary has become present to them in all of its spiritual power.”

Pope Francis drew attention to the trans-historical nature of the Mass in a daily homily in 2014 . He said:

"When we celebrate the Mass, we don't accomplish a representation of the Last Supper: no, it is not a representation. It is something else: it is the Last Supper itself."

The source article continues:

The Pope centered his reflections on the "theophany" spoken of in the first reading, taken from the First book of Kings, in which David's son Solomon, the new king, places the ark of the covenant in the temple, and God's presence descends upon it in the form of a cloud.

Listing the many ways that God speaks to his people, Francis emphasized that a theophany [...] speaks in a different way than prophets or scripture because "it is another presence, closer, without mediation, near. It is His presence."

He then observed how this same thing happens during the Mass, highlighting that it is not just a "social act" or a prayer gathering, but "the presence of the Lord is real, truly real."

"When we celebrate the Mass, we don't accomplish a representation of the Last Supper," noted the Pope, explaining that "it is the Last Supper itself," and that it "is to really live once more the Passion and the redeeming Death of the Lord."

"It is a theophany: the Lord is made present on the altar to be offered to the Father for the salvation of the world."

Calling to mind how some people say that they are going to "to hear Mass," the pontiff emphasized that "the Mass is not 'heard,'" but "it is participated in," and that "it is a participation in this theophany, in this mystery of the presence of the Lord among us."

Representations, he said, are things like nativity scenes or even praying the Stations of the Cross, but the Mass "is a real commemoration" in which "God approaches and is with us, and we participate in the mystery of the Redemption."

 "The liturgy is to really enter into the mystery of God, to allow ourselves to be brought to the mystery and to be in the mystery." 

"All of you here, we are gathered here to enter into the mystery: this is the liturgy. It is God's time, it is God's space, it is the cloud of God that surrounds all of us."

 [T]he pontiff encouraged all present to ask that the Lord give each of us "this 'sense of the sacred,'" and that "to pray at home, to pray in Church, to pray the Rosary, to pray so many beautiful prayers," is one thing, but "the Eucharistic celebration is something else."

"In the celebration we enter into the mystery of God, into that street that we cannot control: only He is the unique One, the glory, the power...He is everything.

"Let us ask for this grace: that the Lord would teach us to enter into the mystery of God."

This is an echo of the words of the Church fathers. 

Lawrence Feingold, in his 2018 book The Eucharist: Mystery of Presence, Sacrifice, and Communion, writes:

In his On the Priesthood, John Chrysostom (died 407) extols the office of the priest by speaking of the Eucharist as the sacrifice of the Lord who, through the priest, is mystically immolated on the altar. He who sits at the right hand of the Father is continually touched and held by the priest and offered to the faithful: 

When you see the Lord sacrificed and lying before you, and the High Priest standing over the sacrifice and praying, and all who partake being tinctured with that precious blood, can you think that you are still among men and still standing on earth? Are you not at once transported to heaven? … Oh, the loving-kindness of God to men!

He who sits above with the Father is at that moment held in our hands, and gives himself to those who wish to clasp and embrace him—which they do, all of them, with their eyes.

He continues later: But when he invokes the Holy Spirit and offers that awful sacrifice and keeps on touching the common Master of us all, tell me, where shall we rank him? What purity and what piety shall we demand of him? … At that moment angels attend the priest, and the whole dais and the sanctuary are thronged with heavenly powers in honor of Him who lies there.

Likewise, Theodore of Mopsuestia (died 428) is a witness to the mystery that Catholics participate in. He writes:

When he [Jesus] gave his apostles the bread he did not say, “This is the symbol of my body,” but, “This is my body.” So too with the chalice he did not say, “This is the symbol of my blood,” but, “This is my blood”—and with good reason. For he wanted us to turn our attention from the nature of the bread and the chalice once they received the grace and the presence of the Lord…. But if the life-giving Spirit gave our Lord’s body [in the Resurrection] a nature it did not possess before, we too, who have received the grace of the Holy Spirit by sacramental symbols should not regard the offering as bread and chalice any longer, but as the body and blood of Christ. It is the descent of the grace of the Holy Spirit that transforms them, obtaining for those who receive them the gift which we believe the faithful obtain by means of our Lord’s body and blood.

We can break out of the natural world and enter the supernatural realm. It is possible to cultivate in ourselves an openness to the experience of the holy that a religious event such as the Mass arouses. We need to know the way our hearts and minds work concerning, as Becklo states, "[our] background convictions, assumptions, and imaginations (either/or vs. both/and, dialectical vs. sacramental, etc.) to any doctrinal question"—and much more, such as our regard for our neighbours. 

Paul, as usual, has words of wisdom. In effect, he says we should teach ourselves to recognise the closeness of God and his goodness. Consider the rains God sends, he says, the fruitful seasons, and the way he "filled you with nourishment and gladness for your hearts". 

For this awareness, we have to open our hearts, minds and imaginations to God's presence, and make space in our lives for our response to the extra dimension God makes possible, and into which we can extend our lives.

There's a final thought that follows on from the insights of Chrysostom and Theodore one expressed well by Scott Hahn, a former evangelical Calvinist pastor, but now a Catholic scripture scholar. He titled his 1999 book on the Mass—The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth. 

Hahn gives an account of his first encounters with the Mass. Taking just one instance, he writes:

In less than a minute, the phrase "Lamb of God" had rung out four times. From long years of studying the Bible, I immediately knew where I was. I was in the Book of Revelation, where Jesus is called the Lamb no less than 28 times in 22 chapters. I was at the marriage feast that John describes at the end of that very last book of the Bible. I was before the throne of heaven, where Jesus is hailed forever as the Lamb. I wasn't ready for this, though—I was at Mass!

Yes, we can participate in heaven on earth, we can know that God is in our hand and we take him into our body so that each of us can be absorbed into him. "Mystery", "mystical": words to describe the reality beyond what is commonplace, though what is commonplace can reveal the supernatural. 

To conclude, as we strive to participate in heaven on earth, there are two scriptural quotations that are apposite in relation to how we must cultivate the ability to grow in right perception.

The first is of the words of the father who came to Jesus to ask for the healing of his epileptic son. In the course of his interaction with Jesus he made this prayer: "Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24)

The second entails the prophecy of Isaiah that Jesus quoted when he taught his disciples about why many of the people they met had difficulty in understanding the message about the kingdom of God. Jesus said:

You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.

 For this people's heart has become calloused; their ears are dull of hearing, and they have shut their eyes, for fear they should see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and be converted, and I would heal them. (Mt 13:13)

We can break out of the natural world and enter the supernatural realm—if we cultivate the hearing and the seeing of God's goodness in the ordinary, and the Holy Spirit at hand in walking with us (as paraclete) in our interactions with the people, the world around us.

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