Secular world rings 'hollow and empty'

It's a question of 'Where to go from here?' Photo Angelo Duranti

Some observations from a Norwegian man, Matthias Ledum, speaking about the consequences of changes in religious practice in his region, which takes in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. It struck me that he could have been talking about much of the WEIRD world. He says:

The trend for a long time has been a strong secularization and a growing irreligiosity. However, I see more and more people feeling hollow and empty after having tried the postmodern atheistic, relativistic and materialistic project, leaving them unsatisfied and hungry for meaning and purpose, for something greater and deeper. Neither money, career, fame nor hedonism have been able to give them the happiness and peace they all seek.

The Catholic Church’s great philosophical and theological intellectual tradition might also be a place of refuge for people living in a world where subjective truths are idolized and people are canceled for not having the right subjective truths. In the Catholic Church, they find not only that there is such a thing as objective truth, but also that Truth itself has a name and a face.

Here's a snippet of Nordic history from the same source:

The beginning of religiosity in the Nordic countries can be traced back to pre-Christian Norse paganism, which lasted until the 12th century. Thanks to the missionary efforts of St. Ansgar and English missionaries, and even the Vikings, who were converted to Catholicism during their travels, Denmark was first Christianized in A.D. 965 followed by Norway in the 11th century and Sweden in the 12th century. Finally, thanks to the  Swedish Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries, the Catholic Church became established in Finland.

Until the reformation in the 16th century, Catholicism blossomed in the Nordic countries. The heroic lives and martyrdoms of the Nordic saints — King Olaf  of Norway, King Erik of Sweden, King Knut of Denmark and Bishop Henrik of Finland — all  bear witness to this. 

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Euthanasia call rehearses Hitler's decrees

"She did not want to be hugged or kissed. Her family felt they had lost her." Portrait Source

The Washington Post recently ran this story: "A catatonic woman awakened after 20 years. Her story may change psychiatry."

In no way was this woman comatose, in any kind of a vegetative state, but the trend in many countries ‒ Canada is the most controversial example at present ‒ is for those with a mental illness to be dealt with by recourse to physician-assisted death even though it is a nonterminal condition. The point is that this woman might not have survived if her's was an unloving family and a vigorous euthanasia regime had taken hold.

According to one survey in the United States, being politically liberal and not religious gives rise to greater support for PAD-nonterminal cases in a variety of circumstances for the patient. Isn't this the trend in the world generally? The key element for decision-making was "quality of life" - the “perceived discrepancy between the reality of what a person has and the concept of what the person wants, needs, or expects” (Source). A materialistic outlook, holding there is no meaning in life beyond possessions  and a high status as determined by others.

It is easy to transpose the reactions of a family with a member who survives in an indeterminate vegetative state in deciding to end the life of that member to the reactions of a family with a member in a long-term mentally disabling state in requesting a physician to end that member's life.

"April was unable to recognize, let alone engage with, her family. She did not want to be touched, hugged or kissed. Her family felt they had lost her." - The Washington Post.

A deeply relevant excerpt from a chapter in a 2022 book Bioethics and the Holocaust makes the point that mindset common within the present culture is markedly of a kindred kind to that under the cultural hegemony of the Nazis:

Today, physician-assisted suicide and/or euthanasia are legal in several European countries, Canada, several jurisdictions in the United States and Australia, and may soon become legal in many more jurisdictions. While traditional Hippocratic and religious medical ethics have long opposed these practices, contemporary culture and politics have slowly weakened opposition to physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. 

Our chapter examines how assisted suicide and euthanasia have been presented in cinema, one of the most powerful influences on culture, by Nazi propagandists during the German Third Reich and by Western filmmakers since the end of World War II.

Almost all contemporary films about assisted suicide and euthanasia, including six winners of Academy Awards, promote these practices as did Ich klage an (I Accuse) (1941), the best and archetypal Nazi feature film about euthanasia. The bioethical justifications of assisted suicide or euthanasia in both Ich klage an and contemporary films are strikingly similar: showing mercy; avoiding fear and/or disgust; equating loss of capability with loss of a reason to live; enabling self-determination and the right-to-die; conflating voluntary with involuntary and nonvoluntary euthanasia; and casting opposition as out-of-date traditionalism.

Economics and eugenics, two powerful arguments for euthanasia during the Third Reich, are not highlighted in Ich klage an and are only obliquely mentioned in contemporary cinema. One dramatic difference in the cinema of the two periods is the prominence of medical professionals in Ich klage an and their conspicuous absence in contemporary films about assisted suicide and euthanasia. A discussion of the medical ethos of the two time periods reveals how cinema both reflects and influences the growing acceptance of assisted suicide and euthanasia.

 A point to take from that statement is how the cultural elite can direct social attitudes, as we see occurring in the push toward widespread acceptance of euthanasia. 

Two films in the category discussed above, Amour (2012) and Million-Dollar Baby (2004), were sympathetic to euthanasia wherein both involved the murder on falsely based compassionate grounds of those deemed a victim of a loss of quality of life, but both instances were also intellectually dishonest. In the first, the elderly couple could have sought quality medical services such as a hospice; in the second, the death of a young woman was presented as the only supportive option, whereas, in fact, her immediate distress would most likely have turned to acceptance and the determination to make the best of the situation, given the character of that "heroine". 

The terminology in this realm of human regression ‒ the only honest way of looking at the movement afoot ‒ is indicative of the threat to a God-less modern society:

Nonvoluntary euthanasia refers to the intentional termination of the life of a patient who lacks decision-making capacity, such as a child or a mentally incompetent adult, with either parental, guardian, or family concurrence or the presumptive consent of the patient. Involuntary euthanasia refers to the intentional termination of the life of a patient who objects, or whose loved ones object.

The authors of the Holocaust excerpt also point out that "withholding life-saving measures (sometimes confusingly dubbed “passive euthanasia”) should not be confused with either physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia". They note that in ethically appropriate cases of forgoing life-saving measures the intention is to avoid placing an excessive burden on the patient, to avoid dangerous or extraordinary actions, or any disproportionate to the expected outcome, which is imminent death. Here, one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. There is also the factor of acting to treat the patient's condition, such as a terminal patient in extreme pain, where the goal is not to end the life of the patient, even if death can be anticipated on account of the treatment, and this is according to the principle in ethics of double effect.

Hitler's stamp of approval

Once again referring to the chapter in Bioethics and the Holocaust, we are provided with the description of a book that was influential as Nazism took hold in Germany. The authors of the Holocaust text share this information:

In 1920, lawyer Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche wrote a short influential book The Permission to Annihilate Life Unworthy of Living. They argued that some lives were not worth living and promoted beneficent voluntary and nonvoluntary euthanasia for selected patients with incurable physical and/or mental disorders. Among their arguments in favor of euthanasia, two stand out. First, they argued that a higher morality should replace Western religions’ moral imperative to preserve life:

There was a time, now considered barbaric, in which eliminating those who were born unfit for life, or who later became so, was taken for granted. Then came the phase, continuing into the present, in which, finally, preserving every existence, no matter how worthless, stood as the highest moral value. A new age will arrive—operating with a higher morality and with great sacrifice—which will actually give up the requirements of an exaggerated humanism and overvaluation of mere existence. (Binding and Hoche 1920)

Binding and Hoche also dismissed longstanding Hippocratic ethical objections to euthanasia: “The young physician enters practice without any legal delineation of his rights and duties-especially regarding the most important points. Not even the Hippocratic Oath, with its generalities, is operative today” (1920).

While imprisoned in 1924 for his failed Munich putsch, Hitler read Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene) by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz (1921), the holder of the first chair in eugenics in Germany. The ideas in this book may well have provided Hitler with the basic substrate for the strange concoction of eugenics, anti-Semitism, politics, and violence that led Lifton (1986, 27) to describe National Socialism as a “biocracy.”

Hitler relied heavily on physicians to annihilate “life unworthy of life.” He told attendees at a 1929 Nazi Physicians’ League meeting that, if necessary, he could do without builders, engineers, and lawyers but that “you, you National Socialist doctors, I cannot do without you for a single day, not a single hour. If not for you, if you fail me, then all is lost. For what good are our struggles, if the health of our people is in danger?” (Proctor 1988, 64). In the same year, at the Nuremberg Party rally, Hitler praised Sparta’s policy of selective infanticide as a model policy (Welch 1983, 121).

 Because physicians were pioneers, not pawns, in eugenics and euthanasia, they responded positively to Hitler’s flattery, incentives for academic and economic advancement, and opportunities to exercise power and gain prestige in his program of “Applied Biology” (Proctor 1988, 7). They willingly and enthusiastically chose to eliminate Jews from medicine, involuntarily sterilize nearly 400,000 German citizens to prevent transmission of their allegedly inferior genes, prohibit marriage and sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans, and, ultimately, murder nearly 200,000 people whose lives were considered not worth living.

The Nazi euthanasia programs began with an autonomous request directly from a family to Adolf Hitler to euthanize their child, Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar, who was blind, epileptic, physically disabled, and diagnosed as an “idiot”—it was approved (Schmidt 2002, 241–242). The Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Constitutional Illnesses was created to secretly oversee the Children’s Euthanasia Program that claimed the lives of 5,000–7,000 children between 1939 and 1945 in 30 special children’s wards, most often by a nurse administering an overdose of tranquilizers (Hohendorf 2020a, 63–65).

The adult euthanasia program began in 1939 with the required registration of almost all patients in nursing homes and neuropsychiatric hospitals. The registration forms were sent to the recently formed Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care located at Hitler’s Chancellery whose address was Tiergartenstrasse 4, hence the name Aktion T4 for the adult euthanasia program. Three psychiatric experts reviewed the forms without examining the patients, and, together with the medical director of Aktion T4, initially psychiatrist Werner Hyde and, later, psychiatrist Paul Nitsche, selected which institutionalized patients were to be killed, primarily those deemed unable to do productive work and all Jews (Hohendorf 2020a, 65).

Patients selected for euthanasia were transported by the Charitable Society for the Transportation of the Sick from one transit institutions to another to obfuscate the program’s true purpose and to obscure the patients’ location from their families. Finally, the patients arrived at one of six killing centers in Germany and Austria where they were killed by physicians in gas chambers designed by physicians, chemists, and engineers according to Viktor Brack’s motto, “the syringe belongs in the hand of the physician” (Lifton 1986, 71; Sulmasy 2020, 229). Physicians then fabricated a cause of death for the death certificate that was sent to the patients’ families.

Significant public opposition to Aktion T4 arose after Clemens Count von Galen, the Bishop of Münster, addressed the issue of nonvoluntary euthanasia in an August 1941 sermon, which led to the end of the gassing but not the killing (Lifton 1986, 39). Some medical directors of institutions other than the six killing centers had already been starving their patients to death, and soon many more institutions were killing their patients by starvation, tranquilizers, neglect, exposure, and untreated infections in what was termed wild euthanasia (Hohendorf 2020a, 67). Nazi documents confirm 70,273 murders in the six killing centers, and the estimated number of murders during the period of decentralized euthanasia is between 90,000 and 130,000 (Friedlander 1995, 151–163).

The medical procedure for euthanizing large numbers of disabled persons in gas chambers became the preferred technique to implement “The Final Solution.” The bridge from gas chambers for eugenic euthanasia to gas chambers for mass murder was Operation (or “Special Treatment”) 14f13 (Lifton 1986, 135). Experienced Aktion T4 psychiatrists were enlisted to select “asocial” patients from concentration camps for “special treatment” in gas chambers at a euthanasia center, which “widened indefinitely the potential radius of medicalized killing” (Lifton 1986, 136). Thus, after considering several potential methods for the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, the Nazis chose gas chambers because “the technical apparatus already existed for the destruction of the mentally ill” (Proctor 1988, 207). Physicians like Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz, selected and gassed many of the 4,500,000 Jews considered undesirable or useless. 

An appeal to doctors of our time

A similar mentality is abroad these days: 

Public Health Scotland on June 1 reported that there has been an 84% increase in the number of abortions where a baby has Down syndrome, from 32 in 2021 to 59 in 2022. 

Overall, the number of abortions recorded in Scotland in 2022 was the highest number ever on record. The national statistics on abortion revealed an increase of 2,659 abortions — equal to 19.08% — in one year, with the number of abortions increasing from 13,937 in 2021 to 16,596 in 2022. Abortions are allowed only in the first 13 weeks of a baby's life.

The agency stated that abortion rates rose sharply in both the deprived areas and in the least deprived areas, but...

Socioeconomic inequality widened in the last ten years in Scotland: termination rates for those living in the most deprived areas are now more than double that of those living in the least deprived areas.

Societies certainly have to take more responsibility in the care of mothers and babies. Similarly, end-of-life decisions are bound to follow those relating to seeking an abortion as a solution to personal predicaments. To waylay such "inhumanity to man", adequate care of the elderly and incapacitated is a social imperative. 

But to continue with the theme of how a mentality of acceptance of euthanasia and worse takes hold of a society, the chapter from Bioethics and the Holocaust we are studying has a comprehensive overview of euthanasia in the contemporary West. It makes shocking reading as the horrors of the European and American eugenics movement are seen to be coming to pass in our own time, including the incidence of “termination of life without an explicit request”. Once again, here is the link to the chapter. 

The authors of this study give an explanation as to why they chose cinema as the focus for studying the change in social attitudes to euthanasia. What they say bout the relationship between cinema and the medical profession has horrendous implications for public safety, but which is being borne out in the medical profession's capitulation to activism in support of the unscientific transgender ideology. They write:

We have chosen in this essay to highlight the ways in which film presents assisted suicide and euthanasia. Understanding history is important, understanding the impact of culture on medical practice may be more important still. The medical ethos—the distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of patients, health care professionals, medical organizations, or medical institutions—is derived from three interacting factions: medicine, culture, and government (Roelcke 2016, 183). In Western democratic countries, we contend that the cinema is one of the most powerful influences on culture, and therefore, is very influential in determining the medical ethos.

And they write: 

Film was one of the National Socialist government’s most effective propagandistic media. Contemporary cinema, likewise, is a powerful cultural medium that encourages simple solutions to complex and emotional end-of-life dilemmas and has promoted assisted suicide and euthanasia in many films including six Oscar winners. 

The authors conclude their study with an appeal to all practitioners in the medical field:

Western culture and governments are well along in the process of discarding three millennia of traditional Judeo-Christian medical ethics and two millennia of Hippocratism. Films both reflect the culture and help to shape it. Contemporary films regarding PAS and euthanasia, like their progenitors in the Nazi era, dismiss traditional medical ethics and, using strikingly similar arguments, present a new ethic. One result of this change in ethics is that today, as in mid-century Germany, we are witnessing a not-so-subtle “shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians” (Alexander 1949, 44). These changes are generating an ever-increasing demand for and supply of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.

We conclude by encouraging physicians to seriously engage with the questions raised by the striking similarity between Nazi and contemporary cinematic portrayals of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. This similarity is not a coincidence. It is not an accident. It should be a warning to all of Western society and a call for physicians to take a stand and speak up for the benefit of the medical ethos, the medical profession, and, vitally, all their patients.

Two key phrases:  “termination of life without an explicit request”, which sounds so anodyne; and the concept of a "strong" versus "weak" medical profession, with the Western experience being that the profession's braying of its scientific professionalism is betrayed at just about every test.

NOTE: Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo has vetoed state law SB 239. which would have legalized assisted suicide in the state. Lombardo said assisted suicide is “unnecessary” due to improvements in palliative care and pain management. 

Ω See also: 

When Is It Morally Acceptable to Forego Life-sustaining Treatments?

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Baby brings overwhelming happiness

A baby is born:

“We felt overwhelmed with happiness and there were a few tears of joy. It’s a truly special moment holding your baby for the first time and one we’ll never forget.”

Expressing those sentiments is Tania Tapsell, the mayor of  Rotorua, a city in my homeland, New Zealand, who delivered a daughter at the public hospital.

“Home is where the heart is just got a whole new meaning,” she said in a public announcement. “We’re looking forward to making the most of these first few weeks before I return to my duties as mayor and [husband Kanin Clancy] takes on the important duties of full-time daddy.” 

Tapsell said the pair “wanted a unique name” that honoured their daughter’s Māori heritage while also acknowledging how special she was to them.

The baby's name is Kahumoa, which translates as “most distinguished cloak” and came from the words kakahu (cloak) and the moa bird, which Tapsell said was the most distinguished species of bird during its time. The moa, an ostrich sized bird, became extinct about 800 years ago because of human hunting.

... Just a human interest story of new life for child and parents.

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Tech as ugly regress not progress

What if new technologies are breaking us?

It is “humanity’s ability to ask what is suitable – what is good, what is bad, what is progress, what is regress – that separates it from other species.”

In Here be monsters: Is technology reducing our humanity? (or see here) author Richard King urges the reader to commit to a bold ambition for a more democratic technological future.

Writer Andrew Hamilton identifies where the text is particularly valuable:

King names three constitutive qualities of human identity that have developed over millions of years of evolution and are now under threat from unconsidered technological development. They are, first, the human sociality that is expressed through our physical presence to one another. This is threatened by the presence at a distance inherent in digital and information technology.

The second quality is embodiment, threatened in our culture by the prevailing image of the world and human beings as machines that are reducible to their smallest parts. This encourages the view that human nature is provisional and alterable. Nanotechnology and genetic engineering make it possible to alter humanity and its gene pool from within, leading to unpredictable consequences for the human future. 

The third quality is agency, embodied in the nature of human beings as tool makers. It is associated with a self-reflective as well as instrumental intelligence. The developments in human technology dissociate human beings from their tool making and risk making them the objects of technology and not its masters.

In response, King affirms the value of technology but insists that it must be subject to conversation in society about its purpose and its human consequences. This is difficult in a culture that establishes a gulf between our brains and our bodies. It sees our brains as subjects of human development and our bodies as its objects. A neo-liberal economic culture with its focus on individual choice then further reduces the worth of human beings to their competitive achievement.

And an intellectual culture that restricts valid questions about the world to ‘how’ questions leaves no room to ask why and to what benefit technological developments should be allowed. It leads to utilitarian ethics and leaves little basis for conversation based on respect for each person’s value as a bodily human being with an active and self-aware intelligence.

The immediate task for us is to become alert to the degree the philosophical concepts dominating this tech age are shaping and reshaping the human being and large swathes of the world not all as yet, and to ask fierce and urgent questions, re-purposing Dylan Thomas's urging: Do not go gentle into the night. Key questions relate to how the new tools are using us, and how we must act to regain our essential humanity.

 King, an Australian author, critic and poet, has this message:

From genetic engineering to Chat GPT, from cybersex to cyberwar, and from mood-altering pharmaceuticals to the widespread automation of work, new technologies are rewriting the terms of our existence. We celebrate this as ‘progress’ but often these developments are in line with the priorities of power and profit. The bright young things of Silicon Valley celebrate their ability to ‘move fast and break things’. But what if new technologies are breaking us?

As science, technology and capitalism fuse ... it is not enough to let the market decide which technologies are good for us. We need to ask what we want from technology. And the question of what we want is a question about who we are. 

And we won't know the answer to that unless we are open to recognising our God-given dignity. 

Ω See also previous post:

Vision Pro device threatens more isolation

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, read the same posts at my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Vision Pro device threatens more isolation

 Possibly to the detriment of real-world interactions among humans. Photo: Source

Michael Liedtke, who has been covering Silicon Valley's technological successes and failures for The Associated Press for 23 years, adds a sting to his warm reception of Apple's virtual reality googles. He writes:

After wearing the Vision Pro during a half-hour demonstration meticulously orchestrated by Apple, I joined the ranks of those blown away by all the impressive technology Apple has packed into the goggles-like headset. Still, that excitement was muted by a disquieting sense of having just passed through a gateway that eventually will lead society down another avenue of digital isolation.

At the end of his article Liedtke had this warning for those captivated by the superficial, though visually stunning, attributes of the Apple device or for those on the rampage as they push for a Homo Deus outcome for technology, the consequences be damned:

The most likely scenario is that Vision Pro in some ways is Apple’s testbed for mixed reality that will encourage the development of more apps especially designed to take advantage of the technology. The next ripple effect will be an array of other products equipped with similarly compelling technology at lower price points that stand a better chance sucking more people — including children — into a realm that threatens to deepen screen addictions to the detriment of real-world interactions among humans.

Already the development of social media has blighted the lives of many through the spread of social isolation:

With social media apps at our fingertips, it’s not uncommon for online interactions to substitute face-to-face catchups.

But when we spend more time following our friends’ updates online than we do seeing them in person, it can lead to social withdrawal and alienation.

Research shows a link between heavy social media use and feelings of social isolation and loneliness.

It found those who spend the most time on social media (more than two hours a day) had twice the odds of perceived social isolation than those who said they spent half an hour or less a day on those sites.

Balanced, self-disciplined use of technology is imperative, but by way of emphasising how technology does shape our society, something recently seen on Twitter:

It’s sad, as a teen I remember going to a record store and listening to music while deciding with one to purchase. Taking the record home and playing it on the phonograph while friends gathered around and laughed and talked and listened.  All that is gone, and social interaction today is mobs of teens videotaping their destruction of the local business area on the weekend and watching it go viral while they text each other. I fear for our nation when this generation is in their 40-50’s. What will be left?

If not virtual reality goggles and the like to salve the human impulse to explore and invent, what? The answer is to go to the heart of life for all co-existing on this planet:  “access to food and water, respect for the environment, health care, energy sources and the equitable distribution of the world’s goods.”

That quote comes from a statement of Pope Francis to the bishop of Hiroshima, the Japanese martyr city that hosted the G7 summit last month. This is the relevant part of the Pope's statement:

Nuclear weapons are a “risk that offers only an illusion of peace.” Instead, “responsible multilateral cooperation” is needed to provide “access to food and water, respect for the environment, health care, energy sources and the equitable distribution of the world’s goods.” 

Ω See also:

4 dangers that most worry AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton

Artificial intelligence could lead to extinction, experts warn

Jonathan Freedland's The future of AI is chilling – humans have to act together to overcome this threat to civilisation

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, read the same posts at my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Western ideology tries to erase personal sin

Although you can try to erase sin from a culture, you can’t erase guilt. Photo: Source

"I decide what's right or wrong. I don't need anyone telling me otherwise." So we all bear the burden of  having socially approved groups deciding what should be allowed, no matter the impact on others' lives by way of slander, loss of property, harm to children, or suppression of the right to hear truly countercultural opinions.

And with the current attention given to the wrongs done to a multitude of victims in Western society the cultural impulse is to link the perpetrator to systemic policies and practices and not to freely willed actions or decisions.

Of course, free will has to be informed and developed according to the wisdom of the ages, not molded by what is temporarily the leading philosophy or even a metaphysical concept promoted by the elite in the media, education, the corporate world, and politics.

With the absence of an informed conscience a person is dehumanised in a striking way, namely by their inability to perceive themselves as a being with a spiritual dimension. The spiritual is essential to our identity as it endows us with specifically human capabilities. (See below a partial list of our human capabilities that go beyond the prominent ones such as free will, conscience, the cosmic knowledge of good and evil, a natural desire to experience perfect goodness, love, truth, and beauty, and our interior awareness of transcendent reality ‒ that there is something more than this world.) 

On that point it is worth considering the crucially relevant observations offered by pastor Robb Brunansky of  Arizona on the RealClearReligion site. It's from such an observer outside the mainstream players that we should expect clear insight into the state of our civilisation. He writes:

Sin is not a popular topic of discussion today. Our culture has virtually banished the word from its vocabulary. Sin has been re-defined, re-labeled, re-directed, and even revered.

But although you can erase sin from a culture, you can’t erase guilt. All humans have an innate sense that we are guilty of doing wrong. We are born into this world having been created in the image of God, and because we live in God’s world as creatures who bear His image, we can never escape the reality of our guilt because of our sin.

Attempts to deny the reality of sin seem only to increase the burden of guilt. Wokeness, social justice, anti-racism, virtue signaling, false religions, and vague forms of spirituality all attempt to erase the guilt we feel over our sins and make us feel like good, righteous people. But these attempts at self-justification are ultimately futile and useless.

Denying your sins will never erase your sins before a holy and just God. The real problem we have as sinful human beings isn’t that our existential happiness is hindered by sin; it’s that we are destined for an eternity under the wrath of God because of our sin. This is the tragedy of denying your sin. Simply wishing it away or pretending your sin is a virtue doesn’t deal with the problem of the wrath of God abiding on you.

It's in this setting of a world of sinners in need of real forgiveness from God that the Gospel writer Mark begins telling the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Mark tells his readers from the outset that he has good news to share with sinful people about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. He ensures we understand at the outset of his Gospel that Jesus has come into this world to defeat Satan by bringing forgiveness to sinners. The miracles, the healings, and the casting out of demons are external signs of spiritual truth, that Jesus has the authority to do the most important thing for us that we need: to forgive our sins. That’s the good news of the Gospel that Mark is writing about.

As this Gospel progresses, we learn in Mark 10:45 exactly how Jesus is going to provide forgiveness for our sins. He will do it in the most degrading manner possible, by giving His life for sinners on a cross. There’s one detail, though, that Jesus includes in Mark 10:34 that will vindicate His claim that His sacrifice was accepted by God and brought forgiveness to sinners: He would rise again three days later. 

Here, we come face to face with the most crucial fact of all: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If He is the Messiah, the Son of God who has the authority to forgive sins, then Jesus must not only die for sinners but rise from the grave. Mark ends his Gospel in a unique way from the other Gospel writers. He concludes having proven that Jesus rose from the dead because at that point his work is done. Mark has proven that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God. He has proven that the Gospel is true, and that forgiveness is found, not by denying your sins, but through faith in this crucified and risen Savior. 

As said above, informing our conscience about how to live in a truly human way, and being prepared to open ourselves to the internal promptings as to where right and wrong lie, but more importantly to what God's plan for each of us is, all give us knowledge of what is sinful in our lives, and how we should relate to society.

Therefore, we won't need to blindly follow the latest cultural norms and fashionable ideologies, but will have the courage of our convictions in accepting that we are governed by a personal entity of a higher order who guides us in such a way that we thrive, and who ensures we do not succumb to the agony of a one-dimensional existence.

Our Spiritual Capabilities

The human person's spiritual capabilities are extensive. They go beyond the cognitive and are centred on the deeply human quest of gaining meaning in and through life. “People have an inbuilt receptiveness to meaning (the ‘lustre’ of life): we discover and we ascribe meaning and we are also capable of recognising and acknowledging others as people in search of meaning, longing for meaning and absorbers of meaning.”

From the same source, see this list of elements of our spiritual dimension involving each of our head, heart and hands, because this dimension is part of our nature:

• Approach with Openness
• Being Present
• Connecting with the Heart
• Deep Listening
• Deep Questioning
• Discern Hope
• Discernment
• Embracing Silence
• Engage with Mystery
• Explore Layers of Meaning
• Re-Imagine
• Respond beyond Words
• Reverence
• Search
• Sitting with Ambiguity
• Stillness
• Symbolise
• Wonder and Awe

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Jesus, the Loved One in the Trinity

Struggling with insights into a hidden reality Photo PxHere

The Hubble and more recently the Webb space telescopes have given us amazing information about the universe, to such an extent that astrophysicists have been puzzled by unexpected findings.

So, too, humanity has been bequeathed insights into the mystery of God, some elements of which are shared by the main religions today, but for Christians unique insights contain the richness of the understanding of God as one Supreme Being but simultaneously and eternally existing as a perichoresis (mutual indwelling - see at end) of three persons. Unlike the mysteries of the physical universe, the human response to the nature of the Divine reality is crucial to our understanding of ourselves and to how we should worship.

For the Christian Church last Sunday was Trinity Sunday, a day for taking stock of the unseen realities that shape the human reality.

Bishop Robert Barron, of Minnesota, devoted his Sunday sermon on YouTube to teasing out the threads of the mystery of the Trinity and to exploring its implications in our lives. He said:

The Trinity names what’s most fundamental and basic in the whole theology and spirituality of Christians. So we should rejoice in talking about the Trinity.

Can I give you appropriately three kinds of scriptural grounds or justifications for talking about God as a trinity of persons?

First of all, Jesus himself. So Jesus speaks of a Father who sent him. And you say, “Okay, fair enough. But wouldn’t Abraham or Jacob or Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses, or Ezekiel — wouldn’t any of them have spoken of God as their Father who sent them on a mission?”

You know, “So far, so ordinary”. But here’s where it gets really complicated: even though he’s other than this Father who sent him on a mission, he speaks and acts in the very person of the God of Israel. “You’ve heard it said in the Torah . . ., but I say . . .” Well, who can claim that kind of authority except God himself?

“My son, your sins are forgiven.” Who can forgive sins but God alone, and [Jesus goes about] showing his mastery even over the elements of nature, or walking on the water and calming the storm?

“Unless you love me more than your mother and father, more than your very self, you are not worthy of me.”

Well, no prophet would ever say that. That would be the height of arrogance. But only the Supreme Good in person could say that.

Okay, he’s sent by the Father, but yet he seems to be himself the God of Israel.

Now, if you think that’s kind of abstract, every single Sunday we state this truth when, with the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) , we say that he’s God from God, light from light, true God from true God, and remember, consubstantial with the Father. That’s just the English version of “homoousios”; that was the Greek for “one in being, consubstantial.”

Well, that was the dilemma they faced in trying to understand what had been handed down to them.

Jesus is somehow other than the Father but yet consubstantial with the Father. That idea was bequeathed to the great tradition.

And then this:  “The Father and I,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John the night before he dies, “the Father and I will send to you an Advocate. We will send to you a Holy Spirit” — listen now — “who will lead you into all truth.” Who will interpret for you the meaning of Jesus and lead you into all truth.

What human figure or merely created power could lead us into all truth?

The Holy Spirit, in other words, is also one in being with the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit shares divinity with the Father and the Son.

And didn’t they experience this at Pentecost when the power of the Holy Spirit came in a divinizing way to them?

Here’s another biblical source, in some ways summing up the idea of the Trinity. We find in the First Letter of John this very peculiar claim that God is love.

Every religion, every philosophy of religion, talks about the love that God has, that love is an attribute of God, that God loves some people, or he loves as a typical activity, or whatever.

But there is no religion or philosophy that makes the truly strange claim that God is love except Christianity.

Well, if that’s the case, then God, in his own most nature, must be a play of lover, of beloved, and of shared love.  If God has love, which any religion would claim to you, I wouldn’t have to say that. I would just say the one God has this activity, that he loves.

But the Christian claim is so much more radical. Love is what God is, inescapably, always, from all eternity. It’s not something he just does; it’s what he is.

Therefore, there has to be…You can’t have love without a lover and a beloved.

And you can’t have love without the love that the lover and beloved share.

And therefore we speak of the Father (the lover), the Son (the beloved), and the Spirit (the love that they share).

See, all of this — and I’ve just been staying within the Bible here; these are all biblical references — they’re bequeathed to the tradition, and some of the smartest people in the early centuries of the Church tried to make sense of this.

The one God of Israel — and no Christian ever denies that. Remember the “Shema” prayer from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy? “Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord your God is Lord alone.”

The oneness of God, the unity of God, is affirmed up and down the biblical tradition. Nobody wants to deny that.

But what was bequeathed to them was this puzzle: that the one God nevertheless subsists as three persons, as a play of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, of lover, beloved, and shared love, of the consubstantial Father and Son, who will send a Spirit consubstantial with them.

That’s where the doctrine of the Trinity comes from.

Now, one of the very best places to look if you’re still trying to get a model for understanding all of this is the great St. Augustine. Augustine was, with Aquinas, the greatest theologian in the history of the Church, and I think his signal accomplishment intellectually was this analogy he gave us for the Trinity.

He spoke about mind, self-knowledge, and self-love. But I want to put this in more contemporary language by giving an analogy that we’re more at home with.

Anybody who’s ever been through counseling or therapy or spiritual direction, or even a  profound conversation with a friend when you’re trying to figure something out in your life, what do you do?

Well with the help of a therapist or spiritual director, you might pose your own life as an object, as an issue, as something to be examined. You say, “Okay, what was I doing? What was I thinking when I did X, Y, and Z? Or when I was a kid what was going on in me?”

Now you see what’s happening, that maybe with the help of your spiritual director, you are looking at you. You are examining as an object yourself. Now, unless you’ve lost your mind, no one in that process will think, “Oh, I’ve split into two things.” No one’s going to say, “Hey, I’ve become two different persons.”

No, no, you are both subject and object. The one person, one you, is both subject and object.

Now, take it one more step. Because Augustine calls this third move self-love. Having gone through that process, you’re examining yourself and you come to a deeper understanding.

You come to a deeper appreciation of what you were doing, or what pressures you were under, or what friendships you had or didn’t have.

And in that process, you come thereby to a greater self-acceptance or a greater love of yourself.

There’s a knower. There’s a known. And now there’s a love that obtains between the knower and the known.

And all this is going on in this ordinary process of conversing with the counselor or the spiritual director.

You haven’t become three things. You haven’t split into three. But yet there is a kind of play, a Trinitarian play, within you.

That’s what Augustine saw.

Go back to his language: mind, self-knowledge, self-love. That obtains in every one of us.

The Bible says we were made in the image and likeness of God. And Augustine said maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s it. When you go deep down into your own interiority, you find indeed this remarkable “imago Dei,” this remarkable image of God, in this Trinitarian play that exists even within our own psyches.

The Father — that’s the great mind.

The Son — there’s the great self-knowledge.

The Spirit — the love shared between the Father and the Son.

Fulton Sheen, one of my great heroes, adapted Augustine’s analogy. He said that from all eternity, the Father looks at the Son, his own image. The Son, who is consubstantial with the Father — he has everything the Father has, he’s the perfect image of the Father — he looks back, and he sees sheer perfection. And the two of them looking at each other, exhale… they sigh their love for each other. That’s the “Spiritus Sanctus,” the holy breath. Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Okay, if you’re with me so far, you might say, “Alright, alright, I guess it’s all kind of interesting, biblical and theological, and yeah, these analogies. Okay, I kind of get it, but at the end of the day, so what?”

Here’s the so-what: “God so loved the world.” I’m quoting now from the Gospel of John (3:16) When he says “God” here, he means God the Father. “God so loved the world” — note — “that he sent his only Son into the world, that all who believe in him might have life in his name.”

Now he sends the Son where? Down into our ordinary humanity. “Though he was in the form of God” — this is Paul (Philippians 2:6) now — “Jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”

Now, further, he obediently accepted even death, death on a cross. The Father sends his beloved Son all the way down. Why? To get us who had wandered far from him.

That’s what sin means. It means wandering away from God. So the Father sent the Son all the way to the limits of god-forsakenness, so that he might gather all of us back in the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the love that connects the Father and the Son, even when the Son is all the way down.

The Son’s gone all the way into death itself, but he’s still connected by the love of the Holy Spirit, and in that love, the Father calls the Son back in the Resurrection and Ascension, bringing in principle all of us sinners with him.

Now do you see how all this abstract talk about the Trinity — Father, Son, Spirit, consubstantiality — all that business becomes very viscerally real?

It’s because God is a Trinitarian play of persons that we can be saved. Not just outside of God, us begging for mercy, but now, through God’s grace, inside the dynamics of God’s life, us gathered by the Son into the power of the Holy Spirit.

There’s the whole Christian life, everybody. That’s the whole spiritual life.

God so loved the world that he sent his only Son all the way down, that we might be gathered into the Holy Spirit, the love that connects them. That’s the Trinity.

That’s what we celebrate today, Trinity Sunday.

Ω See also: Cardinal Goh: The Trinity - insights into globalisation and individualism 

Ω Perichoresis in application

The New Testament demonstrates that God brings glory to himself. John's Gospel is important in understanding how Jesus and the Father relate; a key passage for a perichoretic understanding of God's glory is John 17:1, where Jesus prays, "Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you." We see that the Son brings glory to the Father, the Father brings glory to the Son, and the Spirit brings glory to the Son (cf. John 16:14). Such an understanding of glory exhibits the love expressed within the Godhead by Father, Son and Spirit as they give glory to each other. Theopedia

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