P.J. O'Rourke on God, Evolution and Death

To the extent I have a favorite philosopher, it is PJ O’Rourke. I am not sure exactly what that says about me (it cannot be good), but I find him to be the modern Mencken, without the nastiness.

O’Rourke just found out he has cancer and while things look good, he deals with it in his usual way.

I looked death in the face. All right, I didn't. I glimpsed him in a crowd. I've been diagnosed with cancer, of a very treatable kind. I'm told I have a 95% chance of survival. Come to think of it -- as a drinking, smoking, saturated-fat hound -- my chance of survival has been improved by cancer.

His biggest concern is that he has a malignant hemorrhoid and he is not sure what color bracelet to wear (or where to wear it). Along the way he muses about God, evolution, life, death, pain and meaning. While his theology and philosophy would probably fail freshman courses at Catholic universities, he is right on how death is a part of life. In O'Rourke's words:

Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace. (Although this option is not usually open to reporters.)

Read the whole thing. And get well soon PJ.

The Crucifixion and MultiverseTheory

Having moved to Brooklyn, I now need to find a new church. And Brooklyn being the "Borough of Churches" I have plenty of choices -- there must be 6 Catholic churches within walking distance of our new apartment.



So I choose Saint Saviour, I will admit, mostly because the Mass was most convenient to when I woke up.



The Homily was about the Crucifixion and the importance of it to Catholic belief. Yet, it also has been very sanitized. The crucifix we see at home or in church is nice and clean, it cannot convey the horror and suffering Jesus endured.



But one thing the priest said was quite interesting. It was not important to the homily, to be sure, but raised my interest. Namely, if multiverse theory is correct, would the Crucifixion be the one common event in all multiverses.

In a nutshell, multiverse theory is that there exist an infinite number of alternative universes. In each, history takes a slightly different turn. For example, in one universe, the US Navy may have received the "war warning" in time to win the battle of Pearl Harbor. In another, you did not stub your toe on the bedpost this morning.

The homilist wondered if in each multiverse, the crucifixion would have been the one common event. He used the term "Omega Point" which I think was somewhat unfortunate. The term has something of a loaded meaning, under a very controversial theory of Catholic theology as the point to which all human consciousness is evolving.

Questions of terminology aside, it does make for an interesting thought experiment. I will admit that I always though a bit differently, that I could imagine a multiverse under which humanity accepted Christ's mission, making the Crucifixion unnecessary. But when you think about that, would you still have Christianity. For as the homilist today noted, without Good Friday, you cannot have Easter Sunday.

Trinity Sunday

Sunday was Trinity Sunday and the homilist was expounding at length on the difficulty in understanding the Trinity. This concept still is a hard one to understand, despite having been pondered by the greatest minds in Christendom for almost two millennia. Some Christians, such as the Arians and Monophysits of old times and Unitarians of today, gave up trying to understand it and found it unworkable.

I remember my mother teaching my first grade CCD class trying to explain it to a bunch of six year olds. Needless to say, we did not quite get it. I remember was my mother finally saying "think of it is you, your mother and your father tried to bake some cookies together" - so I think she ran out of ideas also.

But my favorite story is that of Saint Augustine, walking along the shore of Hippo, pondering the problem of the Trinity. There he saw a young child dig a hole in the sand. She then began taking buckets of water from the Mediterranean and started pouring it into the hole. When Saint Augustine asked the child what she was doing, she replied that she was trying to puring the sea into the hole. When Augustine told her that was impossible, she replied that she would pour the entire sea into the hole before Augustine was able to understand the Holy Trinity.

The Anchoress on Eurcharistic Devotion

The Anchoress has a posting on Catholics and Eucharistic devotion. This is something that non-Catholics (other than the Orthodox I would think) find somewhat strange. As Catholics, we believe that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist. In fairness though, this can be even a difficult doctrine for Catholics to understand. I studied the theology in college, can discussed half remembered discourses by St. Thomas Aquinas regarding essence and accidents, yet we still hear of "bleeding host" stories despite he Church's attempts to suppress them.

The Anchoress posted some photographs of people kneeling before a procession. It reminds me of one of the things I miss about Brooklyn. I lived for two years in Williamsburg, my parents’ old neighborhood. Today it has a reputation as an artists’ colony and is now in the process of massive upscale gentrification, but there still remain a lot of Italians. Nearby, in Greenpoint, you have a lot of Polish and other Catholic Slavic immigrants.

The churches there still have public processions. If a priest well known for piety was visiting the area, they would often ask him to bless the Host and then process with it from church to church, sometimes over several days. My wife (who is not Catholic) was astounded by how the people on the street would genuflect or kneel when the procession passed by. Usually, the priest would be accompanied by the children of the parish and by old ladies singing hymns from the old country.

Again, it is difficult to explain to a non-Catholic, but there was something about touching the sacred in Eucharistic devotion, and most incredibly when it was in the most mundane venue of Lorimer Street in Brooklyn, as cars sped by.

Advent Thoughts -- Jesus as Man

As a Catholic, I believe that Jesus is wholly God but also wholly human. Advent starts this weekend and so I was thinking about the human side of Jesus. This mystery of the Incarnation obviously is a difficult one to grasp. God became flesh, but really, what does that mean? Does that mean the agony and the Crucifixion was merely playacting, or does it heighten the power of Good Friday? Riots would break out in Byzantium over this question.

But at this time of year, I prefer to keep Good Friday a bit off center and focus instead at the miracle of the Incarnation and wonder about Jesus as a little baby. A local social club had a short concert today and one of the songs sung was about "Mary rocking her baby." The Bible is mostly silent on Jesus as an infant. There are the Nativity narratives of course, Jesus being presented in the Temple, and Jesus getting lost in the Temple sometime later. Now that I am a father, wonder what Joseph must have thought when he looked into Jesus's eyes or what Mary thought as she held him.

I tried today to explain to my children more about Christmas today. Several years ago, Alex received a Playmobil of the Nativity as a Christmas present and so my wife and I trued to use that to explain the story. Alex was a barrage of questions while Christian just wanted to play with the camel. So my attempt to explain it to two children failed. Yet if I struggle with the meaning for myself, how am I supposed to explain it to a four year old?