Two quick updates

I’m just throwing these on here because they’re too interesting to pass up.

- Some things are finally coming home to roost:

An employee of 1-800-Flowers.com has been fired after an e-mailed death threat was linked to her account.

The crudely worded e-mail was sent Sunday to Paul “PZ” Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris, who is known for his criticism of religion and creationism. It was one of several hostile messages he had received following a controversial July 8 blog posting. The address on the e-mail showed that it came from Melanie Kroll at 1-800-Flowers.com, an online floral delivery service.

Reasonable but regrettable, particularly as it was apparently her husband who sent the message in the first place.  Nobody involved in this comes out looking too bright, but such is life.

- Curious as to how witches and pagans are responding to the initial incident? (Come on, you know you are).  Well, check it out here.  The tenor of the comments is more varied than I thought it would be, but there’s certainly more of a tendency there to defer to other people’s sacred things rather than make a point of trying to disrupt them.

C.S. Lewis on “the death of words”

This is an observation well worth making:

The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker’s yeard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad. And as long as most people are more anxious to express their likes and dislikes than to describe facts, this must remain a universal truth about language.

He cites such examples as “villain” and “gentleman;” “medieval” and “modern.” He sees in this sort of thing a reluctance to simply state the qualities we see in someone – “she is honest;” “he is disloyal” – and an attempt instead to cloak our judgments in caricatures (hence the popularity of pejorative words like “bastard” or “swine”). The mark of impending doom for a word on this score, he goes on to say, is when the word can no longer be taken on its own to simply mean what it does, and instead becomes subject to “true” or “real” or the like (“a real gentleman;” “a true patriot”). The distinction that something like the difference between the words “patriot” and “traitor” used to signify has so collapsed, or is at least viewed so cynically, that the same word (“patriot”) is used to describe both with only the modifier indicating a difference.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the greatest danger to any word of this sort comes from those who support and use it rather than those who discourage and oppose it: “It was not egalitarians [but]… officious admirers of gentility who killed the word gentleman.” For indeed (he concludes), words

…can be ‘killed with kindness’. And when, however reverently, you have killed a word, you have also, as far as in you lay, blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for. Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.

- From “The Death of Words”; The Spectator, Sept. 22, 1944

When There Are Faces

What follows was initially conceived of as a response to a good question asked by a commenter on the big Cook-Myers post. The question was as follows:

When the wafer becomes Christ, does that mean that Jesus is trapped there? I have been assuming that offense comes from the disrespect to a holy item, not from worry about what will happen to Jesus, because God can take care of Himself. But reading this makes me think I must have been wrong, or no one would be discussing the need to protect the Eucharist.

Is it that Jesus chooses to remain in the wafer no matter what happens to it? i.e., not trapped, but still vulnerable?

This got me thinking about how (and, more troublingly, if) I understand the Eucharist and the way in which it “works” in this sense. Reading and accepting the appropriate passages in the Catechism is one thing, but being able to articulate it in a way that might be accessible to someone else is another. As a young Catholic, I’m quite ready to simply be told things by the Church; the hows and whys will become more apparent as I learn and grow. But for those who are not involved in that growth in the Church and who would nevertheless like an answer, what could be said? How I could I put this for someone who wanted to be shown rather than told?

What follows, then, is risky. I will say at once that I fully expect to be corrected where I err, and will welcome it happily when it happens. I have no intention of being the kid who managed to become an heresiarch on his first day at work, so to speak.

When it comes to the question above, I think my correspondent comes very close to the answer in his final sentence. The Body and Blood of Christ are potent and divine; the Bread of Life and the sign of the New Convenant. They are these things fully and completely. However, as Jesus says (John 6:55), His flesh is true food indeed, and so also is His blood true drink. Fully one thing, and yet also fully another. Sounds familiar? This dual nature is functionally similar (and certainly connected) to what Christians describe as the hypostatic union, whereby, although Christ is one person, He subsists in two natures: fully human and fully divine.

In the case of the consecrated host, similarly, we have something that, although only one thing, subsists in the natures of the bread of earth, on the one hand, and the Living Bread, on the other. This dual nature has certain implications. To be both fully God and fully man is to be simultaneously invincible and vulnerable. The same is true for the Eucharist; in being both fully Bread of Life and fully bread of earth it is simultaneously something too high for us to reach and something that has been passed down to us.

In the consecrated host we are presented with Jesus as the Apostles knew Him, and in partaking of that Bread (“do this in memory of me,” He says; Luke 22:19) we come to meet Jesus in the same way as they once did: in the flesh, as it were, and face to face.

The title of this post is of course a reference to C.S. Lewis’ neglected masterpiece, Till We Have Faces (1956), in which the facelessness of humanity (our impatience, our dishonesty, or greed) prevents us from seeing the gods face to face. We cannot do that until we have faces of our own; until we have earned those faces, and until they have been granted to us. In both the Incarnation and the Eucharist (it is perhaps improper to speak of them separately), I see a similar but not identical state of affairs. It is not we who develop larger and more real faces with which to meet God, but rather God who takes on a smaller face of His own – the body of man – to meet us on our own pitiful level. This is the divine mercy.

If the assumption of a small face by the infinitely large is what allows us to meet that largeness as friends and children rather than being overwhelmed by it (or simply failing to recognize it altogether), it is also what allows the monstrous world to ride roughshoud over it. In the Eucharist we are presented with Jesus as He was on the cross: the Bread of Life and the sign of the New Covenant realized through sacrifice. Who could bear to see any further infamies added to His suffering? To see some kid from Florida using Golgotha as a bargaining chip while even the Romans look on in shock? To see some teacher from Minnesota seize the hammer from the guard and try to break our Lord’s legs anyway? These are not to be taken idly, by any means.

We may speak, as the commenter does, of Jesus being “trapped” in the consecrated host only so far as we may speak of Him being “arrested” by the guards, or “persecuted” by Pilate, or “crucified” on the cross. He was arrested, though he could have brought twelve legions of angels to his side with a word; he was persecuted by Pilate, though it was only by His consent that Pilate had any power over Him at all; He was crucified, though he could (as the spectators taunted) have leapt down from the cross and “proved” his power through power itself. But none of these things came to pass. He was arrested, and He was persecuted, and He was crucified. There is a reason and an order to how these things transpire, and from that reason and that order comes the simple reality that a God small enough to be met is also a God small enough to be hurt. God has paid many prices for us, and this is one of them.

All of this has no doubt sounded very abstract and symbolic, and in many cases that would certainly be right. However, to be Catholic is to think sacramentally, and to think sacramentally is to inhabit a world in which outward and visible signs – a disc of bread, a sprinkling of water, a dab of oil – are themselves the small faces of things more enormous than we can yet comprehend. If we are moved to action in defense of the Eucharist, it is not because we have forgotten that God is all-powerful and inviolate, but rather because we remember that to defend the small, the open, the kind and the vulnerable is the duty of all who can stir a limb to do so. It is a natural end of directing the faculties towards virtue.

I don’t know if I’ve managed to accomplish what I set out to do in either case. I doubt that this explanation (if it’s even halfway correct) would serve for someone interested enough to seek it, and I doubt still more, unfortunately, that I’ve been able to answer my commenter’s question. Input from readers is requested and appreciated.

Cook-Myers updates continue

First, here is the incident report as filed by Webster Cook at the University of Central Florida is available here in .pdf. His complaints, his charges, and his version of events unfiltered by media summarization (or, indeed, my own).

The rest is more of an aggregation of opinion at the moment than anything else. Plenty of folks have been coming here (thanks!), but here’s what others are saying…

- The University of Central Florida student newspaper, the Central Florida Future, ran this editorial condemning both sides of the dispute. It’s breathtakingly poor:

I don’t understand the mindset of people who would get so upset over someone stealing a cracker that they would send threats of physical violence.

Isn’t Christianity supposed to be a peaceful religion? The one that is all about that whole forgiveness thing, and the turning of various cheeks?

Still, I don’t hold it against the Future’s editor-in-chief (who wrote the editorial). It is likely that he doesn’t care about the situation in the slightest, but he could not reasonably have neglected to print something about it. This editorial is not the work of someone who has researched the situation enough to form any credible perspective on it, and in cases such as this, where no information whatever has been pursued, it’s generally safest just to say everybody’s probably wrong and call it a day.

- Freddie of L’Hôte, an atheist himself, denounces Prof. Myers’ actions and the pathologies that motivate them. Thus:

…the goal of the new atheism has never been to convert. It has never been to include. It has never been to change minds. The ridicule is the goal; the contempt is the end; the sheer fun of sanctimony, self-righteousness and loathing are the purpose.

- The troubling Vox Day (Theodore Beale, author of The Irrational Atheist, among other things) contributes a condemnation of the good professor’s shenanigans on WorldNetDaily, of all places. They don’t think that the consecrated host has anything but symbolic value either, WND being an Evangelical news service, but it’s the thought that counts. Thanks to Matteo of Cartago Delenda Est for pointing me to this one.

- The delightful Kevin Jones of Philokalia Republic is a voice of calm fury. Thus:

Myers’ support for public dishonesty is unprofessional and undermines the prerequisites for academic inquiry. His endorsement of disrupting religious services is an unjustified threat to civil peace. Myers needs to be reminded of the standards of society.

-Santi Tafarella of Prometheus Unbound makes the case for Prof. Myers having crossed the line from blasphemy to iconoclasm, opening up a whole other kettle of squid entirely. He also sees the Catholic flavour of this bigotry as a hindrance in winning the support of the public sphere:

If Myers was an anti-Semite, and his call went out to his readers to pretend to be Jews, and visit synagogues, and steal symbols of their worship, and con rabbis, under false pretenses, into giving them something from their synagogues, so that Myers could get the objects in the mail and desecrate them on the Internet, we would have moral clarity on this.

More, of course, as it becomes available. This is the website for the diocese of Orlando. No announcements on this subject appear to have been posted, but if they are, that’s where you’re likely to find them.

Categories

Sometime during the previous afternoon the way post categories looked in the sidebar to the left changed from a simple list to something unbearably long and ugly.  I’ve changed their presentation to a simply drop-down box instead.

They’re still there, just smaller.