Worshiping at the altar of materialism

Today is what has become known in modern colloquial usage as "Black Friday," the day after the Thanksgiving holiday when the American Christmas shopping season is supposed to officially begin. When I was growing up, stores might open a few hours early today-6AM was a popular opening time-and have sales that are only good today. It has traditionally been called "Black" Friday because if a store or business was behind in its margins for the year, today was traditionally the day its proprietors could look to as a day that brought enough intake to insure that on December 31st, that business would not end the year in deficit, or "in the red," but in profit or at least even-in "the black."


We have gone well beyond the original intent of today-a day to get in a few seasonal Christmas deals-and instead today has become a holiday in its own right-one that celebrates neither giving thanks nor the joy of the coming Prince of Peace, but instead pays homage to the real god of modern American society-materialism. The god of our things, and our ability to have more things and buy more things than our neighbor. Not only is today a day of honor for our God of the Material, but it is often a day where we as a culture spend our time and energy perpetually breaking the tenth and final commandment-thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods. Not only do we worship at the altar of the deity of materialism on this day, we insult the God of All Creation even further by breaking His Holy Law in a perpetual and cultural fashion.


Early this morning, I went with Nicole to Kohl's-she had been given a valuable coupon that helped her purchase some new clothing for her work at really rock-bottom prices, but since it was only good for today, she had to go early this morning just after midnight since she had to work on Friday itself. People were lined up outside the stores of the local mall like the needy at a soup kitchen-only these people didn't look like they needed much of anything, nor did many of them look like they couldn't afford to wait another few days to go shopping-especially sine most of the good sales aren't really going away after today. Some people could have done what my own mother used to do when I was growing up-she did most of her Christmas shopping through the summer months, so that by the time the rush came, she didn't have to visit the stores much.


I observed people coming and going-I didn't want to go in with Nicole and have to fight the crowd, and I think Nicole regretted it later. While I waited in the car, observing people behaving as though they had gone in and returned from some visitation with the divine, I had occasion to listen to the radio, and I happened upon Raymond Arroyo talking about his experience observing people waiting on this materialistic madness to begin. In addition to hosting The World Over on EWTN, Arroyo also occasionally sits in on a secular radio talk show that I happen to enjoy. I heard him talk about how he had passed by a local Target store on Thanksgiving morning and saw people camped out there, setting up what amounted to tent cities, waiting on the holiday sales to begin so that they could get in on some mythical deal. How many of those folks were running up credit they couldn't afford and will have to pay down later in the name of a deal today? Something seems terribly wrong with occupying places in line or in some overnight camp-out in front of a store when there are people who sleep out in front of malls and stores and on public benches and parks because they have nowhere else to sleep, while some of us camp out in front of Target or Belk or Walmart or Kohl's for our day of worship to the deus de materiali. With Black Friday rapidly becoming Black Thursday, Thanksgiving is becoming not a day for thanks to God, but just another shopping day, and Christmas is now just a day to eat and open presents so that we can all go to the store the next day for the big sale. The Christ Child? Who is that? What deal is this that's at the mall, the clearance rack is keeping? The Sale of Sales, good business brings, while customers' line is winding. This, This is Cash our King, while cashiers watch and  registers cling, haste, haste, to bring it laud, the jingle, the sound of profit.

Materialism has been the ultimate source of every wicked and evil ideology that has been formed in the mind of man, and it is the notion that only greater things can make us happy. Materialism brought us fascism, because only the State controlling the business you own can insure fairness-and while we're at it we'll go after those nasty Jews and other pesky people because they have more than us. Materialism gave us socialism and its child communism, because no one is allowed to earn more than their neighbor and if they have more it is always wrong, and it must be rectified-forcibly if necessary. Nevermind that we will kill all incentive to work or to achieve, and therefore to bless others as we have been blessed. Materialism also gives us a kind of crass capitalism that cares little for the individual or the dignity of the human person and only about the bottom line. Materialism is also the root of the sort of neo-socialism that we are seeing today that discourages thrift, because we want what we want now, even if someone else should pay for it.


None of this is to say that there is an inherent wrong in going Christmas shopping-there isn't. But our celebrations of Thanksgiving and Christmas have become about the creature more than the Creator, and we have made them more about the god of our making than the God who created us and who is using these special days as yet another way to call us all to Himself. When we prepare to give gifts to others, do we do it in the spirit of bringing Christ to others, or is it simply about the gifts-the things which, as St. Paul says, "passeth away?" (cf. I Corinthans 7:31)

Fulfilling all things in Christ

I have returned from a wonderful weekend at deaconate formation. It was wonderful because we explored the topics of Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and the parousia in great depth. I must admit that one of the books we had been required to read, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life by a certain Joseph Ratzinger certainly got my wheels turning in ways that I didn't expect, and I had to confront some controversial ideas about the nature of the soul (ideas which I was at least somewhat familiar with, but which I was surprised to learn that our present Pope seriously wrestled with over the years), and some new-to-me theology and theological ideas about the nature of Heaven, and what Heaven is-even what we're going to be doing when we get to Heaven. I didn't find this to be a bad thing, I fully recognize that Aspirancy to the deaconate means that I am going to have to confront theological ideas which are unfamiliar to me, and I am going to have to learn either to accept or refute them as the appropriate case may be, and even (where the Church might say to) integrate them into the thinking side of my own faith and the way that I teach others. That doesn't mean, however, that everything is easy to swallow on the first take, and that is how I would describe some of the eschatological ideas we're learning about-things that will take time to digest.

We also had our first exam this afternoon. Now, let the reader understand, I do not think I failed the exam. However, there are times when you take an exam and you come away knowing that you didn't bomb it, but you also didn't do as well as you could have done, and that seems to have been the case with today's exam for me. Despite having written the answers in my notes about 30 minutes before the exam, I drew a blank on most of St. Thomas Aquinas' five ways to prove the existence of God...literally, my mind blanked out, I should have remembered more than just the Unmoved Mover. Later, while discussing the exam with another of my Brother Aspirants (this one from my own Deanery) on the way home, I figured out that I flowed on one of my essay answers with an idea which, while not completely incorrect, was also not right where the question at hand was concerned, so I expect to be called on the carpet for that. The essay isn't ruined, but it didn't say what it should have said-one of my statements in it was simply not correct. One of my Brothers was kind enough to pay me a compliment this weekend-he said that he wished that he were as well-read as I am and that he had the time to read. I responded to him that while I am well-read in some areas (as with most people, I am well-read in the topics I like and am familiar with), I am not well-read in others, it depends on the topic. Well, the experience of this exam has showed me that I need to read better, and reread content more, and if that means that in order to have time to do that I am going to have to read less non-formation or non-theological material during the process of formation, so be it-a deacon cannot teach or preach what he himself does not grasp, and so I need to commit myself to being better-prepared in the future. In addition to this I would ask for readers' continued prayers, because I continually need them.

Despite my difficulties with the exam, I would not have traded this weekend for anything in the world. Robert Feduccia (who leaves us clueless as to why he is not Deacon Robert!) didn't just blow my mind and everyone else's with his teaching about the Blessed Trinity and Heaven, but I came away with an even deeper love for Our Blessed Mother after this weekend. We had to read Redemtoris Mater for this class, but it was the discussion of the theological reasons, rooted in the Trinity, for our veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Catholics that was the topic I just never wanted to quit on...I wanted more and more. Many of our Protestant Brothers and Sisters wouldn't ever consider denying the divinity of Christ, but do they do so in an implicit and unintentional way when they fail to accept Mary as the Mother of God? The Council of Ephesus said that Christ is God, and so Mary is truly the Mother of God.


Robert wrote this song with Sarah Hart which Oregon Catholic Press calls an Advent Hymn, but I think it is even deeper than that. It is about our hope in the parousia, in the Second Coming of Our Lord-it really touched me, because this is what the study of eschatology is really all about-the world is in darkness, but Christ will not only end that darkness and bring all things to completion, but He will unite us with Him for all eternity. I might grapple with what I am discovering about Heaven, but I came away from this weekend really wanting to go there.

The Holy Trinity

Firstly, I want to apologize to those of you who have become regular readers of this weblog (that number is still admittedly small but growing) that I have not posted since the New Year. I have had an extremely busy week, and it had been my intent to post something this past Friday before leaving for deaconate formation, and it didn't quite work out as I had wanted-I just ran out of time. That's something that seems to be epidemic lately, and no, that isn't a complaint, it is just the way things are.

Our formation weekend was packed with material, and my mind is still somewhat on sensory overload from all that we learned. What's more, we have a seven page paper, give a few here and there, that will be due in about a month and a half in which we have to choose a topic where we can prove a theological idea from the writings of the Church Fathers as well as from the ideas of a more modern biblical scholar...oh, and next month, we will have our first exam. It has been a long time since I have had to take an exam, so I am a bit nervous about it. Nevertheless, the material we talked about this weekend was so important that I see the need to be tested on it. Robert Feduccia, currently of Oregon Catholic Press (Spirit and Song) and formerly the youth coordinator and vocation director at St. Meinrad Archabbey (to which I am pledged as an Oblate of St. Benedict) was our instructor for the weekend. The topic was the Holy Trinity-something that I learned more about this past weekend than I ever knew before, and in the name of brevity and because I am exhausted, I can't really give a typical overview in one post as I have done in the past, so I'll have to break some of the finer points into multiple posts.

We discussed the arguments of the atheists and secularists, which are quite pervasive, and as Robert pointed out, even though so many of our people in this country claim to believe in God, so few by comparison act on that belief. At least we are better off than Europe, which has surrendered itself completely over to an unabashed secularism and unbelief. However, if we do not change the tone of the culture and take our place at the forefront of the debate over the increasing secularization of our country, we will soon be headed in the same direction, as the statistics bear out that the millennial generation is inherently unchurched and seems inclined to be so.

The Blessed Trinity has been the matter of dispute within Christendom precisely because it is difficult to explain to anyone the idea that we only worship one God, but that God consists of Three Divine and Distinct Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Further, Christ was begotten, not made, and was born of the Father before all ages (there was never a time when He was not). Christ is of one substance with the Father (consubstantial) and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son-the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. These Persons are not types of God and they are not mere modes of the one God, but are Persons distinct and divine, but exist as one God, as hypostasis-real and distinct Divine Persons in an undivided Unity of God. If that sounds confusing to you, it was to Arius, which is why he came up with the idea that Christ was an intermediary to God, had no human soul, and was not equal to the Father (and therefore not Divine). Arius' ideas weren't far-fetched, which is why they were widely accepted-they were an easy way to explain a complex theological question. The difficulty is that Arius and his followers ultimately denied that Jesus Christ is God, and it was that dangerous notion-that Jesus Christ is not fully Divine and of one substance with God the Father-that led to the Church's ultimate adoption of the Nicene Creed as the profession of faith of Christians.

Is the Trinity hard to understand in our human terms? Sure it is. We literally profess to believe in one God (Deutoronomy 6:4-9), but we say that the one God consists of three separate and distinct Divine Persons who are still of one substance and who act as One in a Unity of Love which existed before all ages. Christ, as the Divine Word, is the second Divine Person of this Godhead (John 1:1-4). It isn't easy to put one's arms around this idea, so it is easier to say, as Arius did, that Christ could not possibly be Divine.

Who said the Faith of the Church was meant to be easy?

Bede the Venerable

Father Bede Aboh

I've returned from this month's Formation class and am still alive and kicking, both physically and spiritually. As for my fears about how I'd be able to handle Aquinas and the rest of our material, I think those fears were partly justified and partly overblown on my part. I learned that the difficulties that I have been having with Aquinas were largely shared by my fellow Aspirants, and our stories of initial frustration and how we dealt with this were very (and almost eerily) similar. However, as I told several confreres this afternoon, if my mind were an egg, Father Bede Aboh, Pastor of St. Mary's in Oak Ridge and our instructor for this weekend's series of classes on philosophy, has managed to crack the shell.

Father Bede managed to have me understanding enough Aquinas to be able to write a short paper comparing the epistemology of Aquinas with that of Plato-I feel confident enough to write it (praying that it is up to Father Bede's standards, of course) believing that I can produce something that at least appears as though I know what I am writing about. I could not have done that before this past weekend began, so that tells you something not only of Father Bede's knowledge of philosophy, but of his ability to convey that knowledge to others. Of course, not all of this material was foreign or unintelligible to me. Yesterday afternoon, late in Father Bede's lecture, he drifted on to what for me is familiar ground when he discussed John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. A lot of my confreres know that my minor in college was history, but my major was Political Science, and both Locke and Hobbes are required reading for any student of political theory. Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Hobbes' Leviathan were two examples of competing ideas of human nature and political theory, with Locke positing that human nature is basically founded on reason and tolerance, while Hobbes believed that human nature was savage because of human greed (both Locke and Hobbes agreed on a seemingly inherent ability for humanity to be greedy) and that life without control would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes, being a Royalist who had returned to the boiling chaotic cauldron of Cromwellian England, thought that people should trust the power that protects them-the opposite of Locke's social contract, rooted in the choice of the individual.

The discussion of these giants of the political world is what finally cracked the egg of my mind, because in all of the years I spent studying comparative politics, it never really dawned on me that these men were philosophers in the same sense as Aquinas, and Aristotle and Plato before them (let alone someone like Bertrand Russell), they simply belonged to our own age, and in my mind I began to compare the ideas of Locke with Aquinas as I was coming to understand them. Talk about hitting me over the head. It took until Sunday afternoon, but Father Bede inadvertently managed to do that. Political people really are in our own little mini-world, and it is easy to forget that politics can be, and often is, composed of deeper philosophical questions...so it finally began to make some sense...some sense...finally.

Perhaps the most important thing that stuck in my mind from this weekend, however, was the discussion we shared after Vespers Saturday evening. The scripture reading for the First Vespers of Sunday this week was 2 Peter 1:19-21:

We possess the prophetic message as something altogether reliable. Keep your attention closely fixed on it, as you would on a lamp shining in a dark place until the first streaks of dawn appear and the morning star rises in your hearts. First you must understand this: there is no prophecy contained in Scripture which is a personal interpretation. Prophecy has never been put forward by man’s willing it. It is rather that men impelled by the Holy Spirit have spoken under God’s influence.

After Evensong was complete, Father Bede asked for the scripture lesson to be read again, and then asked what we believed that the Apostle meant when he said "there is no prophesy contained in Scripture which is a personal interpretation. Prophesy has never been put forward by man's willing it." I responded that I believed this meant that we as individuals had no authority to interpret Scripture, but that we must defer to the Church as a collective body. Another Brother Aspirant said, correctly, that we should defer to the magesterium. "What is magesterium," asked Father Bede. "The teaching authority of the Church." Father Bede then said specifically to me that I should be careful with the use of the words "collective body." He said that he had a seminary professor that was utterly obsessed with the term "collective body" and she used it to try and undermine and undercut the authority of the bishops and the Pope. I responded, of course, that I would never do such a thing. In my heart, I was thinking "may the Lord strike me if such vile schismatic thought were to proceed from my tongue when teaching in His Church's name." While I understand what I meant by the term "collective body," and I think Father Bede understood what I meant-and for that matter, so did the class-Father's recounting of his heterodox seminary professor made me think twice about ever using that term in the same context again, that's for sure.

Father Bede then told us to "remember that when you are ordained, the words you speak carry weight. When you speak of the Church's teaching authority, some people will look to you for that authority." This was why, Father said, we must be well-formed before being allowed by the Church to enter into ordained ministry.

Father Bede came to our country from Nigeria, and he began seminary at 11 years old-11!  He went through minor seminary and then major seminary, and he said that there were a couple of times when he contemplated quitting, but that he asked the Lord to lead him out of there if he wasn't supposed to be a priest-the Lord didn't. He said that he loves being a priest, and that "this is the only life I have ever known."

One of the many things that Father shared with us is the difference in attitude toward the priesthood that Catholics have in Nigeria, as opposed to the attitude that Catholics have in the United States and other Western countries. "In this country," said Father Bede, "we have to beg men to become priests, but in Nigeria men are begging to become priests." Seminaries have had to turn otherwise-acceptable men away there, because there are simply not enough spaces for those who want to get in. The so-called Third World seems to have become the First World of clerical and priestly life. How selfish has our culture become, when men in a place like Nigeria beg for a life of general obscurity in the name of spiritual riches, but many Catholics in our own country scoff at the idea of their children becoming priests or religious because "I want grandchildren?" We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. The Lord will take our spiritual blessings away from us and give them to people who will make use of them if we are not careful.

I hope Father Bede comes back and visits our class again-I would really like to hear much more from him.

Trying to decipher Thomas

In addition to our monthly in-class formation, a few of my confreres and I meet through the blessing of the internet a few times each month to share our experiences with the academic and spiritual material we are assigned, and often simply to enjoy each other's spiritual company as we travel down this road together. We've had internet meetings a couple of times this month and we agree on one thing: We sure hope that Father Bede Aboh, our instructor for this month's series of classes, will help us make sense of St. Thomas Aquinas, because God help us, we can't-at least not on our own.

Among the four texts that we've been  assigned for the forthcoming month's classes-the Philosophy section-is St. Thomas Aquinas' Treatise on Human Nature, part of the Summa Theologica. What we are reading is an English translation of Thomas' work, but it is nonetheless couched in what we believe to be a philosophical and theological language which the few educated people around in St. Thomas' day would have understood, but which is over our heads. To give you an idea of how over us this seems, those of you who know me well know that my degree is in Political Science-but my minor concentration was history, and I concentrated on the Europe of the Middle Ages through the Renaissance- the high point of the Middle Ages roughly fell during Thomas' time. Brother Thomas has me confounded.

Don't get me wrong here, none of us have given up on Thomas, we are all searching for and finding resources which explain him and the glories of his work for the Lord to us in ways that we can understand it. One of my Brother Aspirants discovered Peter Kreeft's A Shorter Summa and has gone to the trouble of sharing parts of it with some of the rest of us. Still others have discovered something called Aquinas 101, and some of us have wondered why these were not assigned as texts since we can actually understand them, and they help us understand what Thomas is saying.

The texts we use for our lessons, however, are up to each instructor, so we are hoping that perhaps Father Bede will translate Thomas for us.

St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!