Monthly Archives: November 2014

God’s Will and Man’s Prayer

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in Definitions, Free Will, God's Will, Liturgy of the Hours, Prayer, Submission to God, The Fall

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The quote below is from the Office of Readings appointed for Friday, November 28, 2014. The first line and how he connects it to prayer is what really caught my attention.

Our obligation is to do God’s will, and not our own. We must remember this if the prayer that our Lord commanded us to say daily is to have any meaning on our lips. How unreasonable it is to pray that God’s will be done, and then not promptly obey it when he calls us from this world! Instead we struggle and resist like self-willed slaves and are brought into the Lord’s presence with sorrow and lamentation, not freely consenting to our departure, but constrained by necessity. And yet we expect to be rewarded with heavenly honours by him to whom we come against our will! Why then do we pray for the kingdom of heaven to come if this earthly bondage pleases us? What is the point of praying so often for its early arrival if we would rather serve the devil here than reign with Christ.

From the Treatise of St Cyprian on Mortality

Specifically, St. Cyprian is here referring to the Lord’s Prayer and the petition within it that states, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” He is trying to show how absurd it is to pray this prayer daily and yet to try to resist God who is constantly calling us to Himself. But this passage has much broader implications.

First of all, let us consider mankind’s obligation of doing God’s will and not our own. Let us go back to the beginning before Adam and Eve turned against God. At the moment of their creation Adam and Eve were absolutely perfect, they were in a state of Original Justice. The Catechism describes Original Justice in the following way:

As long as (mankind) remained in the divine intimacy, man would not have to suffer or die. The inner harmony of the human person, the harmony between man and woman, and finally the harmony between the first couple and all creation comprised the state called ‘original justice.’

CCC §376 (for more information see CCC §374-384)

In addition, in §377 it goes on to say that mankind’s mastery over the world was most importantly his mastery of self.

The first man was unimpaired and ordered in his whole being because he was free from the triple concupiscence that subjugates him to the pleasures of the senses, covetousness for earthly goods, and self-assertion, contrary to the dictates of reason.

In short, this means that man’s will was perfectly aligned to the will of God who had created him. This is how God had designed it to be and intended it to stay. But then, sin entered into God’s perfect creation through the disobedience of Adam and Eve. What the sin was does not matter as much as the fact that Adam and Eve, who had been made in God’s image, did sin. What this means is that instead of keeping their wills in alignment with the will of God, they choose to go their own way, trying to assert their own wills above the will of the One who had created them. They, being finite, were trying to tell the infinite where to get off, which is an absolute absurdity.

Now, how does this fit with our prayer to God? When considering our prayers, and that maybe we are not ‘getting what we ask for’, we must remember that prayer is not primarily about getting what we want. Perhaps this is the reason that people do not pray as they ought to, because they don’t see the results they want and, therefore, think that it doesn’t work. But we need to remember that prayer is not about imposing our will on God but about submitting our will to His. As St. James tells us, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly.” (James 4:3a, RSV-CE)

What it all really comes down to is this: for anything to work properly in our lives, whether it be prayer or anything else, then our lives must be properly ordered. And what is the proper order for our lives? It begins by realizing that our wills are subordinate to the will of God and then, through the grace of Christ, fulfilling our obligation to God by subordinating our wills to His.

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Christ the King

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Loving our Neighbor, Salvation, Sermons, Submission to God, Update

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(Editorial note: the comment below by Dr. Delaney is worth noting and, as he suggests, would have fit into my sermon very well. In addition, it was pointed out by one of the deacons at the parish that we in America do not actually have a true democracy but instead a democratic republic. Both of these mistakes find their origin in my own ignorance, which can be attributed to my always taking the easy way out in my studies earlier in my life. I am now trying to remedy that problem. I have left the sermon as is, though, because this is how I delivered it.)

Sermon for Christ the King Sunday

November 23, 2014

What is a king? This is the question posed to us by our celebration today. But secondly, and more importantly, what does it mean for Christ to be our King? Regarding the first question, in an absolute monarchy, the king is one who exercises complete political power over a specific group of people. And if these people are good subjects then they will obey the king’s decisions and follow where he leads. But, of course, this kind of monarchy only works if the king is good and has the good of his subjects always in mind. And this is why earthly kingdoms which have absolute monarchies do not work – because the concerns of an earthly king often devolves into either a concern for what is good for himself or other petty concerns that hurt his subjects. Because of this, when this country was founded, we chose not to have a king, but instead established a democratic system with elected officials. And even though at this time many of our elected officials act more like dictators rather than ordinary citizens who have been elected to represent the people, nevertheless, our choice of government seems to be the best model for a planet of fallen and sinful people. We are all sinful and selfish and therefore, no single one of us should have absolute power over the rest.

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A Man Unafraid to Tell the Truth

22 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Free Will, God's Will, Salvation, The Great Divorce

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On this day 51 years ago C.S. Lewis died. I have had the pleasure of meeting a few men that actually met and talked with Lewis (one of them being my friend Thomas Howard) but I never had the pleasure of meeting the man himself. In fact, I was not even alive when he died. But even though I never met him he has greatly impacted my life. He was the first one that helped me to truly see what Christianity really is through his book Mere Christianity. Even though he never converted to the Catholic Faith, I count him as one of the influences that led me necessarily into the Catholic Church. I owe him a great deal. So much do I owe him that I even nicknamed my first son Jack (my wife wouldn’t let me name him Clive Staples, or so I jokingly tell people). Lewis is on my top 10 list of people I most want to meet when I get to Heaven (assuming that in the end I choose that instead of my own miserable desires.)

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis

Thank you St. Jack for everything you did in serving Christ and His Church.

 

The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

21 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in Free Will, God's Will, Saints, Submission to God

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No time to write anything original today. Therefore I commend to you a wonderful article from EWTN found here. The thing that really caught my attention was the following:

By the consecration which the Blessed Virgin made of herself to God in the first use which she made of her reason, we are admonished of the most important and strict obligation which all persons lie under, of an early dedication of themselves to the divine love and service.

 

Chance and Absolute Chance

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Definitions, Philosophy

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I have a sermon to write for Sunday, which prevented my posting yesterday and which leaves me no time to write anything original today. But in order to continue with our topic I am posting the definitions for ‘chance’ and ‘absolute chance’. I will have to leave any further explanation until after my sermon is written.

chance, n. and adj. 1. the unforeseen, the unintended. 2. the seeming absence of cause or design. 3. that which is said to happen without a deliberate purpose. 4. the accidental, the irregular, or the unusual in nature’s course. 5. that whose cause is indeterminable. Chance is not properly ascribed to the absence of efficient cause. Antonym – end, intention.

absolute chance, that which is not planned nor foreseen and permitted by any agent. Scholasticism denies this kind of chance occurence.

Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy, Bernard Wuellner, S.J.

Definition of ‘Final Cause’

17 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by in Definitions, Philosophy

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Today’s post is part 2 to yesterday’s post: Lewis on Chance. In that post I mentioned a second opinion by a Catholic philosopher but that will have to wait until tomorrow because there is a term that must be defined before we move on to his opinion. Although, I will be quoting him today because that is where we encounter the term in question.

We frequently use such expressions as, ‘A game of chance,’ ‘This happened by chance,’ etc., to refer to various types of situations in our experience. This seems at first glance to deny the above thesis on the need of final causality to explain all action, as we have just established.

The One and the Many, W. Norris Clarke, S.J.

The term we need to understand here is ‘final cause’. St. Thomas, in his Summa Theologiæ, said “the first of all causes is the final cause.” I know that sounds counter-intuitive and it took me a while to understand it. What helped with my understanding of this term centers on the proper understanding of how St. Thomas is using the word ‘final’. To us it sounds like he is saying that the last in a series of events (the final cause) is actually the first, which makes no sense whatsoever. But that is not how the word final is being used. Instead, final means the end or purpose for something happening. And the final cause is linked to the efficient cause, although they answer different questions. (And here we need another definition: an efficient cause is that which causes an effect.) Fr. Clarke puts it thusly,

The efficient cause answers the question: Which being is responsible for this effect’s coming to be? The final cause answers the question: Why did this efficient cause produce this effect rather than that? For in many cases the same efficient cause can produce several different possible effects. (p. 202)

I suppose you could say that the final cause gives direction to the efficient cause so that there is actually an effect that takes place. Because, if there is more than one possible effect there must be something there to choose from all the options so that this effect happens rather than that one. Therefore, without a final cause – a purpose – would there be anything that ever happened at all?

Tomorrow (maybe), we will see how this applies to Fr. Clarke’s understanding of chance, and then later compare that with what Lewis had to say on the matter.

Lewis on Chance

16 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Thought for the Day

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Now as to your other story, about Isaiah 66? It doesn’t really matter whether the Bible was open at that page thru’ a miracle or through some (unobserved) natural cause. We think it matters because we tend to call the second alternative ‘chance.’ But when you come to think of it, there can be no such thing as chance from God’s point of view. Since He is omniscient His acts have no consequences which He has not foreseen and taken into account and intended. Suppose it was the draught from the window that blew your Bible open at Isaiah 66. Well, that current of air was linked up with the whole history of weather from the beginning of the world and you may be quite sure that the result it had for you at that moment (like all its other results) was intended and allowed for in the act of creation. ‘Not one sparrow,’ you know the rest [Matthew 10:29]. So of course the message was addressed to you. To suggest that your eye fell on it without this intention, is to suggest that you could take Him by surprise. Fiddle-de-dee! This is not Predestination: your will is perfectly free: but all physical events are adapted to fit in as God sees best with the free actions He knows we are going to do. There’s something about this in Screwtape.

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III

(An alternate opinion on ‘chance’ from a Catholic philosopher will be offered later.)

Ordinary and Extraordinary Medical Care

12 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Catholic Church, Catholic Obligations, Morality, Pro-Life

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I just received the most recent edition of Ethics & Medics: A Commentary of the National Catholic Bioethics Center on Health Care and the Life Sciences (wow, they need to shorten that). It is a four page newsletter that comes out every month with various medical ethical issues being discussed. This month the issue in question is whether or not to deactivate someone’s pacemaker in given situations. The issue itself is not my reason for this post but instead information within the first article that I was not aware of beforehand, which has to do with ordinary and extraordinary means of medical care.

The distinction between ordinary and extraordinary does not take into account the entirety of a patient’s medical situation; it can only concern the relationship between a specific problem, its corresponding treatment, and that treatment’s effects.

Ethics & Medics, Nov. 2014, vol. 39, num. 11, page 2.

What this means is that you cannot combine all of a patient’s various and unrelated symptoms and say that any care given would therefore be extraordinary. For instance, the type of situation it discusses in the article is when someone has a serious and painful disease that would cause them to die if it were not for the fact that they had a pacemaker. But, the disease and the pacemaker are totally unrelated. Therefore, you cannot deactivate the pacemaker saying that it is extraordinary means of treatment because what it is treating is unrelated to that which is causing the severe pain. There could be other reasons in which the pacemaker could be viewed as extraordinary and therefore could be removed but it cannot be removed because of an unrelated illness – no matter how bad it may be.

But before anyone says, “The Catholic Church is so mean; why do they want people to suffer.” The Church does not want anyone to suffer but instead recognizes that suffering is a part of our experience in this life. In addition the Church does believe in and promote the use of medicines that can alleviate pain. Lastly, the Church does not allow euthanasia or anything else that could be done that would be for the express purpose of ending the patient’s life because she (the Church) recognizes that we are not the creators of our lives but instead the stewards of it. And, therefore, we are bound to protect our lives with the ordinary means that are available to us.

For more information on the subject you can go to §2278-9 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church or go to the USCCB document located here. (Helpful in particular is Part Five that starts on page 29 and especially §55-7 that starts on page 30.)

The Definition of Definition

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Definitions, Philosophy

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Sorry I disappeared for about two weeks. Last week was Fall Break for the Atonement Academy and even though my family and I did not go anywhere it was nice not to have to do anything in particular. The week before that was just busy.

I’ve decided to begin this re-start of blogging with a new category of posts – that being ‘Definitions’. The primary thing that has prompted this is the fact that, due to my increased reading of philosophy, I have had to look up very many terms in order to understand what I am reading. Some of them are terms that I never knew before and some are terms I only thought I knew before I discovered their true meanings.

It may be asked – why bother with such an endeavor? Because if we do not have a common understanding of the meaning behind the words we use then we cannot communicate with one another. If I say something is red in color then the listener, if he speaks English, understands what I am talking about. But when I am reading St. Thomas Aquinas there are many times I do not understand what he is saying because I do not understand what he means by this or that word (or any of them at all sometimes). By writing about these words and what they mean I hope to gain a better understanding for myself and perhaps someone else will as well.

To begin this category off it seems that the most logical place to start is with the definition of the word definition itself. I am taking my meaning from a book I recently purchased: The Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy by Bernard Wuellner, S.J. The section for the word ‘definition’ contains seven different senses in which it can be defined. Therefore, so this post does not get too convoluted, I have chosen just one of those senses to list here.

definition, n. 1. logical and philosophical senses. a proposition either stating the meaning of a term or explaining what an essence is.

But of course this definition leads to the necessity of another definition for the word ‘essence’. In the same book it describes essence as “what a thing is” (and I will stop there because this word deserves its own post). Therefore, when we are defining some particular thing, we are trying to describe what that thing is. I suppose many people would respond to this by saying “Yeah, duh!” Even though this definition of definition may seem obvious but it is not insignificant. The fact that we can define things so that others can understand what we are talking about shows us what kind of universe we live in: that being a universe where we can know what something truly is and are able to communicate that to others. The reason this is so important is because there are other philosophies that would say that we cannot really know anything at all. But if that were true then those who hold such philosophies would not be able to communicate what they mean to anyone else because no one would be able to understand what it was that they were trying to define. In fact, if we could not know things and define them then no one would be able to understand anything at all.