Being! Or Nothingness

Somebody needs the wood

Madonna's on the cross again.  Literally this time, but it's really an appropriate metaphor for her entire life.  She can't get away from the cross, from the Church, from God.  Oh sure, she's practicing Kabbala and has changed her real name to Esther (no more Maria Louise), but try as she might to erase her Catholic past, she seems haunted by the Cross.

The first time she caused a little a little controversy in this regard was with her music video "Like a Prayer."  In it she has a very torrid affair with St. Martin de Porras whose statue comes alive in a church.  There have been other instances where she has used images from the Church to either scandalize, sensationalize, or demonize the Church she was baptised into.

I guess my major question is "Why bother?"  Her fans could care less.  Those who hate her may get offended, but in the end, she doesn't matter to them so they get over it.  Why is Madonna so obsessed with Christian imagery?

I remember once talking with Fr. Groeschel and somehow the topic of celebrity culture came up.  He mentioned that he prays every day for Madonna's conversion.  He made one of his typical comments "I wanna catch a big fish."  Well, Fr. Benedict, I think you're on to something.  Madonna will share in that cross one day, more than just as a prop.

So Dark the Con of Man

Ok, so now it's official.  The Da Vinci Code stinks, but millions of people went to see it anyway.  Most are reporting that the movie is entertaining.  No one is clamoring to go see it again.  The Catholic blogosphere is raling against it.  Some bishops are railing against it.  Some priests are railing against it.  Opus Dei is basking in the publicity.  The most anti-catholic critics are upset that the movie is so bad that it doesn't really work as an attack on the Church.  And the beat goes on . . .

I particularly enjoyed Amy Biancolli's take on it.  Writing for the Houston Chronicle she writes:

 It's only a movie.

And, as it turns out, not a good one — turgid and pompous, lacking suspense or any mitigating wit. As a book, Dan Brown's global blockbuster The Da Vinci Code was a gripping riddler tricked out with provocative theology, which you could swallow whole or spit out with a grimace, depending on your mood.

But in the film, The Da Vinci Code's addictive narrative slows to a grind. Absent is the pure guilty joy of sequential puzzle-solving; instead of participating in the hunt, we're shoved off to the side as a couple of crashing boors do it for us. Sitting through this overlong, overbaked, overbearing anti-thriller felt like watching a team of academics solve cryptograms for two and a half hours straight.

Given all the brouhaha over the gnostic gospels and their "secret hidden knowledge" about the "truth regarding Christ" it's, as PaperClippings reminds us, a good time to remember that Christianity is an event!  An event that still happens!

A Wedding Story

On Saturday, April 23, my sister became Mrs. Emanuel Gonzalez. It’s rather strange, if you think about it, that a person whom you have known all your life, whom you have always known as an individual, with a particular name, who has always been particularly independent, would take on a character, a name, a personality that is no longer one, but two as one.

Well, maybe it’s not that strange, people have been getting married since man’s earliest days. The Greeks did it, the Jews did it, the Romans did it, and so it’s not so odd that still 2,000 years later, we still do it.

Yet, marriage certainly makes a particularly counter cultural statement today. In particular, a marriage like my sister’s, a Christian marriage. In a culture where everyone is supposed to be the self-sufficient creator of their own personal happiness, where everyone has to “be themselves.” A Christian marriage says “I am only me in relationship with You.” It’s not the Jerry Maquire “you complete me” sentimentalism that so often replaces the “two will become one flesh” of the Gospel. Rather it’s an affirmation that I, alone, cannot make myself happy. I need another, a companion to my destiny to help me, to walk with me on this road to what will really fulfill me.

The week before the wedding, and in particular that day, really put me in front of the question of what this means, why man desires to get married, why marriage is a sacrament, why it’s a sacrament that people, at least in preparing for it, still take seriously (unlike confession, or mass, or baptism nowadays).

The Wedding day was beautiful... My sister was, of course, beautiful in her white dress with long train. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect for what is usually a windy month in El Paso. The Church was full of friends and family, and everything went off without so much as a kink in the flow of the day. It was really “une belle evente,” as the French might say.

What particularly struck me that day, what amazed me, was that this day which was, ostensibly, for my sister and her husband, really was a day for everyone, it was a day for me, my parents, our family, our friends . . . but also for the whole Church, for the whole world. More than once I wanted to run outside and shout at the cars driving by, “Do you know what’s happening here?!?!? Do you realize what is being affirmed in this place? Do you recognize what this event means for you?”

Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote a book on marriage in the 1950’s called “Three to get Married.” In it, he makes a particularly interesting observation. That two people cannot be happy, cannot be fruitful, and cannot really look at each other without a third person, without God.

But God, can too easily become something of an abstraction in marriage. He is too quickly reduced to this far away judge of what marriage should be. And of course, because we’re so far away, and so incapable of really knowing what he wants, we use him as a stick by which the actions we take in marriage, completely apart from him. And so, God becomes the irrelevant “third person” that is only invoked when, like shopping at Costco, I need something big.

This is why I was so happy that the Franciscan priest who married my sister, Fr. John, took it a step further. He reminded my sister, and all of us, that marriage doesn’t take place alone, but within a family, within the Church. He told my sister and her husband that they needed to look at us, those who were happily married and those who weren’t, and even those of us who never have been married to help them judge how their marriage is lived.

He reminded those present that these two people who had been brought up as the “responsibility” of everyone their in their youth, continue to be everyone’s responsibility as they mature in their marriage. His homily helped me to be aware that the reason many marriages fail is because they aren’t lived closely within a community.

A community, is where the “Third Person” resides, is made manifest, and helps you to judge the thing that you live. This is the Church, the Divine Presence through history, continually made present and human.

This point is always clear to me in the movement. A community is not just a place for your social interaction, but is a place where you live out the context of your life with help. Alone I am lazy; I am prone to separating myself, especially in my judgments, from others. Alone, I become the sole judge, the sole measure of life, and my response to life is limited by my own personal creativity and capacity. Alone, I can’t do it.

 And so on this Wedding day, a day that was beautiful for many reasons (I could probably do 8 or 9 posts on what I recognized that day) what most impacted me was how clear and strong the attraction and need for Another is. In my sister’s vows, just as in my own life, I cannot say “I” without also saying “You.”