Tomasino Blog

This was written on Friday, July 6th, 2007. I had originally written it for myself, but I think it probably belongs here.

Two days ago, I spent the evening contemplating the connection between the soul and God. The thought process began that afternoon while I was running at the gym. While listening to an audio-lecture¹ about Saint Augustine on my iPod, the author brought up the Platonists’ concept of the inner world and began comparing it to John Locke’s philosophies, and finally discussing Augustine’s conclusions on the subject. The lecture really stuck with me and led me to some long overdue decisions.

The single greatest barrier between me and Catholicism has been Jesus; his validity, his divinity, and his relation to God. That is to say, I have had a very hard time believing in the doctrine of the Trinity, and while it has not kept me away from the Church per se, is has kept me from making a permanent commitment in the manner to which I feel called.

Without believing firmly that Christ is the path to salvation, indeed, without believing that Christ is himself God in every essence of being, it would have been hypocrisy to commit myself to a life of that teaching. Even more-so, it would have driven a wedge of lies into a place already tender with doubt. So for the past few years, I have avoided the commit-of Christ, I wanted it very much. I prayed as often as I could for God to steal away the doubts in my mind, to solidify my faith. In the end, each night I was assailed by my uncertainty and disappointment.

The problem I had with faith was that of rationality. Despite everything I have read² and everything I’ve been taught, I still find it difficult to respect the numinous irrationality of God. My search has been with the empiricism of mysticism and the rationality of logic; and while my greatest triumphs of faith have always come from those moments when I, in my creature-consciousness, feel my place juxtaposed against my creator to be proclaiming my unworthiness with greater truth that can be known to mankind, after the fleeting moment of hierophany fades, I breathe deeply and again make the false attempts to puzzle out the unspeakable mysteries with inadequate tools.

It was most certainly a gift of God’s grace that led me down the path that day in the gym. The lecture was able to put some things into perspective that had long been out of place in my mind, and this reasoning led me down that same path of logic, but this time it led me with the open heart and compassion necessary to understand and believe. Here is the path:

John Locke envisioned our mind as a dark room in which we sit alone. There are no windows or doors in this room, at least not that can be used to look outside. Instead, there is a small lens that lets light trickle in and form a picture on the opposite wall. In this camera obscura, literally “dark chamber,” we interact only with this image reflected on the wall. We do not see the true object, only a reflection.

This argument reminded me at once of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in which our entire world seemed to be nothing but shadows dancing on the wall, while in reality³ (or in the ideal reality, I should say) the world was filled with real creatures who were walking in front of a fire and casting those long shadows. The Platonists built upon that allegory in their further discussions of the inner self. The ideal world is like a giant crystal sphere, they thought, holding in it all the perfection of Truth. Our minds are tiny faces on the surface of this sphere, perpetually looking outward from it.

Augustine knew the Platonist teachings very well and worked hard at integrating these philosophies with the beliefs of the Church in his day. He saw this sphere as an obvious symbol of God, but it was incomplete. The ideal world is not God, but rather like the heavens that surround him. God is, after-all, indivisible, he is One. And so Augustine saw the picture a little more clearly than those who came before him. In this newer metaphor, God is the single point from which all of the sphere is derived. He is inconceivable, immeasurable, and unique. Around him he is surrounded by the world of the ideal or perfected bodies⁴. On the surface of the sphere are tiny individual spheres. These are the spheres of our souls. In each of these is a small window that glances back into the greater sacred, but we are isolated from it, floating on the surface. This was the key for me to understanding why Christ came to us, why God would not just enter the physical world as God the Father, and why we had a need for the Holy Spirit.

The first question I asked myself when I heard Augustine’s idea of these metaphorical sacred spheres was why can’t we gain access to God by studying those windows in each of our souls? Just as some people believe, couldn’t we gain access to heaven by acting right and looking inward? But that question overlooked a very basic problem, or perhaps a more basic question that needed to be asked. Why aren’t we in that inner sphere already? What has kept us on the surface? That answer, as Augustine found it, was sin.

When the first man sinned in the garden⁵, he sinned for all mankind. He broke the special bond that had connected us with all of the perfect things next to God. He ruined the possibility that we could lead a perfect life. And in doing so, he justifiably damned us all to leave God’s presence. Why, then, did Jesus Christ come and die for our sins? That answer now seems quite self-explanatory. And what tools were granted to us that we could avoid the pitfalls of being human? The grace of God is in each of us, asking a simple two-fold task. Love God with all your heart, and Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

It is that love and compassion that truly makes us a part of Christ’s Body, the Church. It is that Body that is forgiven its sin and has a chance of salvation. All of the logic of it seems very clear to me in using that analogy, but on its own it is still empty of the emotional quality of faith. However, as I meditated over the image of the sphere of God, our souls dancing on its surface, of Jesus–whose essence always was in that great, eternal sphere–being born into our profane little world to forgive a lost people and offer them the chance to come home, of God’s mercy and His presence, that is when I finally felt at peace. I was no longer meditating over those things in doubt or theory. They were a part of me like the air I breathe, as surely true as anything can be.

I prayed to God that my doubts would be taken away and replaced by faith. Two days ago, God answered my prayers.

1. The audio-lecture I refer to is by Professor Philip Carey.
2. In particular, Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy) by Rudolf Otto, and The Sacred and the Profane by Mircae Eliade, which are referenced here.
3. It should be clarified that the ideal world might not be that single step back from the cave wall, but perhaps an infinite number of such revelations. The concept is the same, in any case, that there is a perfected reality, though it may not exist in our physical world. Professor Philip Carey makes an excellent allusion to it in his metaphor of the Pythagorean triangle.
4. The term “bodies” is inaccurate as the things in this sphere do not have an only “physical” body.
5. This as well may be a metaphorical story that is suggestive of man’s development from unconscious creature to self-awareness, when the we first became capable of pride-the original sin. It is, in that context, a sin that is shared by all people and entwined in the very essence of what it is to be human.

Share on Facebook

I love this reading. It’s the most direct explanation of faith in the New Testament, and though it’s not meant to be a precise definition, per se, it teaches us something remarkably important about it. Faith is more than an on/off switch. It is more than whether you think God is real or not. Faith is not a synonym of belief.

Faith is a gift and it’s a response. It is a mystical part of us that forms up around our hope and orients on the awesome. It is our ground-work, the foundation upon which we walk. It is the strength upon which we build up our belief, because it allows us to look at the numinous, the ineffable, and give us the strength of will to answer yes. It is God’s hand reaching down to us and saying, “It’s okay to believe.”

I think that’s what I love most about faith. It doesn’t come from us. It, like all of our great gifts, comes from God. We are asked to take it, be thankful for it, and offer it back to him. When we don’t have faith, what we’re really doing is turning away that gift, and that, in a nutshell, is true free will. God offers us something and we can choose to accept it or not. The rest of what we call freedom is an illusion, but I’ll write more on that another day.

Share on Facebook

There are so many kinds of love. There’s the love of pets and the love for them, the love of a favorite TV show about to begin its series finale, the love of your favorite baseball team when they’re down by one in the bottom of the ninth. There is the love of family and of friends, and the love of people you met for five minutes in an office years ago but have never left your memory. There’s also a love of each and every day, every moment ticking away on the clock. A love of time, of place, and of being.

Deus caritas est. (God is love)
    - 1 John 4:16

Theologians talk about caritas, or agapē, when they talk about God’s love for us. It’s an overwhelming, pure, unlimited kindness that goes beyond romance or want or even need. It is what first Corinthians talks about when it says it isn’t boastful, it isn’t proud. It’s the type of love, in particular, that religious are to seek in their relationships with, well, everyone.

It’s still hard for me to find that type of love, even (or especially) in relationships I’ve had for a long time. Maybe that makes it harder, though. When I have a certain type of love for someone already, it is so much more difficult to shift that into caritas, into charity. Romantic love, especially, screams at me saying that it is more important, or deeper than charity, that it deserves to be respected and explored. I know in my mind that’s not all true, that it gets a part of its strength from its self-serving nature. Still, the difficulty remains. It’s a struggle I don’t foresee becoming any easier with time.

It may not be easy, but when it comes I feel it more strongly than anything else. I know that if any of my tiny loves compare to it, it is only as a shadow cast along a wall in passing. God’s love is enormous and subtle, and it provokes such awe and clarity that it wakes us up from our petty dreams to point us in a direction and say with the clear clarion only available to angels, "Here it is! Here I am!"

Still, even with the experience in my pocket, there are days when I fall for the old habits. I want love, not just to love. It’s inescapable, even if it weren’t broadcast across our culture in blazing lights. That want is human as well, and I don’t think I can necessarily call it wrong. Though the selfless love may be altruistic and divine, and thus qualitatively better, that doesn’t diminish the greatness that comes from being loved by another person. Just because one thing is infinitely good, infinity minus one is still increasing without bounds. (There’s a cardinality vs. cardinals joke in there somewhere, but my math nerd skills aren’t up to it)

I know what I should do. I know that I need to bridge those gaps and put things in the right perspective. Times will come in the future where I’ll experience this same dilemma and I should put in the practice now at developing those relationships into a love that is healthy for celibacy. Based on what I’m experiencing so far, I’d say it’s a slow process.

Of course, I can’t turn a blind eye to romantic relationships. Even though it’s not the path I’m headed down, I already find myself counseling other people on theirs. I typically take the position of offering up my mistakes as a guide for things they might want to avoid, but that’s only really appropriate for surface level advice. So many friends are coming to me these days with worries about finding a love in which to share their life. I guess with all of us hitting our 30s, they’re beginning to wonder why life hasn’t fallen into place like they expected. But that’s the key, isn’t it? Life is never what we expected. How many of us can look back at our 8th grade yearbook, slide our finger down to the “What do you want to do when you grow up?” line, read off our grand plans and say honestly, “Yup, I nailed it.” How many of us planned out our futures when we left for college? How many of us are even in the same career as when we began? These are just the mechanical things of the day to day. They are jobs, homes, cars. How much more complex and unpredictable is love!

Even though it’s unpredictable, and life takes us on twists, that doesn’t help people who feel left behind, who feel alone. I want to say, “of course you’ll find someone!” I want to tell them that it will work out better than they could have planned, but that’s not the way of life, and it’s not the way of God. He challenges us at every turn. The better we are at things, the more skilled or talented, the more the challenges become. He never abandons us, but he doesn’t make it easy.

It’s tempting to take a break from your life and look to the side, at the lives of others passing by like cars on a highway. It’s tempting to look and say, “look how easy they have it! They’re in the carpool lane and it’s moving so quick.” We so rarely see their challenges, though. We trick ourselves into simple habits, like pretending that if we could only have this one thing, all of life would be okay. That’s never the case, though, is it?

More often than not, I think my friends will find the love they’re looking for. It might happen soon, or not for many years. Most will find it. There is another group, though, who may not. That’s the big conspiracy of our modern world. That’s the horror movie too scary for the big screen. What happens to the people who never find a romance to last the rest of their lives?

They live and love anyway.

That’s the big secret. God doesn’t call us all to married life! Just as he doesn’t call everyone to religious life, just as he doesn’t give us all the same gifts and passions. And that’s okay.

I know we all want it, but the wanting isn’t love in itself. The wanting is just the self crying out at the outrage of not having what others have. There is still love available for everyone, even if it isn’t romantic love. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s anything less than romance, either. It is far more grace-filled and awe-inspiring. It is the love that creates worlds!

Whether you’re one of those people who has already found your special love, one who is still looking and will discover it soon, or one of us who will live by the love of charity and fill your life with the friendship of many, God’s love is there for every single person, without exception. It’s even there for us screw-ups who misuse it, abuse it, and fail to spot it when we should be on our knees thanking heaven. It’s there for sinners and saints alike.

Let all that you do be done in love.
    - 1 Corinthians 16:14

Share on Facebook

St. Augustine probably did more good than bad with his writing, but it doesn’t help me be any less frustrated. City of God, City of Man, two worlds which collide at an invisible line between the real and the unreal. The concept wasn’t his, but I still blame him for the popularity in common thought. Without Augustine, would we really have this all-pervasive gnostic sense about our own selves? Would we really see the spirit and the body as two separate entities? How different would our actions be if we never turned over the idea, if instead we knew ourselves as a whole, indivisible and inseparable from the here and now.

That’s the biggest problem I have with gnostic ideas. It’s not that there isn’t anything to be learned by classifying and delineating, but when we attribute individual value and stop seeing our bodies as part of our souls and vice versa, we stop seeing the entire person. More than that, we stop seeing each other.

There is no path to God through the soul alone. You can’t shed this flesh and ride your spirit alone up to the heavens. The body is not an anchor weighing you down. It is not a prison. All these ideas, they make us see ourselves in such a dark way, as if the only thing of worth were buried beneath a dirty mask. It’s a wonder how people survived with those thoughts at all!

Theology is a little beyond me tonight. It’s late and I’m only up because of an ill-advised nap this afternoon. In a few minutes I’ll be back in bed letting my slumbering mind take me on silly journeys where my cat is the conductor of an illegal space-train. I guess I just needed to get that thought out of my head.

Share on Facebook

And He began telling this parable: “A man had a fig tree which had been planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and did not find any.

“And he said to the vineyard-keeper, ‘Behold, for three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree without finding any. Cut it down! Why does it even use up the ground?’

“And he answered and said to him, ‘Let it alone, sir, for this year too, until I dig around it and put in fertilizer; and if it bears fruit next year, fine; but if not, cut it down.’”
    - Luke 13:6-9 (The Parable of the Fig Tree)

Some of the people I’ve met recently can point to one or two parables or passages in the Bible and say, “Look at that! That is where I found God’s purpose for me!” I’m not sure I ever saw a message so personal or clear in any particular thing. I identify with a lot of different biblical stories. As most of you know, I like to make a lot of analogies and find metaphor in just about everything that crosses my path. Maybe that has kept me from developing a special bond with any one thing; there’s too much to choose from.

The parable of the fig tree, though, has long managed to fall into a special category, or perhaps I should say a lack of category. It’s not that I don’t understand it, and it’s not that I can’t place its meaning in my life. The fig tree has some other element to it, an element of the numinous, ineffable sacred. I suppose, if you allow me to personify it a bit, the parable is like a man facing away from me. I know he is a man. I see what he is about and what he is doing, but his face is hidden.

A few minutes ago, I experienced a totally cheesy, totally predictable twist. At least, that’s how I’d describe it if my life were a movie. As I read the passage again that person/parable turned around to face me and there I was, staring back at myself. I told you it was predictable!

I’ve been learning to pray by placing myself in the scenes, becoming the actors, becoming onlookers, really being there. I have no idea why I never put myself into the position of that tree before, but the moment I realized it things woke up inside me.

How do I see myself? Am I worthy of being saved? How much longer can I go on “bearing no fruit”? If I am tended to, if I make the right decisions and respond to what my vineyard-keeper is trying to sow in my life, will I have a real worth? What is my fruit? It is love (caritas), obviously! Charity is the fruit that becomes the seed, that grows and spreads and falls again and again… The questions, the metaphors, they go on and on until I catch myself shaking my head back and forth in wonder at the blindness of a moment ago, of a lifetime ago.

This is what contemplative prayer is. It is waking up. It is suddenly having words stop being words in such a profound way that you shake your head at your former self, wondering how you could have ever been that person. It is waking up in a moment and knowing, just knowing, that you are making the right decision.

On that note, I received word that I have been accepted to enter the tri-state novitiate for the Maryland, New York, and New England Provinces of the Society of Jesus this summer.

The letter represents a culmination of a decade of discernment, countless hours of writing, of reading, and prayer; and yet this is just another beginning. It is a milestone, a thing to be celebrated with joy and excitement, but I can’t fool myself into thinking I have really accomplished anything yet. I still stare at my branches and see no fruit. Maybe this represents buds?

I try more and more every day to live my life like I am fully in bloom, to share the love and faith and my sense of joy in the Lord. Soon I will have more support in that respect than I’ve ever known. I will also have people pushing me (and pulling me, I’m sure) to do more, to be more, to grow in that relationship of faith. The idea is so amazing, I can’t even come up with a pretty metaphor!

New things are on the horizon. I love new things.

To those of you who have been praying for me, thank you so much for absolutely everything. If you have a moment, join me in praying for the other (currently anonymous) souls who are still in the long discernment/application process. God bless!

Share on Facebook