Mercy

Except when confessing my sins, I never understood the concept of mercy. As such, it always intrigued me.  I read Pope Francis's book about mercy; and yet, I still wasn't able to get my mind around it.  I used to ask, what about repentance, don't we have to first repent in order to receive mercy?  But it says in the Bible that mercy is a gift, freely given--unconditionally--no strings attached. Mercy exists first. It is mercy that enables repentance, not the other way around. Repentance can occur only if mercy exists beforehand. My understanding of this only came after listening to a witness by someone who was sentenced to sixteen years in jail in North Carolina.  People like Nomi Network and The Sisters of Life are agents of mercy.

Chehkovian Christianity?

 Michael Sean Winters on Cornell West:

West has styled himself a “Chekhovian Christian.” He wrote that he was inspired by Chekhov because his “magisterial depiction of the cold Cosmos, indifferent Nature, crushing Fate and the cruel histories that circumscribe desperate, bored, confused and anxiety-ridden yet love-hungry people, who try to endure against all odds, rings true to me.” What that has to do with Christianity is anyone’s guess – and West gives no clues. For the Christian, the Cosmos are not cold, they are created and Nature is not indifferent, it is infused with the love of the Creator. But, never mind all that. It sounds so authoritative, doesn’t it?

Michael Sean Winters quoting Cornell West:

“Despite my Chekhovian Christian conception of what it means to be human - a view that invokes pre-modern biblical narratives,” West writes. “I stand in the skeptical Christian tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and Kierkegaard …My Chekhovian Christian viewpoint is idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. My sense of the absurdity and incongruity of the world is closer to the Gnosticism of Valentinus, Luria or Monoimos ... My intellectual lineage goes more through Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Rilke, Melville, Lorca, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Soyinka, O'Neill, Kazantzakis, Morrison and above all, Chekhov ... And, I should add, it reaches its highest expression in Brahms's ‘Requiem’ and Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme.’”

-from The National Catholic Reporter, "Cornell West: Idiot-in-Chief."  Michael Sean Winters May 19, 2011.

I am not posting this because I believe in it.  Rather, it sounds rather contrary to the idea that all of reality is a positive.  (Luigi Giussani / Communion and Liberation). But it bears thinking about. 

Cornell West - A Love Supreme/John Coltrane

"All we can do as human beings is to try and inspire one another and encourage one another and enable one another, ennoble one another. And that in and of itself is what John Coltrane called a force for good.  How do I become, based on a love supreme, a force for good in a cold and cruel world?  And a love supreme is not love in the abstract. It's a love of beauty in its concrete forms.  It's a love of goodness in its concrete forms.  It's a love of truth in its concrete forms." 

-Cornell West (Joe Rogan Experience #1325)

On Experience

From, "Disciples Called to Witness," from the USCCB (2012):

Discipleship is rooted in human experience.  It is through human experience that one enters into a dialogue with modern culture.  The human experience provides the "sensible signs" that help us come to know ourselves, one another, and God.  It is through common human experience that the Word of God is revealed to us.  These sensible signs are not abstract metaphysical signs but the concrete actions of the Holy Spirit.

When did God Breathe a Soul into Humans?

I think that when God created the universe, he made the laws of nature with the future homo sapiens in mind.  I think he made the laws such that the soul evolved in parallel with the human body, and I think we had souls prior to our becoming homo sapiens. Of the soul, I include self-awareness, consciousness, imagination, empathy, love, the ability to think in the abstract, to use symbols in communication, plus a sense of the transcendent and a desire for the infinite.

The Seven Story Mountain, by Thomas Merton

Of course, it is a wonderful conversion story. However, there was nothing in it for me, nothing I could take as an insight, advice, etc. This contrasts one hundred and eighty degrees with his other writings. Merton's writings that grabbed me were his essays on social issues and comments on the same in his journals. Admittedly, some of it is dated today, about social justice issues that were current back then or are settled now. Overall, I found Merton to be somewhat optimistic about humankind and society, in hindsight, more optimist than what was called for. But to be fair, I think his optimism is typical/expected from a person of his intelligence and talent, from the time period in which he was educated and lived. And I suspect the optimism is what society and the church needed at the time. When I was in my twenties, I read every book of Merton's that I could find in bookstores. He had an enormous influence on my thinking/spirituality/attitudes, for which I am grateful.

I see Thomas Merton and Jack Kerouac as contemporary soul brothers of a sort but ones who chose radically different lifestyles from each other. (with Kerouac failing in his spiritual journey). Merton and Kerouac attended Columbia U. and shared certain professors, most especially, the legendary English professor Mark Van Doren, mentioned in Seven Story Mountain. One quirky reason the I read/liked Seven Story Mountain is that Merton (and Kerouac) were contemporaries of my father. Without going into details, the beliefs and attitudes of my father, my uncles, and all of their friends--working-class guys from the neighborhoods of NYC who served in WWII--were all that I knew when I was growing up. As a young adolescent/adult, the discovery of people of my father's generation who thought so radically different from them was radically mind-opening.

Christianity--Quotes from the Book, Caesar and Christ (1944), by Will Durant, from the Series, The Story of Civilization

Casesar hoped to reform men by changing institutions and laws; Christ wished to remake institutions, and lesson laws, by changing men.  - p. 562

All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind.  It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes, and nations; it was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freemen of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome.  By making all men heirs of Christ's victory over death, Christianity announced the basic equality of men, and made transiently trivial all differences of earthly degree. To the miserable, maimed, bereaved, disheartened, and humiliated, it brought the new virtue of compassion, and an ennobling dignity; it gave them the inspiring figure, story and ethic of Christ; it brightened their lives with the hope of the coming of the Kingdom, and of endless happiness beyond the grave. To even the greatest sinners it promised forgiveness, and their full acceptance into the community of the saved. To minds harassed with the onsoluble problems of origin and destiny, evil and suffering, it brought a system of divinely revealed doctrine in which the simplest soul could find mental rest.  To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life a vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world of sick brutality, cruelty, oppression, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed to no longer need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace.  -p. 602