Church Fathers Under the Roof

I just ordered all 38 volumes of the Church Fathers! Though I can read them online, I want them in my hands, in hard copies. It was a great deal--64% off the normal price. These men and women were in large part what drew me back to the Catholic Church. I want their words in my house, under my roof, and in my hands. I think we'll become best of friends. And, they'll be used for the Book...which makes them deductible too!

Clement on Wool

Clement can be pretty funny. Check out this passage on gaudy dress, and what he says about...and to...wool.

But we must moderate our severity for the sake of the women. We say, then, that their garment may be woven smooth and soft to the touch, but not adorned with gaudy colors, like a painting, just to dazzle the eye...It is the height of vanity to let oneself be fascinated by the flowing robes and gowns and cloaks and mantles and tunics 'that cover nakedness,' as Homer says. I am really ashamed to see so much money squandered just to cover the private parts. Of old, man fashioned a covering for his shame out of branches and leaves from the garden, but, now that we have sheep for our use, let us not imitate sheep in their stupidity, but follow the guidance of reason and refuse to have anything to do with expensive clothing, insisting: 'Wool, you belong to the sheep.'

I laughed again rereading it. As for me, I'll stick with woolen sweaters dear Clement--we live in Michigan, not Alexandria! And trust me, no one wants to see me wearing branches and leaves out in public!

The Church and Homosexuality

I've decided that I'm a huge fan of Clement of Alexandria--he could be my favorite saint. (Is it OK to have a favorite saint?) The man is absolutely brilliant in dissecting the many heresies that were rampant in the second century, and it seems that today words like Clement's are needed just as much as they were in his time.

In Stromatesis, Clement strikes blow upon blow to the teaching of those who modify Scripture, twisting the writing of Paul in Romans to justify immoral living.

Those who drag in a doctrine of moral indifference do violence to some few passages of Scripture, thinking that they support their own love of pleasure; in particular, the passage “Sin shall have no authority over you; for you are not subject to sin but to grace.” But there are other such passages, which there is no good reason to record for these purposes, as I am not equipping a pirate ship! Let me quickly cut through the attempt. The admirable Apostle in person will refute their charge in the words with which he continues the previous quotation: “Well then! Shall we sin because we are no longer under Law but under grace? God forbid!” With these inspired prophetic words, at a single stroke he undoes the sophistical skill at the service of pleasure.

He is greatly concerned with heresies that do injury to the institution of marriage from two distinct extremes--one that allows for license and loose living, based on an over liberal interpretation of grace and on the other extreme, one that condemns marriage as an inherent evil to be avoided for it indulges in the pleasures of the flesh.

It seems in today's world, we need to heed the words of the writer of Hebrews: "Marriage should be honored by all." Our enemy desires to abolish and destroy marriage for he understands it's significance far more than we do. Marriage is a symbol that points to the union of Christ with his Bride, the Church. And in its fullest expression, it results in obedience to God's command to be fruitful and multiply. Every birth that comes into the world is viewed by our enemy as an incursion without parallel. The Prince of this World desires to destroy all that bear the image of God. We are hated by him, and the very institution that God created for the procreation of his children has always been under attack. It was true in Clement's time, and it is true today.

In the current climate, we are faced with an attack upon the institution of marriage of a far more insidious nature, a nature that shows clearly how Satan clothes himself as an angel of light. Proposition 8 in California is going to be voted on this November to decide the fate of marriage. Under the aegis of love, compassion, social justice and equality, Californians, and by extension, the rest of the country are being asked to turn marriage into a desecration of God's institution of marriage by allowing homosexual men and women to be legally married.

Clement would have strong words to say to those who would advocate inclusion of marriage of homosexuals within the church.

The Bride and Church must be pure alike from inward thoughts contrary to truth and from outward tempers, that is, the adherents of heretical sects who try to persuade her to sexual unfaithfulness to her one and only husband almighty God. We must not be led, “as the snake seduced Eve,” whose name means “Life,” to transgress the commandments under the influence of the wicked factions.

There are many in the church who painfully struggle with homosexual desires, but sadly, some have chosen to manipulate Scripture to justify their desires, rather than seek the Cross of Christ and view their struggle as their particular cross to bear. Clement writes strong words to those who would lead others astray through sophistic and clever arguments that twist Scripture:

It is not right to entrust the Word to hearers to make a test of it on the basis of comparison or to hand it right over for investigation to those who have been brought up to all kinds of sophisticated arguments and who vaunt the power of their intellectual proofs, those whose souls are already determined beforehand instead of being emptied of prejudgment.

The church needs to fight this newest heresy attacking marriage, and speak the truth in love. Many well intentioned and well meaning men and women who have lived with tremendous pain resulting from their struggle with homosexual desires have in recent decades decided to conform Scripture to justify desires that seem insatiable. They have deceived themselves, and as they have looked at Scripture anew, their souls were determined beforehand as to the outcome and through sophistical arguments, they have done violence to Scriptural prohibitions against sexual immorality.

We need to have compassion for these hurting people, for they have exchanged the truth for a lie. In the words of Clement, they "cannot distinguish true pleasure from false, or a beauty that is perishable and insolent from beauty of holiness." This is a sad state of affairs! But it is motivated by the immensity of their pain, which has been transformed into a desire, as Clement so aptly puts:

Every pleasure has its origin in a desire. Desire is a form of pain, a care which yearns for something it lacks. Those who choose this way of life simply seem to me, in the familiar words,

To be suffering grief on top of shame.

and choosing an evil “they have brought on themselves” for the present and the future.

What the Church needs to teach is that the desire that gay men and women so keenly feel can only be satisfied at the Cross of Christ. The "something it lacks" is the God-shaped void in us all. To choose a faux marriage is choosing an evil for the present and the future and buying into a lie of our enemy.

Many in the Christian gay community speak out about the freedom from the Law that we now enjoy through the redemption of Christ. They conveniently ignore the words Christ spoke to his followers: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets." For Clement, there is nothing more beautiful than the Law, and as he says, the inherent caution against immoral living that accompanies the Law. For him, as with Paul, it is the Law that points out our sin, not so that we will suffer condemnation, but so that we can strive to live, as Clement calls it, "the blessed life."

Through the commandments we have a demonstration of the blessed life. We all ought to pursue it without misunderstanding any of the statements or neglecting any of the properties, even the slightest of them. We are to follow where the Word leads…We must follow God’s Scripture, the road taken by the faithful, and we will, so far as possible, become like the Lord. We are not to live amorally. We are, so far as possible, to purify ourselves from pleasures and lusts, and take care of our soul which should continue to be engaged solely with the divine. For if it is pure and freed from all vice, the mind is somehow capable of receiving the power of God, when the divine image is established within it. Scripture says, “Everyone who has this hope in the Lord is purifying himself as the Lord is pure.”

Clement concludes his treatise by quoting Paul's admonishment against sexual immorality of all kinds, and reminds his readers that "we used to be such, but "have passed through the purifying waters" of baptism. He contrasts those who twist Scripture to justify immorality by saying,

But they purify themselves for this licentiousness. Their baptism is out of responsible self-control into sexual immorality. Their philosophy is the gratification of their pleasures and passions. They teach a change from self-discipline to indiscipline. The hope they offer is the titillation of their genitals. Under the name of what they falsely call knowledge they have embarked on the road to outer darkness. “For the rest, brothers, set your minds on all that is true, all that is holy, all that is righteous, all that is pure, all that is attractive, all that wins praise, whatever wins admiration for its moral excellence. Put into practice the lessons I taught, the traditions I passed on, the words you heard from me, the actions you saw me perform. And the God of Peace will be with you.”

Peter in his letter says much the same: “In consequence, you have purified your souls in obedience to the truth, and your faith and hope are in God,” “as obedient children, not molded by the lustful desires of your former ignorance. The one who called you is holy. Be like him, holy in all your behavior, since it is written, ‘You are to be holy, since I am holy.’”

C.S. Lewis's words in The Weight of Glory need to be what the Church champions and proclaims to those within her care who struggle with homosexuality: it is not that our desires are too strong, they are too weak. And they need to realize that Scripture's prohibition against homosexuality is an expression of the very heart of the love of God. My dad often told me and my brothers as we grew up that God says no because He loves us. Responding to God's commands is usually difficult, but as Thomas Merton writes, "Have we forgotten that love can be demanding, exacting, unyielding?"

All of us who journey through life must wage a battle between following God or following the Prince of the World. We have a holy host around us to whom we can look to as an example, and as Clement so clearly puts, "The best means towards understanding of the truth and the performance of the commandments is to follow those others who have already been through the test with flying colors."

My prayer is that those who desire to reconcile a homosexual lifestyle with the Church would follow the saints who have gone before, and allow themselves to be wooed by the true Lover of their soul, consumed by divine love that is the place where true happiness and joy resides. As Augustine said so long ago: "our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." We are called to greater things than finding our ultimate happiness on this earth. As Lewis says in The Weight of Glory, "we are far too easily pleased." Lewis admonishes us, saying that "we are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea."

Gay men and women who clamor for the rights of marriage are clinging to a chimera, a mere caricature of the joy possible to them. How I wish they could understand that God calls them, and all of us who must carry our cross daily, to a higher place that reflects our nobility as sons and daughters of the Most High God.

The possibility is this, as expressed by Thomas Merton:

Suffering, therefore, must make sense to us not as a vague universal necessity, but as something demanded by our own personal destiny. When I see my trials not as the collision of my life with a blind machine called fate, but as the sacramental gift of Christ's love, given to me by God the Father along with my identity and my very name, then I can consecrate them and myself with them to God. For then I realize that my suffering is not my own. It is the Passion of Christ, stretching out its tendrils into my life in order to bear rich clusters of grapes, making my soul dizzy with the wine of Christ's love, and pouring that wine as strong as fire upon the whole world.

I can't think of a more noble calling. As Paul has said, there indeed can be joy in suffering.

The Weight of Glory

I've been spending some time this afternoon, surfing around the blogosphere, seeing where it will lead. I've come across a lot of people who are interesting, honest and real Christians.

Sometimes I become keenly aware of how beautiful we all are. We don't reflect often enough on who we are, that we are made in the image of Christ. I think our job is to work with Christ to recapture our image.

I think we view our sin in the wrong light, or rather God's adamant refusal to allow it to live within us. I was laying in bed this morning thinking through this, and it dawned on me that I think why he's so adamant about removing sin from our lives is because it detracts from our beauty. He of course sees Christ when he sees us, but life is a purifying process to bring us into alignment with that image.

I have begun to see sin like a mosquito, circling around us, and God is continually shooing it away. The battle has already been won--sin has been conquered, yet we keep returning to it, and when God convicts us, it's Him swatting away a gnat. Of course, for us it often feels elephantine, but to God, it's an amoeba.

God isn't trying to keep us from having fun--he's attempting to restore us into our true selves. We are beautiful because he made us. There is no greater creation in the heavens. The wonders of the stars in the sky are wan and drab in comparison to the glory that exists in us because of who we truly are.

I love Lewis's Weight of Glory sermon, and for me it's become central as to how I view the world.

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour's glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal...Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat--the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

I recently read something that Gregory the Great wrote about glory, and it's worth adding here.

Yes the angel proclaims the birth of a king, and choirs of angels accompany his voice. Rejoicing together they cry: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will. Now, before our Redeemer was born in the flesh, we were at variance with the angels, from whose light and purity we were far distanced as a result of the first sin, and of daily sinning. For because, through sinning, we became strangers to God, God's citizens, the angels, regarded us as strangers to their company. Yet seeing that we recognized our king, his fellow citizens, the angels, recognized us again. Now that the king of heaven has taken the earth of our flesh, this angelic aristocracy no longer looks down on our weakness. They have returned to peace with us, and put behind them the reason for the earlier disagreement. They now respect as their colleagues those on whom, at one time, they had looked down as weak and degraded. This is why Lot and Joshua venerated angels and were not forbidden to do so. Yet, when John in his Apocalypse would have bowed down before an angel, that same angel restrained him from any need to do so, saying: You must not do that. I am a fellow servant with you and your brethren. Before our Redeemer came, angels were venerated by human beings and the angels held their peace. Why should this be if the reason is not that our nature, which they once despised, is later taken above them, so that they tremble to see it lying prostrate at their feet? Nor dare they despise what is beneath them as weak, when they venerate it above them in the king of heaven. They do not feel contempt for a human being as a colleague when they adore, above them, a man who is God.

So then, beloved brothers and sisters, let us be careful that no unseemliness degrades us--seeing that, in the eternal foresight, we are both citizens of God and equals of his angels. Let us lay claim to our honor by the way we live. Let no immorality stain us, no shameful thought accuse us, no evil intent plague our minds, none of the rust of envy eat into us, no conceit puff us up, no ambition weaken us with earthly beckonings, no anger set us on fire. For human beings are called gods. Be answerable for yourself, then, against the vices for the honor of God since, for your sake, God became man.


Today, I see the glorious image of God all around me, and for that I am grateful.

The Gift of Celibacy

I have been thinking about celibacy a lot lately. Partly because it is my lot in life, partly because I don't know if I will ever marry. That's up to God. But in the meantime, I'm called to live a chaste, celibate existence. Thankfully women aren't falling over me, offering themselves to me, but it's never easy to live chastely.

I've been doing a lot of reading as well, and I've stumbled upon a lot of revisionist takes on the theological ramifications of celibacy. One book I stumbled upon in the library was a book called Saving Sex From Christians. I picked it up to see what dastardly things Christians had done to sex.

Of course the author was a "new testament" scholar from some university somewhere. It became clear as I thumbed through the book that he was merely trying to make a case for anyone to do what he wants with anyone else and say it's A-OK.

There's a whole slew of these revisionist books out there, affirming our right to have a fulfilling sexual existence. It's common to read this phrase: "Not everyone who is single has the gift of celibacy." And in another book, I read this: "Every human being has a God-given right to sexual love and intimacy. Anyone who would deny this right to any individual must prove without a doubt the grounds for this denial." Talk about tickling your ears! I like something that Clement of Alexandria wrote about wolves who run about in sheep's clothing:
"The universal instruments of trickery are the charms of pleasure or the terrors of fear." It's easy to sell people a bill of goods when you profess the belief that God has given us all the right for sexual love and intimacy.

I've been wrestling with what these authors have been writing about the gift of celibacy and what was so intrinsically wrong with it. Tonight, as I was doing some laundry it hit me. Those who write about the "gift of celibacy" seem to have it backwards in my mind. They view the "gift of celibacy" as one in which one is granted some sort of spiritual power over your sexual desires, so that the "gift of celibacy" is equated with someone suddenly becoming an asexual being. That's absurd!

The gift of celibacy is a gift given by God to be single and to be able to serve Him and the Kingdom without the attachments and responsibilities incumbent on a man or woman who is married. That's the gift! This is exactly what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7: "I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord's affairs--how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world--how he can please his wife--and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord's affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world--how she can please her husband. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord."

When a man or woman is married, they are granted the gift of marriage. Does that mean that they have been gifted with the ability to chart a course through marriage without struggle? Or could one argue that because someone is unfaithful in a marriage, they haven't been granted the gift of fidelity? It's absurd to imply that because one is single and struggles with living a chaste life, he therefore has not been gifted with celibacy. It seems to me that everyone who is single has been given the gift of celibacy for as long as they are single, and they should take full advantage of it and be about the business of heaven.

God's will steers the ship of our life. If for a time some of us are single, then we need to follow Paul's admonition and to be concerned with the Lord's affairs, and embrace that fully. Isn't it a gift to be able to use our time and energies for the Kingdom of God? And indeed, in the very struggle towards chaste living we can become more like Christ, offering up our very desires at the foot of the Cross. God no where talks about a right to sexual fulfillment. He does talk about dying to ourselves, and that is part of receiving the gift of celibacy.

As for me and celibacy and marriage, I've come to view my hopes for marriage in much the same way as God's call to Abraham to offer up his son Isaac. I find that I need to continually place my hopes and dreams on the altar, because I keep yanking them back. But there are times when I leave them there, and within me creeps the faint hope that a lamb will be found in a bush nearby.

But there's no guarantee that when God asks us to sacrifice something, that he gives it back as He did with Isaac.

Clement on...pork!

Here is a quote from Clement of Alexandria that made me smile:

"Life was given to this animal (the pig) for the extravagant enjoyment of its flesh."

Amen, brother Clement, amen!

Stromateis, Book Two, 105.1

Euripides

Lately I've been reading the writings of a lot of the church fathers. My current book is by Clement of Alexandria, writing in the second century A.D.

I've often thought that as beloved as the writings of C.S. Lewis are to me, he has predecessors that belong to a long line of men and women who have been graced with a more keen insight on the truth than most of their contemporaries. I've always been fascinated by these unknown authors (or at least unknown to me). Out of a desire to know more of them, I remember buying a book back in 1989 of some of the writings of the early church fathers. Clement was included in the anthology that I purchased.

There are tremendous insights to be gleaned from his work, and I'll post a few excerpts in the next day or so. Aside from his spiritual insights, I marvel at the depth of the material that he quotes in this work that I'm reading, Stromateis. According to the editor, Clement cites 384 different literary works. Living in Alexandria, before the library was destroyed, afforded Clement with a wealth of information and he uses this wealthy resource to full advantage in his writing.

One quote in particular is something that I find worth sharing on my blog, since it is the source of one of the maxims that we all still use to this day.

My son, well-spoken words may still be false
and use beauty of language to win victory
over the truth. But that is not what counts for most.
Rather it is an upright nature. A victory won
by eloquence shows cleverness. But I think
that actions always speak louder than words.

Clement quotes from Antiope, written by Euripides who lived from c. 484 B.C. to 406 B.C.

The continuity and similarity that exists between people in different cultures and different ages, as well as the common adoption of pithy maxims such as "actions always speak louder than words" by generations upon generations of men never ceases to amaze me.