So it’s been since last May that I made a posting, at that
time to announce my new documentary about pianist Vladimir Horowitz. I have since turned the documentary over to West
Bloomfield’s municipal cable TV station Civic Center TV and will be
collaborating with them this winter on a modified version that they will show
on the channel, thereby multiplying my viewers from the few dozen who have seen
it on YouTube to perhaps thousands more.
Meanwhile, I am tempted to write quite frequently but have been trying to restrain these impulses in favor of completing the script. And it’s been working. I’ve made significant progress and am currently working through the final draft, which is not really a final draft, but at least a draft that I will at last be able to show to agents and put some closure to this. There is also the small matter of preparing for my new career as a Certified Personal Financial Planner (CFP), and I will have a significant announcement to make in that regard in the near future.
My objectives are to finish the
script, finalize my will and trust, do some long overdue traveling (certainly to
DC, Philly and NYC, but also particularly to Paris, a lifelong dream of mine)
and then to enter the CFP program at Oakland University.
So
those are the projects that have been my motivation in exercising restraint from
writing more regularly in this blog, as I have usually done in the past. But I do ordinarily post an annual essay
about my experiences at the January Jesuit retreat at Manresa and since I’ve
already fielded two requests for that, I guess I will do it. While I was there I did make several pages of
notes and I will share them now. I was
particularly moved by this retreat so my notes may come off as effusively
sentimental. So you are forewarned. If such is not your thing, please feel free
not to read further. What I am about to
share may strike some as maudlin.
Fri
1/8/16 Manresa Day #1
Our
first conference this evening was on the subject of prayer. Fr. Fennessy, Manresa’s resident art expert,
offers us yet another retreat using art history lessons to illustrate spiritual
concepts through the analysis of classical art.
A few years ago, he gave another retreat along these lines. It was the year that Rembrandt’s famous “Head
of Christ” was exhibited at the DIA (along with a rich collection of many of
his other works) and his retreat that year centered entirely on Rembrandt’s spiritual
works and their meanings. I have since
acquired a very high quality print of the “Head of Christ” which is beautifully
framed and hangs proudly on the wall opposite my piano. It is such a beautiful print that, inside the
frame, it actually looks like the original oil.
And I now know things about that painting that I never would have known
except for Fr. Fennessy’s fascinating lectures that year.
The
theme of his retreat this year was “Icons and Music” in which he presented a
wide collection of famous icon art covering the entire two thousand years of
Christianity. The minutiae that he was
able to point out shed so much wisdom on what the artist was conveying that it
was mind boggling, really gave me a desire to go back to college and pursue a
degree in art history. (As Dad was so
fond of saying, “someday after I retire ...”)
Perhaps
the most fascinating of all these icons was a 6th century portrait
of Jesus. Rather than being painted with
oils, the artist chose dyed waxes as his medium. The remarkable result is a brilliant luminous
portrait that looks as if it could have been created yesterday. We are told this is one of the unique
properties of wax – it doesn’t deteriorate over time, no matter how much
time. This beautiful portrait was 1400
years old and looked like it could have been 14 days. It made one wonder why artists don’t paint more
often in wax. Those ancient artisans
knew a few things.
Another very famous icon painting
was of a pair of hands folded in prayer.
This was the way the nuns taught us to pray but, until Friday night, it had
never been explained to me the origins of the tradition, the tradition being
that the fingers are pointed skyward. As
he explained, in the first millennium of Christianity, believers prayed by
holding their arms up with their palms upward, similar to the way we Catholics
have been taught to pray in the last few decades, another gesture I never
understood. The problem is we’re doing
it wrong. It’s not just holding your
hands out (like you’re being arrested), it’s holding your arms up in a specific
posture with the palms open skyward and 90 degrees to the arms. It turns out there’s a specific meaning to
this. The early Christians prayed this
way as a sign of unity (or is it joy?) so the arms and palms are positioned to
resemble the ancient Greek symbol for unity (or is it joy?)
Then around the 10th
century as we are immersed in the Dark Ages, the secular symbol for showing
allegiance to your king or lord was to kneel before your king and put your
hands together with fingers pointed skyward.
This was a sign of devotion and loyalty that was considered more intense
and intimate than a marriage vow; it was reserved only for the highest secular
authority. Thus, since God was
considered to be infinitely more deserving of allegiance than any earthly king,
the Church decided to adopt this gesture as the way we should pray. So at last I understood why we were always
taught to pray this way (and why I always felt uncomfortable doing so.) Frankly, I think the early Christians had the
better idea.
For a first conference, I was
surprised to hear Fr. Fennessy say something that immediately struck me as
being very profound and might serve as my takeaway for the entire weekend. He showed us this beautiful painting of Jesus
being tempted by the devil illustrating the very famous gospel story in which
Satan tries to break Jesus down after his 40 days of fasting in the
desert. Satan offers him food. Satan offers him all the riches in the
world. All Jesus has to do is kneel
before him and venerate him. But why
would Jesus be tempted? He knows Satan
is a compulsive liar so why would he believe anything he says? Why would he have any inclination to worship
this demon? He’s not being offered
anything that he can’t get for himself except he doesn’t want to because that
would be against his mission of saving humankind.
So it brings up an interesting question
– what is temptation? It suddenly occurs
to me that I do not know the answer to that seemingly simple question. How was Jesus ever “tempted”? Don’t you have to “feel” tempted in order for
it to qualify as a temptation? How could
Jesus have ever felt tempted? This goes
to the core of the very hardest mystery upon which all of Christianity is
based. We are told that Jesus was both
fully human and fully divine. How can
the mortal mind wrap itself around that concept? If Jesus was fully human, wouldn’t he have to
have his weaknesses and vulnerabilities?
If his experience out in the desert really was a temptation, then he had
to have been considering it. But then he
couldn’t have been fully divine. And if
he never considered it (since he is divine), then how could he be fully human?
This
was the vital question that was explored in the novel and film, “The Last
Temptation of Christ,” which conservatives abhorred since it portrayed Jesus as
succumbing to temptation. Of course, if
they had bothered to read the book or see the film, they would know that he
didn’t really succumb at all. But that’s
beside the point. The point is that
conservatives explain the whole thing away by simply denying Jesus’ full
humanity. They simply cannot stomach the
notion that Jesus could have been tempted by anything. They wish to remain focused on his divinity
and play shrift to his humanity only insofar as that he was a perfect
human. But of course there’s no such
thing as a perfect human. A perfect
human means you’re not really fully human because humanity requires one to have
flaws and feel desires, desires that may not necessarily be virtuous.
So
before I leave Manresa this weekend, I must have a private conference with Fr.
Fennessy about the definition of temptation and the nature of Jesus’
humanity.
**************************************************
Sat,
1-9-16
At last
night’s orientation, Fr. Henry Chamberlain, a very elderly priest, told us of
his extensive background in finance. So
I thought he would be a good person to talk to about this major change of life
I’m heading towards with the CFP. Not
really. My session with him this morning
could have been a sketch on Saturday Night Live.
He
could only stay awake for about 10 seconds at a time. I’d say five words and he’d nod off. He did this several times. By the time I was finished, he was sitting
there snoring so I had to raise my voice and told him I was done. Then it was funny – I had started our meeting
by telling him I was sleepy as I had been battling insomnia for a couple
weeks. So when I woke him at the end,
his only comment was, “Well, you’re going to have to stay awake if you’re going
to have a job.” No I said I had insomnia
– the problem wasn’t that I was sleeping too much; the problem was that I
wasn’t sleeping at all. But it had only
been a couple of weeks, I’m sure it’ll go away.
Yet
somehow he had gotten into his sleepy head that I had said I had had a sleeping
problem for two decades instead of two weeks.
Funny that he wouldn’t let go of that.
He insisted on criticizing me for sleeping too much. But the real punchline was that, after we
were done, he informed me that the battery on his hearing aide had gone dead,
and he spent several minutes replacing it.
So he hadn’t heard anything I said.
Really, it could have been on SNL.
I had a fleeting desire to inform Fr. Daly, the Exec Director here, that
maybe it was time for Fr. Chamberlain to be retired.
************************************
I had
my conference with Fr. Fennessy this afternoon about my thoughts on
temptation. Didn’t Jesus have to have
human frailties if he was fully human?
And if not, can we really say he was ever “tempted” if by virtue of his
divine side, he had no interest in human longings? And if he had no interest in human longings,
how could he be fully human? See where
I’m going here? There’s a genuine
logical quandary trying to wrap your mind around this mystery of our faith.
I
brought up the whole issue of “The Last Temptation of Christ” and how this
story explored this very issue. He was
very familiar with both the book and the film and gave me a pretty good lesson
on how the Church defines temptation.
Jesus certainly had all the normal human longings – including sexual –
and he had to struggle with them same as any man. Where his divine side came in was that he was
able to summon the strength not to succumb, as was also illustrated in the
film. So he is the only man in history
to never have sinned. (Mary is the only
woman.)
He laid
out a good definition of temptation.
Just thinking about something sinful is not in itself a temptation since
we cannot control what thoughts come to us.
A thought that just comes to us does not make a temptation. It’s what we do with it that counts. He has men coming into confession all the
time saying they’ve had “impure thoughts.”
He corrects them. No, you
haven’t. You’ve had sexual
thoughts. Sexual thoughts are normal.
Sexual thoughts are healthy. If not for
sexual thoughts, we would never have sex and the human race would go
extinct. Thinking about sex in and of
itself is not a sinful thing. It’s what
we do with it. If we use it to encourage
more intimacy with our spouse, then it’s actually a grace. But if we use it to manipulate and abuse
people, then it’s sinful. If we even
obsess on it to the point that we’re turning away from real people, then it’s
sinful. Even having a thought towards
sin does not make it a sin. It becomes a
sin only if we act on it in a destructive way.
For a married person, using sex to cheat on your spouse is highly
destructive. For a single person, using
sex to screw everything in sight is highly destructive. For anybody, using sexual thoughts as a way
to avoid relationships or intimacy is highly destructive.
I
brought up the example from the gospels of Jesus losing his temper and flogging
the merchants out of the temple. Didn’t
this show that he did succumb to temptation since he lost his cool when he
could have just as easily politely asked them to leave? He corrected me. The gospel did not say that Jesus lost his
temper. It says he became angry, made a
whip out of rope and used it to overturn the merchants’ tables and chase them
from the temple. Anger in itself is not
sinful. If one sees a child being
abused, you’d hope you’d get angry. And if that anger motivates you to step in
and rescue that child, then the anger is not a sin, it’s a grace. Jesus used his anger for a constructive purpose
in chasing the money-grubbing profiteers from the temple. But he never “lost his temper,” he was in
fact in complete control of his anger at all times.
This is illustrated if you read the
gospel story more carefully. In addition
to the money changers, there was also a table set up by poor people to offer doves
for sale. These were not greedy
profiteers but just ordinary peasants trying to make money to feed their
families. The gospel story tells us
that, even though he flogged the other merchants out of the temple, he did not
do so with the poor people selling doves.
Instead he just went up to them and calmly asked them to take their
table outside. This demonstrates that
Jesus was not succumbing to temptation at all but was doing the Father’s
will.
He
certainly proved to me that he knew the scriptures a lot better than I
did. And I know them a lot better than
the average church-going Catholic. So I learned
a lot about temptation today.
**********************************************
More
thoughts:
On my
retreat last year, I had become inspired to learn more about St. Therese de
Lisieux, known popularly as Theresa of the Little Flower. I did find her autobiography in the Manresa
library last year and scanned through it.
The little wisp of a French girl who lived in the late19th
century practically bullied her way at the impossibly young age of 15 for
admission to her local Carmelite abbey as a cloistered nun and then was dead at
the age of 24. In those ten years, she
made a lot of history.
She was
one of Mom’s favorite saints and Mom spoke to me often about the novenas she
made to her. Per mother, Theresa had
made a promise before her death that she would personally respond to anyone
praying her novena by giving them a rose.
Mom had prayed the novena many times and claimed that she had
miraculously been given a rose by some random stranger within a day or two of
completion every single time.
I
personally witnessed one of these. She
had told me one day that she had just finished the novena and was now waiting
for her rose. I just smiled and
dismissed the notion. It was too
fantastic to believe that something that coincidental could actually happen. It just so happened that afternoon that I
accompanied her to Kroger to help her with some shopping. We got in line at checkout and, as I was
removing items from the cart and placing them on the conveyor belt, we noticed
that among the many items in her cart, the woman in line in front of us had purchased
a bouquet of a dozen roses. She was a
few dollars short on her bill so she returned the roses to the cashier so she
could pay her bill. The cashier put the
roses off to the side, picked up her phone and called customer service to have
someone come get them. The other lady
leaves and, as we’re being cashed out, mother simply smiles sweetly at the
cashier, something she does to virtually everyone she runs into. The lady then goes under the counter and
pulls a single rose from the bouquet and offers it to Mom. “You seem like a very nice lady. Have a great day.”
Mom
takes the rose and smiles at me. Her
meaning was clear. She wanted me to see
for myself that she had done absolutely nothing out of the ordinary to cause
that rose to come into her possession.
It was just an ordinary random act of kindness in which she obviously
had no expectation that the lady would break up a baker’s dozen to make a small
gift to her. But St. Theresa’s promise
had been fulfilled. It made her day and
it was all she and Dad could talk about for hours afterwards.
After
Mom died, I thought it would be really cool to pray the novena myself and see
if I could get a rose. I thought of
videotaping the whole project – it would make a great documentary. But in the move to Keego in looking through
all of Mom’s books that I had thought I had so carefully boxed and preserved, I
could no longer find her book on Theresa.
*******************************************
That’s
why I looked her up last year when I got here and spent an evening scanning her
autobiography. She was just a poor
uneducated girl from the tiny village of Lisieux in France and, due to the
extremely harsh living conditions in the abbey (in which there was no heat in
the bitterly cold winters, nor relief from severe summer heat), fell ill very
soon after entering and remained so until her death. She was considered by her superiors to be
quite useless as a nun, spending most of her time ill in bed and being cared
for by the other cloistered sisters.
But
during those years, she wrote voluminously from her sick bed, mostly letters to
her sibling sisters who had also entered convent life, but also wrote quite
extensively about scripture and morality.
In what I read, I saw a portrait of a very naive young girl whose
piousness was so extreme as to qualify as a mental illness. In fact, she was so obsessive-compulsive
about her morality and the morality of her sisters and fellow nuns that, after
she gained worldwide fame in the years following her death, Freud, who was her
contemporary, did in fact categorize her as a psychopath.
After
she died in 1897, her sister took possession of all her writings, had them
published, and they became instant classics and best sellers. She quickly had a global following with
millions praying devotions to her. She
has been credited with so many miracles they are too numerous to count. Among these was the famous French singer
Edith Piaf who began life as an orphaned waif on the streets of Paris and was
dubbed “The Little Sparrow” as she sang like a bird. Piaf claimed that, in 1922, she had prayed Theresa’s
novena and had been cured of blindness.
There is a marvelous 2008 French film about Edith Piaf called “La Vie En
Rose” (Life in Pink) if you want to know more about her. It was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the
Oscars that year and won Best Musical at the Golden Globes. The marvelous actress Marion Cotillard also
won Best Actress at the Golden Globes and Oscars, as well as the French and
British Oscars and others.
Theresa was put on the fast track
to canonization and was made a saint in 1925, far short of the 50 years the
Church ordinarily requires to even begin the process. In 1997 she was declared a Doctor of the
Church, a very rare distinction reserved generally for such luminaries as St.
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. There are
a number of very famous theologians and modern saints – such as Dorothy Day –
who admired her immensely and have written their own books about her. Among other admirers were Thomas Merton,
Mother Teresa and Jack Kerouac. Pope
Francis is also a major fan.
So on my last night at Manresa, I
attempted to seek out these other books in the library but was unable to find
them. What I did do last night was scan
the three books I did find – with one objective – find her novena and see if I
can get verification about the promise of the rose.
**************************************
Well,
no luck on either score. There were many
references in all the books that there was indeed a novena, but none with any
details and certainly none that talk about the rose. Roses – and flowers in general – I find are
just things of which she was very fond.
And since she was just this little wisp of a girl, her fellow nuns
called her “The Little Flower.” As far
as I can tell, the tradition of the rose seems to have its foundation in a well
publicized statement she made or wrote shortly before her death.
She
announced that she wished to spend her eternal life as a guardian angel coming
back to Earth to help people and could only hope and pray that God would let
her do that. (“Touched By An Angel” 100
years before that show was on TV?) And
she promised that, if God would let her, she would send as a sign of her
admission to heaven “a shower of roses upon the earth.”
This is
the closest I could find as a validation of this legend. Since she’s also on record as promising a
personal response to anyone who prays to her for help in a crisis, I guess her
devoted following just extrapolated the rest.
Mom believed in it very strongly – do the novena and you get a rose.
I have
to get Dorothy Day’s book. And I suspect
it will be far easier finding the novena on the Internet than it has been
finding it here. But I also did discover
last night – almost like karma – that the Manresa book store does have a new
book about her.
******************************************
It is
now 1 a.m. on Sunday morning and in about 12 hours this 40 hour retreat will be
over. It’s been a rough retreat
physically since my whole system has been in turmoil adjusting to this change
of venue and schedule. I’ve been wiped
out the whole weekend, continuing to suffer the insomnia that has plagued me
the last couple weeks – can’t fall aslepp at night and then exhausted and
stomach upset all day. This is why I
don’t like vacations. By the time my
body adapts to the change in circumstance, the vacation is over. The only thing good about a vacation is when
it’s over and I can return to my normal routine. If the only thing good about a vacation is
that it is so distressing that it makes getting back to your humdrum little
life so attractive, that’s not much.
It’s been a rewarding retreat but I will be very happy to go home
tomorrow afternoon.
The
title of the book in the Manresa book store:
“I Believe In Love: A Personal Retreat based on the teaching of St. Therese de Lisieux”
“I Believe In Love: A Personal Retreat based on the teaching of St. Therese de Lisieux”
by
Fr. Jean C. J. D’Elbee, Sophia Institute Press, 1969 and 2001, 180 pp, $20.05
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