Cosmos The In Lost
One episode in particular which I recall, involved my being told that I was little more than a “liturgical yuppy who was spitting on the memory of his ancestors”, because I preferred to assist at the offering of the Eucharist within the tradition of a particular church other than that of my ancestors. But it did not suffice for them to say that, they in turn informed me of which particular liturgical form corresponded to people such as myself, and that I was little more than a “Puerto Rican who was a wannabe Arab”. This person in turn made the case that people should stick to the liturgical traditions of their forebears and did so in a rather essentializing manner when they cited the case of an individual of Indian descent who assisted at liturgy within their church, but who was of one of the Syriac churches of India, should assist at the latter in keeping with the tradition of his heritage. Now, while their words were just that,words, I wasn’t so much affected by what they said, but rather the overreach on their part and that which was being implicitly communicated therein. Namely that I did not know my rightful place in relation to them, and that I was in turn disturbing a rather fixed social order. As such, my social value and position had already been negotiated for me. I was being told what type of person I am, what tastes I am supposed to have, and what my degree of mobility was to be.
I believe Fr. Thomas Merton put it quite well when he said the following, once again in Seeds of Destruction:
We claim to judge reality by the touchstone of Christian values, such as freedom, reason, the spirit, faith, personalism, etc. In actual fact we judge them by commercial values: sales, money, price, profits. It is not the life of the spirit that is real to us, but the vitality of the market. Spiritual values are to us, in actual fact, meaningless unless they can be reduced to terms of buying and selling. But buying and selling are abstract operations. Money has no ontological reality: it is a pure convention. Admittedly it is a very practical one. But it is in itself completely unreal, and the ritual that surrounds money transactions, the whole liturgy of marketing and of profit, is basically void of reality and of meaning. Yet we treat it as the final reality, the absolute meaning, in the light of which everything else is to be judged, weighed, evaluated, and “priced.”
Thus we end up by treating persons as objects for sale, and therefore as meaningless unless they have some value on the market. A man is to us nothing more nor less than “what he is worth.” He is “known” to us as a reality when he is known to be solvent by bankers. Otherwise he has not yet begun to exist.
Ultimately from that and other experiences like it, I have learned to be unfazed by statements such as these. Not that they do not bother me on some level, but rather that they further allow me to smooth out my rough edges, and by grace grow into the Christ that I hope to be. After all, I am not, as St. Josemaria Escriva puts it in The Way, a dollar bill:
You clash with the character of one person or another… It has to be that way–you are not a dollar bill to be liked by everyone. Besides, without those clashes which arise in dealing with your neighbors, how could you ever lose the sharp corners, the edges–imperfections and defects in your character–and acquire the order, the smoothness and the firm mildness of charity, of perfection?
If your character and that of those around you were soft and sweet like marshmallows, you would never become a saint.
But I digress. Truth be told the dilemma in question is not without resolution, but rather has quite the simple solution,though made difficult by man’s lack of cooperation with grace. A kenotic purge which will allow us to see and experience the ever-immanent Kingdom of God present in our midst which is obscured in a world marred by sin. In doing so,it allows us to accept His challenges, His defeats, His joys, and His sorrows as truly our own in union with the mono-hypostatic pan-hypostatic, divine-human multi-unity of the Second-Adam at the center of our fellow man and ourselves.
Now, while I realize that this may seem quite vague and abstract in its own way, it actually accomplishes the opposite. For as opposed to focusing on secondary issues and solutions in isolation (which are indeed worthy of our consideration, though when engaged with in isolation become their own idols of abstraction), it contextualizes them in accord with their primary cause, and affords a primary solution to those secondary issues, or put another way, the triumph of Life over Death. Life who not only has a face and a name by which we are redeemed,but who by grace has called us to be Sons to participate in the very act of redeeming the world, making Christs of all Nations. This by no means is an abstract image, but a true image of our restored humanity of The Word made flesh who willed to tabernacle amongst us.
So while I may have been just a bit long winded (and perhaps not as precise as I may have wanted to be given the medium I’m communicating through), my purpose is to impress upon you all that we do away with our idolized abstractions in the vein of “Jesusism” and truly condescend in honoring the person of the Son present at the center of our fellow man by whom His name is called observed in Eros transformed into Agape (and no I’m not alluding the fuzzy, vague, and outright misapplication of the term in certain circles which justify a warped understanding (even if well intentioned), by which we give Thanksgiving in spirit and in truth to Wisdom-Love Divine.
As such, let he who has ears heed Wisdom’s cry and enter into her embrace, for Wisdom will save the world. The Lord be with you. Pray for me a sinner.
Jonathan Alfaro is a cradle born misfit of a Catholic whose interests span the gamut from matters of comparative theology, anthropology, inter-religious dialogue, humanitarian causes, education, botany, dogs, and children’s literature. It his hope to perhaps one day compose his own work of children’s literature synthesizing his diverse interests.
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