One of my favorite films of all time is a 1929 film by the famed director, King Vidor, called (I hesitate to mention it in this time of year) Hallelujah! The film tells the story of Zeke, a sharecropper from Mississippi who comes to Memphis to sell the family’s cotton crop and squanders the money on gambling and lose women. Afterwards, in typical fashion, he has a profound conversion and becomes a fiery revival preacher. As he goes around preaching, he encounters a prostitute named Chick, who at first taunts him and then is converted. Chick is a new woman, she is upright, righteous, justified and clean, all the things a new convert should be.

Then one day her old, um, business manager, Hot Shot shows up. Hot Shot is bound and determined to draw Sister Chick back into the world of sin and a violent fight ensues, It ends with Chick taking up a fireplace poker and beating Hot Shot to death. Exhausted from her labors she stands triumphantly over the dead beaten body of Hot Shot and proclaims to the heavens as she tosses the poker down. “That is what is going to happen to anyone who tries to block my path to glory.”

The Law of Love is relentless and we must be relentless in its pursuit. More violent than any two-edged sword, or fireplace poker for that matter, the Law of Love cannot be ignored. Christ came to preach and his preaching is compelling. Not one jot, not one smudge of this Law can be neglected until its effects have conquered hearts, conquered souls, conquered the world. The Law of Love consumes its followers, propelling us, missleing us into a totally fulfilling reality.

Like a case of naked peeps in a small cosmological microwave, the Law of Love is determined to fill this place and this place, leaving no room for half-measures, half-heartedness, half-interest. Powerful and utterly exhausting, the Law of Love experienced in the broken body of Christ Jesus beats down the pimps of our collective and individual lack of imagination (that is sin). It might drag us kicking and screaming but the Law of Love is going to conquer this place, Jesus is going to have us for his own. He is going to make us more gentle, more kind, more loving toward one another, drawing us into the promised land where the bright promise of his immortality crests the dark horizons of minimalism and mendacity like the light of a morning sun cresting the edge of a piece of bread or dancing, glimmering playfully off the surface of a cup of wine.

The Law of Love is filling this place and will fill us as well, clearing out path drawing us on from glory to glory now and always and unto ages of ages.

This is from Chesterton and I am sure it is one of the best statements about the action of orthodoxy ever written. It is the very core of discipleship.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom -- that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

There are just too many books to be read. My problem is that I get started on something, then I read something else and I keep going on a topic and then realize I have read about 14 books on thermoplastics and the other books are still piling up. Perhaps I am too curious. Perhaps I should be more discerning in my reading, but then, what adventures would I miss out on if I were. I have recently been re-reading In the Fullness of Faith by Hans Urs Von Balthasar. I have read this book about 4 times and I am always awestruck at at the poetry of it. Von Balthasar understands the poetry of the Church. "From outside she looks like an establishment, like one organization among others. From within she is the medium, one might almost say the magic, whereby God is able to be all in all within his creation, without suppressing the creature he has made free. That is amazing. Of course, this book led me to re-read certain sections of Newman. Here is Newman: "and Christianity is dogmatical, devotional, practical all at once; it is esoteric and exoteric; it is indulgent and strict; it is light and dark; it is love, and it is fear." Now, that little section then connected me to re-read Middlemarch, Don't ask why but it has to do with the very last paragraph of the novel. Then I became interested in reading more Carlyle and I read Sartor Resartus Of course, this connected me too Goethe so I looked at Werther, then I decided to listen to Massanet's opera. At the same time a friend of mine sent me a reflection on Lent and Thais, which connected to Massanet. Thais made me think about St. Athanasius and thus, back to Newman. But I resisted that stream and tried to get back to some real work so I picked up a book on leadership and read it in about five minutes. Then Fr. Mark came into my office to discuss his course on the Spanish Mystics and so I went upstairs to get my copy of Teresa of Avila. I read about two chapters of the Interior Castle and started to feel queasy and so I put it down and picked up Chesterton and re-read Magic. Chesterton is always the antidote for queasiness. Chesterton led me to Charles Williams and All Hallow's Eve, and that led me to Bernano's Under Satan's Sun and that led me to a medieval grimoire (too weird) and that led me to Harry Potter, which I listened to on tape as I drove back and forth to a parish mission this week. This is how it works and this is why I get so little done that is of real value in the administrative realm. I wish I had more time to read.

I have recently been re-reading Chesterton’s play, Magic, with the Chesterton Society. Magic is really an amazing compact little work that Chesterton probably didn’t fully understand himself when he wrote it (he was not yet a Catholic). The play concerns the denigration of magic in a modern world consumed by facts and figures. Magic for Chesterton is the faulty of the imagination. Imagination, in his estimation was a quality lacking in the modern world. We no longer believe in something beyond ourselves. We no longer believe that there is a power for believing. We no longer even have the language to think about or talk about transcendence. In many ways, Magic, for Chesterton was a great remedy for the narcissism of the present age. It is the ability to look beyond the introspection of analysis and into a kind of cosmic synthesis. There is something greater than me. The world is more than meets the eye. Fairy tales used to be read in this way. Perhaps they are no longer. Fairy tales, like all great myths, tell a truth beyond facts in a way that engages the person completely. Today we have little use for myth, or we try to read it as fact and thus no longer understand the power of fiction to shape and inform us. If we have robbed ourselves of the ability to synthesize great Truths through story, we have robbed ourselves of something essential. I still believe in magic because I believe in the power of the human person to get beyond the commonplaces of daily life and soar into the creativity of divine union.

It seems to me that Lent is a very spatial season.
That is, it is a kind of geographical smorgasbord
It is all about places.
Arid and acrid deserts, the sting of shifting sands pummelling faces
Precipitous rock formations
Cast yourself down
A derelict town square and an ancient, moss covered well
Give me a drink of water
A chaotic pool of stone teeming with the crippled, the broken, the forgotten
I was blind but now I see
A new hewn tomb, heaped with the tribute of grief
Friend come forth
A garden overgrown with human fragility
Could you not wait one hour
A Public court acrimonious with irony
What is truth
A temple of tattered trusts
The curtain was torn from top to bottom
A desolate eerily silent hill – a skull place – Adam’s loins
It is finished

Lent is about places, lush and unkempt places, wild places, desolate places, real places and spiritual places.

If we look carefully at the Sunday readings for the first two Sundays of Lent we see this quite dramatically laid out for us with the precision of a spiritual cartologist

The first Sunday of Lent takes place in the desert. It is a lonely and isolated scene, particularly in Mark’s spare prose. Jesus was in the desert. He was tempted. There were beasts. The angels attended him.
Hyperbolic and very dry, this deserted place

The second Sunday of Lent takes us far away from that lonely locale to a mountain. God does all of his revealing on a mountain. The mountain is the sphere for answers, just as the desert is a place of confounding. The mountain and the desert.
Two poles of experience, two extremes.

And we are a people caught somewhere between the desert and the mountaintop

The desert

The desert of course is a beautiful place. Full of exquisite exotic flowers and cacti, lovely rock and sand formations, odd fauna that slither and slide through clefts in the cliffs. The desert is a beautiful place, that is if you don’t have to live there

Jesus went into the desert for forty days.
Perhaps it was to share our human experience in the depth of its depravity

Because, upon close inspection the desert, like life, is a dangerous place.

Those who venture into the desert must be prepared for it. They must pack lightly. No extra baggage, nothing useless only the essentials
They must plan carefully. We will need this much and not more. At bit too little and all is lost, a bit too much and the burden is too great

Every choice counts in the desert.
Every rock is a portend of menace.
Every wind a prophet of doom
Every pool at potential phantasm
Every sound a plea of desperation
And so
The desert, is like our lives --- Full of risk, scorching, menacing.
But we are thrown into it and do not know the rules
We pack too much, we carry around all our ugly attitudes, blatant bigotries, prides and prejudices
We get weighed down by the desert’s desperate difficulties
The sands shift into our mouths and nostrils and we are lost

The desert is a place of death, unless of course, Jesus is there
Wherever two or three are gathered
When Jesus is there is nothing to fear
When Jesus is there, there is hope of escape

To The Mountain

The air of the mountain is rarefied

On the mountain things are clearer, easier to comprehend. This is this and that is that.
This is my son
That is Moses
That is Elijah
On the mountain there is symmetry
You stand here and you here
On the mountain there is wonder and light
Light which the clouds cannot obscure
Wonder that our cynicism cannot shroud
Everything can be seen from the peak
God’s Law is clear
God’s prophecy is Fulfilled
God’s love is explicit.
We are known on the mountain

Once we were people of the desert
One day we will dwell in the heights
But between the desert and the mountain top is the road

Ah the road
Now the road, well - --
The road has its own challenges
Finding the road is the first thing
Which path should I take?
Which way am I called?
Shall I walk this way or that?
If I choose this path, the other may be closed to me
Obscured as it were by the dense forest of alternative
No matter which highway is chosen
The outcome is usually the same
Maps are few and far between and hard to come by
Generalities, values, character, suggestion, these are the billboards of the road
There are rules, no doubt, but as on any freeway, they are often more evident in the breech than the observance.

Sometimes the road is confusing, turning here and there, and we can become confounded.

Sometimes the road is flooded by the waters of adversity and we must wade all un-baptism like through the muddy morass of muck and mire, waters sometimes up to our necks, but onward we go

Sometimes the road swirls with the brittle leaves of seemingly endless autumns. The road and the field becoming indiscernible from one another

Sometimes there are ditches along the road and we erode into the chasm of our own hopelessness, fatality, sin.

On the road we face the inevitable stumbling blocks, the satans of our own creation, landmarks of pride, conceit, guilt and jealousy
On the road we can become bogged down in fixating on the landscape, gazing forever at the hills and dales of our own talents, our insolence
On the road we can step on each other’s feet (or roll over each other’s feet) we betray our fellow travellers, we give bad directions, we err

But On the road we are together, for good or not
On the road we must walk side by side through the occasionally narrow passages. We must help one another
This one’s provisions have failed. This one has fainted. This one is going in the wrong direction.
I am lost
I am desperate
I am destitute
On the road we must learn to ask for help and to give it.
We sometimes are very good at this kind of journeying, and sometimes not.

But on the road, as long as we keep moving on the road there is also some expectation, some harbouring of hope, some murmur of prospect, some imperative to Come and See this view from the mountain that which we cannot altogether fathom.

For we travel in a between time, a time when there are wars and rumours of war, when the smoke of battle is in our eyes, when destructions ugly hand scars the landscape of our moral consciousness, when death and violence are mere commonplaces, and yet hopefully we hang on to hope, we still somewhere in the recesses of our imaginations in spite of what we see, somewhere, we can envision, peep at, a world of peace, where the lion lies down with the lamb, where crescent and cross intersect in an ironic encounter of mutual respect and even love. If we can still hope we are in a between time, a people on the move, toward the mountain a people of the road

and on that road we travel in a between time, a time when religion has become a tool of rhetoric, an arguing point, a vote getting apparatus for the right and the left. It is a time in which the magisterial word of God is wielded for power by the right and by the left. A time in which liberals and conservatives use God’s word not for a better world but for the begetting of chronic agendaizing. But if we can imagine a world in which the power of God is manifested not only in rhetoric but in deeds that transform the desert of sin and self destruction that liberate those who are hungry for dignity and bread then we are living in a between time. If we can still gasp for the ruah of God in the asphyxiating plastic bags of our own destruction drenched world we are in a between time and we are a people on the move, a people of the road

yes, brothers we are men of the road, drifting, hovering between life and death, between chaos and order, between fertility and futility, between building and utter destruction. We are men still choked and dazed by the harsh reality of the desert But not without hope, not without dreams, not without the Spirit. Not without the promise of the mountain. Our time is a time of anticipation, a time of wondering, a time of living into the mystery of the God who is here and not here, the now and not yet.
There will be a time when the road will end
There will be a time when all irony will cease
a day when all heartache will be healed
When our tired limbs will stretch out toward eternity
When our conflicted minds will turn from the dark mirror to the reality of the living one
When we can stand full stature on the mountain top and sing
Then we can face one another with pure love
Then we can know even as we are known
Then we can be in spirit and truth what we are now only in insinuation, that is, SAINTS

And so it is Lent again
And we put our tired feet on the road
A people of the road

The desert and the mountaintop
Indeed, Lent, like life, is a spatial season

I hate Lent. Or at least I hate the culture of Lent. After all, it really is a silly season, isn’t it? What is all the talk among Catholics these days? What did you give up for Lent? And of course the answer is many things like, smoking, or candy, or using foul language. For forty days and nights (not counting Sundays) these sacrificial victims will make their lives and the lives around them miserable with their constant grousing and complaining about their heroic work for Jesus. Then, on the Day of Resurrection all of the smoking and candy bar eating and foul language will crank up again and it will be business as usual. A few years ago a movie came out called Forty Days and Forty Nights in which a young man gave up pre-marital sex for Lent. How do you work that out? Lent can be a silly season. What is it anyway? Is it a sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice kind of time? I hope not, that business is called Jansenism and we (at least officially) gave up on that ages ago. Is it a season of tokenism, symbolic engagement? I don’t think we have room for much more tokenism in the Church today, many of the faithful are already resolute minimalists. Can Lent be more? I hope so. Jesus went into the desert to fast and pray for forty days and nights in preparation for his public ministry. He went in and came out a changed man. The catechumens of the early Church used the season of Lent as a time or preparation for becoming new persons at Easter. Can Lent not be the same for us? The Holy Rule says that Lent should be a time for sweeping away the negligence of other times. Good enough! Perhaps the season of Lent should be a season of resolution and change. What we give up for Lent we might as well give up for life. In Lent we can become new persons in Christ and rise on Easter in newness of life. It’s not for Lent, it’s for life! In that way maybe Lent could become less a silly season and more a serious season of true conversion. If we add up the Lents of our lives, we may come out with something like discipleship. The Holy Rule also says that the monk’s life (the disciple’s life?) should be a perpetual Lent. Life should be a perpetual season of change and conversion, but if not every day, how about forty days and forty nights?