Prayer

I remember the first time I ever prayed - I feared that a certain terrifying event might follow certain immoral behaviour of mine.  I prayed intensely that it might not be so (it wasn't :-)).

The odd thing is that if at the time - I was only 16, I think - anyone had asked me whether I believed in God, I would have laughed and said "of course not!" - so natural is it to ask for help when we have passed the hope of human efforts.

When I first believed in Christ, at the very end of 1969, and began to receive advice from mature Christians to dedicate a time each morning that my Campus Crusade for Christ called my 'quiet time,' and that I should spend that time in Bible reading and prayer.

The Bible reading part I understood.  I began then a regime which I have continued pretty continuously of reading the Bible through once a year.  That is not my only Bible-reading, but it is a basic background to the rest - of study, meditation, reading books about the Bible.  I have ever been glad that I have done this.

The prayer part I really did not.  I thought, I suppose, the same thing about prayer as I had at age 16: prayer is the way we ask for things from God that we cannot do ourselves.  I began a routine of praying for the conversion of persons.  At one point - I have abandoned this since - I had a large set of 5" x 3" file cards with names on them, and I prayed through these regularly.  I did not, it is true, have a very clear idea what such prayer should consist of - but I did pray for the salvation of others; I still do, of course.

Nevertheless, the whole business seemed, in a way, artificial.  God knows, surely, that men need to be saved.  The Father knows, Jesus tells us, what we have need of.

As I understood more of Christianity, I read that the reason for prayer is for us - the ones praying - to be changed.  This, I am sure, is so.  Yet I really didn't think that my prayer was changing me very much.

When I became a Catholic, what I heard about prayer began to change - ultimately to change pretty fundamentally.  Prayer, I was told, was a way for me to get to know God - as a man gets to know his friend, I was often told.

I am a slow learner.  Only this week-end did I reflect on what to know God means and implies:

...then shall I know even as also I am known (I Cor 13:12)

...we shall see him as he is. (I John 3:2)

and above all:

...this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent (John 17:3)

I cannot say that any of this has made prayer any easier.  In a way, it makes it harder.  The number of ways I have of deceiving myself in prayer is legion.  I think, "I want to know God."  Well, there is the Bible.  I read the Bible - but find I am actually more involved in theologising - or historicising - or even doing linguistic analysis - then finding God there.  I can talk to God - so readily I am talking to an idol of my own creation, a sort of idea of God.  I can listen to God - oh, the temptations there!  Feelings?  Are these God?  Thoughts?  Are they from God or just from me (or from a lower source!)?  Often, what I call listening to God is just being in kind of revery - the state that Ste Teresa warned her readers against, sitting there in silence como unus estupidos - which I think means, rather than like stupid people, something akin to like stunned mullets, if I may use a New Zealand colloquialism.

I must not rest in seeking.  Seek and ye shall find; knock and the door shall be opened unto you.  But I know what I am looking for now - or, rather, Whom.  Prayer is not, in a way, the means to an end; if prayer is knowing God, then prayer is the end.  It is what we are made for.

The sins of the fathers

...I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me... (Exodus 20:5b) 

I am colour-blind - specifically what is known as red-green colour blind.  I suppose I have the commonest form, deuteranomalous red-green colour blindness (neat big word!).  Because colour-blindness is on the X-chromosome, and because males only have one, this means both my daughters are carriers of the colour-blindness gene (even more interesting, either of them might be a tetrachromat, which sounds pretty cool, thought I don't know what, if any, practical consequences this may have).  Their sons have a 50-50 chance of being colour-blind like me.  My mother was a carrier; at least one of her brothers was colour-blind.  My brother is not colour-blind; I am.

I (probably; theoretically could be Susan, but most likely me) have passed on another dodgy gene to at least one of my children.  Adele is a carrier for the gene causing Tay-Sachs Disease.  This was discovered when she was pregnant with Thea.  Thea's father, Adele's husband Luke, is Jewish.  It turns out that the gene for Tay-Sachs is of higher than average frequency amongst persons of Ashkenazic Jewish descent (gosh, I'm getting to put a lot of links into this one, am I not?).  They were worried lest he also be a carrier.  If Thea were homozygous for the gene, her life expectancy would have been something like four years.  Fortunately, Luke is not a carrier - but Thea may be.

It so happens that persons of French Canadian descent have a higher than average incidence of T-S.

Adele's fortune is probably due to me, therefore.  My paternal grandmother was an Ashkenazi Jew.  My material grandmother was French Canadian (or at least her parents were).

All of which is to say the obvious - that - quite without their having any say in the matter - our children may be the heirs of genetic troubles from their parents, from their parents' parents, from their parents' parents' parents - and so forth.

In - when? I think 1997 - I began to despair of overcoming my tendency to bad temper (putting it mildly).  I was, after all, a Catholic.  If my dates are correct, it was in July or August of 1997 that I went to Father Aquinas McComb at the Newman Centre at the University of Auckland, and asked him about counselling.

I had been receiving the Sacraments of the Catholic Church since 24 December, 1995.  My mind and heart were clearer than they had ever been regarding the truths of the faith - and the reality of my sinful nature, and of my sin.

I think - I do not impute such beliefs to other Protestants - but I think I thought, as a Protestant, that anything like psychological counselling was a sign that one didn't really trust God.  But I knew that the Catholic belief was not that Grace annihilated Nature, but that Grace perfected Nature.

So I asked Father Aquinas for advice about counselling.  I was a little taken aback when what Father Aquinas recommended was not counselling, but what he referred to as a Mass for Healing of the Family Tree.

This is, in origin, an Anglican idea, but it has caught on in the Catholic Church.  Preparation took some time.  I needed to write out something of both my and Susan's family trees - what we knew of them (in Susan's case we knew quite a lot).  I also wrote out a sort of plenary Confession (which Father John Moss did not read - he burned it!).  Sue and I, with Helen, Eddie, and Adele, went to the Mass - Johnny was living the the United States at the time.  But the Mass was offered for several not present.  Our friends the Waldegraves - not yet Catholics at the time - attended with us.

As Susan said, after that "all Hell broke loose."

Perhaps that line is more accurate than it seems.  We did have a burst of new troubles.  It is a long time ago now, and I do not know how long they lasted - not long, I think.  In about October of that year I went to my first Opus Dei retreat, and can scarcely express what that, and all the subsequent, retreats and other ministries from Opus Dei have meant for me.  Susan eventually joined as a member.

My temper?  Well, the John Jensen whose tendency to shoot off is still the same person.  I can only say that if my behaviour had continued after that Mass as it had done for the many years before, I do not know if I would still be married - perhaps not still alive.

All of which is a pretty dramatic way of saying that things have changed, and for the better.

There is obvious truth in the idea that our sins affect our children - and our grandchildren - and so on.  This effect is, in part, purely natural.  Being reared by a blow-top father cannot be good for your own self-control.

There may, however, be a certain preternatural 'genetic inheritance' as well.  I do not know and do not wish at all to claim it.  There have been some who claim that the families who inherited the monasteries that Henry VIII dissolved have been the heirs of some sort of curse, or bad luck, or something.  I do not know and hope and pray that it may not be so - certainly our instinct is to say that those who quite innocently inherited land should not properly suffer for the sins of their ancestors.

I do know one thing, though.  Whatever we have inherited, whether through genetics, through this 'spiritual inheritance,' or by any other means, is a gift from God if we turn to Him in love and thanksgiving:

...And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments." (Exodus 20:6)

and, though we suffer the consequences of some of this inheritance:

...all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

Christmas

It would be impressive if I could explain that the reason for my silence over the last few weeks has been some great crisis in my life - even some tragic circumstances that I have had to deal with.  The reality is more prosaic: just my usual writer's block.  I have had one or two possibly good ideas.  Each time I have faced a kind of fear of doing anything about them until they became stale.

And that is still my situation - so I thought I would at least retail a few of the happenings over the Christmas-New Year period.

Johnny came to stay with us from just before Christmas until the 2nd of January, when he went home.  We went driving with him only once - to visit Nick and Helen Alexander in their new home in Matatā.

Johnny had one very distressing experience on Christmas Eve.  He was sitting up in his room, on the front of the house, just before midnight, when he heard a woman outside screaming.

There are screams and there are screams.  This, he decided, was not the angry scream of someone in a 'domestic' - and it continued for minutes.  Johnny went outside to investigate.  A few hundred yards down Helvetia Road from our house a crowd was gathered.

A man had been hit by a car and left dying in the street.  This article mentions Johnny as he was interviewed by the Herald reporter.  It was pretty ghastly, I guess.  Johnny said the ambulance took at least twenty minutes to arrive.  The man was dead by then.

Despite this, it was wonderful to spend time with Johnny.

On Friday the 7th of January Sue and I went up north for our annual trip to the commemorative Mass on the Hokianga.  This trip is a bit of a pilgrimage for us - the Mass commemorates the first Mass in New Zealand on 13 January, 1838, on that spot.  We always drive up on the Friday, spend Friday through Sunday nights at the Van Boxels' in Whirinaki, and come home on the Monday.  This year we visited Frances and Simon (Frances is Robert Hensen's sister) in Kerikeri on the Friday (Simon was actually at work, though), and my old workmate Lorri O'Brien and her husband Chris on the way back.

What a boring recital!  But I felt I must say something!  I have been on leave this week - back to work on Monday!  Maybe I will think of something better to write next week...

New Heavens and New Earth

It is, I suppose, merely a sign of increasing age that I have become (a little :-)) less idealistic.  A sometime-reader of this blog will remember the enthusiasm with which, twenty-five or so years ago, I told him of my plans to build "the world's best short-wave receiver."  I have thought of my own tendency towards perfectionism - which has very often worked against any actual tendency in me toward perfection - as my inclination to building yet another "world's best receiver."

I'm not really cured of the disease of perfectionism.  Every time I start something, I have to fight the tendency to be sidetracked into WBR syndrome.  "If I am going to finish my Yapese dictionary, I really need to get all the words in the Yapese Bible in.  Oh, but then I'll have index them to the context they are a part of.  But in that case..."  I must keep in mind Chesterton's (What's Wrong With the World): "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

We must work.  We must do what we can.  Yet all our efforts are imperfect - and at the end, all that we do will fade - like the grass of the field that withers.  All is vanity.

And yet ... it is not so.  The same Bible tells us (I Cor 15:58) "...your labour is not in vain in the Lord."

It is a mystery to me what "new heavens and new earth" can be - yet somehow I think that what we do - especially what we do with love here in the old earth under the old heavens - may be re-presented to us one day, perfected and shown in real beauty.  Will it be rather like being a pupil of a great master artist?  We will listen to him, make our attempts at drawing something beautiful - our frustration always there are our inability to do perfectly what we want, yet knowing that we are trying - and then - perhaps? - he will take it, change a line here, a colour there - and let us see what we were aiming at all along?

Today at Mass - the Fourth Sunday in Advent - I felt, somehow, that the Lord was with me - that even now, in the old earth and under the old heavens, He is encouraging me to try, to do my best, knowing that it can never be good enough - but knowing that the end of all my starts and uncertain attempts will be to be renewed - to be made, after all, what I had always wanted them to be.

May it be so.

Bigotry

A friend of mine has asked me a question - or rather expressed a difficulty he has and wonders if I have any thoughts on the matter:

I am trying to come up with a suitable response to (or way to approach) the "new atheists" (Hitchins, Dawkins, etc), who strike me as bigots, i.e. persons motivated by hatred of belief and believers, who do not take religious belief seriously.

A bigot (in the Wikipedia article's words) is "A bigot is a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices, especially one exhibiting intolerance, and animosity toward those of differing beliefs."

I am, of course, not competent to answer this question :-)  I have not read the books by these authors attacking religion, and am not going to do so.  I have what seem to me sufficient reasons to put my faith in Jesus Christ and in the Catholic Church.  I do not see that anything anyone could say against these reasons could change that.

So does that make me a bigot?  I do not think so.  In the first place, it is not as though I have not considered, and considered at some length, the various arguments against faith.  These arguments appear to me not to offer anything to believe in, but only to suggest that the reasons persons have for believing in the Christian faith might have difficulties.

Fair enough - these reasons do unquestionably have difficulties.  Every question of importance in life, from whether to trust a particular person's integrity in business or love to the question of religious obedience has difficulties.  There is not - and, I think, cannot be - an argument in favour of, say, believing that my wife loves me that is totally unassailable.  She might, after all, be an imposter - in it for some benefit (which, to be sure, I cannot currently imagine: wealth, physical attractiveness, and social prestige would seem, at least, not to be in question :-)).

So I do not think I need to read yet one more attack on Christianity to feel that I have sufficiently considered the objections to my faith.  I absolutely believe in God.  I have what Newman calls assent.

But if I were inclined to try to respond to Hitchens or Dawkins - rather like that mouse responding to the lion, I would suppose - but still - if I were to try to respond, I hope I would take them seriously as persons convinced of a point of view.  From the discussions of their books that I have read on-line - and from the bloggings of persons who quite certainly share their point of view - I would say that, yes, they are bigots.  These reviews and bloggings do not, indeed, seem to me to take religious belief seriously.

Well, so what?  Why should they?  They consider God to be a delusion.  Do I take seriously the views of some maniac locked up in an asylum who assures me that he is Napoleon?  No, I do not.

But of course I do not write books to show him that he is deluded.

But here, I think, we can see at least one aspect of the attack of the "new atheists" on religion.  For the religious point of view is not held by a single unfortunate schizophreniac.  It is held, and held with vigour, by billions of persons.  Great good is done in the name of religion - but great evil is done in its name, as well.  Religion is no mean opponent.  Both of these men sincerely believe, I think, in the fundamentally malignant character of religion.  Both think it worthwhile to try to point out this fact.

The, to me undoubtable, bigotry of their approach is therefore the more regrettable.  If, after all, there is something to their argument, it seems to me they would win more hearers on the other side - that is, on the side of religion - but taking seriously the point of view of religious believers.  The best of religious believers have been the best, also, of humankind.  I do not see how a clear-sighted view of history can deny that.  There must be something in it that makes us accept what Hitchens and Dawkins think a delusion.

I do not have the impression that they really want to know what that is.

But then I have not read their books, and do not expect to.  So they have the last laugh - for now, at least.

Habits

Well, see, I was going to post something here every week.  Then I missed the week-end of 20-21 November - not, I suspect, for any real reason but just because I did a bit of this and a bit of that - and then the week-end was over.

Once you do something once, it gets a lot easier to do it again.  The following week-end was pretty intense orchestra rehearsal.  And the week-end just past - 4-5 December - was the concerts.

I think a major reason I don't write is that I cannot really convince myself that anyone would be interested in what I have to say.  Occasionally I get a response, which appears to mean that my feeling is not entirely correct - but, still...

No, I am not urging anyone to start writing stuff back just for the sake of it!  I am just explaining how I feel.

In any case, I cannot write anything much at the moment.  It is Monday evening the 6th of December (Happy Feast of St Nicholas!).  I have been on leave all the week before the concerts, and today; tomorrow I am back to work.

We had a wonderful Saturday evening concert.  Sunday afternoon was very good except that one idiot totally failed to play the fairly obvious solo line at the end of one of the pieces everyone knows.

Yes, of course it was me.  The piece was Strauss's "Blue Danube Waltz"  I somehow missed the conductor's cue.  Nevertheless, the rest of it went well.

The business that led the doctor to talk about COPD (emphysema and chronic bronchitis) has continued to be a problem.  The doctor says it is not COPD - and doesn't know what is going on.  I have been referred to Middlemore to the ENT specialists there.  It is troubling - my voice is getting permanently hoarse.  At night my lungs get congested.  I would be glad of prayer.

I will try to reform my habits, replacing bad with good.  Next week-end I will try to write something - on what, I don't know.

Sabbath

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

Exodus 20:8-11

And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold, why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful? And he said unto them, Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an hungred, he, and they that were with him? How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him? And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.

Mark 2:24-28

(I notice that in the Exodus Sabbath command, the command is addressed to "thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates" - Susan wonders if that means wives don't get rest on the Sabbath :-)).

I confess I find the Mark 2:28 passage puzzling.

The Greek (for those of you who want to see it :-) - no accents or breathings and I'm too lazy to find a version with them) says:

"ωστε κυριος εστιν ο υιος του ανθρωπου και του σαββατου"

That first word - 'ωστε' - really means just something like 'therefore; so that; with the result that.'  So the King James quoted above is matched more or less by other translations in English and other languages I know.

It seems odd to me, and may be no more than a sort of textual puzzle.  Perhaps the underlying Aramaic doesn't mean that.  Doubtless there are Biblical textual scholars who could tell me.

As it stands, Jesus appears to be drawing a non sequitur.  What He says - the examples in which a technical Sabbath-breaking was justified by the ministering to human need - surely needs little explanation, is natural, is matched by many other Dominical sayings, and is a principle He says they themselves will do even for an ox;

The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?

Luke 13:15

None of this is the least puzzling.  We ourselves are inclined to be astonished at the rigid religiosity of the Pharisees, who want to upbraid Jesus for being kind to people.  It is surely true that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

But then Mark 2:28.

Why 'therefore?'  Why 'so that' (as some translations have it)?

I confess this is rather only more of a linguistic puzzle than a sort of spiritual lesson.  Nonetheless, there is something in it - at least something for me.

The key, I think, is in Our Lord's title for Himself: The Son of Man.

Perhaps I am quite wrong in this, and if there are any real Biblical scholars reading this, I would be grateful for their correction.

In its first usages in the Old Testament, "Son of Man" is just Hebrew parallelism - Numbers 23:19:

God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?

and passim.

Ezekiel begins to make it seem like a title (2:1):

And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee

(sadly, some modern PC "non-sexist" translations destroy the connexion to Jesus's words by translating "Son of Man" in Ezekiel as 'mortal' - bad translation, bad theology, and bad English - but that is rather a different matter :-))

Throughout Ezekiel, God addresses Ezekiel by this inchoate title.

Jesus uses it almost universally for Himself.

The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath - wherefore the Son of Man is the Lord even or also of the Sabbath.  The Son of Man - Hebrew 'בן אדם' - "Son of Man" - "Son of Adam" - is what Our Lord is.  What Adam lost has now been found.  The Lord of the Sabbath is the Sabbath - the eternal rest.

The wonderful Easter anthem cannot be improved on: