That One Time Xerxes Did Not Die

 ... and why. 

Jesus Reveals the True Meaning of Faith

 

 The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith."

The Lord replied, "If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.

"Who among you would say to your servant who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, 'Come here immediately and take your place at table'? Would he not rather say to him, 'Prepare something for me to eat. Put on your apron and wait on me while I eat and drink. You may eat and drink when I am finished'? Is he grateful to that servant because he did what was commanded?

So should it be with you. When you have done all you have been commanded, say, 'We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.'"

This was the gospel reading at last Sunday’s mass.

Jesus’s initial statement is striking: if anyone has the slightest faith, they can order trees to uproot and grow on the surface of the ocean.

It would seem to follow that nobody has even the slightest faith. Because nobody can do that. Doesn’t that mean all is lost?

No, wait—I can do that. I can make a mulberry tree uproot itself and float upright on the ocean. I can do it in my imagination, in my mind’s eye. Anyone who has a decent imagination can do it. And we can draw it, too, or put it in a story.

So what Jesus is actually telling us is that faith = imagination. Or rather, faith is the willing suspension of disbelief, the ability to accept that the world of the imagination, and not the material world, is the real world. Our imagination is the kingdom of heaven, or our window into it.

But although the kingdom of heaven is in this sense within, we are also not in the kingdom of heaven now. We are living in a material world, where we must tend to our ploughs and our flocks, earning our daily upkeep by the sweat of our brow. This is what Jesus goes on to point out: we are servants spending most of our time just maintaining ourselves. And when we have free time—we ought to be taking the products of the fields, and using them to feed God. “You may eat and drink when I am finished.”

The kingdom of heaven is our reward, once we have done this—presumably, in the next life.

And this stands to reason. There must be some need for the material world; otherwise, why did God create it? Why not have us born into heaven?

The need is not simply to prove our worthiness for the world to come, although this might be reason enough. We are here to accomplish something God needs us to accomplish: to feed him.

That is, to take the produce of the fields, of the material world, and fashion something from it that will satisfy him.

Which seems to me to describe the process of creating art. In making art, we are co-creators with God; we are completing his plan for creation.

Rose Prince

If you do not know about Rose Prince, you should. Canada has few enough saints, and few enough miracles.

As, no doubt, does the rest of the world.

Her life was rather unremarkable. She lived most of it at the Lejac Residential School, near Fraser Lake in Northern BC. She entered at age 6. After she graduated, for whatever reason, she chose not to leave. She joined the school staff, and spent her days quietly at the work of her hands: cleaning, sewing, embroidering, and mentoring the students. She suffered from curvature of the spine. And she died of tuberculosis in 1949, at the age of 33.

Those present at her deathbed claim that her body remained warm.

In 1951, her grave was exhumed to allow for new construction, and her corpse was found to be uncorrupted. She looked as though she had only fallen asleep, but with a slight smile. Those present say there was a scent of flowers when the coffin was opened.

Since then, her grave in Fraser Lake has become the destination for an annual pilgrimage. Some go every year. Some say there is still a floral scent around her tomb. And many have reported miraculous cures.

I know what you are thinking.

You are thinking there must be some divine mistake, or just human imagination. This must all be some coincidence. Why, after all, would God single out this particular person for such special attention? Rose Prince did not go to Calcutta to rescue street children. She did not get beheaded for the faith. She did not write some inspiring book. She did not even take any religious vows. Nor did she have a widespread reputation for holiness in life, like a Brother Andre or Kateri Tekakwitha. She was just Rose.

Surely, though, God is making a point.

Recently, on a Facebook feed, we subscribers were asked which religious order seemed to speak least to us—not most, but least. Most chose the Jesuits, and so did I.

What the early Jesuits did was superhuman. I visited St. Francis Xavier’s uncorrupted body in Goa. He is credited with converting and baptizing 300,000 people in India alone, before he set off for Malaysia, and Japan, to die trying to enter China.

In Canada, Jean de Brebeuf was tortured, disabled, and enslaved by the Mohawks, then ransomed by a Dutch Protestant minister. He found his way back to France, and, once recovered, he headed back to Canada, volunteered for the Mohawk mission, and they finished the job.

All incredibly admirable. Yet there is also something excessive here.

Did God need St. Francis or St. Jean de Brebeuf to do these things? Obviously not. He is God. Weren’t they being a bit presumptuous to suppose so much depended on them? It smacks of spiritual pride.

I have felt the same way reading St. John of the Cross, the great hero of the Carmelites. All very admirable, his turning away completely from the world of the senses. He says, at some point, that one should live as though there are only two persons in the universe: oneself, and God.

Yet I had to put the book down then. Isn’t that also presumptuous? Doesn’t that assume for yourself some special place and privilege with God? What about other people?

To my mind, Rose Prince may have gotten it right. You do what is set before you, and you do it with a full and open heart.

The pilgrims.

The goal.

Lejac Residential School

Leonard Cohen on Miracles

"I’ve witnessed many miracles, some very conventional. I was a counselor at a camp in the Laurentians in the early 50s. In the town of St. Margaret, Quebec, there was a nun by the name of Sister Anne, who began curing people, locally. Within two or three weeks there were private ambulances from as far away as Texas in the streets of St. Margaret, which had maybe 5,000 people. People were sleeping on the streets and in the public squares. There were cripples, crutches, wheelchairs. There were hundreds of people in the public square singing all day and the chief of police walking up and down with his baton singing along.There was a line waiting and Sister Anne would come down the stairs of the little parish church and people would be brought to her. She had a silver crucifix and she would cross them and tell them to stand up or walk towards her. And sometimes they would drop their crutches and walk towards her and the crowd would surge in and pick up the crutches and break them and throw them into the air. Sometimes a person would collapse. She didn’t seem to be attached to the outcome of blessings. She merely gave the blessing. Afternoon after afternoon I witnessed miracles. Some would say there are certain kinds of hysteria that this particular kind of treatment addresses well. That’s OK. Whatever the thing is, I saw these cures. She was eventually called away and encouraged to stop performing this kind of practice. Those were miracles that I saw very clearly."

-- Leonard Cohen

https://cohencentric.com/2016/08/07/leonard-cohen-talks-witnessing-miracles/

Our Lady of Zeitoun

Take that, David Hume!

Mirabile Dictu

Faith is apparently required to perform miracles. Jesus says, “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” Effecting a miraculous cure, he says, “your faith has healed you.” Elsewhere, he says he can do no miracles, because of the general lack of faith in those villages.

This seems to be backwards, doesn’t it? People more commonly look to miracles as proofs of faith. The New Testament pretty clearly says the opposite, that you must have faith in the first place or you’ll never see them.

Nor can this New Testament claim be covered by the common concept of “faith healing”—when what is meant is essentially the “placebo effect.” For we are not speaking only of healing here, but also of walking on water and moving mountains. No placebo effect does that.

So how does this matter of miracles requiring faith work?

Well, here’s my thought. Just imagine you were a disbeliever in all things supernatural. Or better, since I believe this is essentially an intellectually impossible position, imagine you had decided to shut yourself off from God and the spiritual realm and any consideration of them. And suddenly, before your eyes, something impossible happened. A mountain moved. How would you feel?

Very threatened; I’ll warrant. Very frightened. Quite likely, it would drive you mad.

I say this, because I have myself seen people go mad in similar, but relatively trivial, circumstances: as a result of culture shock, or because assumptions about their marriage or relationships or family that they had long held proved untrue. When merely the social organization around them stopped making sense to them. How much more so if the tumult includes the physical world: “hallucinations,” indeed.

And so, a merciful God will not do this. If you do not have faith, he is not going to perform any great miracles for you, for your protection. Even if you ask for them, and sincerely want them, he cannot.

Realizing this suggests another interesting possibility, regarding another New Testament puzzle: what happened to all those demons that possessed people in the Bible and in the New Testament? Have they all disappeared since then? Logically, mustn’t we still have demonic possessions happening today?

It is possible, mind, to believe they are now many fewer then they were then—thanks to the widespread practice of baptism and faith in Christianity, which hold them at bay. But then, these practices are now in decline. It should follow that we get an upsurge in demonic possessions, and this should show up somewhere…

Interestingly enough, it does. The incidence of “mental illness” has risen dramatically since the 1960s—since just about the time our focus on Christianity clearly began to decline.

But of course. If you accept the Bible as true, you must accept not just the existence of God, but also of both angels and demons. Demons will not share God’s compunctions about performing supernatural acts when the human supplicant is not prepared for them. Speak of the devil, and he will appear. Turn from God, and you lose protection against him.

Hence, surely, the traditional legend of the “sorcerer’s apprentice.” Hence the warnings against dabbling in magic. All hell really could break loose.

And hence the possibility that much of what we call “mental illness” is, more or less as the New Testament says—indeed, as many sufferers themselves insist--a demonic possession. It is a spiritual (psychic) “illness,” and so how would it not have a spiritual cause?

It could be the common result of becoming suddenly, dramatically aware of the reality of the supernatural, and lacking the conceptual framework to handle this knowledge. This could be caused by taking hallucinogenic drugs. It could be caused by culture shock, or a shock in one’s personal life--hysteria. Or, especially in severe cases, it could be caused by a demon, a mischievous or hostile spiritual being.

If so, of course, traditional psychotherapy is not going to help—as, indeed, it does not, for the “severely” mentally ill. The therapist is going to insist that the visions and voices and moving mountains are purely imaginary and “nonexistent”—and they are not, and the “patient” in his heart and his mind knows perfectly well they are not. In such a case, talking therapy will be purely counter-productive: striving mightily to hold the sufferer back from the fundamental restructuring of his notion of reality that he needs to perform. Interesting that all severe forms of “mental illness” are now “incurable”—while they clearly were not in the New Testament.

The bottom line is this: the modern techniques, objectively speaking, do not work. Those in the New Testament apparently did. Moreover, similar shamanic approaches, which center on casting out unwanted spirits, still do seem to work in cultures like Korea, India, or Sri Lanka today.

Time for some real “faith healing,” I’d say.