Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Remembering those who have gone before us



Nothing can compel us to practice hope, that most fragile of virtues. 

We can only be inspired.

A table in my living room has become a kind of shrine. On it rest photos of people special to me: my grandmother, my parents, my best friend.  All have passed away. My grandmother passed away after 84 full years of life. The others died far too soon in my reckoning: my mother at age 64, my dear friend at only 59. Their deaths leave an emptiness that fits this season of longer nights and colder days. And yet their images bear a fullness as well. The memories they trigger also contain a yearning expressed in the hope that their absence is not the final word. The shrine is an act of hope that my loved ones are not gone forever.
In November, Catholics remember those we call “the faithful departed” who have “gone before us marked with the sign of faith.” In many parishes, we bring pictures of deceased loved ones to church and pray in a special way for those who have died over the past year. These acts of remembrance are signs of love. They are also acts of hope. Our prayers declare our hope that, in the words of the funeral liturgy, “Lord, for your faithful people life is changed, not ended.” As a people we nurture the hope that life will continue again, but in a way we can’t imagine or conceive.
But this November my thoughts will go beyond my own loved ones to include the parents of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and many other unarmed African American young men whose deaths have caused such concern and reflection in our nation these last few years. The litany of such premature passings is too long to list here. They occur in every part of our country. They happen far too often. And most often they pass unnoticed by those not directly impacted, or those who are unlikely to ever be subject to the threat of such a premature end to their lives.
This year I will wonder: What does this month of hope mean for those who have been taken from us so suddenly and abruptly, for those whose violent deaths are in part the consequences of unacknowledged social fears? What does it mean to hope in the face of such ongoing bloodshed?
Hope has been called the most fragile of the virtues because, in the words of Jim Wallis, founder of the peace and justice organization Sojourners, it requires “a leap beyond the evidence.” Hope is not built on ironclad proof. There is no proof of life everlasting. Or that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. Or that praying for justice is not folly in a world of violence and strife. Hope is indeed fragile. We can’t be compelled to hope. We can only be inspired.
But hopelessness mocks memories of past love and success, and empties the future of possibility. Without hope, the present becomes unbearable when the future is made bleak by the foreclosure of anything new. Hope, then, is a shorthand way of speaking of the power of the new. Hope is the inner conviction that life—despite its pain, losses, and disappointments—is still open to new possibilities, to the unexpected, to the amazing and marvelous.
This, then, is the belief we celebrate each November as we remember those who are no longer with us. As I remember my grandmother, parents, and sorely missed friend. As I and others remember young unarmed men who died violent deaths. Our remembrances are testimonies of hope that our God is one “who makes all things new” (Rev. 21:5). We thus become beacons of hope in a season of encroaching darkness. We bear witness to God’s power to bring something new, just, and life-filled out of personal and social pain, sorrow, and loss.
This column appeared in the November 2014 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 79, No. 11, page 8).

This Thanksgiving, develop an attitude of gratitude




The good news: If you have an attitude of gratitude, it does rub off on your kids.
When I was about 7, the family next door took me out for ice cream. This was a rare treat because they chose Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors, not the local frozen custard stand with only vanilla and chocolate, where my own family normally went. I chose mint chocolate chip, which was delicious. As I got out of the car afterward, I said goodbye. The mother of the family said, “You’re welcome.” I was horrified. I had forgotten to say thank you.
I hope the reason this memory is etched in my mind is because my lapse in gratitude was relatively rare. My parents were—and still are—people who value gratitude. My mom writes thank-you notes for everything from strong homilies to kindness done by volunteers at church. My dad appreciates things others may take for granted.
I’m pretty sure their gratitude rubbed off on me. Most of the time I feel authentically thankful for my husband, my children, my job, my friends, and, strangely, even for some of the difficulties of my life. I notice that grateful people tend to be joyful people. Research shows that when participants are asked to write gratitude journals or thankful letters, they become happier.
Gratitude at home. True gratitude is best learned by absorbing the thankful attitude of those around us. When kids hear a parent say why they’re grateful, they internalize the idea of being thankful for important relationships.
Sam, a father of three, says his children are learning that being grateful can grow into a desire to contribute to the family. “Our children can see my appreciation for how my wife, Emma, cares for the entire household,” he says. “I especially appreciate the culture of accountability Emma fosters. Each of us who benefit from her care must do our share in helping her and each other when possible.”
As children age, parents will witness the power of gratitude in their children’s relationships. “Each birthday, anniversary, Mother’s or Father’s Day, my husband and I have always sent each other a card with reasons we love and are grateful for each other,” says Liz, mother of four. “Now we see our teenagers writing similar notes to each other and to us. They never just sign their names—they always write a few sentences about the goodness of the other person.”
Gratitude at school. Children’s genuine thankfulness can buoy the classroom atmosphere.
“Very few children in my school will remember to say thank you when someone is handing out a treat or a snack,” says Bill, a middle school teacher. “Once one student does, though, there is a domino effect, and all the children will remember to say thank you.” Bill says he understands that some children are developmentally unable to truly appreciate what he and other teachers are doing for them. When a child or a parent does take the time to express their gratitude, however, he says it means more than the family might know.
Thankfulness and faith. The word Eucharist means thanksgiving. “Sometimes my only prayer at Mass is thank you, thank you, thank you,” says Emma, mother of three.
Many parents find their gratitude to God deepening as they grow older. “I see the presence of God much more clearly now than I did in my 20s or early 30s,” says Liz, 42. “I am more likely to thank God for a great conversation with a friend or the chance to help someone because I was in the right place at the right time.”

This article appeared in the November 2014 issue of U.S. Catholic (page 49) and in the November issue of At Home with Our Faith, Claretian Publications' family spirituality newsletter (homefaith.com).

Monday, November 24, 2014

The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe



November 30, 2014



With no fanfare and little celebration beyond the ordinary, this Sunday marks the end of the church year.
Granted, this is a liturgical way of organizing time;
but, during the past 52 weeks, the liturgy has involved us in the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ,
our shepherd-King for all time and eternity.
Therefore, we Christians have a different view of time and the way we human beings are supposed to live in it and through it.

Even though we see time differently, we are not meant to live outside of it.
We take the world very seriously because God took the trouble to create it.
This stance puts a basic tension at the heart of our Christian existence.
We are in the world but not of it.
We live here but we are on our way to somewhere else.
That is why we call ourselves "a pilgrim church."

As pilgrims, we pass through constantly changing situations.
Because we are constantly moving from place to place, we must always be adjusting our language, changing our habits, creating new ways of living-just to survive.
Pilgrims, however, never quite go native, never lose their identity, never fully settle down.
They always feel a little out of it because a pilgrim's lot is not to find a spot to call one's own.
The pilgrims' task is to keep their heads turned toward the goal until they arrive there purified, purged, forged in the fires of all their experiences on the road.

You and I, the church, are pilgrims.
But how can the church move without losing her way, how can the church maintain her identity while changing the world?
That is no small problem.
It is part of the continuing tension we experience.
Other institutions can adapt to their environment as necessary; and, if they end up as something different from what they were, no matter - they have served their function.

Not so with us!.
If we break living contact with our origins, if we lose the sense of our tradition. if our beliefs become blurred and our faith fuzzy,
then we have nothing to say and no authority to say it.
And yet, we cannot be imprisoned in our past,
we cannot get bogged down in our tradition.
If we do not relate our faith to our culture, then we wall ourselves up in a ghetto.
If we cannot communicate our belief in current language, then we end up talking to ourselves.

God is present to us now in the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that was present in Jesus.
And Jesus promised that we would do even greater things then he did because the same Spirit empowers us
and there are more of us to do great things.
And what mlight some of those good things be?
The Son of Man describes a few of them in today's gospel.
What all of these things have in common is that they make no sense on the ordinary level of life.
The only time we can be certain of God's presence in our actions is when there is absolutely no other explanation,
when we do something for no earthly reason.
Then we know we are working out of a different set of values and living in a different kind of time.
Of course, this does not mean that we should always be doing only crazy things.
But, every once in a while, we should do something foolish like feed the hungry or clothe the naked

just to check it out and see if God is still hanging around with us -- as he used to.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time



Image: "Whether Awake Or Asleep"
©Jan Richardson

November 16, 2014

You can tell a lot about a company by the risks it takes.
Insurance companies take low risks based on carefully calculated actuary tables.
That's good for us--we pay them to be safe.
Venture capitalists, on the other hand, eagerly go out in search of ways to risk money.
Losing it all is considered better than keeping what they have.
Today's parable of investing clearly puts the church in the venture capital category; and calls Jesus an entrepreneur who values risk over security.

Now, if that analysis is at all close to the truth, then how did the church become the largest, safest insurance company in the world?
Why have Catholics replaced Jews as Keepers of the Law instead of following the frisky spirit of adventure?

The Christian church began as a dare.
It dared to believe that the ancient dream of a savior actually came true.
The idea was so risky, the synagogue terminated their policy and forced them out.
So the church left the security of the traditional biblical ideas and took a chance on the new-fangled Greek philosophy.
That risk was repaid with the genius of Catholic theology.

And when the overly sophisticated Greeks lost their virility, the church threw in its fortune with the barbaric Roman hoard.
That high risk resulted in the Holy Roman Empire which ruled the world for centuries.
But when that amazing empire started to disintegrate, the church seemed to lose its nerve.
Anything new and exciting seemed to traumatize it.
In succeeding centuries, this insecure Church winked at the Enlightenment, winced at Nationalism, cringed at Industrialism.
And at the onslaught of Science, she stashed our mighty God in a fortress for safekeeping.

But it is perhaps unkind to belittle the fears of others while our own knees are shaking.
Prudence is still a cardinal virtue.
But when prudence paralyzes us, it becomes a deadly vice.
You can die of prudence without ever having lived.
But life is supposed to be Lived,
not Preserved!

Unbelievers seem to sense this more than we.
Pagans attack life, devour it each day as if there were no next day.
For them, there isn't.
For us, the miraculous belief in resurrection appears to have backfired.
Christians ought to swing from birches over roaring flames to land on a narrow ledge with the aplomb of a cat confident of eight more lives.
Instead, we camp on the safety island out of traffic.

Christians ought to dare the impossible, knowing that we cannot finally fail.
We ought to defy death, knowing that we will bounce right back.
We ought to be in the thick of the action instead of being wallflowers at the dance of life.
Why has Christianity not bred a breed apart, a people of adventure and daring?
For people who have been promised life overflowing into eternity, we expect far too little.

Creative people do not compress their lives, they enlarge them.
Architects always work with what they call the "Next Larger Context."
They design a room with the house in mind,
the house with the lot in mind,
the lot with the neighborhood in mind.

Humans are the architects of the universe.
Some of us have discovered continents, walked on the moon.
What have we done?

Christians are architects of the Kingdom of God.
Some of us have converted whole nations and died for the faith.
What are we daring?
I know.
It is no small thing to raise children, support a family, live single in a double world, balance a budget, and maintain sanity.
I know.
Some days, just holding the scattered pieces together is a heroic accomplishment.
I know.
Grimly holding on is sufficient for people who have nothing more to hope for, who are content to grind their teeth in the dark.
But for people of the Light, the way things are is not good enough.
For those who want to share their Master's joy, risk is demanded.

The Dedication of the Lateran Basilica




November 9, 2014

A study on accidental death occurrences shows that
(a) 20% of all fatal accidents occur in automobiles,
(b) 17% of all accidents occur in the home,
(c) 14% of all accidents occur to pedestrians on streets or sidewalks,
(d) 16% of all accidents involve traveling by air, rail, or water,
(e) 32% of all deaths occur in hospitals,
and (f) only .001% of all deaths occur in church during worship services.

According to this study, therefore, the safest place for you to be at any given point in time is not in your car, or in the home or in the hospital but in church!
Today we celebrate the dedication of the basilica of St John Lateran in Rome.
Why celebrate the dedication of a church in far away Rome, you may ask.

It is to remind us of the importance of the church building as sacred space set apart for personal and collective encounter with God.
Historically, the basilica of St John Lateran is the oldest church of Rome and the
highest ranking church in the world, followed by St Peter's basilica in the Vatican. As such it is the mother of all churches.

When we celebrate its dedication to God, therefore, we celebrate the mystery of God's special presence and indwelling in buildings set apart for divine worship, including our own parish church.
We know that God is everywhere.

Yet when the people of God erect a building and dedicate it totally to God's service,
God's glory comes to dwell in that building in such a way that the building can now be called the house of God.
Solomon recalls this mystery in his prayer of dedication of the temple in Jerusalem: "Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!" (1 Kings 8:27).

So, while we celebrate God's special indwelling in a temple, we must remind ourselves that God's presence is not confined in the temple.
God is still everywhere.
But God manifests His glory in a special way in some persons, places, and things.
A temple or church is one such place.

In earlier days, a temple, church or shrine was revered so much as to suggest that God dwelt exclusively in such places.
People went to church, participated in service, received communion and went home without knowing who was sitting beside them in church.
Spirituality was very individualistic and the man or woman sitting next to you was rather seen as a distraction in one's intimate communion with God.
Worshipers forgot that we are brothers and sisters, and that we come to church to worship God as family.
To discourage this self-centered religiosity, Vatican Council II introduced some changes in worship such as the priest facing the people at Mass and worshipers exchanging the sign of peace.
But we swung from one extreme to the other, and today many Christians have lost the sense of the church as a sacred place, to the point that the comportment of many worshipers in our churches today borders on irreverence.
Many Christians have altogether abandoned traditional practices that were meant to remind us that we are in God's presence when we enter the church.
These include such little things as signing oneself with holy water on entering the church, genuflecting or bowing to the altar before taking one's seat or before leaving the church, and lowering one's voice when one has cause to talk in church.
When we realize that the church is a holy place, a place of encounter with God, with one another and with oneself, then we bring a certain disposition of mind and body to church service which helps make worship an uplifting rather than boring experience.
Today's celebration of the dedication of St John Lateran invites us to renew our faith in the church as a house of prayer and to cultivate habits and practices that make it easy for God to encounter us whenever we go to church.

The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls)




November 1, 2014


This time of year, our thoughts turn more and more to the place we call home.
Holidays are coming up.
There are gatherings around the family table.
Home is our destination again and again.
We’re drawn to the bright light that offers us comfort and warmth, especially during this cold part of the year.

But home is not just brick and mortar.
It is also people.
It is the arms that hold you.
The shoulders you lean on.
The people who share your joys and your tears — the ones who pray with you and for you, even after you are gone.
We are all a part of that – a community, a communion.
Yesterday, we celebrated the communion of saints.
Today, we honor a communion of souls.

Many are closer than we realize.
Just think about it.
They are in the stories we tell, and the jokes we share.
They are in the recipes we’ve saved, advice we’ve remembered, shortcuts we’ve taken, ornaments we’ve wrapped in tissue and saved to hang on the tree.
The people we pray for today are in a thousand small details that together make up the world we know.
They are memory.
They are life.
They are my mother and father.
They are our neighbors and friends.
They are parishioners we all knew and loved.

.
These are among the souls we remember and pray for this day – our communion of souls.
 They are worth remembering, and cherishing, and celebrating.
The Church refers to them as “the departed,” as if they were on a train that has left the station.
Maybe that says it best.
They have finished their earthly journey, and reached another destination.
We hope that they made it safely.
And we pray that one day we will join them, in that place of warmth and light, that place we all call home.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Learning from Our (First) Parents

Oct 24 2014 - 1:37pm | Richard J. Clifford
Can we see Adam and Eve anew?
PARENTAL UNITS. Stained glass window depicting Adam and Eve in the cathedral of Brussels, Belgium.
Centuries of Biblical interpretation make it difficult for us today to appreciate Adam and Eve as characters in a well-told story that deftly probes the ways of God with humans. Yet the increasing availability of literary works comparable to Genesis 1-11 enables us to appreciate how seriously ancients took their stories of origins. Pope Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical “Divino afflante spiritu” (Nos. 19-23, 31) urged scholars to appreciate “the manner of expression and the literary mode” of the stories in Genesis 1-11. Tryggve Mettinger of Lund University in The Eden Narrativeclearly expresses appreciation for Genesis 1-11: “the conditions of real life in the present are seen, in a validating and explanatory perspective, as being founded on events between god(s) and man in primordial time.” The referential ambition of such texts is representativity; that is, they possess a validity that is greater than the individual case. Mettinger explains: “We do not ask about the factuality, the historicity of event narrated, but about the relevance of the narrative. How can it contribute to our understanding of what it means to be a human being,” and, one might add, what it means to be a married couple.

The Man and the Woman in the Garden of Eden

The Lord God creates the man (2:4-7), plants a garden in Eden with the tree of life and tree of the knowledge of good and bad, appoints the man as gardener and gives him leave to eat everything except the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and bad (2:8-17). Observing that it was not good for the man to be alone, God creates the animals from the earth. Observing again that no animal proved to be a suitable helper for the man, God creates the woman from his rib (2:18-24). On seeing her, the man rhapsodically declares her to be the one for him; the couple are naked without shame. Enter a snake (not a serpent, not Satan), wisest of the animals, who persuades the couple to eat the fruit of the tree, which, he says, will open their eyes and make them like the gods who know good and bad. (The translation “like God” in the NRSV is inaccurate.) The couple’s eyes are indeed opened, but they know only one new thing—they are naked (2:25-3:7). God investigates their transgression (3:8-13) and assigns penalties to the snake, woman and man (3:14-19). The man then gives his wife a second name, Eve, “mother of all the living” (3:20). God clothes the couple with leather, i.e., permanent, garments, and expels them from the garden (3:20-24), setting armed cherubim to guard against re-entry.
It may help readers to recognize two “before-and-after” scenarios shaping the story, one “agricultural” and the other “anthropological.” Before the couple’s sin, agriculture consisted in the man tending a vast garden irrigated by a mighty stream flowing up from the Deep and branching into four great rivers that fertilized the earth. After the sin, the couple was expelled into a new agricultural system in which the man will laboriously till the arable soil dependent on uncertain rain. The soil had been there from the beginning, of course, but it was dormant, for “there was no man to till the soil” (Gen 2:5).
The “anthropological” scenario concerns the couple’s human nature and defining tasks. Before their sin, the man and the woman enjoyed fullness of life and knowledge simply by being in the presence of the Living and Wise God. To be sure, they were not inherently immortal like heavenly beings, formed as they were from earth, nor did they have the wisdom of heavenly beings. But such limits did not matter as long as they were in God’s garden. After the sin, “death” in the sense of living outside Eden, the sphere of life, was imposed on humans. Humans now had a life span.
Narratives such as Genesis 2-3 invite many more questions. Here are seven.
Gardens of gods and kings were exceedingly important institutions in the ancient Near East well into Islamic times; their plants and trees symbolized creativity and fertility. 1. Is the garden important in the story? Yes, for it is part of the palace of God. Gardens of gods and kings were exceedingly important institutions in the ancient Near East well into Islamic times; their plants and trees symbolized creativity and fertility.The four rivers fertilizing the earth in Gen 2:10-14 are essential to the story also, for they symbolize the intense vitality emanating from the garden. The man and woman did not need to go outside God to enhance their life. There was another reason the garden was important. It was sacred space, requiring strict protocols for human behavior. Expressions of sexuality and all vestiges of death were excluded, for God was eternal, beyond sex or death. The demand for such purity in sacred places is a feature of both Judaism and Christianity as Gary Anderson points out in The Genesis of Perfection (2001).
2. What is the meaning of the two trees? Though the narrator tells us there were two trees, the man, woman, and snake speak of only one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. (In the same way, the narrator speaks of the “Lord God,” whereas the couple and the snake speak of “God.”) The best explanation for the discrepancy in the number of trees is not that the tree of life is a later addition (a common view), but the literary concept of voice (who speaks?). The characters speak from their limited perspective, whereas the narrator speaks from an unlimited perspective. 
The trees are metaphors for the two qualities that in the ancient Near East chiefly distinguished earthly from heavenly beings—immortality and super-wisdom. Two second millennium Mesopotamian stories, Gilgameshand Adapa, tell how the gods gave humans a certain degree of wisdom, but withheld immortality. Like the protagonists of those two stories, the biblical couple gains a certain knowledge of primordial things, but not the heavenly knowledge they aspired to.
3. Why did God forbid the couple to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and bad?God’s prohibition is usually seen as an assertion of divine will, reminding the couple that humans’ first duty is to obey God even when no reasons are given. But an explanation that is more closely tied to the story is also possible. God’s command was meant to safeguard the wisdom the couple already had simply by being in God’s presence; there was no need for them to acquire knowledge outside of God. The tree of knowledge wastherefore forbidden to them. In the Bible, God sometimes issues a command (“You shall not eat!”) instead of giving a reason. In Deut 16:18-20, for example, God describes the duties of judges by a series of commands: “You must not distort justice; you must not show partiality,” instead of simply saying (as we might do) that judges must judge fairly.
4. Why did the man and woman not die when they ate the fruit? God said to the man, “on the day you eat from it you shall surely die” (2:17) On the day” is simply a Hebrew idiom for “when”; it should not be taken literally. “You shall surely die” cannot mean that the man will die upon eating the forbidden fruit, for he lives to be 930 years old (Gen 5:5)! Nor does it mean “you will become mortal,” for the man was already mortal by reason of being made from earth. The meaning can only be that the man’s sin will end that nearness to God that made him fully alive despite his being made of earth. When he leaves God’s garden where life abounded, death will eventually come to him, as 3:19 says, “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
The eyes of the man and woman were indeed opened, but they learned only that they were naked.5. Is the Woman a temptress leading the Man into sin?Christian tradition has often said yes, but the short answer is no. We need to know why the snake approached the woman rather than the man. When God noticed that none of the animals was a suitable helper for the man, he created the woman from the man’s body. The snake was passed over and planned revenge. He addressed the woman to expose her as an unsuitable helper. And so he asked, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” The snake first overstated the prohibition (“from any tree?”), provoking the woman to another overstatement (“or eventouch it”) and awakening in her, it seems, a sense of the arbitrariness of the command. To the woman’s generic reference to “the tree in the middle of the garden,” the snake supplied specificity: it is not just any tree, it is the tree that God doesn’t want you to eat from, for its fruit will make you “like gods knowing good and bad.” The woman looked at the tree again—its fruit was delicious, alluring and imparting secret knowledge. She ate and gave the fruit to her husband standing at her side. (Unfortunately, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate omitted “at her side,” creating the impression that Eve approached him later as a temptress.) The eyes of the man and woman were indeed opened, but they learned only that they were naked.
6. Why are the Man and the Woman naked and not ashamed (2:25)? It is often noted that Eden depicts the childhood of the race, for only children are naked and unashamed. Yes, the couple’s sexuality has not yet been awakened, but that fact must be put in context. In the agricultural scenario mentioned above, the soil outside the garden was originally dormant, because “the Lord God had not caused rain to fall upon the earth and there was no man to till the land” (2:5). But when the man left the garden to till the soil, the soil was activated by the man’s tilling it and rain began. The same thing happened to the procreative aspect of the couple’s sexuality. It was dormant at the beginning of the story, indicated by the couple’s unashamed nakedness. As long as they were in God’s garden, they did not have to worry about procreation of children, for life bloomed everywhere. Indeed, they could not have exercised their sexuality (in the Bible, the remedy for mortality) because no elements of sex and death were permitted in the sacred dwelling of the eternal God. But once expelled from the holy garden, they had to exercise their procreative powers and beget children, for they no longer were in the life-imparting presence of God.
The interpretation just stated, while not a common one, has the advantage of explaining a puzzling feature of the story: the man names his wife twice, the first time in 2:23, when he names her “Woman.” (The phrase “the two of them become one flesh,” in 2:23 does not refer to sexual union, but to the woman’s joining the man’s family.) He names her a second time in 3:20, “Eve” when “she became the mother of all the living”; she must henceforward bear children in view of human lifespans.
God enters so deeply into human temporality and finiteness that he must wait to learn what these new creatures are capable of doing before responding. God has a learning curve.Inquiring minds will no doubt ask: if the couple had remained forever in Eden with their procreative powers dormant, how could they have had descendants and the human race expand? The answer lies, I think, in understanding the way that God chose to relate to the couple—by observing and responding. God observed that it was not good for the man to be alone and so created animals from the earth to be his helpers; but observing that animals did not satisfy the man’s “aloneness,” determined that the helper would have to come from the man’s body. But why did God not foresee the man needed a woman? Even more pressing, why did God not foresee the human race would become totally corrupt and avoid the bother of even creating the world? It took ten generations before God “regretted making man on the earth, and his heart was grieved,” and that “he was sorry he made them” (Gen 6:5-8).  Philosophical notions of divine omniscience cannot be applied to God in these stories. In a sense, God enters so deeply into human temporality and finiteness that he must wait to learn what these new creatures are capable of doing before responding. God has a learning curve.
7. How should we understand the divine punishments inflicted on the snake, the woman and the man (3:14-19)? “Punishment” is probably not the right word. Rather, God imposes on them a new state, or more accurately, announces the new state their actions have created. The snake, the woman, and the man become the beings we know today. Previously, the snake aspired to be a suitable helper to humans and was able to stand and speak face to face with them. Now he must crawl on the ground as humans recoil at the sight of him. The woman can no longer live simply by her nearness to the Living God. She will now “live” by giving birth to the next generations, a process attended by pain and danger. Because the husband listened to her instead of God, she now must listen to her husband, “Your desire shall be for your husband, but he shall rule over you.” The man will longer tend a well-watered and fruitful garden, but struggle to farm resistant soil.
The man accepts the couple’s new state when he names his wife Eve, “the mother of all the living,” 3:20, and God accepts the new state of affairs with a gesture of his own—replacing the couple’s hastily made fig leaves with leather, i.e., permanent, garments. God’s final act is to put the tree of life beyond their reach, a mercy in view of their mishandling of the tree of knowledge of good and bad. God’s sarcastic comment (3:22) can be paraphrased: If they made such a mess of their life with the tree of knowledge, think what a mess they would make with the more potent tree of life.

What Do Our First Parents Teach Us?

Living in the very dwelling of God proved too much for our inexperienced first parents. They had to leave it for a less intense environment. But they—and we—cannot forget that living with God in Eden was what God originally intended for them. And we, poor banished children of Eve, ought never to forget God’s original intent or to lose hope that one day that intent will be realized.
If the story teaches us about God’s high hopes and generous intent, what does it teach us about our parents’ sin? When the snake urged the woman to eat the fruit so that she and her husband could be wise like the heavenly beings, he invited them to go outside their relationship with God to acquire something belonging to another order of beings. Their act was an everyday thing—eating fruit—but it was representative. It was at once an act of disobedience and an act of idolatry. Disobedience is more obvious. God had commanded them, using the commonest Hebrew verb of commanding. The Hebrew verb šāma‘, “to obey,” is profoundly personal; one “listens to” a person rather than carries out a command. In 3:17, God accuses the man of “listening to the voice” of his wife rather than listening to God. The couple refused to let God define their life.
Their act was, more subtly, also idolatry. The couple went for the gift and bypassed the giver, illustrating vividly Hos 2:8: “[Israel] did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished upon her silver and gold that they used for Baal.” The prophet Hosea indicts the people for seeking from other gods the benefits that were in reality gifts of the Lord. The man and woman in Eden sought to be wise with heavenly knowledge instead of living on earth with God.
Though the pair (and all whom they represent) missed out on the fullness of life and wisdom that was originally intended for them, they did come away with a lesser version of each. They continued to live, but not in the Garden of Eden. And as for knowledge, they had seen what happened in the beginning, and they also learned how to farm the soil and beget the next generation. The story ends with a loss, but not an irreparable one, for it is possible for their descendants to access the garden and the tree of life in the present, albeit in a diminished mode, by visiting God’s dwelling, seeking wisdom, and living according to God’s word. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden may have pushed the man and the woman into a harder existence, but it provided the human race with an indelible image of a future life with God. No wonder that the Christian vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 22 includes the tree of life.
Richard J. Clifford, S.J., is a professor of Old Testament at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry in Brighton, Mass. A former editor of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly and president of the Catholic Biblical Association, he also served as a translator and commentator for The New American Bible, Revised Edition. This article is part ofAmerica’s series, "The Living Word: Scripture in the Life of the Church,” co-sponsored by the American Bible Society.

Ten Reasons To Oppose the Death Penalty


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| Mary Meehan America Magazine
From November 20, 1982

Over 1,000 state prisoners are on death row in America today. A Justice Department official recently said that many of them are exhausting their appeals and that we may soon "witness executions at a rate approaching the more than three per week that prevailed during the 1930's."
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, there is an effort to restore the death penalty as a punishment for certain Federal crimes. A bill to accomplish this was approved by the Judiciary Committee in a 13-to-6 vote last year when conservatives lined up for the death penalty and liberals declaimed in vain against it. Yet one need not be a certified liberal in order to oppose the death penalty. Richard Viguerie, premier fundraiser of the New Right, is a firm opponent of capital punishment.
Some of the arguments against the death penalty are essentially conservative, and many others transcend ideology. No one has to agree with all of the arguments in order to reach a decision. As President Reagan has said in another context, doubt should always be resolved on the side of life.
Nor need one be "soft on crime" in order to oppose the death penalty. Albert Camus, an opponent of capital punishment, said: "We know enough to say that this or that major criminal deserves hard labor for life. But we don't know enough to decree that he be shorn of his future—in other words, of the chance we all have of making amends."
But many liberals in our country, by their naive ideas about quick rehabilitation and by their support for judicial discretion in sentencing, have done much to create demand for the death penalty they abhor. People are right to be alarmed when judges give light sentences for murder and other violent crimes. It is reasonable for them to ask: "Suppose some crazy judge lets him out, and members of my family are his next victims?" The inconsistency of the judicial system leads many to support the death penalty.
There are signs that some liberals now understand the problem. Senators Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) and Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.), in opposing the death-penalty bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, are suggesting as an alternative "a real life sentence" for murder and "heinous crimes." By this they mean a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole. And if we adopt Chief Justice Warren Burger's proposal about making prisons into "factories with fences," perhaps murderers can pay for their prison room and board and also make financial restitution to families they have deprived of breadwinners.
With these alternatives in mind, let us consider 10 good reasons to oppose the death penalty.
1. There is no way to remedy the occasional mistake. One of the witnesses against the death penalty before the Senate committee last year was Earl Charles, a man who spent over three years on a Georgia death row for murders he did not commit. Another witness remarked that, had Mr. Charles faced a system "where the legal apparatus was speedier and the death penalty had been carried out more expeditiously, we would now be talking about the late Mr. Charles and bemoaning our error."
What happens when the mistake is discovered after a man has been executed for a crime he did not commit? What do we say to his widow and children? Do we erect an apologetic tombstone over his grave?
These are not idle questions. A number of persons executed in the United States were later cleared by confessions of those who had actually committed the crimes. In other cases, while no one else confessed, there was great doubt that the condemned were guilty. Watt Espy, an Alabamian who has done intensive research on American executions, says that he has "every reason to believe" that 10 innocent men were executed in Alabama alone. Mr. Espy cites names, dates and other specifics of the cases. He adds that there are similar cases in virtually every state.
We might consider Charles Peguy's words about the turn-of-the-century French case in which Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason: "We said that a single injustice, a single crime, a single illegality, particularly if it is officially recorded, confirmed...that a single crime shatters and is sufficient to shatter the whole social pact, the whole social contract, that a single legal crime, a single dishonorable act will bring about the loss of one's honor, the dishonor of a whole people."
2. There is racial and economic discrimination in application of the death penalty. This is an old complaint, but one that many believe has been remedied by court-mandated safeguards. All five of the prisoners executed since 1977—one shot, one gassed and three electrocuted—were white. This looks like a morbid kind of affirmative action plan, making up for past discrimination against blacks. But the five were not representative of the death-row population, except in being male. About 99 percent of the death-row inmates are men.
Of the 1,058 prisoners on death row by Aug. 20,1982, 42 percent were black, whereas about 12 percent of the United States population is black. Those who receive the death penalty still tend to be poor, poorly educated and represented by public defenders or court-appointed lawyers. They are not the wealthy murderers of Perry Mason or Agatha Christie fame.
Discriminatory application of the death penalty, besides being unjust to the condemned, suggests that some victims' lives are worth more than others. A study published in Crime & Delinquency (October 1980) found that, of black persons in Florida who commit murder, "those who kill whites are nearly 40 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks."
Even Walter Berns, an articulate proponent of the death penalty, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that capital punishment "has traditionally been imposed in this country in a grossly discriminatory fashion" and said that "it remains to be seen whether this country can impose the death penalty without regard to race or class." If it cannot, he declared, then capital punishment "will have to be invalidated on equal-protection grounds."
It is quite possible to be for the death penalty in theory ("If this were a just world, I'd be for it"), but against it in practice ("It's an unjust, crazy, mixed-up world, so I'm against it").
3. Application of the death penalty tends to be arbitrary and capricious; for similar crimes, some are sentenced to death while others are not. Initially two men were charged with the killing for which John Spenkelink was electrocuted in Florida in 1979. The second man turned state's evidence and was freed; he remarked: "I didn't intend for John to take the rap. It just worked out that way."
Soon after the Spenkelink execution, former San Francisco official Dan White received a prison sentence of seven years and eight months in prison for killing two people—the Mayor of San Francisco and another city official.
Anyone who follows the news can point to similar disparities. Would the outcome be much different if we decided for life or death by rolling dice or spinning a roulette wheel?
4. The death penalty gives some of the worst offenders publicity that they do not deserve.Gary Gilmore and Steven Judy received reams of publicity as they neared their dates with the grim reaper. They had a chance to expound before a national audience their ideas about crime and punishment, God and country, and anything else that happened to cross their minds. It is hard to imagine two men less deserving of a wide audience. It can be argued, of course, that if executions become as widespread and frequent as proponents of the death penalty hope, the publicity for each murderer will decline. That may be so, but each may still be a media celebrity on a statewide basis.
While the death penalty undoubtedly deters some would-be murderers, there is evidence that it encourages others— especially the unstable who are attracted to media immortality like moths to a flame. If instead of facing heady weeks before television cameras, they faced a lifetime of obscurity in prison, the path of violence might seem less glamorous to them.
5. The death penalty involves medical doctors, who are sworn to preserve life, in the act of killing. This issue has been much discussed in recent years because several states have provided for execution by lethal injection. In 1980 the American Medical Association, responding to this innovation, declared that a doctor should not participate in an execution. But it added that a doctor may determine or certify death in any situation.
The A.M.A. evaded a major part of the ethical problem. When doctors use their stethoscopes to indicate whether the electric chair has done its job, they are assisting the executioner.
6. Executions have a corrupting effect on the public. Thomas Macaulay said of the Puritans that they "hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." While wrong on the first point, they were right on the second. There is something indecent in the rituals that surround executions and the excitement—even the entertainment—that they provide to the public. There is the cat-and-mouse ritual of the appeals process, with prisoners sometimes led right up to the execution chamber and then given a stay of execution. There are the last visits from family, the last dinner, the last walk, the last words. Television cameras, which have fought their way into courtrooms and nearly everywhere else, may some day push their way right up to the execution chamber and give us all, in living color, the very last moments.

7. The death penalty cannot be limited to the worst cases. Many people who oppose capital punishment have second thoughts whenever a particularly brutal murder occurs. When a Richard Speck or Charles Manson or Steven Judy emerges, there is a tendency to say, "That one really deserves to die." Disgust, anger and genuine fear support the second thoughts.
But it is impossible to write a death penalty law in such a way that it will apply only to the Specks and Mansons and Judys of this world. And, given the ingenuity of the best lawyers money can buy, there is probably no way to apply it to the worst murderers who happen to be wealthy.
The death penalty, like every other form of violence, is extremely difficult to limit once the "hard cases" persuade society to let down the bars in order to solve a few specific problems. A sentence intended for Charles Manson is passed instead on J.D. Gleaton, a semiliterate on South Carolina's death row who had difficulty understanding his trial. Later he said: "I don't know anything about the law that much and when they are up there speaking those big words, I don't even know what they are saying." Or Thomas Hays, under sentence of death in Oklahoma and described by a fellow inmate as "nutty as a fruit cake." Before his crime, Mr. Hays was committed to mental hospitals several times; afterwards, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

8. The death penalty is an expression of the absolute power of the state; abolition of that penalty is a much- needed limit on government power.
 What makes the state so pure that it has the right to take life? Look at the record of governments throughout history—so often operating with deception, cruelty and greed, so often becoming masters of the citizens they are supposed to serve. "Forbidding a man's execution," Camus said, "would amount to proclaiming publicly that society and the state are not absolute values." It would amount to saying that there are some things even the state may not do.
There is also the problem of the state's involving innocent people in a premeditated killing. "I'm personally opposed to killing and violence," said the prison warden who had to arrange Gary Gilmore's execution, "and having to do that is a difficult responsibility." Too often, in killing and violence, the state compels people to act against their consciences.
And there is the point that government should not give bad example—especially not to children. Earl Charles, a veteran of several years on death row for crimes he did not commit, tried to explain this last year: "Well, it is difficult for me to sit down and talk to my son about 'thou shalt not kill,' when the state itself...is saying, 'Well, yes, we can kill, under certain circumstances.' " With great understatement, Mr. Charles added, "That is difficult. I mean, that is confusing to him."
9. There are strong religious reasons for many to oppose the death penalty. Some find compelling the thought that Cain, the first murderer, was not executed but was marked with a special sign and made a wanderer upon the face of the earth. Richard Viguerie developed his position on capital punishment by asking what Christ would say and do about it. "I believe that a strong case can be made," Mr. Viguerie wrote in a recent book, "that Christ would oppose the killing of a human being as punishment for a crime." This view is supported by the New Testament story about the woman who faced execution by stoning (John 8:7, "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone").
Former Senator Harold Hughes (D., Iowa), arguing against the death penalty in 1974, declared: "'Thou shalt not kill' is the shortest of the Ten Commandments, uncomplicated by qualification or exception....It is as clear and awesomely commanding as the powerful thrust of chain lightning out of a dark summer sky."
10. Even the guilty have a right to life. Leszek Syski is a Maryland antiabortion activist who says that he "became convinced that the question of whether or not murderers deserve to die is the wrong one. The real question is whether other humans have a right to kill them." He concluded that they do not after conversations with an opponent of capital punishment who asked, "Why don't we torture prisoners? Torturing them is less than killing them." Mr. Syski believes that "torture is dehumanizing, but capital punishment is the essence of dehumanization."
Richard Viguerie reached his positions on abortion and capital punishment independently, but does see a connection between the two issues: "To me, life is sacred," Mr. Viguerie says. "And I don't believe I have a right to terminate someone else's life either way—by abortion or capital punishment." Many others in the pro-life movement have come to the same conclusion. They don't think they have a right to play God, and they don't believe that the state encourages respect for life when it engages in premeditated killing.

Camus was right: We know enough to say that some crimes require severe punishment. We do not know enough to say when anyone should die.