as men do who expect to die

Sir Steven Runciman on the fall of Constantinople:

... Constantine told his hearers that the great assault was to begin. To his Greek subjects he said that a man should always be ready to die either for his faith or his country or his family or his sovereign.... He then walked slowly around the chamber, asking each of them to forgive him if ever he had caused offense. They followed his example, embracing one another,.... Later in the evening, the Emperor himself rode on his Arabian steed to the great Cathedral and made his peace with God. Then he returned through the dark streets to his palace at Blachernae and summoned his household. Of them, as he had done his ministers, he asked forgiveness for any unkindness that he might have shown them, and he bade them good-bye.

forgiveness transcends

In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which... can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.

- Hannah Arendt, quote in W. H. Auden, A Certain World

to forgive; to be forgiven

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because, while both parties came prepared to forgive, neither party came prepared to be forgiven.

- Charles Williams, quoted in W. H. Auden, A Certain World

the homeland of my heart's desire

FORGIVENESS SUNDAY
I am the image of thine ineffable glory though I bear the brands of transgressions. Pity Thy creature, O Master, and purify me by Thy loving kindness. Grant unto me the homeland of my heart's desire, making me again a citizen of Paradise (Troparion from the Panikhida and Burial Service, on the refrain 'Blessed art Thou, O Lord: teach me Thy statutes' (Psalm 118))

Today the Church highlights the theme of forgiveness as we enter into the Lenten season. We need to understand that without mutual forgiveness there can be no spiritual change or growth. In fact, without striving to forgive and asking for forgiveness from God and one another there can be no salvation. The Lord Himself says that divine mercy will be shown only to the merciful and divine forgiveness only to the forgiving.

This Sunday also commemorates the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. The ancient, ancestral fall from grace of our first parents is the source of our own sense of exile and alienation, of the division and separation we experience in our relationships with God and one another. We have only at times a passing glimpse, a brief taste, of the paradise for which we were created and for which we long, our true spiritual home. The experience of being forgiven and forgiving - letting go - are just such moments.

Most of us will have experienced at some point in our lives the sweetness of being forgiven. It really is a kind of paradise, a brief taste of heaven. It is like paradise to be in a right relationship with God - and with one another, especially those with whom we have a difficult relationship. To shed all that is calculating and defensive and guilty and to savor a moment of relief, of honesty and openness, to have a clear conscience, is to regain - even if briefly - an almost child-like innocence and purity. It is in its own way a return to Paradise.

At Vespers for Forgiveness Sunday, we hear this beautiful verse: O Paradise, garden of delight and beauty, dwelling place made perfect by God, unending gladness and eternal joy, the hope of the prophets and the home of the saints, by the music of your rustling leaves beseech the Creator of all to open to me the gates which my sins have closed, that I may partake of the Tree of Life and Grace which was given to me in the beginning.

May our Lenten journey be marked by such moments - moments when the veil is lifted and the distance that separates us from paradise - from the Lord and from one another - is diminished, moments of recognition and sweetness that point towards the true homeland our heart's desire.

the gift of being looked at by God

.... Christians often say that human beings are disposed to configure
appetite in a God-directed way, but we are, in fact, no more disposed
to configure our desires that way than any other. This is, in part,
why it is improper to speak of our desire for God as natural to us.
That desire is just one configuration possible for us; it is no more
natural to us than its opposite, which is a desire for the lack that
is God’s absence. The cultivation of the desire for God, then, is not
a human work independent of God; it is an instance of responsive
gratitude to the gift of the very possibility of action.

An interesting question is whether this openness—this inchoateness of
desire, this readiness for formation and malformation—is a good thing
or a bad thing about us. Is this feature of human existence after the
Fall something to be lamented and corrected, or are there features of
it that warrant rejoicing—features that make it possible for us to be
more fully conformed to God?

In Eden, before the Fall, human desires were not inchoately open in
the way they are now. Adam and Eve’s desires were focused on God
without need for catechesis, and the desire for God was as natural to
them as a heartbeat. An inevitable concomitant of this natural focus,
however, would have been a reduction in the range of desire’s texture
and possible formation. There would have been neither need nor
occasion for the range of gastronomic, verbal, or sexual appetites
that are unavoidably open to us now.

The same is true in heaven. The saints’ natural desires are
indefectibly fixed on God, formed in the single and maximally
beautiful shape of praise. Desire’s heavenly range is, therefore, in
one sense, very small: tightly aimed at a single focus. But because
the Lord is in every sense infinite, desire’s removal from the open
range of possibility that exists here below is not, in fact, a
derangement in the direction of loss but, rather, a focus in the
direction of infinite gain.

Like Adam and Eve, the saints in heaven have a natural desire for God,
but the grammar of the faith requires us to say that there is,
nevertheless, a deep difference between Edenic desire and heavenly
desire. The difference is not of range but of history — a history that
has intervened between paradise and heaven; a ­history of sin and
death, violence and blood; a history in which we are fully implicated.

The absence of tears in heaven — an absence for which there is deep
scriptural warrant—does not mean that this history has been erased or
forgotten. The weight of it remains because the events that constitute
it are real; it is not a shadow play that can be erased by heaven’s
radiance. Those who love God in heaven are healed sinners; they
include killers and rapists and torturers. Those who dwelled in the
paradise at the beginning had not yet sinned and were not yet soaked
in blood violently shed.

God’s embrace of each kind of lover is, therefore, correspondingly
different. If it is true that there is more heavenly rejoicing over
the lost sheep that is found than over the sheep that have not
strayed, God’s embrace shows one important sense in which the history
that began with the eating of forbidden fruit in the Garden and that
will end in the heavenly city is a good one. God’s embrace of each
kind of lover is a way of explaining Adam’s sin, and the consequent
removal from us of a natural desire for God, as a felix culpa, a happy
fault. To say this neither explains nor justifies sin and death. It
simply indicates one thing that follows from the Fall’s derangements
that should not be lamented but, rather, rejoiced in.

The derangement of human desire in the Garden opened human desire to
an infinite range of possibility by making that desire inchoate. The
secondary derangements I have described catechize this inchoateness
into a vast variety of particular configurations. Each of these
particular configurations is, to some extent, damaged, blood- and
violence-threaded, idolatrous, lured by lack and absence.

But not every particular configuration is deranged to the same extent.
My desire to sing the Sanctus and to receive the body and blood of
Christ in humility, in the company of my brothers and sisters in
Christ, is not, in these respects, on a par with my desire to dominate
by intellectual violence my brothers and sisters in the university.
I’ve been catechized into both desires, and both are alive and active
in me, but one conforms me more closely to God, and the other damages
me by separating me from God.

Catechized, secondarily deranged desires are, then, theoretically
locatable in a hierarchy of goodness, although never easily and never
without qualification and ambiguity. Among the products of desire
deranged are some goods that otherwise would not have been. Consider
the singing of a Bach cantata, or the flying buttresses of a Gothic
cathedral, or the poetry of George Herbert, or the embrace of lovers
long separated, or the gift of time and love to the dying, or the
Christian assembly on its knees as bread and wine are consecrated on
the altar. All of these fit with desires well catechized and divinely
beautiful, and all of them would not have occurred without the Fall.

Such goods will, in some fashion, be taken up into heaven. Their
beauty and complexity and order is the reason our theological
rejection of the ordinary concept of natural desire is a lament linked
with joy.

Catholic theologians and Thomistic philosophers will object to this
understanding of the human situation, and their objections must be
taken seriously. But consider this: Among the strongest currents of
thought these days is one that encourages us to discover who we are
and to act accordingly—to gaze with the inward eye on our glassy
essence and respond to what we find there. That gaze yields a vast
range of identities: of gender and sex and ethnicity, of trait and
temperament and passion. If what I have argued is right, when we
attempt to discover who we are in that way, we find only
phantasms — creatures of the imagination that wither when we turn our
imaginations away from them.

This rejection of the language of natural desire opens to us, instead,
the truth that we are creatures — inchoate, unformed, and hovering over
the void from which we were made — who must seek either to return to
that void or to find happiness in the arms of the one who brought us
forth from it. There is no glassy essence to discover; there is
nothing but an unformed gaze that receives form only by looking away
from itself and receiving the gift of being looked at by God.

- Paul J. Griffiths, from The Nature of Desire

some at His right, some at His left

Most modern Christians - and especially the so-called liberals who have abandoned most of the church's traditional doctrines - do not believe in the Judgement. They demythologise it and turn it into a psychological process so that they can easily dismiss it. These modern debunkers are not alone. There were many in the 18th century, even among the friends of Samuel Johnson. Johnson did not share the fashionable Enlightenment sophistication and the tendency to regard religious doctrines as if they were metaphors. He was once in a discussion and he turned morose.

A lady asked him what was the matter and he said, I think I may be damned.

She said, What do you mean, Sir, to be damned?

He replied: sent to hell and punished everlastingly.

The lady protested: You seem Sir to forget the merits of our Redeemer.

Johnson was in tears, and he said vehemently: I do not forget the merits of our Redeemer. But our Redeemer has said that he will set some at his right hand and some at his left.

- Peter Mullen, in A Partial Vision

What Charles Murray Gets Right

..... Finally, Murray makes a very convincing case — one that I don’t think his more deterministic critics, Frum included, have done enough to reckon with — for the power of so-called “traditional values” to foster human flourishing even in economic landscapes that aren’t as favorable to less-educated workers as was, say, the aftermath of the Treaty of Detroit. Even acknowledging all the challenges (globalization, the decline of manufacturing, mass low-skilled immigration) that have beset blue collar America over the last thirty years, it is still the case that if you marry the mother or father of your children, take work when you can find it and take pride in what you do, attend church and participate as much as possible in the life of your community, and strive to conduct yourself with honesty and integrity, you are very likely to not only escape material poverty, but more importantly to find happiness in life. This case for the persistent advantages of private virtue does not disprove more purely economic analyses of what’s gone wrong in American life, but it should at the very least complicate them, and suggest a different starting place for discussions of the common good than the ground that most liberals prefer to occupy. This is where “Coming Apart” proves its worth: Even for the many readers who will raise an eyebrow (or two) at Murray’s stringently libertarian prescriptions, the story he tells should be a powerful reminder that societies flourish or fail not only in the debates over how to tax and spend and regulate, but in the harder-to-reach places where culture and economics meet.

Ross Douthat, from discussion of Charless Murray's Coming Apart

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/what-charles-murray-gets-right/

February 14, 2012, 5:33 pm
What Charles Murray Gets Right

delight

The vocabulary, diction, and mood of delight is an offering rather than an asking.

Paul J. Griffiths, Song of Songs (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible)

Carried away

.... I spend much of my time making my mind up about things, trying to account for and authenticate my feelings about music and suchlike. It can be an uneasy process. Western civilization prides itself on a conception of art that implies its ability to change us, for the better but also for the basic good of being changed. It keeps us open, so to speak, and too much certainty - being too sure of oneself - inhibits this process like nothing else. At the same time you need to grasp your response and let it take hold of you, to let it filter into the rest of your perceptions so that they cohere in the heat of the experience. Music is particularly powerful in this respect, easily gaining a sense of unchallengeable necessity, once you've ceded to it its right to do so. We tend to use the phrase "getting carried away" in explaining moral weakness, but if we never get carried away we probably never learn what morality is in the first place....

- Guy Dammann, Freelance, TLS Commentary (December 16, 2011)