No, I do not want to go back into slippery philosophy now. The weather has turned, if for only two days, and yesterday brought a beautiful raiment of fuzzy ice on the trees as fog rose and condensed on the still-frozen limbs. Today feels more like spring, with temperatures going to the 40’s and the sun as bright as a summer’s day at the beach. Refreshed with hopefulness and gratitude, it would be a shame to bring it all back into the dismal, albeit necessary, science of balancing words with the rational.
So I will not. Rather, I will focus on the miracle of synchronicity that occurred around the last essay/blog concerning “equity,” politics and spirituality.
Yes, that last one brought me controversy as I knew it would. Why it would, besides the subtleties of language in philosophy, did not occur to me until the storm of indignation hit: then I remembered. I had been there before, this time as an observer rather than a participant.
It happened about five or six or seven years ago with the arrival of a new priest to the parish who had a penchant for telling people what the Catholic Church taught: just say NO to homosexuality, contraception, abortion, and, most relevant here, government-run socialism. The last was unexpected but was explained in some classes the priest taught, not with his own words but with those of Catholic doctrine and several popes. Of the later, he brought in an encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, written in 1891. At that time, various forms of socialism were being experimented with in Spain and (I believe) Italy, where the governments, per definition, were taking control of property and its redistribution. Pope Leo saw in this the imminent danger of the government replacing religion and spirituality concerning work and wealth distribution, and so acted upon it with his writings. Yes, the pope agreed, people should get fair wages and safe work conditions, but property must remain in the hands of individuals, for reasons given in my last essay. First and foremost for the pope – and this I did not mention but should have – should come the family. His signature message was that economics and government should be subordinate to the family, from which all people and training and human love come. Not profit (capitalism), then, and not government control (socialism) would be followed, but rather an obligation of those in power to empower the family. After all, It would be to everyone’s good, forming a stable, functional, and reasonably just (as far as humans can be) society, and it would be in line with God’s plan, embedded in our specie’s biology.
So that is where the last essay came from, not, as some might think, from some right-wing pundit on Fox News. But all this is a digression from the point of this essay, which will not, as said, focus on politics with religion and all the vitriol that inevitably follows. Rather, it will be on the synchronicity of events that followed the essay and the realization that my thoughts had come from Pope Leo XIII through a controversial conservative priest.
For one, the arguments in the class that sifted into my memory were primarily between the priest and Mary Ann, a wonderful older woman who had long been committed to the social struggle as a radical activist. She reasoned, and not too poorly, that the Church was hiding behind its theology to protect the property of the wealthy, in hopes of keeping them on its side. This, indeed, has been done on and off in Catholic countries for centuries. On the other hand, she could not see the point the priest was trying to make, which was that the spiritual dimension must always come first (as a guiding principle to the physical reality of the family).
Not long after, she lay dying of leukemia, attended to by this same priest. At her funeral eulogy, the Father said (from my memory): “She died a perfect death, all her questions and arguments answered. She died in the arms of God.”
I believe it. But back to the point: just last night I was reading a biography of G. K. Chesterton, a brilliant novelist, journalist, and Catholic apologist from early 20th century England. As I rounded the bend towards the final chapters of the book, Knight of the Holy Ghost, by Dale Ahlquist, the heart of Chesterton’s philosophy came to light, formalized by a doctrine Chesterton called “distributism.” The nut of this was that the family should come first, bending government and economics to its service. In this, Chesterton emphatically stated that his source came from the encyclical Rerum Novarum, the name given to the very same encyclical mentioned above, written by Pope Leo X111 in 1891.
I can say with absolute certainty that my last essay was consciously stimulated only by my son and his comment “we can have equity (equality of outcomes) in heaven, not on earth” mentioned in a cabin buried in snow far up north. Immediately the parable of the Vintner came to mind, where he gives the same pay to the last as to the first, and on I went from there. It was not until later that I realized the theology used was from Pope Leo, and not until last night that I learned that the philosophy of the great Chesterton had come from the same source.
Around we go, then. Synchronicity reminds us, even shows us, that there is a plan. The Holy Spirit works in wondrous ways, far beyond our own reasoning and imagination. It is the very essence of creativity and cosmic influence, working far above the static mathematics of the astrologer. This wind will go where it may, but will always influence us for our betterment in ways we could never imagine. This latest experience of it was of no great importance except to show that the Spirit is here. It shows us that it is working both on warming days with frost-etched trees, as well as in the depths of bitter cold in a snow-bound cabin. So it is with our lives, that even in our worst moments, it is working for us in ways beyond our grasp.
While it is most important for us to believe in this continuous cosmic intervention, let me imagine for a moment what it might mean for my argument. Is the Spirit showing me that I am on the right path, or that I must read more thoroughly the sources of my thoughts to, by God, get it right? Probably both. And so, with apologies for my limitations, I will peer again into the minds of those greater than my own more earnestly before the winter winds blow again and I am left only with the vision of the dismal science to search for truth through a darkened glass.
RSS Feed