A good game of scrabble

Every once in a while, a young priest finds an outlet for his competitive/social life. On Friday nights, I go and play scrabble with a group of women from the parish. It challenges me to be creative and gives me a good outlet for conversation. I find that these moments are good for me to connect with people and to be reminded that I'm still a human being. I think we all need those people in our lives that stretch our intellects and feelings a little.

Have you ever had a song stuck in your head?

When I was in Israel, I became addicted to a song called "Something Stupid" which, I thought, was by Frank and Nancy Sinatra. In truth, it was redone by British singer Robbie Williams and Aussie Nicole Kidman. That was in the fall of 2000. For some reason, for the last several days, that's all I've wanted to hear. It's not a great song in terms of the message. In fact, the point of the song seems to be that, despite the fact that someone is not all that interested in you, still you remain infatuated with the person. St. Augustine said that sung prayer is praying twice, once with the words and once with the tune. I think this is a derivation of that. The words could be better but the tune just catches me and makes me smile. No profound truth here. Just a thought.

above all, follow the church

This week, the city of Dubuque paused to reflect on an issue. The Dubuque City Council voted on and defeated the issue of including sexual orientation to its list of actions that are considered illegal discrimination. It listed five areas; employment, housing, public accommodations, credit, and education, that would allow a homosexual man or woman to sue someone if he or she felt someone was discriminating against him or her. A task force, formed by the Dubuque civil rights sub-committee of the city council to study the issue, asked two of its members to come to a meeting of the priests of Dubuque in order to present the issue to us and ask for our support. We listened intently and heard a well reasoned and thought out argument in its favor. The presenters knew the church’s teaching on homosexuality, which is, basically love the person but the act is disoriented. They claimed they weren’t advocating a life-style but, instead, were seeking to ensure the God given dignity each of us have by being created in the image and likeness of God. They claimed that the legislation would merely be securing these five areas to ensure that gay people have a place to live, an education, and the opportunity to be able to earn a living. At the end of the presentation, before the active priests of the city could ask a single question, one retired, resolvedly politically conservative priest immediately said that this would lead to gay marriage and, basically, the fall of western society as we know it. It was almost as if he had researched a completely different subject, gay marriage, but didn’t really care that his criticism was blatantly not about the topic at hand. He did the research, he was going to present it. In the end, even though the priest said that he was advocating the official church’s position, since he was fighting against gay marriage and not against the actual amendment, he not only made himself look bad but the church as well. And, the real problem was that, despite the fact that he was completely void of any reasoning whatsoever, he was still closer to the truth than the well reasoned and logical pro-amendment folks who couldn’t see that their legislation could be used to ensure that someone flaunting their disoriented lifestyle could not be removed from an apartment, school, or job even if their employer believed flaunting a same-sex oriented relationship was contrary and detrimental to the mission of his or her school, job, or property.
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. A variation of this might be the road to sin is paved with well-reasoned arguments. This is not just a twenty-first century phenomenon, however. In truth, this has been with us for a long time. According to the book of Genesis, in fact, it has been with us from the very beginning. Adam and Eve were given a very short list of rules to govern the garden: don’t eat from the tree in the middle of the garden or you will die. All is, apparently, going well until the devil comes along, as the devil is apt to do, with a kind of confidence that makes his advice seem sage. “Did God tell you not to eat of all of these trees?” he asks, as though God would be as cruel as he is. “No, just the one in the middle of the garden. We can’t eat it or touch it” Eve added. She wanted to emphasize that it really is a taboo subject. But the devil is cleaver. He contradicts God’s law with the ultimate human temptation…selfishness. “God knows the moment you eat it you will be like gods.” he says. Well, who could turn that down? And so, they commit the original sin and find that they are suddenly afraid to show God the very bodies he molded out of clay for them. They gave into temptation to be like God because of a well-reasoned, logical argument by the prince of deception.
The irony is that it took one who had every right to claim to be “like God” to undo the arrogant disobedience of our first parents. Jesus avoids temptation three times in the gospel, despite being like Adam and Eve in all things but sin. He doesn’t turn stones into bread despite fasting for forty days and forty nights. He doesn’t invite angelic servants to do his bidding because he would abuse his own word of God. He doesn’t take charge of all the world’s governments because, in doing so, he would have worshipped the very arrogant disobedience that divides nations in war. Despite the well reasoned, tempting presentation similar to the one that tripped up our first parents, thank goodness that Jesus was able to turn it down.
And this is the dilemma of our time as well. Our culture and our government have theories that seem reasonable even though they fly in the face of the church and her teachings. and there are more issues than homosexuality. Our culture tells us that we need to have “safe sex” which puts enmity between man and woman by seeing one of the gifts that God put into sexuality, procreation, as a curse. And there are others. We are inundated with groups that seek to turn us away from the truth of Jesus Christ and his message to a well-reasoned, logical lie. As we enter into this Lenten season, it only makes sense that, before we turn back to God with all our hearts, we much first rid ourselves of those “well reasoned” “logical” things that took us away from God in the first place.