No More Bad Religion

Well this is certainly a new sight...

As autumn rapidly approaches, we find ourselves rushing towards our quadrennial (once every 4 years) national ritual of vehemently  hating at least 50% of the population of the country, based almost entirely on whether they are red or blue, elephant or donkey, conservative or liberal, and so on and so forth.  Neighbor hating upon neighbor, Conservative older generations against liberal younger generations (or vice versa), everyone's barbecues and picnics ruined by squabbles until November blows over, all of which done with star-spangled hearts.  Now, far be it from me to interfere with our national tradition, but I have noticed that when we draw our political battle lines, we tend to draw them in other aspects of our lives, or at least we tend to emphasize them more... emphatically (yes, its a redundant word... just work with me here, I'm no English major).  Now, being a (mediocre) practitioner of Catholicism, I tend to ignore the battle lines drawn in realms like psychology and humanities and theatre (are there even polarizing debates in the realm of theatre?), mostly because I tend to be indifferent/ ignorant towards them.  However, whenever I find there to be these lines drawn in Holy Mother Church, I think its worth mentioning, perhaps even worth and outcry of sorts.

Now, before you scratch your head wondering why this has anything to do with STARR, or get angry because you've assumed my stance on either side of this fight (which, in this post, I have not), I ask you kindly to read on...

Now, politics are split between big government and little government (somewhat), and psychology divided between nurture vs. nature (or so I've been told), and theatre between... whatever it is that thespians debate about.  In Catholicism, the predominant polarizing debate typically lies here:  Social Justice vs. Traditional Values.  Unfortunately, it was never supposed to be a debate at all.

Let's set the stage, using a painfully rushed and stereotypical simplification of each side  On the so-called "left", you have the social justice Catholic.  These Catholics tend to place their emphasis on the issues of... you guessed it: social justice.  They wish to greatly emphasize the need for Catholics to serve the poor, to alleviate suffering, to resist greed and elitism and what not.  They aim to be accepting, inviting, and welcoming, and often find themselves at odds with some of the Church's more controversial teachings.  On the side deemed "right", you find the traditional values Catholic.  There is (stereo)typically an odor of incense surrounding these types, as their attention goes to liturgy, to moral teachings, and to near fanatical devotion to the Pope.  They have a love and affinity for the rich tradition of Catholicism, their kids are named after no less than 19 saints, and all their favorite hymns are in Latin (some of them even possibly being in Koine Greek.)  Where the left tends to be in disagreement on the controversial issues, the right is in absolute agreement with them, so much to the extent that these issues seem to dominate their focus and fill them with a horrible distaste for the current worldview.  They tend to dislike the other, with the left accusing the right of being unsympathetic, rejecting Christ's loving and welcoming nature, while the right accuses the left of being unfounded, rejecting Christ's foundation in the truth for the sake of relevancy, popularity, and fair-play.  So here's our debate.  Left vs. Right, loving acceptance vs firm truths, Social Justice vs. Traditional Values.  Its present, its widespread, and most of all, its really really really boring.

Now I'm no scholar of Sacred Scripture, I'm merely a humble commentator with little to know qualification to be commentating, but I do know this:  there was never meant to be a division in the Body of Christ.  We were never meant to be divided, to be split, to be politicized.  The conflict is a festering wound on the Body of Christ, a reminder that, though the King be perfect, the Kingdom is made up of ridiculously imperfect humans.  The main issue behind the debate is the illusion of division, brought on by the assumption that the Church is only as big as we can envision it.  Thus, when we envision Church in the streets and the slums, we wonder how any Catholic could dwell in gilded, ornate, lofty cathedrals, and we quickly conclude that they must be wrong and we must be right.  Or, when we see the great beauty and tradition of the Church's timeless and enduring tradition of faith and morals, we wonder how anyone could find themselves affirming those people living contrary to that tradition and concluded that they must be wrong and we must be right.  In truth, both are wrong and both are right, entirely because both have envisioned a Church that is too small.

Catholicism is not a religion of either one vision or the other vision.  It is a Church of both/and.  We do not all choose between lives of comfort and austerity, we are a religion in which both desert hermits and kings are saints.  We find people like St. Thomas More, a man well-off and influential who, when pressed, stood firm in his faith and paid for it with his life, yet we also find our dear St. Francis, who gave up everything to serve the poor and downtrodden.  These men are together in the Communion of Saints, not divided, but in full understanding of their roles in the Body of Christ.

  

Christianity is not a matter of either serving the poor or standing firm in the teachings of the Church.  Christianity is a matter of as Christ put in his own words, coming to "Love one another as I have loved you."  (John 15:12) It requires us to know how Christ loved us and to love each other in such a way.  Christianity is the inseparable bond of unstoppable Love and immovable Truth.  Our mission is to accept everyone in the truth, and we cannot sacrifice either for the advancement of the other.  “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27).

In the midst of the political wars, it is important to avoid the temptation to politicize Christianity.  We are not about policies or platforms, we are about Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh.  The whole world, in all time and space is looking at us, silently asking us to prove all these things we claim, that God became Man, that Death is not the end, that Life can be eternal, and that the most fundamental truth behind everything is that we really are loved infinitely and eternally.  We are given the mission to let the whole world know that Jesus Christ lives, and we have no way of doing so except serving the unservable, believing the unbelievable, hoping in the hopeless, and loving the unlovable.  We're called to be Christ to the people.

STARR will only succeed to the extent that it seeks this goal.  Marian will only succeed to the extent that it seeks this goal.  You, my brother/sister in Jesus Christ, will only succeed to the extent that you achieve this goal.  In ordinary things and extraordinary things, let the world know Jesus Christ.  In great speeches and quiet words, speak of a God who loves unconditionally.  In great outreaches of relief and gentle touches, heal the wounded in His Name.  Everything you do, deeds great and deeds small, whether it be in lofty towers or the slums of the streets, let the whole world see Jesus Christ, alive in you.

You can never have enough pictures of Mother Teresa, her face
shining with a love that this world is so desperately needing.

Working with Marian University Students

Last Friday, over 30 students showed up for our first STARR(Students Taking Active Reflective Roles) program of the 2012 Fall Semester. It does my heart good to see our young adults gather weekly to pray, reflect and serve.  It is a source of empowerment for me to see the unselfish desire to "get dirty for a good cause," (quote from a Marian graduate) and learn more about feeding hungry people in Indianapolis.  The energy, commitment, passion that these students bring to service is a sign, to me, of God alive in our world.  I am ever grateful that I have the blessing of working with such as these!  Peace, Jeanne 

Photo Page

Welcome back to Marian University S.T.A.R.R. Be sure to check out the photo link at the top of the page. There will be weekly updates from miscellaneous sites. If you have photos you would like to contribute, see myself or Joe Gehret at any of the S.T.A.R.R. gatherings.

Peace in Christ,

Caleb Ringwald

Welcome to Poverty

Welcome, one and all, to another exciting semester of Marian University STARR!  For all you returning folk, welcome back, glad to have you.  For all you new folk to STARR, a hearty welcome, and thank you for responding to the call to serve.  Here at STARR, we're committed to the service of fellow man, both here at Marian and the surrounding community, and taking the time to reflect upon those experiences, understanding how they fit into our lives as Christian college students.

The little white lines are pieces of your soul,
forever lost to some bank of servers
at the Facebook headquarters.

 That's where we come in, and by we, I mean STARR blog.  We here at STARR blog understand that we live in a generation of young whippersnappers who like to use the interweb to do practically everything that used to require some form of genuine interaction.  Rather than genuinely talk, we engage in the ever-thrilling Facebook comment war.  We do our shopping on line, our socializing, our planning, our writing, etc.  Heck, even romance, which used to be done by engaging in such ancient customs as conversation, travelling, personal relationship, and self-vulnerability, is now engaged in safe behind the screen of digital glory.  These times sure are a-changing, and the STARR community is willing to change with them.  So, in order to facilitate much of the "reflecting" part of the STARR experience (STARR = Students Taking Active Reflective Roles), we've created STARR blog, using the all-powerful, soul-consuming power of the webbernet (because the word "internet" is sooo passe) to convey some good old fashion reflections on Christian service, Catholic social teaching, and other cool pertinent things.

Starting this year, we here are STARR blog want to spend good chunks reflecting on specific themes.  As our first blog theme this semester, we (and by we, we mean me) decided that the theme of poverty would be a wonderful reflection theme.  Because let's face it, if it weren't for poverty, STARR would be out of a job.  If there wasn't some sort of discrepancy in the world, if there wasn't some need that needed filled, there'd be no reason beyond sentimentality for an organization dedicated to selfless service to exist.  So we have to seek to understand what it is we're fighting.

Luckily for you, Joe's got you covered.  Besides a slew of rambling thoughts on poverty from my own skull, I've consulted with some folks who actually have experience in the realm of poverty, as in missionary work in Haiti, China, Kenya, El Salvador, and Ghana.  As the semester progresses, I will share with you their experiences and thoughts on true poverty, and we'll all learn from their wisdom and experience.

But for know, lets look at poverty on a local level.  Poverty is an important subject.  As long as man has been rich, he has also been poor, and understanding the nature of those two things is crucial to understanding the nature of man himself.  What in us drives us to be so rich, and what in us causes us to be so poor?  The great temptation is to assume that the rich are rich because they deserve to be rich and the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor, and that assisting them in any direct way would only serve to enable them.  While it may be true, this mentality all too often stems, not from concern for the person, but as a justification for our indifference.  Yes, handing money to a homeless person on the street might be patronizing or enabling, but sitting down and talking to him isn't.  Assumptions about poverty are dangerous, not just for the sake of the poor, but for our sake.  When we neglect the poor, either by ignoring them or by writing off our reluctance to aid them as being for their benefit, we risk our own soul.  We deceive ourselves, we somehow come to believe that we're any better than them, that no matter the circumstances, we'd never make the decisions that they have made to get where they are at.  Truthfully, we make them out to be less than human.  And that's wrong.

"What, give him compassion?  Nah, he'd probably spend it on booze anyways." 

So, all things considered, I'd like to make a proposal, I'm going to call it "Welcome to Poverty".  What I want all you awesome peoples to do is to carve a chunk of your time each day and find poverty in your own life.  How are you, like those without money, also poor?  Money is not the only inequality in this world, nor is it the measure of the value of a man.  So, in order to understand poverty, I want all of us to become poor, or rather, to realize that we've always been poor, making us no better than any beggar, panhandler, hobo, or what-have-you.  Think, or even better, pray that you might come to know your own poverty.  Take the time to deprive yourself for the sake of the poor, whether it be money, time, consideration, or (most importantly) pride.  Empty yourself a little bit, so that they might be full.  Step down from society's lofty heights, so that they might look a little taller.  Take the time each day to think, and welcome to Poverty.

Sin, Service, and Social Justice from the Confessional

Most people, if not the overwhelming majority of people, tend to think that there is something generally dysfunctional about our world, that there's something amiss about our global culture, varying from people saying that the entire world is evil (A view I particularly dislike) to saying that all we need is world peace and everything will be spiffy (I also generally dislike this view).  Regardless of the degree or sort of malaise we might attribute our world's imperfection to, we can come to a fairly solid consensus that the world is in need of remedying.

"Oh!  There's you in the garbage heaps of Port au Prince,
cradling a starving child... Um, here I am, nicely dressed
in a massive basilica... so yeah..."

This being said, I'm finding it increasingly encouraging that more and more people (at least people that I know) are stepping up to the plate with a desire to do mission and social work (recession be damned, we've got bigger problems than securing a pension! Hoo-ah!)  Whether it be a friend of mine making trips to El Salvador, China, and Haiti (and probably Africa, eventually) every time I seem to turn around, or my little sister who shows interest in Latin America mission work, or my activist cousins, I've been seeing a rise in activists, missionaries, and social workers seeking to combat the commonly held notion that our world needs some fixing.  In truth, I feel a bit sheepish about my rather comfortable life in the seminary, working to become a Catholic priest in the ever needy region of.... Greater Cincinnati, Dayton, and God's Country.  Not exactly the slums of Haiti, as I've come to see in countless Facebook pictures.  

Don't get me wrong, I've done some pretty cool service work with STARR and the seminary, assisting the mentally handicapped, feeding several shantytowns of homeless quite literally out of the trunk of my car, raising and razing houses in the "ghettos" of Indianapolis's near East Side.  But, I also have an air-conditioned room, a car, health insurance, and a pretty secure career path, unless of course, a massive persecution breaks out, in which case, I'll live a pretty sweet life underground.  But I digress.  As Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said: “There are 200 million poor in the world who would gladly take the vow of poverty if they could eat, dress and have a home like I do."

So what about the seminarians, priests, and religious of the world living rather nicely in the States, probably never going to set foot into true poverty?  How are we to fight the evil of the world?  Well, you see, we look at the world's evils in a bit of a different light than the missionaries and social justice heroes.  Take sexual slavery, which was front and center here in Indianapolis (The Super Bowl is one of the highest occasions for sex trafficking in the world.).  Sex trafficking is a horrible crime, absolutely devastating and disgusting, etc. etc.  In today's world, there are more slaves than there have ever been, most for sexual servitude.  In the United States alone, there are over 100,000 children forced into sexual slavery.  Yes.  Even here.

Fighting sin and evil like a boss

So what's a seminarian/future priest to do to address the problem?  Hear confessions and celebrate Mass.  No, seriously.  Those are our weapons, and many many people don't realize how potent they really are.  You see, slave traders aren't born as slave traders.  They're born as children, sons and daughters of mothers and fathers, like you and I.  Its what happens after their born and before they sell or buy their first human being that shapes them into slave traders.  They are created by a culture laced with sin, and appear as the horrifying anomalies of that culture.  Our culture, saturated with sexuality (almost exclusively unhealthy, unnatural sexuality) makes for lots and lots of sexually dysfunctional people.  People with a consumeristic view of human sexuality.  We seek, to a lesser or greater extent, to consume sexual pleasure like we consume food or entertainment.  We've made porn and strip clubs so normal in our culture, and they engender within us the notion that other people's bodies are object for consumption rather than treasures for honor and love.  Thus, we find the odd collective of people who go to horrific ends to profit from such a notion.  

The Catholic priesthood, in its own distinct way, is tasked to fight that.  Before it ever develops into sex slavery,  or starvation, or war,  or the other terrifying evils of our modern world, the priest (and every other Christian) is tasked to kill it at the root.  Priests hear confessions and celebrate Mass because, unlike any other experience known to man, it is in the Sacraments of Jesus Christ that the battle against evil becomes most sublime.  It is in the confessional that the a man's lust is combated and forgiven, before it drives him to consume another.  It is in the Mass that Jesus Christ, through the priest, compels people to abandon their selfishness and pride, before it compels them into apathy for the struggles of anyone but themselves.

As a future diocesan priest in the U.S., I may not get to feed the poorest of the poor.  But I'll fight my hardest against greed, the root of poverty.  I may not rescue the child traded in slavery, but I'll exhaust myself to the last breath to fight against the objectification and dehumanization of others.  Ultimately, I may not be the boots on the ground in the battle against poverty, starvation, and injustice, but I can guarantee that I'll be in the fight.

Learn a lesson from the priesthood.  Learn a lesson from all those invested in the battle for souls:  Not everyone is called to walk with the poor, but everyone is called to fight what makes them poor.  No matter how much aid money, how many cases of Plumpy-Nut, however many wells we drill and wars we fight, we'll never end evil unless we strike it at the root.  Our culture's greatest sins:  poverty, starvation, war, abortion, slavery, etc, are directly resulting from our own sins, no matter how small those sins may be.  We might think "My cocaine usage isn't hurting anyone," but we fail to see how Latin America has been torn to pieces by drug cartels, who are hell bent to see that you get your next gram of coke.  We might think "Its just some porn, its not that bad."  But you're only buying into a system of objectification, humiliation, and sexual consumption that's breeding some of our society's most horrific evils:  abortion, slavery, sexual abuse, gender discrimination, depression, suicide, the destruction of families, the devastation of marriages.  Our society is at the brink of nothing short of falling apart at the seams from the amount of rampant, immature, insincere sexuality.  The human heart is becoming increasingly empty and devoid from lust, because the more we feed our lustful hunger, the less capable we become of truly and genuinely loving each other.  And that, my friends, is killing us.

3 Keys to Better Ministry

Henri Nouwen was a Catholic priest, university professor (Yale; Harvard School of Divinity), and the author of many books on Christian spirituality.

In Spiritual Direction he talks about developing "The 3 Disciplines of the Spiritual Life." They are:

1. Solitude
2. Community
3. Ministry

Solitude is our 1-on-1 time with God. It's where we come to know ourselves as beloved by God, and created with a purpose. Spending time in communion with God fills us up and allows us to move into...

Community: This is where we encounter others and create a space of welcome between us, where all are free to love God and one another. Here, we affirm the goodness we see in one another, and the overflow of that community causes us to engage in...

Ministry: sharing our gifts and belovedness with a world in need. Ministry is the natural response of someone who knows they are blessed, and who seeks to share that with the world.

The interesting thing about the three disciplines is that, for them to work, they must be practiced in order.

To serve someone (Ministry), I must first acknowledge the goodness in that person (Community). I cannot know that my neighbor has worth and value unless I know first that I am valued by God (Solitude). Then I can recognize that my sisters and brothers are also beloved by God. It's all tied together.

Why is this important?

At STARR, we minister to our brothers and sisters in need. We have built up a community of students, in partnership with many sites throughout Indianapolis. But the thing is... if we don't spend time outside of STARR in solitude, we might not be giving our all. Taking the time to discern what your gifts are, and asking God in prayer how you are called to serve the world, will better equip you to make an impact at STARR and beyond.

Solitude. Community. Ministry. 

Do them in order!

Dunamis

"Alas, I've been blinded by the
Golden Rule!"

In the early years of Christianity, as a converted Paul tread his way across the eastern Mediterranean world, he carried with him what the New Testament called "dunamis", the Greek word that we distilled "dynamite" from.  "Dunamis", very roughly translated, means "power" or "excellence" and referred to Paul's good news.  Now, this was not news of "I've found this great moral teaching!  This Jesus guy has some great ideas of how to live a moral life, you should all listen!"  No, the Jews seemed pretty content with their Mosaic law, and the Greeks with their philosophy and logic. Paul barely touched on the moral teachings of Christ.  To Paul, the true dunamis, the true power of this new Christian sect was in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Paul fascinated Jew and Greek alike with the message of Jesus's death and resurrection, something that baffled and confounded all who heard it.  It was this message that had him tread all across the Roman Empire and suffer much persecution, and eventually to die a martyr's death.