The Aimless Passing of Idolatry

"Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into a multiplicity of desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life’s story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.”

                           - Pope Francis in Lumen Fidei

HT: The Anchoress

Practicing Detachment

From The Anchoress:

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go.. to move forward. — CS Lewis

That is very true. It is also true of great experiences — those moments of ‘triumph’ when for a short time it all comes together for you; the accolades that follow can surprise and confound and are always too effusive.

Take what is healing in all of that, but the rest must be let go. Practice detachment, or you begin to believe the hype, and then you’re lost. If you have not practiced detachment, when your hand inevitably misses a rung, it will come a hard, hard fall.

About That Cover....

I absolutely love the cover of Elizabeth Scalia's book  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life

The cover, as you can see to the left,  has a stained glass window- with a difference. Instead of images of saints and biblical characters, there are individual tiny images from our culture's most common diversions, distractions and attractions, including Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. I wonder if it is only a coincidence that we call the little images on our smart phones and tablets "icons."? Are we trying to worship these things, to use them as are sources of meaning and joy? Food for thought, and discussed in the book.

In the Catholic/Orthodox traditions, an icon (from Greek εἰκών eikōn "image") is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting designed to symbolize spiritual realities. In the afterword of the book Scalia makes these points about the differences between religious Icons and our little icons, our idols of the heart, as symbolized on the cover:,

• An Icon looks out from Intrinsic light and points to its source; there are no shadows in which to hide.

• An idol looks out from man-created light and points to itself; invites us into the shadows.

• An Icon teaches us how to focus, how to quiet down, collect ourselves, and hear the small, still voice.

• An idol throws noise, images, and issues at us, non=stop, scatters our thinking, and deafens s to any voice but its own.

• An Icon whispers wisdom.

• An idol shouts soundbites and mindless trendspeak.

• An Icon inspires us to chant to the Most High.

• An idol inspires us to chant to it, and to ourselves.

• An Icon looks us straight in the eyes and dares us to pursue truth.

• An idol wears shades and tells us what we want to hear.

I hope that you have enjoyed the posted excerpts from this book that I have been posting over the past few weeks. For many of my readers, reading a book from a Catholic and non-evangelical tradition may be a stretch, and a journey outside of your comfort zone. If so, I think it is a journey worth the effort. I hope that you will consider getting and reading this book.

The Ultimate Disenthrallment

"The key to the Christian life begins with confronting and amending the self, rather than indulging it. This can only be done through grace, which enters upon our yes and moves and grows on the intentional breeze of willingness. Because those are the only things that count - our intentions and willingness- worthiness does not enter in.

But willingness only comes with humility. It comes when we can say, 'Thy will be done,' and then actually surrender, instead of preparing a treaty, complete with expiration date.

Such surrender is the ultimate disenthrallment and the banisher of all idols, even the super idols."

 - Elizabeth Scalia in  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life., page 116

A Powerful Idol of Distraction

"Ideas become idols; it is an unstoppable human truth. We make an idol of our sexuality and out sexual appetites. On some level we understand that we cannot control these appetites, they will control us -and what controls us takes us away from God. But that feels to us like some distant sort of truth we can easily wave off. 'If it feels good, do it' has been a powerful idol of distraction. It is one that keeps us from the fullness of his presence in our lives, and thus his astounding, transcendental, and eternal love, because we're too busy chasing a worldly facsimile."

  - Elizabeth Scalia in  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life., page 88

All Our Longings Fulfilled

"The whole point is this: when we have cleared away the idols we have place before God - imagine using your arm and just sweeping away all those trophies from the mantle so that there is nothing between us and him- we open up a direct line to the God who is all in all. He is all love, all mercy, all light, all power, all compassion, all goodness, and all wealth. God is the God of all our longings fulfilled, in whom no voids remain.And that is all God wants and needs from us- our willingness to keep the direct line open so that he may be with us and be all of those things for us, with nothing standing between our love."

  - Elizabeth Scalia in  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life., page 61

An Ax to the Root

"It is interesting to ponder for a moment both the order of the Ten Commandments and Jesus' famous sermon.  While it is certainly the case that all the sins warned against in the Decalogue are serious, there does seem to be a bit of a hierarchy to them. Murder is a pretty big deal - certainly a bigger deal than coveting your neighbors' donkey. And yet, that is not the first or second or even the third commandment. It's not even the first 'You shall not.' The warning against strange gods is the first of those. Both the greatest commandment and the Sermon on the Mount do not present things like murder as root sins. The true roots of sin, the roots that grow into actions like murder, are seeded within the mind, which is where idolatry always begins.

No idol is constructed in the act of murder. Rather, the murder is, at its end, and offering to an idol. the real idol is the enlarged anger within us, and it forms through our willingness to sustain an idea about our righteousness, and therefore an idea about ourselves.... The great evil of murder, then is the fruit of the idolatry that is first an idea, and the idea is almost always about the self."

    - Elizabeth Scalia in  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life., pages 31-32
    (italics in the original)

Ideas As Idols

"[In] the Sermon on the Mount...Jesus is teaching us not only to focus but also to actively cast aside the things that stand between God and ourselves. And what are they really? Mostly they are ideas, and our ideas are full of I. Ideas are what first pull our attention away from God and from the wonder of knowing him. And then, because they are our ideas (or so we come to believe they are), we engage with them passionately, forming them into idols, like golden calves.

Just as we must get rid of our distractions in prayer, we must dissolve the ideas that have become idols before we can approach the altar of God..."

     - Elizabeth Scalia in  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life., pages 29-30

The Most Difficult Idol to Dislodge

"...the overwhelming evidence before us -from Eden until now- suggests that making strange gods for and of ourselves is something that comes to human beings as naturally and easily as taking a breathe, expelling it, and taking another. And the most painful truth is that the first and most difficult idol to dislodge is the idol of oneself."

     - Elizabeth Scalia in  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life., page 28

The Source Where All Needs Are Met

"...We have lacked perfection since the original sin of Eden, and through millennia God has been intent on reclaiming and restoring us to himself, the source where all of our needs are met.

We encounter a huge part of that reclamation effort within the direct communication drawn by God and delivered by Moses, but what we seldom realize is this: all of the commandments are simply an expansion of the very first commandment - the one about gods and idols. The command is given primacy not because the Creator is insecure and in need of constant attention, but because it is the one commandment that, if obeyed, renders all of the others quite nearly moot. Were we not continually making idols of the objects of our desire - all of those shiny things we cannot resist grabbing on to - nothing would be cluttering up the space between us and God; the lines would be straight and the crooked letters rendered unnecessary.

The 'you shall nots' are less a list of restrictions and limitations than an invitation to keep turning back to God, who will 'satisfy the desire of every living thing' (Ps. 145:16) The 'shall nots' say, 'Don't steal that; look at me. Don't objectify her with lust; look at me.Don't nurse your anger unto death! Look at me. Do not look out there, not even to your past, be it good or bad; and do not look to your earthly desires. Look at me, and let me love you, and you will have no need of the rest.'"

      - Elizabeth Scalia in  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life., pages 21-22

Nothing Between You and the Presence

   "...'You shall not have other gods besides me' this meant no gods other than the God who freed the Israelites  yes, but it meant something deeper as well. It meant inviting God's presence - the living, breathing truth of who God is - to reside amid all of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, at all times.

To place anything - be it another deity or something more commonplace like romantic love, anger, ambition, or fear - before the Almighty is to give it preeminence in our regard. To become too attached to a thought or feeling or thing is to place it between God and ourselves. When we attache ourselves to something other than God, God's presence is blocked, unseen, and disconnected from our awareness. The straight line between creature and Creator is then impeded, and - as with most unwise detours - disorientation follows."

 - Elizabeth Scalia in  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life., pages 14-15

Only Wonder Comprehends

"There is a quotation attributed to Saint Gregory of Nyssa: 'Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything.'  A simpler translation reads 'ideas create idols; only wonder leads to knowing....

...We are so comfortable with our idols and so convinced that they are built on entirely correct ideas that we have stopped wondering at anything and, therefore, are comprehending almost nothing."

    - Elizabeth Scalia in  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life., pages 8,10

Reading "Strange Gods"

Now that  I'm done quoting excerpts from a book by a Pentecostal Pastor, I'm going to switch gears in an entirely different direction and start quoting from a book by a Roman Catholic!

For many years I have followed an intriguing blogger and writer widely known on-line as "The Anchoress," and more recently revealed under her true name as Elizabeth Scalia. She is a Benedictine Oblate and the Managing Editor of the Catholic Portal at Patheos.  Mrs. Scalia has recently published an insightful book on the subject of idolatry, entitled Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life. None of my regular readers will be surprised that subject attracted my attention! 

Now I know that some of you will immediately react in puzzlement at the idea of a Roman Catholic in good standing discussing the subject of idolatry. After all, you may think, aren't all Catholics somewhat idolaters who worship statues and images, and pray to saints and the Virgin Mary? Our Protestant prejudices can easily come into play here. There is plenty of stuff in Catholic theology and practice that I do not endorse or agree with, and I am not turning in my protestant identity badge or, so the speak, "swimming the Tiber." After all, I'm a "Five Solas" kind of guy. However, I do challenge you to put some of your anti-Catholic prejudices on hold and let the quotations from the book which I will be posting speak for themselves. Or, better yet, get and read the book. 

I called the book "insightful," and I really mean the adjective: This book is stock full of insights. I learned things about idols, idolatry and the human heart that I have not read or seen in all the many other books and blogs I have read on this subject from good evangelical writers, pastors and theologians (and I've read some of the best). And on top of that, "The Anchoress" is such a good writer that the insights are a great pleasure to read!

Be looking here for some really good quotes over the coming weeks.

A Bottle of Port

A pithy C.S. Lewis quote from an old Life Magazine interview.

Hat Tip: The Anchoress

Our World Prison is Split

The Third Day
The immovable stone tossed aside,
The collapsed linens,
The blinding angel and the chalky guards:All today like an old wood-cut.
The earthquake on the third day,
The awakened sleeper,
The ubiquitous stranger, gardener, fisherman:
Faded frescoes from a buried world.
Retell, renew the event
In these planetary years,
For we were there and he is here:
It is always the third day.
Our world-prison is split;
An elder charity
Breaks through these modern fates.
Publish it by Telstar,
Diffuse it by mundovision.
He passes through the shattered concrete slabs,
The vaporized vanadium vaults,
The twisted barbed-wire trestles.
A charity coeval with the suns
Dispels the deep obsessions of the age
And opens heart-room in our sterile dream:
A new space within space to celebrate
With mobiles and new choreographies,
A new time within time to set to music.
— Amos Niven Wilder
(NT Scholar and brother of Thornton Wilder)

Hat Tip: The Anchoress

Did You Know...

... that 75% of those killed for faith are Christian?

From The Anchoress

Thankful for Laughter

Love this little prayer from The Anchoress. As she says, "Laughter is not just good medicine. Sometimes having the opportunity to laugh segues into a prayer of thanksgiving:"

Thank you, God, for the interruption to a hectic day, and the cleansing effect of a laugh. Thank you God that I can hear and see this, in order to so fully enjoy it. Thank you that my lungs work, so I can bark out “HA! That’s funny!” and it heals me more effectively than a thousand sighs. Thank you for the Holy Spirit, who moves on the air I breath, and therefore on all of my tears and laughter and carries them where you will. Thank you for the good friend who sent this to me, and the fact that I have any friends at all. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for my life, I do not appreciate enough.

Thank you, God, that a few minutes spent in frivolity only led me back to you, who — being all good — can only be my joy.

I needed that. Thanks for the laugh, Lord!

It is Jesus...

“It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal”.

              – Pope John Paul II

Hat Tip: The Anchoress

Ascension Sunday Thoughts

Some thoughts on Ascension Sunday:

“The Ascension is not really a departure. It is entering into a new more dynamic manner of presence beyond the bounds of ordinary space and time. It is the assurance that Jesus is with us always during the ministry He gives unto the end of the age, and a hope for the age to come.”                           - John Michael Talbot

  Hat Tip:  internetmonk.com

What happens when you downplay or ignore the ascension? The answer is that the church expands to fill the vacuum. If Jesus is more or less identical with the church—if, that is, talk about Jesus can be reduced to talk about his presence within his people rather than his standing over against them and addressing them from elsewhere as their Lord, then we have created a high road to the worst kind of triumphalism. …and the other side of triumphalism is of course despair. If you put all your eggs into the church-equals-Jesus basket, what are you left with when, as Paul says…we ourselves are found to be cracked earthenware vessels?

N.T. Wright • Surprised by Hope, p. 112

Hat Tip:  internetmonk.com

“Ascension Day proclaims that there is no sphere, however secular, in which Christ has no rights – and no sphere in which his followers are absolved from obedience to him. Instead of it being a fairy tale from the pre-space age, Christ’s ascension is the guarantee that he has triumphed over the principalities and powers, so that at his name ‘every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’ (Phil. 2:10-11).” - Bruce Metzger

Blinded by the Artificial Light

Here's a selection from a great piece by Elizabeth Scalia, aka The Anchoress, on looking at the stars with a sense of wonder - Stars and the Excess of Clarity :

Spent some time stargazing a while back, when I couldn’t sleep.

No telescope, just the naked eye, a dark neighborhood and a willingness to wonder. I was digesting a bit of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, and it had stayed with me through evening’s pass – the sight of the stars, the early, wise writings of a monk.

Does the fact that we can no longer see the stars have anything to do with our loss of wonder? These things, the stars, and all creation – they are more splendid, perfect, beautiful and lasting than anything man can create or even conceive.

It seems like when we were more aware of milky ways and horizons, it was easier to believe. Could Joan of Arc have led her army, could she even have thought to, could she have trusted enough, without having a sense of something greater, bigger than herself?

We have obliterated the stars with our artificial light – but perhaps we’ve blinded ourselves, too. Without the wonder, the greatness of the galaxies in our sight, we’ve lost the ability to believe in, or expect, miracles.

When you cannot see the glory of God’s creation, how can you wish to glorify the Lord? No longer seeing anything greater than ourselves, we turn inward, we worship our own thoughts, our invention, our desire.

More good stuff at the link.  Love the Anchoress!