Trinity Sunday

As you can guess from the name of this Sunday we honor the Trinity this weekend. Since the season of Easter ended last week we no longer begin in Acts, but turn back to the Old Testament for the first reading. This week we begin in Deuteronomy, which is a second telling of the law, Moses has many speeches and today we hear one, Moses says to the people Ask throughout the ages has anything like this (escape from Egypt, God choosing a people) happen before. Moses then says that “This is why you must know and fix in your heart that the Lord is God of the heavens above and the earth below and there is no other.” Later in Deuteronomy we hear the Shema (Hear, O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is one) which sums up this idea rather quickly. The Lord is one and there is nothing above him.

As we turn to the letter of Paul to the Romans, we shift gears and are talking about the spirit. Paul tells us those who are led by the Spirit of the Lord are children of God. So that we may all cry out “Abba Father!” The last line I think is the most important the Spirit bears witness to our spirit that we are children of God and therefore heirs like Christ if only we suffer with him so that we will be glorified with Christ. Through the Spirit we know that we have to suffer to gain the joys of the kingdom.

Finally we reach the Gospel and it’s Matthew’s commissioning of the apostles/disciples. Jesus told the disciples to meet him on a mountain in Galilee. When they got there Jesus approached and says “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Jesus tells the disciples to teach all people about him. This is the Trinity; Father, Son and Spirit. All to often we forget about the triune nature of God, and just focus on one aspect of the trinity. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says “If you think of the Father as something ‘out there’, in front of you, and of the Son as someone standing at your side, helping you to pray, trying to turn you into another son, then you have to think of the third Person as something inside you, or behind you.” I hope that we can all recognize the trinity working in our lives this week.

News Roundup

It is that time of the week once again, a smattering of news time.

Religion– Pope Francis released his Apostolic Exhoration on The New Evangelization and it is long (about 90 pages) and thorough (with over 200 end notes). Please expect my overview of it some time next week. As I started reading it today.

Pope Francis is going to be canonizing Peter Faber, co-founder of the Jesuit Order, sometime in December. So soon all the founders of the Jesuits will be saints. Faber was well regarded and after his death some including Francis de Sales always spoke of Faber as a saint. Pope Francis spoke highly of Faber in his big Interview earlier this year.

Over in England on November 22 they also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis. His death was overshadowed by some president. So in honor Lewis there was place a memorial stone in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. On his stone is inscribed a quote from one of his theological lectures “I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen. Not only because I can see it but because by it I can see everything else.”

Movies– The are reports that there will be a J.R.R. Tolkien biopic. This seems like a cool idea for a movie as his works are still very popular. Tolkien is considered by some to be the father of modern fantasy literature specifically high fantasy. It would be an interesting film since I know that Tolkien was fiercely Catholic and it seems like religion would play a big role in the film but religions don’t seem to be featured in most movies today.

In other news it seems like the news about a sequel to It’s a Wonderful Life was all just a smoke as Paramount has stated that as owners of the original film no one has contacted them about making a new film nor would they grant permission to them to make the film.

Science– Scientist have discovered a second Planetary system(KOi-351) just like ours, it contains seven exoplanets (5 rocky and 2 gas). It is a very compact also as the whole system is under 1 au (distance from Earth to Sun) from its sun. I hope that these exoplanets and the exploration for Earth like worlds gets covered in the new Cosmos that is coming in March on Fox.

Related articles

• Pope expected to proclaim sainthood of Jesuit companion of St Ignatius (catholicherald.co.uk)
• J.R.R. Tolkien to get a biopic (examiner.com)
• J.R.R. Tolkien biopic in works, but will it explore author’s Catholicism? (examiner.com)

Love in society

So this past weekend I re-watched all of The Matrix movies. I couldn’t believe that it has been about ten years since the film series concluded. It has been awhile since I last saw them all and was surprised to see how much of it is about love. In the first two movies two main characters are brought back to life just because of love and then in the third there is a whole treatises on the idea of love, it is not the word itself but what is behind the word, basically what we do for love that makes love what it is. Paul Martin wrote up a nice piece on Love in The Matrix. This leads anyone to the big question in society what is love. Sure the term is used so much in society today that it has lost some of the panache that it used to have. When did this broadening of love happen, it seem we can no longer just like things. Could the real culprit in this like/love debate really be the word “like”. Like is that rare word that is used in like everything, it functions as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, particle, conjunction, hedge, filler, and quotative. Sure this may be a reason but it is most likely also due to the fact that love is so much stronger than like. However even with love there are different ways for it to function, the ancient Greeks had four types of love, storge (family), philia (friendship), eros (romantic) and agape (divine) but I’ve never heard or read of Plato or Euripides writing about how they love mashed beans or spankopita.

In some religions we are told to that God is Love. C.S. Lewis explores the concept of love through this lens in his book The Four Loves and came to the realization that there are two type of love need-love (child to mother) and gift-love (God to humanity) from here he categorizes love like the Greeks into four categories affection, friendship, romance and charity and Lewis say that none is more important than any other and these categories build on each other, He also offers a warning that even “love can become corrupt by presuming itself to be what it is not”. In the Abrahamic religions (Christianity and Judaism for sure) they are taught to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and love our neighbor as ourselves. In Hinduism they teach that love is a sacrament and one gives expecting nothing in return. Buddhism on the other hand is more about compassion, mercy and benevolence they say that kama or sensuous love is an obstacle to enlightenment and a selfish act.

Now how can we reconcile these varying differences in love, CS Lewis and the Greeks categories are very similar. One of the famous quote from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable and says to love another person is to see the face of God, I guess this is like how many religions see love it is a way to God through self-sacrifice, compassion and caring. I see one of the major problems that we face when tackling the subject of love is that people always end up thinking about love in the carnal sense, as the classic Salt-N-Pepa song goes “Let’s talk about sex” this may be due to the hypersexualized culture that we live in.