Paul vs. Apollos
I'm still doing liturgical eating (check the tag if you don't know what I mean) in a quiet way. Lent is a fairly easy time to do it because so many saint's days get suppressed. In order to have your day actually "make it" in Lent you have to be a fairly big deal. And fairly big deals also tend to have lots written about them, etc, which also makes it easier. So it's easy on several levels.
There are three saint's days this coming week and then none until April 8, not counting Sundays, Holy Week, or the octave of Easter. St. Cyril of Jerusalem Monday, St. Joseph Tuesday, and St. Turibio on Saturday.
St. Joseph and St. Turibio were both easy--for St. Joseph, there's tons of foods associated with his feast day; I'm probably going to do something with fava beans. And maybe buy some cream puffs. St. Turibio's patronage of Peru makes Peruvian food easy, and we have quinoa in the fridge, which I would like to try making into "quinoa atamalada", which is kind of like risotto. The catch is that a key ingredient is aji amarillo, a yellow hot pepper, which I have never seen for sale around here. Latin American food is probably the biggest hole in the Vancouver market, simply because there aren't that many Latin Americans in Vancouver. Very recently there's been a boom in it in the restaurant scene, but on the raw ingredient side of things it's still pretty slim pickings. If I can get to a Latin American market before Saturday I'll take a look, otherwise, I think I will just substitute another pepper mince.
Anyway, what I really wanted to write about, is that St. Cyril wasn't easy at all. As far as Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church go, he's fairly obscure, and doesn't have a lot of traditions or symbols. But one thing that was interesting, is reading some of the tensions, suspicions, and disagreements he had with contemporary saints. St. Jerome, for instance, was highly suspicious of him and believed him to have obtained his bishopric via fraudulent means. While some contemporary writers see his affirmation of the Nicene crede as expected and seamless, others frame it as a recantation/repentance of earlier wavering at the very edge of the Arian heresy (the hot issue of the day; Cyril's earlier writings are sometimes characterized as "semi-Arian"). According to several sources such as New Advent, he was a rather conciliatory/diplomatic guy who tended to just avoid difficult/controversial points.
He's a saint. And the guys who didn't like him, who pilloried him for cowardice, toadeating, crawling, etc, are also saints.
I think this sort of falls in line with a thread of thought that's been weaving around in my brain every since the conclave ended. It's the paradoxical both/and thread. If we can speak of a thread having facets without butchering the metaphor too far, one facet of this paradox is the phenomena of excellent Christians being in actual bitter opposition for years or all their lives and yet both be held up after death as saints. (Another example would be in the confusing years of popes and anti-popes--there are several saints who died believing down to the ground in the legitimacy of someone who was later ruled an anti-pope, while other saints championed the eventual true pope.) In some cases, one "side" is clearly wrong in hindsight, while in others the disagreement is on a matter of prudential judgment, and in others it's more of a personality clash--there are quite a few saints, from St. Paul on down, who left a wake of "who was that unpleasant man" comments wherever they went! (Bringing to mind Evelyn Waugh's famous riposte when asked how he could be so nasty and yet be Christian: "Madam, you have no idea how much nastier I would be if I weren't.")
Another facet was more prominently in my mind after the conclave, with regard to how reporting on the conclave almost without exception conceived of it like a modern democratic political election, with "parties", and with those parties necessarily "enemies". That is to say, for a cardinal to vote for a candidate who is different in any way from Benedict, is a "condemnation" of that aspect of Benedict, or a "win" for the "X faction" who "suffered" during the ascendancy of the (different and therefore enemy) "Y faction". People race to analyze every most minor gesture, every buzzword, every detail, and then invest them with enormous significance as signs of continuance or rupture from the previous pontificate.
Then the actual partisans, that is, people who DO conceive of themselves as belonging to a specific faction (eg Cardinal Mahony's infamous tweets), take these overblown and absurd conclusions from the tiniest details and use them to taunt the "losing" party, which, as is human nature, not infrequently takes the bait. (Sometimes it's the "losing" partisans who are taunting the "winners", in a combination of sour grapes, cynicism, and masochism, eg Rorate Caeli commenters.)
This is particularly noticeable in the liturgy wars (as my previous examples bear out). The new Pope doesn't chant--ok, obviously chanting is "out". This is a "win" for the anti-chanters (who are apparently now a thing?) and a stinging rebuke to the partisans of blah blah blah. (Never mind that the Pope only has one lung, not exactly a good thing for singing!)
When you step back for a minute and think about it from this larger perspective, it all becomes a bit absurd. It's not in the Church's nature to think that way. We are a Church that has Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and many, many more. We are a Church that encourages rosaries, Liturgy of the Hours, Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, lectio divina, and many more. It is a fact and a shame that in our human jealousies and competitions we often DO make all of these into mini-idols and put them into opposition with each other. But the paradox and the beauty is that the Church has a diversity which is not relativistic. We can't seem to grasp that. We either want to kick out the diversity or bring in the relativism.
Anyway I don't know if any of that made sense, but writing it has helped me work it out a little more for myself. I think part of what made me hesitant to attach to Pope Francis is that the media, even to some extent the Catholic media, keeps hyping on the differences in a way that seemed to say that to approve of Pope Francis is to disavow Pope Benedict. And of course I could never do that. I love Pope Benedict so much; who's this new guy to come between us? (LOL.)
I had to realize that I was getting unconsciously caught up in an assumption that, once seen for what it was, wouldn't stand up to the slightest challenge.
It reminds me of two quotes, one VERY obscure, which I will mention first, from I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, in which the psychiatrist and the mentally ill heroine are talking. The psychiatrist says "To praise one thing is not to damn another," and the heroine replies "Isn't it? Isn't being wrong courting death? [...] I was wrong a hundred times [but as long as that was due to my intrinsic inhumanity] I could still appear to be right. If I was wrong--even a little--then what was left?"
The second, hopefully not as obscure is from scripture, and shows that this is a very old problem: "While there is one that says, 'I belong to Paul' and another that says, 'I belong to Apollos' are you not being only too human? For what is Apollos and what is Paul? The servants through whom you came to believe, and each has only what the Lord has given him." 1 Corinthians 3:4-5
There are three saint's days this coming week and then none until April 8, not counting Sundays, Holy Week, or the octave of Easter. St. Cyril of Jerusalem Monday, St. Joseph Tuesday, and St. Turibio on Saturday.
St. Joseph and St. Turibio were both easy--for St. Joseph, there's tons of foods associated with his feast day; I'm probably going to do something with fava beans. And maybe buy some cream puffs. St. Turibio's patronage of Peru makes Peruvian food easy, and we have quinoa in the fridge, which I would like to try making into "quinoa atamalada", which is kind of like risotto. The catch is that a key ingredient is aji amarillo, a yellow hot pepper, which I have never seen for sale around here. Latin American food is probably the biggest hole in the Vancouver market, simply because there aren't that many Latin Americans in Vancouver. Very recently there's been a boom in it in the restaurant scene, but on the raw ingredient side of things it's still pretty slim pickings. If I can get to a Latin American market before Saturday I'll take a look, otherwise, I think I will just substitute another pepper mince.
Anyway, what I really wanted to write about, is that St. Cyril wasn't easy at all. As far as Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church go, he's fairly obscure, and doesn't have a lot of traditions or symbols. But one thing that was interesting, is reading some of the tensions, suspicions, and disagreements he had with contemporary saints. St. Jerome, for instance, was highly suspicious of him and believed him to have obtained his bishopric via fraudulent means. While some contemporary writers see his affirmation of the Nicene crede as expected and seamless, others frame it as a recantation/repentance of earlier wavering at the very edge of the Arian heresy (the hot issue of the day; Cyril's earlier writings are sometimes characterized as "semi-Arian"). According to several sources such as New Advent, he was a rather conciliatory/diplomatic guy who tended to just avoid difficult/controversial points.
He's a saint. And the guys who didn't like him, who pilloried him for cowardice, toadeating, crawling, etc, are also saints.
I think this sort of falls in line with a thread of thought that's been weaving around in my brain every since the conclave ended. It's the paradoxical both/and thread. If we can speak of a thread having facets without butchering the metaphor too far, one facet of this paradox is the phenomena of excellent Christians being in actual bitter opposition for years or all their lives and yet both be held up after death as saints. (Another example would be in the confusing years of popes and anti-popes--there are several saints who died believing down to the ground in the legitimacy of someone who was later ruled an anti-pope, while other saints championed the eventual true pope.) In some cases, one "side" is clearly wrong in hindsight, while in others the disagreement is on a matter of prudential judgment, and in others it's more of a personality clash--there are quite a few saints, from St. Paul on down, who left a wake of "who was that unpleasant man" comments wherever they went! (Bringing to mind Evelyn Waugh's famous riposte when asked how he could be so nasty and yet be Christian: "Madam, you have no idea how much nastier I would be if I weren't.")
Another facet was more prominently in my mind after the conclave, with regard to how reporting on the conclave almost without exception conceived of it like a modern democratic political election, with "parties", and with those parties necessarily "enemies". That is to say, for a cardinal to vote for a candidate who is different in any way from Benedict, is a "condemnation" of that aspect of Benedict, or a "win" for the "X faction" who "suffered" during the ascendancy of the (different and therefore enemy) "Y faction". People race to analyze every most minor gesture, every buzzword, every detail, and then invest them with enormous significance as signs of continuance or rupture from the previous pontificate.
Then the actual partisans, that is, people who DO conceive of themselves as belonging to a specific faction (eg Cardinal Mahony's infamous tweets), take these overblown and absurd conclusions from the tiniest details and use them to taunt the "losing" party, which, as is human nature, not infrequently takes the bait. (Sometimes it's the "losing" partisans who are taunting the "winners", in a combination of sour grapes, cynicism, and masochism, eg Rorate Caeli commenters.)
This is particularly noticeable in the liturgy wars (as my previous examples bear out). The new Pope doesn't chant--ok, obviously chanting is "out". This is a "win" for the anti-chanters (who are apparently now a thing?) and a stinging rebuke to the partisans of blah blah blah. (Never mind that the Pope only has one lung, not exactly a good thing for singing!)
When you step back for a minute and think about it from this larger perspective, it all becomes a bit absurd. It's not in the Church's nature to think that way. We are a Church that has Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and many, many more. We are a Church that encourages rosaries, Liturgy of the Hours, Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, lectio divina, and many more. It is a fact and a shame that in our human jealousies and competitions we often DO make all of these into mini-idols and put them into opposition with each other. But the paradox and the beauty is that the Church has a diversity which is not relativistic. We can't seem to grasp that. We either want to kick out the diversity or bring in the relativism.
Anyway I don't know if any of that made sense, but writing it has helped me work it out a little more for myself. I think part of what made me hesitant to attach to Pope Francis is that the media, even to some extent the Catholic media, keeps hyping on the differences in a way that seemed to say that to approve of Pope Francis is to disavow Pope Benedict. And of course I could never do that. I love Pope Benedict so much; who's this new guy to come between us? (LOL.)
I had to realize that I was getting unconsciously caught up in an assumption that, once seen for what it was, wouldn't stand up to the slightest challenge.
It reminds me of two quotes, one VERY obscure, which I will mention first, from I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, in which the psychiatrist and the mentally ill heroine are talking. The psychiatrist says "To praise one thing is not to damn another," and the heroine replies "Isn't it? Isn't being wrong courting death? [...] I was wrong a hundred times [but as long as that was due to my intrinsic inhumanity] I could still appear to be right. If I was wrong--even a little--then what was left?"
The second, hopefully not as obscure is from scripture, and shows that this is a very old problem: "While there is one that says, 'I belong to Paul' and another that says, 'I belong to Apollos' are you not being only too human? For what is Apollos and what is Paul? The servants through whom you came to believe, and each has only what the Lord has given him." 1 Corinthians 3:4-5