This is a scene from Tolkien's Catholic Worldview, hosted by Joseph Pearce and featuring Yours Truly as J.R.R. Tolkien and Theater of the Word Actor Al Marsh as C.S. Lewis.
The program was quite well received when it originally aired last spring. I am told it will air again on EWTN Friday, May 4 at 1:00 pm Eastern and Saturday, May 5 at 5:00 am Eastern.
Be sure to watch!
Here's a link to an article my friend Kevin Fraser sent me. I have been on the road and have just gotten around to reading it. It's about the media and the Catholic Ghetto. It's quite good. Some highlights ...
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The results of such efforts are, in Nicolosi’s words, “predictably amateur,” lacking either professional polish or, as in case of There Be Dragons, the basics of good storytelling. Much the same thing can be [said] of television, where there is little to no Catholic presence in prime time, and where cable television networks, such as EWTN, enjoy minimal viewership among both young Catholics and non-Catholics.
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"They want every film to be The Passion [of the Christ] and expect people to walk out of the theater converted,” Iocco told OSV. “But we’ve already had The Passion and the whole world hasn’t converted. Nor are they going to because of a film. That’s not what films do. A film is successful if it gets people to ask a question they might not have asked before.”
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To make the budget work, [Nicolosi] went on to explain, they hire people without the experience or the training to do the job — a move that Nicolosi characterizes as “simply crazy. You would never attempt to build a $20 million building and hire an architect who had never built a building. You would never go in for brain surgery and let someone operate on you who’d never performed surgery. But people think they can do that with movies,” she said.
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It was for that the reason that John Paul the Great Catholic University opened its doors in 2006. Focusing almost exclusively on communication arts and offering concentrations in fields such as screenwriting, producing, social media evangelization, animation, and gaming, the school is the first of its kind in the world of Catholic higher education.
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[My comment: in my opinion, the video projects that John Paul the Great University brags about and puts up on the internet illustrate the point of this article, but not in the way they intend to. They are a good first step, but they are a further example of what this article is about, and what I call the "Catholic Ghetto Mentality".]
Anyway, it's good to see Our Sunday Visitor do an article on this and focus attention on something we need to take seriously.
It has long been a teaching in the Catholic Faith, as well as something recognizable in natural philosophy, that there is only one Truth. There is not a truth for you and a truth for me; a truth for science and a truth for religion, a truth for Monday and a truth for Tuesday.
But the Church now teaches, with the authority of the Magisterium, according to D. C. Schindler in a brilliant essay on Pope Benedict's papal encyclical Deus Caritas Est, that there is only one love - that eros (passionate and affective love) and agape (disinterested love of neighbor) are really two aspects of the same thing - or really, two faces of the same God.
This cuts right to the heart of our troubled world today.
Schindler notes:
Allan Bloom describes the boredom, the self-protectiveness, the banality, the absence of a sense of mystery and adventure, and the general disenchantment, that characterize a “de-eroticized” world such as that of contemporary America.
Now hold on a minute, I can hear you saying. America is many things but it's certainly not "de-eroticized"! If anything, the erotic runs through every pore of our popular culture and tends to poison marriage and the family.
But this is a mistaken understanding of what eros is.
Eros is not "the erotic" in modern parlance. Eros in the tradition of Plato and others is a love that desires, and anyone who's been in love with anything - either a person or a thing or a vocation - knows that the desire of eros is a desire to possess the good and is at best marginally sexual. Indeed, lust, which is abandonment to sexual desire, is but an itch and the more you habitually scratch it, the more it itches. An itch you scratch has nothing really to do with a person you desire with love.
But the Puritans get this all wrong. Notice how this particular sedevacantist rad-trad condemns our Holy Father for daring to say that eros has value in our lives. He reads "eros" and thinks sex. He thinks Benedict is saying, "Sex and love of neighbor are the same thing!"
And while this misreading of Deus Caritas Est is laughable, it is the same kind of misreading Christopher West, anti-Puritan extraordinaire, falls into. As Paul Stilwell points out, West picks up a sermon by Fr. Cantalamessa on the unity of eros and agape and runs it into the ground. West, who opposes nothing more than Puritanism, like the Puritans, sees sex where he should be seeing love.
(Parenthetically, for those of you new to this, Christopher West and his defenders say that the Easter Candle is a phallic symbol which performs coitus with the baptismal waters at the Easter Vigil Mass - an interpretation that is supported by no theologian or Church Father in history; he claims that we should meditate on the Virgin Mother's voluptuous breasts; and he claims quite bluntly that the "spiritually mature" need not practice custody of the eyes, but may stare at naked ladies at will.)
But back to eros.
Schindler argues that the Holy Father makes a case for the unity of love in that "desire is not truly desire unless it is also generous, and generosity is not truly generous unless it is also filled with desire."
For more on this, see my post on the odd squeamishness about love and about approaching God in prayer that many devout Catholics have, entitled Love and Sex and Keeping your Mouth Shut. There has developed in this world a divorce between eros and agape, making eros into lust and making agape into something shifting and coy that is a condescending philanthropy on the one hand and Marty Haugen / David Haas gay guitar tunes played to distract us from the Eucharist on the other.
But when united, the two aspects of love bear fruit, with the union of this apparent paradox of love held together by the wisdom of the Church and by God's grace. For the Church teaches us that if we have lost our eros, we are not to find it in adultery or fornication or pornography - for these can not really fulfill the fullness of our eros. Likewise, she teaches that if we have lost our agape, we can not find it in empty "service projects" that teens use to mark time in order to get Confirmed (see also Schindler on how "selfless" love is really a very self-centered thing, once it is emasculated of its regard for the other).
This is why it's so important that West and his followers start getting things right - not only to correct the bizarre fruits his teaching is bearing, but also because West is engaging us on a crucially important subject.
Our problem is how to love - and how to love as God does. West seems to have set off on this course, he seems to have begun with the intention of addressing this central problem of our day, but he gets off track when he lets "the body" dominate his "Theology of the Body" or his gonads dominate his approach to eros. As St. Paul says, for some men their gods are their bellies; for others (I would add) their gods are a few inches lower.
For look at how God loves, look at what we are to imitate. Before you ever get to the New Testament, you learn that the God of the Jews LOVED, loved with a love of eros, a love of desire, a jealous love, a love that brooks no nonsense, a love of passion - a Passion that is only fully revealed at Calvary.
As Schindler points out, we can only speak of the desire of God for us by way of analogy, since strictly speaking God is ultimately sufficient in and of Himself and has no need to desire anything. But He shows us throughout Scripture, and throughout out daily lives if we let Him, the most powerful burning love, a love that wants us for Himself and wants us for our own sakes, a love that is everything St. Paul tells us love is in 1 Cor. 13 - and more, for it is indeed (as Christopher West says) the desire of the bridegroom for His beloved in Song of Songs and the desire of the bridegroom for His beloved at the End of Time, as articulated most clearly in the book of Revelations.
It is a love of agape and eros - for love is one; and our nature is to love both for the unselfconscious sake of the other and out of a desire for the other - a desire which is something far more profound than sex could ever be.
Paul Stilwell brings up a fascinating subject in his daily Lenten post on Christopher West.
He shows how West misunderstands a remarkable homily by Fr. Ramiero Cantalamessa entitled The Two Faces of Love - Eros and Agape, a homily which itself elaborates on a subject Pope Benedict XVI deals with in Deus Caritas Est: the relation between the gratuitous love of agape and the passionate and possessive love of eros.
In this blog I've struggled quite a bit with trying to express my own "eros", the eros of actors, which is a powerful and passionate love for our vocation and at the same time for the God Who calls us to our vocation. In fact, just before the Christopher West subject came up, I wrote The Problem of Love and Frozen Banana Stands, which dealt awkwardly with the perennial problem, how can we love?
For this is a problem, and as Fr. Cantalamessa points out, it's a problem that gets split in two. For the world (and for Christopher West), eros is reduced to lust. But in a similar but opposite error, for many in the Church, agape is reduced to good will.
Now we know what it looks like when people think that love is the same thing as sex (we see that every day), but what many of you who have normal friends may not know is what happens when people think love of God is the same thing as keeping your mouth shut.
My friend Noah Lett tells me of his frustration with devout Catholics who, for example, might have a child diagnosed with a terrible disease and they will pray "God's will be done". Noah says, "Yes, you must pray that, but you can't begin and end with that! Look at David! When God struck his son with illness, he fasted and prayed non-stop from the depths of his heart for the life of his son - and only after he knew that his son was dead, did he accept God's will and move on."
Noah continues, "If you don't pray for your son, if you don't plead with God from the depth of your soul to spare his life, who will?"
I knew a very devout Catholic woman who married a man who turned out to be mentally disturbed, and it was clear from looking at her that the marriage was wearing her down and wasting her away. Knowing her, there's no way she prayed, "God, why did you do this to me? Why did you let me marry this man? I was trying to do your will! How could you let this happen to me?"
Praying to God with that kind of affect, or from the heart, is a movement of eros. It is a hot love, not a cold one. It is the fury of Job, who loves God even in the midst of his suffering, but who will not keep his mouth shut (as his facile comforters suggest). Job will not keep his mouth shut precisely because of his very deep love for God.
And yet there seems to be, in devout Catholic circles, a kind of Quietism that presumes that we can't approach God with any heat or humidity - we must cool the heat of our hearts and dry the humidity of our tears before we dare approach Our Lord in prayer.
And it is this kind of phenomenon Fr. Cantalamessa adresses in his homily; but it is exactly this sort of thing that the Westians so utterly misconstrue. If Christopher West would focus on eros, and on the fullness of eros (which is much more than what he makes of it - mere sexual desire), he might be able to do some good.
Paul Stilwell at Spike is Best has vowed to make his Lenten Penance a daily post on Christopher West!
Such suffering is beyond human ken.
Two highlights so far - a distrubing look at where proto-Westianism took Eric Gill (not for the faint hearted), and a patient look at an infuriating subject, West's Apology for Pornography, in which Mr. Stilwell makes the admirable observation ...
Here's a question: Is it possible to keep talking about "the human body" without having to concede at some point (indeed, at some point very early on) that "the human body" must be this or that human body - in other words, the human body belonging to this or that particular person?
Stilwell also points out that the dignity of man resides in the Human Person, not merely in the Human Body - a point West obfuscates.
I know a lot of you want me to shut up about this. But of all the heterodoxies I've battled on this blog, I personally think this one is the most pernicious.
Why? Because ...
* Torture Defenders do not personally torture anyone.
* Lying Apologists are probably no more honest or dishonest in their everyday lives than Critics of Lying.
* But Westians are changing their behavior - to the detriment of their souls. For example, under the cover of a serious misreading of Bl. John Paul II, good and sincere and devout Catholic college kids are now openly obsessing about sex on campus and congratulating themselves for their spirutal maturity in doing so.
In my mind, panty raids are more spiritually mature than this.
West's mistaken theology has, it seems to me, done more harm than theological mistakes on torture or lying ever will.
The Protestant funeral was at an "African American" church in North St. Louis County. My wife and I were pretty much the only white people in attendance.
The service was astonishingly different from the Catholic Mass - and more improvised than anything.
The best way I can describe it is that even though we have Jesus physically present at the altar in our Masses, we approach Him in an indirect and round-about way. But these black worshippers, in a church where Jesus was not physically among them, went for Him directly and without a trace of reticence or self-consciousness.
The main sermon was by an eighty-year old woman, the pastor of the church, who was quite compelling and fascinating to listen to.
Oddly, though this was clearly a church in the "Bible Only" tradition, much of this lady's sermon had nothing to do with Scripture. For instance, she assured her listeners that at the Judgment Seat, Jesus will judge only Christians and will send all of them to heaven; also, she made sure we understood that there are several "crowns" that we could win in the afterlife, with the "crown of glory" going to all clergy. Of course, neither of these assertions has any Scriptural warrant whatsoever.
And yet this darling woman got the heart of it right.
I have never heard anyone speak about the two Great Commandments - Love God with all your Heart, Mind and Strength, and Love your Neighbor as Yourself - with more assurance and heartfelt sincerity.
And this was a wonderfully refreshing and good thing to see.
Let us remember that our Protestant brothers and sisters in Christ, though they are missing the fullness of the Sacraments and of Catholic teaching, nevertheless can sometimes get the heart of the matter more right than we do.
[Photo: Yours Truly as King Arthur and Jessica Franz as Guinevere in Kill-a-Lot]
After years of therapy and extensive soul searching, it appears as if the reason I got into show business was so that my mother would love me.
Now this makes little sense, because my mother, God rest her soul, certainly loved me.
But for whatever strange reason it seems I was unconvinced of this unless I could make her laugh.
"Your mother laughed at everything you ever said," my wife Karen has observed on numerous occasions.
She always adds: "That was her mistake."
And so Karen refuses to laugh at anything I say, and she usually manages to hold this line rather well.
So I'm married to a woman who never laughs at anything I say, while my mother laughed at everything I said, but not uncontrollably. And there's the rub! I knew on a deep subconscious level that I would never be happy as an actor or comedian - or for that matter as a man - unless and until I found a woman who would laugh uncontrollably at everything I ever said. (Sad but true).
And so, beginning at age five or so I would memorize long-play comedy records and recite them at recess to make the girls laugh. I remember quite clearly the principal of Trinity Lutheran Grade School coming over to the merry-go-round and listening to me recite all of Morey Amsterdam's Mixed Up Stories for Smart Kids. He asked if I would be willing to perform this at the school assembly, since apparently no kindergartner had ever memorized all of Morey Amsterdam's Mixed Up Stories for Smart Kids. I declined, but proceeded to enrapture my playmates every day with a different "mixed up story".
I still remember a sample from that comedy album - "Cinderella's step sisters used to make her sleep in the fireplace. She felt like a silly ash. The older step-sister went on a diet. Every day she ate nothing but coconuts and bananas, coconuts and bananas. She didn't lose any weight, but boy could she climb trees."
But back to the highlight of my career.
It happened on Thursday night last week at Summit Lake Winery in Holt's Summit, Missouri, where Maria Romine and I were performing my comedy murder mystery Kill-a-Lot ("King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table investigate Murder Medieval Style").
There was a cute young woman sitting at a table who not only laughed at everything I said, but laughed uncontrollably at everything I said. She was also sporting tattoos and wearing a very revealing top that was, in effect, almost no top at all.
This girl, then, had the three things I most desire in a woman: breasts and a sense of humor.
At any rate, I realized at that point that my career had peaked. I no longer had any deep hidden subconscious reason reason to be in show business, so from this point on, I can do it all for the glory of God. And to make a living. And because it's fun. And because it's my vocation.
But at least I've achieved the selfish and miserable and unexplainable thing that I had set out to achieve.
And now may the rest of my career begin!
[Above: Me as Lt. Columbo, who for some reason solves the mystery in Kill-a-Lot]
