World Youth Day: Godzdogz Goes to Madrid

Every three years, young Catholics from all over the world, converge in a city to celebrate their faith with the Holy Father and with one another. The Friars of the English Province will be leading a group of fifty pilgrims to Madrid this evening. En route to Madrid, we will take in Toulouse, where St Thomas Aquinas is buried, the famous Benedictine monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, Caleruega, where St Dominic was born, and Valladolid.



Godzdogz will be providing regular updates and insights into our pilgrimage(internet access allowing). We hope to post videos and audio clips from our journey and from Madrid itself. You can also follow us on Twitter.

Biblical Beasts: Moth

Death's Head Moth

Moths are far less romantic than their flamboyant cousins the butterflies. They seem to prefer the twilight zones to bright sunshine and usually make their presence felt by eating our clothes. Not surprisingly they get a bad press in the Bible. The best known text in which they appear is Matthew 6:19-20 (see also Luke 12:33) which contrasts earthly with heavenly treasure. Earthly treasure is destroyed by rust and moth, heavenly treasure is secure from such things. You should lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, says Jesus, a treasure that will last.

The consuming power of the moth is mentioned in many Old Testament texts including some of those already mentioned in our earlier post on the insect (some translations read 'moth' where others have the more generic 'insect'). Sometimes another destroying agent is mentioned as a partner in crime with the moth: rust, worms, or dry rot (see Isaiah 50:9; 51:8; Job 13:28; James 5:2). The moth gets a mention in a complaint of Job (27:13ff) as he struggles with the fact that his experience contradicts any easy alliance of good with prosperity and evil with misfortune. The text, however, seems corrupt (Job 27:18) for it might refer to the house a spider makes (easily destroyed) or to the house a moth builds (i.e. in somebody's clothing).

Psalm 39 chillingly describes God as a moth devouring all that a person has come to treasure: it seems clear that it belongs with Job 27 as a lament of the good person at the misfortunes of life. Such wisdom teaching constitutes the background to Jesus' teaching about the two kinds of treasure.

Silk Moth

It is difficult to warm to the moth. As a nocturnal creature it is associated with hidden or secret knowledge. It belongs to the realm of the moon and so sometimes appears with bats, owls, and other creatures of the night. The 'Death's Head Moth' is an obvious candidate to star as one of the terrors of the night. The silk moth on the other hand, when still a larva or caterpillar, is of great economic significance since it is the world's primary producer of silk. Its capacity to do so is attributable to the human beings who first domesticated and bred the silk worm, in China, more than 5000 years ago.

Saints this Month - 8 August, St Dominic

18 months ago, my 10 year old nephew and godson, Leo, said to me that he wanted to choose St Dominic as his patron for his Confirmation. He asked me to write a short account of St Dominic’s life. I included the following section which I think bears reproduction (slightly adapted) here.

Dominic’s Personality and Gifts

Dominic was of middling height and slender build. His face was ruddy and his hair and beard had a reddish colour. His eyes were striking and he was said to have a beautiful face, and one that seemed to give off a certain light. He was intelligent but sensitive, usually cheerful except when moved, as quite often, to tears by people’s suffering. He was known as a man of humility and purity, of prayer and penance, and of deep compassionate love. He was very disciplined with himself but merciful with others. He was noted for his peace and joy. He had great patience and courage. He made good friendships with both men and women, and was good company to be with.

He was generous, putting God and others before his own needs or wants. He loved Jesus and the Gospel, always carrying some of the Bible (Matthew’s Gospel and Paul’s letters) with him. He had a passion to help people know and love Jesus and so ‘save their souls’. He had great energy and commitment to the work of Jesus. When he preached he often moved people to tears as well as explaining the truth of Jesus well. His life and conversation were so God-centred that it was said that he only ever talked to God or about God – yet he seems to have done this in ways that were warm and human and attractive.

He was a good leader and a good organiser and good at making sensible laws to organise communities. He trusted others and gave them freedom and opportunities and encouragement to develop and use their gifts. In these ways he showed himself a true spiritual father. He was also wise and diplomatic. He saw clearly the needs of people in his time and what the church needed to do and set about bringing this about. In all this he was very open to being led by the Holy Spirit.

St Dominic, pray for us. May we be filled with your virtues, your values and your vision and so be vessels that God can use to reach others with the Gospel of Jesus today. Amen.

Transfiguration

In chapter 15 of Matthew's Gospel, Jesus withdraws from the crowds into the region of Tyre and Sidon so that he might teach his disciples without distraction. In Chapter 16 the penny drops for Peter: 'You are the Christ' he tells Jesus, 'the Son of the living God'. Yet he immediately demonstrates his lack of understanding when he protests against Jesus' warnings that the Christ must suffer. Now in chapter 17, the Transfiguration, Jesus offers Peter, James, and John a private tutorial. These apostles were shown a glimpse of their final end, the glory that they will share in through Christ if they persevere through the trauma and desolation of the cross. At the same time Jesus showed them the means or way to this final end, that is, the body of Christ.

We can read the entire episode of the Transfiguration, then, as a peculiarly explicit kind of holy teaching. Jesus' choice of a mountain as the scene is meant to remind the apostles of the revelations received on the mountain by Moses and Elijah. Moses and Elijah suffered enormously in their struggles to implement and embody the revelations that they received. Here, then, we have a hint of the struggles that Jesus will face. At the same time, the presence of Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus at the Transfiguration shows the continuity between the law, the prophets, and Christ. Jesus fulfills the law, he does not replace it.

Just as Moses' face shone after his encounter with God on the mountain (Exodus 33-34), so at the Transfiguration Jesus' entire body is radiant with the light of his soul and of his divine nature. Peter grasps that this divine light is not simply a reflection, but that it somehow comes from within Jesus. He proposes to build three tents so as to more appropriately 'tabernacle' this divine presence, just as the Tent of Meeting housed the Ark of the Covenant during Israel's sojourn in the desert. Peter, like Mary Magdalene in the Garden (John 20:11-18), wants to cling to this moment in God's presence. He has not yet understood that Jesus must undergo the cross before his glory can be fully revealed. It is easy to sympathise with Peter in this instance: we too only really grasp the power and meaning of the resurrection when we have fully embraced our cross.

The voice of God coming from the cloud that so terrifies the disciples again emphasises the presence of God in this encounter. The voice repeats what was said at Jesus' baptism: 'This is my beloved Son, listen to Him'. Jesus is reconsecrated and reconfirmed in his redemptive mission. In the context, then, of Jesus' final journey to Jerusalem, the Transfiguration acts as a balance to all the passion predictions and calls to follow Jesus into the suffering of the cross. It represents a preview of the glory of the resurrection, a resurrection that we share with Christ if we die with Christ.

Biblical Beasts: Leviathan

The first question I suspect many people will have about a leviathan is, 'What is it?' There is, it must be said, no simple answer to this question. The earliest translation of the Old Testament, the Greek Septuagint, calls it a dragon or serpent, while the Latin Vulgate sometimes follows the Greek, and sometimes leaves the Hebrew name, Leviathan. This was the approach adopted by the translators of the King James version of the Bible, which, with its huge influence on the English language, has given us the word Leviathan.

Photograph by Gianfranco Lanzetti

This doesn't get us an awful lot closer to understanding what one is though. Modern scholars have suggested it might be a crocodile, or perhaps a whale, but in fact we can see a certain significance in leaving the name untranslated. It represents something more than an ordinary animal, since it is clear from the mention of Leviathan in Isaiah 27:1 that this animal has some kind of apocalyptic significance. We could perhaps identify it, for example, with the dragon which features so prominently in the book of Revelation.

In any case, the Leviathan does seem to be some kind of sea creature or, as we might say, sea monster, and this perhaps gives us the most useful key to understanding its significance. In some ancient Near Eastern creation myths, the creation of the world was the result of a battle of the creator god with an ancient and powerful sea monster: it symbolised a power opposed to that of the creator. In the Psalms, though, the Psalmist sings to God of the Leviathan as 'the monster you made to play with' (Psalm 103:26). For the Lord, creation was not the result of some cosmic struggle, but a completely free act of love: thus everything in the world is the object of his delight, even sea monsters, or crocodiles, or, in short, Leviathan.

Thinking Faith and the Grand Design

Last week Brother Robert Verrill attended the Thinking Faith week at Boarbank Hall and he gave a talk about Stephen Hawking’s latest book ‘the Grand Design.’ Here is a summary of his talk.

Stephen Hawking’s latest book ‘The Grand Design’ has the subtitle ‘New answers to the ultimate questions of life,’ and Hawking clearly has in his sights those of us who find meaning in life by turning to God. Whilst being a physicist doesn’t guarantee that Hawking has anything particularly insightful to say about theology, it is still worthwhile listening to the theological concerns of someone like Hawking because it can give us an opportunity to think more deeply about our own beliefs.

Hawking devotes a considerable amount of effort to debunking a concept of God traditionally known as the God of the Gaps, which is just as well, because this is not the traditional Christian concept of God anyway. It shouldn’t be of any great concern to Christians if physicists can give a scientific account of why the physical constants of the universe appear to be so finely tuned for life to evolve. Invoking God to explain this fine tuning is bad theology and such explanations are liable to lead to the idea that once God set everything in motion, he no longer had anything to do with the universe. So we have some common ground here – neither Stephen Hawking nor I believe in the God of the Gaps.

But the big problem for Stephen Hawking is that his basic philosophical outlook means that the God the Gaps is the only concept of God that he can comprehend. He is unable to consider God as the ever-present cause of being. He refers to his own philosophical outlook as model dependent realism. This is how he explains it:

[Model-dependent realism] is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth.

Earlier on in the book Hawking claims that philosophy is dead and so he sees no alternative to his concept of reality which is only concerned with those ideas which can explain particular physical phenomena. Hawking is clearly heavily influenced by the philosophical tradition of Descartes who called into question everything conceivable – the only thing Descartes was sure of was that he thought, hence the famous saying ‘I think, therefore I am'. And so like Descartes, Hawking struggles to come to terms with a reality that doesn’t depend on the way he thinks about it.

But Descartes' is not the only philosophical tradition one can choose from. Aristotle doesn’t start his philosophical endeavour from a position of extreme scepticism, but takes the more common sense approach that we live in a real world of real causes and effects and all our knowledge comes to us through our senses. This is the philosophical starting point many Christians have followed. Hawking does have a go at challenging this common sense view. He uses the example of a fish in a goldfish bowl: what appears to be a straight line to us outside the goldfish bowl would appear curved to the fish. Hawking’s claim is that we are like that fish – our senses are so distorted that they don’t give us any reliable information about reality. However, this is not a particularly good example because although the world is distorted to the fish, it is not so distorted that causes and effects in the world can no longer be correctly apprehended.

Hawking tries to prove the inadequacy of our senses by using examples from modern physics, but these arguments are unconvincing because one needs first to accept his idea of model dependent realism beforehand. Despite the great value of mathematical models in their ability to make predictions, making such predictability the only measure of reality is not the kind of philosophical outlook that many people can honestly embrace. It certainly isn’t a philosophy that provides new answers to the ultimate questions of life.

Biblical Beasts: Kid

There are a surprising number of ways in which kids are used in the Old Testament. You’ve probably all heard of the Passover lamb, but in fact it was also permissible to eat a kid at the Passover. Kids could also be used for burnt offerings, fellowship offerings, and sin offerings.

Amongst the more morally dubious uses for a kid was Jacob’s deception of his blind father Isaac by wearing the skins of kids so that he could receive the blessing that was meant for his brother Esau. Then there’s the rather bizarre story of Judah offering a kid as payment to a prostitute who happened to be his daughter-in-law Tamar. But the really big no-no when it comes to the use of a kid is cooking a kid in its mother’s milk. From this prohibition comes the restriction on Koshar food of not eating meat with dairy products.





It is not entirely clear why there should be such a restriction, but one interesting theory is the claim that an essential part of Judaism was a desire for clear separation and the abhorrence for mixtures. In Hebrew, the word for separation, kadosh, also means holy, and so practices such as not eating a kid in its mother’s milk could be symbolic of Israel’s call to holiness. It’s understandable why this particular combination might be objectionable to Jews. The kid once it had been drained of its blood in preparation to be cooked was very definitely dead, whereas milk was given to a kid to give it life. This was unacceptable to a holy people who were aware of the sharpest separation that existed on God’s earth between the realm of the living and the domain of the dead. But equally we can see why this prohibition should have been lifted under Christianity, for the separation between death and life has now been overcome by Christ’s Passion - holiness is no longer about separation, but about being united in Christ.