Reading DEUS CARITAS EST (Part 2)

I'm back! It could take me years at this rate to read DEUS CARITAS EST but at least I'm plugging away. I have to admit it feels good to be working on something challenging. As a mom who spends the majority of her time building forts and reading children's books it's kind of nice to read something a little more academic. I can feel the neurons firing up right now. Sparks are flying! I have to just say that when you read something a bit challenging and especially something as important as the Pope's message to us, then it's a really good idea to break it into chunks. I read a lot of blogs written by people blessed with far more brains than myself and somehow they have managed to read the entire thing, internalize it, and pop out a review 24 hours ago. Sometimes in reading other blogger's reviews, I still have to keep the dictionary right next to me. Many of the Catholic blogs I read are challenging in and of themselves and I'll admit to feeling like a freshman who accidentally got placed into a graduate level class when I read them. If you ever start feeling like maybe God forgot a piece of the brain puzzle when he put you together then cry no more tears. You are not alone! I'm well convinced that if you were to swim around in the sea of theological terms that many of our fellow bloggers do daily you would probably also feel more at home with the wording of some of these encyclicals. However if you're like me your days consist of mudpies and magnets not philosohy and theology. It's ok if you feel out of your element. This is your faith. Fire up the neurons, grab your dictionary and don't get frustrated. Consider this to be that piece of pie you want to just savor one bite at a time.

I'm going to head back into the Encyclical (and I'm up to number 6. Don't you think they number it like that for people who have to take it in chunks? That's my guess! If you're reading this with me then go ahead and minimize dictionary.com. You know it's not going to be a few words in before we have to start using it!

6. In the last entry we discussed the fact that the kind of love modeled by Jesus will require us to purify ourselves aka get a serious scrubbing from the inside out! How can we experience the kind of love as defined by Jesus standards so that it takes us to that promise of eternal life? Well the Pope takes us over to Song of Songs well known as the Bible's own version of "erotica" if you will. He says this book is well known to the mystics. Now I've heard of the mystic tradition but I'm not sure I know what it is really. Mysticism defined means inspiring a sense of mystery and wonder. At this point you may want to open another window at www.newadvent.org because you will need it for pulling up Catholic terminology. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia at New Advent the mystic tradition is all about bringing us to a direct union of our soul with the Divinity. What is the Divinity? Well my understanding is that the Divinity is basically God. Mysticism would entail a study in and of itself to truly understand it but suffice it to say that the mystics seem to be trying to bring the soul and the Divine together through a method of contemplation (deep concentration) and prayer. Apparently the mystics of the Old Testament were really into Song of Songs.

Song of Songs is basically an Old Testament book (so it was all written pre-Jesus). It was meant as a love song for a Jewish wedding feast to glorify the idea of love in marriage. Now just so you know I've already looked up numerous words in the dictionary. Many of these words I already know the definition of but I looked them up anyway. For example I looked up "exalt", "conjugal", "divinity", and "ascent". So why would I look up words that I already know the meaning of? Well this is a trick of the trade and if you want to become the kind of reader who does more than just scratch the surface then you'll add this to your repertoire of reading skills. Words have lots of various meanings. Some of the differences are so subtle that you hardly wonder why they add another entry to the definition. Yet the one thing language is NOT is cut and dry. This is clear already from the Encyclical that Pope Benedict is writing to us right now. We have spent almost our entire time discussing the meaning of the word love AND we're about to do it some more! Words are more than their mere definitions. They are expressions of far greater thoughts and ideas. You could write an entire dissertation on the meaning of just one word. Why do you think communication can be so difficult even amongst people who speak the same language? If you want to grasp what you are reading then you need to taste the full flavor of a word's meaning. Read the definition and ponder it. You may find it gives your sentence more depth, even when you thought it was just a very simple word.

So here we go again....in the Song of Songs two different Hebrew words are used for love. Dodim which we are told refers to a love that is insecure or at least not fully formed. The second word used is ahaba. Ahaba is the Greek version of agape . If you remember agape means the kind of love modeled by Jesus. Let's just call that perfect love. Apparently in the Song of Songs text Ahaba replaces the word Dodim. Both mean love but as we have learned they mean very different levels of love.

The Pope writes ..." No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice."

Let's just go ahead and paraphrase that sentence to help us "get it". Here goes my elementary version of that sentence:

..."No longer is this love just about what that individual person wants. The selfish individual who wants that "happy feeling" the same way a drug addict craves another hit. This selfish person craves the feeling of happiness as a drug to feel on top of the world; Instead this higher kind of love forgets about their own selfish desires and instead actively looks for ways to help the person they dearly love: this love grows into a rejection of the person's previous selfish desires. This kind of love is ready and prepared for total surrender. "

This is just my own paraphrase. As you can see I took a sentence that was well written and concise and turned it into a long paragraph full of many words. My college English instructor would have called that being "verbose" or "wordy". Well what I did was turn a perfectly eloquent sentence into something very wordy. As someone who double majored in English as an undergrad I can tell you that this goes against all the good training you receive in writing. However, we are not talking about writing as a discipline right now. We are talking about reading for understanding.

When you write you do want to be descriptive and concise. The Pope's sentence was the perfect example of this. When you read however you may find that you need to dissect things in order to understand them. Paraphrasing is a method that is very useful for this. It is for your own personal benefit. Breaking it down into a possibly wordy, verbose paragraph is a good method for reading. It is certainly not the method you would use for writing.

Of course you may ask "But isn't this a blog---an act of writing in and of itself?" Well I will say this much. I have written countless essays and papers as a student. I have even tackled the Masters Thesis (though I have yet to take on a dissertation). That is an entirely different kind of writing. This blog, for me, is more of a series of thoughts set down in an almost conversational tone. If you were to sit down for coffee with me this is most likely exactly the way the conversation would go because this is how I think. Scary, I know (cringe)....Can you imagine being my husband who has to be subjected often enough to my ramblings!

At any rate, I hope that someone may stumble across the blog and realize that reading things like Encyclicals and other theological writings requires a lot of interaction. I focused my masters thesis on the use of metacognition as a means to reading for understanding. Research shows that reading is not a passive process, at least not if you want to understand what you're reading. As a convert who literally read herself OUT of the Baptist church and INTO the Catholic Church, I've discovered that a great many Catholics could benefit from a self education in the faith. The reason they shy away from it is because they don't want to feel stupid! They think to themselves "Yeah sure...I'm going to read some book written by a guy who has a PhD in Theology...that's just what I needed today---a swift reminder that he's smart and I'm not!"

I'm here to say that the majority of authors out there are not trying to make any of us feel stupid. However they do need us to actively participate in our reading endeavors. Authors need to take time in their writing to make it clear, interesting and informative. I am a firm believer in choosing the authors you read wisely. There are just too many good books out there these days to waste your time on a book that simply doesn't speak to you. However, you still have to interact with that book in your hands. You have to pick it apart like a fresh muffin chock full of blueberries. You have to pry it open like a little child looking for the sweetest part and then savoring it one chunk at a time.

Speaking of food....it's lunchtime and real life calls! I must put back on my apron and whip up something fabulous for the crew. Before I leave though I just want to reflect on what we read in the encyclical because that is after all the whole point to reading it in the first place!

We read today about people who want to feel that euphoric feeling of love. They seek happiness as if they are drug addicts who will go into withdrawal shakes without it. They aren't caring about what the person they are "in love" with needs or wants. They just need that "feeling". This we have learned poisons love and twists it. It is not at all the kind of perfect love that Jesus asks us to work towards.

I think this is the kind of thing we all need to just stop and reflect on ESPECIALLY if you're married. In fact I've got to tell you if I never read another word of this encyclical I have already learned something more valuable than gold. This applies to me right here, right now.

I'm an Army wife. For 10 years we've been shuffling all over the country every 2-3 years. Once we even moved after only being somewhere 18 months. Of course that place was Tampa. We lived minutes from Busch Gardens and close to the beach. We had it made in the shade. Naturally they yanked us from there almost as soon as we arrived yet we've been stationed in other places that were not our favorite destinations for 3 full years. Since we moved to our new location 5 months ago my husband's new job has become a total nightmare. He leaves the house at 4 am returning between 8 and 9 pm. Most weeks the kids don't see him at all because they're already asleep. Meanwhile I'm cooking,cleaning,homeschooling, diaper changing, bathing, reading bedtime stories, cleaning up bumps and bruises and wiping away the tears from children who want to know if Daddy will ever eat dinner with us again. I've got to tell you I've had a very bad attitude ever since we moved here. I can assure you that I'm just not "feeling the love" right now. There's nothing fuzzy going on around here. It's hard to feel euphoric about your beloved when he's never home or better yet when he does come home he's covered in camouflage paint from a field excercise, dumps all his field gear onto your newly mopped kitchen floor, heads for the bathroom with a sleepy grunt to the family then collapses on the couch into a coma. Repeat this every night after. When the weekend comes he is on staff duty. He works 24 hours, meets you at Church, and then goes back to the office. For the most part your conversations consist of "Hey I'm going to be late again" and "Have you washed any of my underwear?". My end of the conversation consists of "The baby had diarrhea" and "Yes I washed your underwear with the 3rd load of the day because two of the children have the flu, something is wrong with the water pipe, and we are out of milk again".. Oh can't you just feel the love?????

If you think for one second that either one of us (hubby or I) are feeling happiness in the form of an IV drip that takes us to pure Euphoria then let me set it straight. If I paid attention to what my feelings told me I"d have to say "Love has been cancelled this evening and been replaced by vomit,snot and a bad case of diarrhea"

The Pope is right. If you're addicted to the feeling of the love drug then you've got a bad case of "Dodim". If on the other hand through all of the vomit, diarrhea, runny noses and sleepless nights you can find your way to care more for the other person than you do for yourself then you may have the right to actually call your love Ahaba or Agape. I think Papa Benedict must have been talking directly to me. It's time I start thinking more about my husband and how tough it is on him to work all those hours than complaining to myself about how lonely this life can be. I'd rather love like Jesus than a druggie looking for her next hit.