Tag: Hambone

(v) – Two Conversions

Notes from a conversation with Hambone

I had two conversions.

1- I realized the Catholic Church is the true Church.

2- I realized that I am not important or essential.

  • Conversion 1 had to happen before conversion 2, otherwise I would despair. I am not important because I am united to God. Without that corollary, the world is a scary place.
  • Even when/if God calls us to be Saints, he will not fill us with a sense of importance. Joan of Arc didn’t wake up one day and say “I am important”. In her mind, God asked her for a favor and she had faith and obedience enough to follow. God provided for everything else.
  • Both conversions are important. The Catholic Church is the true Church and no one can be truly fulfilled until they order their lives to God through His Church. The realization that we are not important is itself important because it allows us to properly order our relationship to God once we are joined to Him through His Church.
  • Most evangelism focuses on #1- bringing people into the Church. This is important work. Less effort is spent on #2- which helps them understand their relationship with the world and with God.
  • Wanting for #2 is what drives people to cling desperately to political ideologies, sports teams, their own opinions and feelings. We have a natural human desire to be a part of something and to win. The proper fulfillment of these desires is to join the true Church, in the case of the former desire; and to trust in Christ’s ultimate victory, in the case of the latter desire.
  • This latter desire–to win–is difficult. My sports team can win all the time–winning teams are always the most popular teams. But how often does Christ win? It seems like he loses an awful lot, it seems like the Church is losing an awful lot. But we know that Christ wins in the end, Christ wins at the only moment it matters.
  • The former desire–to be a part of something–is easy. Supporting a sports team costs us nothing. Supporting a political position or cause costs nothing. We make no personal sacrifices by going to the street and saying “I think our tax rate should be different”. Being a part of the Church is hard. Not only because we are going to lose every time until the last time, but because Christ demands everything from us. Literally, everything. He tells a man who wanted to bury his father “Let the dead bury their dead”. In Acts, a man who withheld some of his money from a contribution to the Church and lied about it is smote, and his wife along with him. Christ demands nothing less than everything we have and everything we are.
  • What are we holding back?

No conversion is one and done. Both conversions must always and eternally be refreshed. I will wax and wane in my zeal for the Church, I will want very badly to feel important. It is the work of a lifetime to rein in these beliefs and yoke them to Christ.

AMDG

CCLX – Multitudes of One

Reader Max Leyf had a great comment that really popped my brain. You can tell it popped my brain when I think about it while reading other things. In this case, an article about Hypostatic Union. In order to help process complex ideas, I turn at times to my friend Hambone. Here is a lightly edited excerpt of our conversation:

Scoot: The idea of number being meaningless the way time is meaningless across the threshold of eternity–it strikes me as grokkable but I don’t grok it right now.

Hambone: OK Try this on for size: In the material world division is more definitive. Taken as a whole it’s much easier to look at a jar of marbles and say “there are 52 marbles in there”. But in the spiritual realm it’s all very obviously subcomponents of the divine and is more like an immense orb of liquified glass. That’s what I feel like he’s trying to say.

Scoot: Ahh, I like that. Like God created the universe but he didn’t create it outside of Him, it’s a part of Him, like an idea in His head rather than a construction from His hands. But God being God, his ideas are perfectly realized and so real.

Scoot: So within the material plane, number is a quantifiable thing because the material plane follows rules perfectly realized by God. But in the Spiritual plane, you transcend materiality and see creation as a perfectly realized idea. This would explain guardian angels too. A later commenter on the same article quoted JRR Tolkein saying that we are all motes suspended on a beam of light, and the light is God’s attention, but God’s attention personalized in the form of a guardian angel.

Scoot: Makes the hypostatic union make kinda sense too if you think of Christ as God entering his own perfectly realized idea.

Hambone: Yeah it’s kind of beautiful as a lens because it’s like the answer for “how many X are there in the spiritual realm” is “it is part of the One”–which by the way is where I think neo-platonists ended up.

We all construct logic in our heads to make sense of the spiritual reality and it looks a little funny when you take it out and show it to people. For me, a key aspect of my internal logic is the idea that the reflection of perfect is still complete, and that a perfectly formed idea is real.

The visual that put the first logical piece in my head is the idea of God looking into a mirror, and humans crawling out of it. God is perfect, so his reflection would be a fully realized person, with minor flaws because it’s reflected through an imperfect medium. When we say we are created in the “image of God” it’s like we climbed out of that mirror. This logic justifies an idea of perfection as being both incomprehensible and complete.

The origin of the second logical piece is from St Anselm’s proof of God, that (to badly paraphrase) an actual gun is more deadly than the idea of a gun, so an actual God must be more perfect than the idea of a God. It hints that the perfection of an idea just is the actual thing. If I imagine a gun, I could imagine the size, the shape, how it works, the color, the texture, the weight. If I could hold all those in my head, perfectly, it would seem real–and God can take the dimensions and the construction and every smallest detail and imagine them perfectly, so perfectly that it is a gun, not just an idea of a gun.

So the idea of creation being a thought of God is that God has the idea of the universe perfectly realized, the way he can realize a gun by imagining it perfectly. God’s perfect focus and attention manifests guardian angels, because the idea is perfect. The Hypostatic Union is God participating in His own idea of creation, as a perfectly realized idea of a man and also as Himself, in the same person.

Food for thought!

AMDG