Serendipitous Synthesis

Anthony here again. I've been preparing for a Tolkien class that I hope to teach this summer (need a few more kids to sign up yet). At the same time, I've been talking about evolution. And I've been running a creative writing club at work. All of these things suddenly collided in my mind today in a surprising and kind of awesome way.

In my writing club yesterday I was trying to explain to the kids that to make their writing satisfying they need to make sure everything that happens in the story has an explanation within the world of the story. If, for instance, the author needs a character to do something for the plot, that character has to have his own reasons for doing it that make sense to him. Otherwise the reader will feel like the author is cheating, imposing his will from without, and the character ceases to seem like a real character with his own desires, motivations, and free will but instead is only a marionette manipulated by the author.

In the evolution post I wrote yesterday, I talked about how God’s causality is different from natural causality, and a mistake that both atheists and some religious people make is to assume that if a process like evolution is completely natural God had nothing to do with it. Actually God underlies the entire natural order and makes it what it is. It relies on him at every moment for its very existence. So we should expect a natural process to be explicable entirely in terms of natural cause and effect, even though the natural order itself requires something outside of it to explain it.

It stuck me that this is basically the same sort of thing that I had been talking about when I had said that elements in a story need to be explainable within the story itself. Even though the story is created by an outside author, everything within the story must make sense in terms of its own series of internal causes and effects.

And that made me think of Tolkien’s philosophy of subcreation. Tolkien believed that our ability to create stories is one way that we are made in the image of God. As God created the world, so we are able to sub-create our own imaginative worlds. By making stories we are, in our lesser, analogous way, mimicking what God did when he created the universe. We have something like the immanent yet transcendent relationship to our creations that God does with his.

All those things hit me at once today, and suddenly I got God’s relationship to his creation in a way I hadn't before. I’d already understood these things intellectually, but now it went home on some deeper, more fundamental level. I understood God’s complete independence of creation, and how far above it he is. And yet I also understood his love of it and his intimate involvement with it. And I understood creation’s complete dependence on God, and how much creation glorifies its Creator in its beauty and perfection. And I was amazed in a new way at the knowledge that God entered into his story – his-story – and become one of the characters, so to speak, bounded by his own creation of natural cause and effect. The author stepped into his work.

I’m doing a poor job putting into words what hit me in one wordless moment. But I love it when disparate things suddenly come together and give you a moment of understanding that is greater than you could get from any of the things alone. I haven’t had a moment like that since my undergrad, when I was studying C.S. Lewis and Thomas Aquinas and Big Bang cosmology all at the same time.

Evolution: It Doesn't Matter

Anthony here with another long post, this time about a hot topic: evolution.

We all know how it goes. Protestants thump their Bibles and declare that evolution isn't in scripture. Atheists thump their biology textbooks and declare that scripture isn't scientific. “Faith!” screams one side, and “Science!” screams the other. And so it seems to most of the world that faith and science are opposed, and you have to pick a side. And good protestants take their kids on field trips to the Creation Museum, and good atheists insist their kids watch Cosmos, and the debate gets more and more shrill.

Ham and Nye

Where do Catholics fall in all this? Most Catholics take one of two rather worrying paths. Liberal Catholics embrace evolution because then they can talk about Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” and how God is evolving along with us and ignore traditional doctrine. Conservative Catholics reject evolution because it seems to lead to either that nonsense or to atheism, and so they follow the protestants. Homeschooled Catholic children read protestant science textbooks, and they visit the Creation Museum too.

But some interesting facts are obscured in all this. One is that the Big Bang theory, supposedly a bastion of atheism, was first posited by a Catholic priest.

Bang, baby.

Another is that St. Thomas Aquinas intriguingly wrote, “[S]pecies, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning” (Summa Theologica, I.73.1 reply 3). Species coming into being through natural causes? That sounds suspiciously like something near to evolution, from the pen of the man who is most famous for his proofs of the existence of God.

So what’s going on here?

Let’s first of all look at the common atheist refrain: “Evolution is true, so God doesn't exist.” Can you spot the problem with it? Here’s a hint: if you said, “The problem is that evolution is not true,” you’re making the same mistake many religious people make. You’re attacking the wrong premise.

Let’s break the atheist claim down into a syllogism:

           Evolution is true.           
Therefore, God does not exist.

Something is missing here. We only have one premise before the conclusion, and we need at least two. But we do have a second premise; it’s just implied. Let’s re-write the syllogism using that premise as well:

If evolution is true, God does not exist.

           Evolution is true.           

Therefore, God does not exist.

This is a lot clearer, isn't it? Now we can see the problem. Protestants try to disprove the conclusion by saying that the second premise isn't true. But that grants the first premise to the atheists. And in fact it is that first premise that is the problem.

What does evolution have to do with God? Atheists say evolution gets rid of the need for a Creator, since we can see how one species evolved to the next and how the universe developed. Protestants say that evolution contradicts Genesis, which states that God created the universe over a period of six days.

Both of them are misunderstanding what creation actually means.

In his commentary on Genesis, Thomas Aquinas talks about the order of creation and at the same time gives us an explanation of how to read the Bible:

“For certain things are per se the substance of the Faith, as that God is three and one, and other things of this kind, in which no one is authorized to think otherwise. . . . But certain things [pertain to the faith] only incidentally [per accidens] . . . and these things can without danger remain unknown by those who are not held to be knowledgeable about the Scriptures, for example, many items of history. In these things even the Fathers have thought differently and have explained the Scriptures in different ways."

Aquinas is saying that what the Bible teaches can be divided into things that are of primary or doctrinal importance, like the Trinity, and other things, like history and science, that are only incidental to the faith and that the Bible is not concerned with teaching. This contradicts a protestant reading, which sees every line of the Bible as having equal weight and being true in a literal sense (though, strangely, their literal understanding of scripture breaks down at John 6 – but that’s a post for another time). Aquinas is basically saying that the Bible is not a science book. Your faith will not be affected if you don’t understand the order of creation, but it will be affected if you reject the fact that the world was created.

This is important. It means that, though the literal meaning is always the first meaning to look for, the Bible is allowed to operate on other levels. It does not rule out metaphorical or symbolic speaking, as, for instance, when Psalm 103 says that God "makest the clouds thy chariot: who walkest upon the wings of the winds." He’s obviously not doing that literally.

God's daily cloud chariot ride

And it frees the Bible from trying to be not only a source of religious truth but also a science book, a history book, and so on. This is important because while the New Testament is a straightforward historical text, the Old Testament can be weird, man, weird. It’s a collection of myths – not in the sense of being untrue, but in the sense of a story that tells important truths but is not an exacting and rigorous historical document that is literally factual down to its tiniest incidental details. It's stories the Hebrews told to make sense of things -- real things -- that they experienced. So the Old Testament is always attributing ideas and motivations to God that can't be literally true. For instance, does anyone (except radical Calvinists, of whom I have met one) really believe that God hardened the Pharaoh's heart and then punished him for it, as it says in Exodus?

And what about Exodus 32:14, which says, "And the Lord was appeased from doing the evil which he had spoken against his people?" God can neither do evil, nor change his mind. Taking every jot of the Old Testament literally can lead you to some very strange places. This doesn't mean that you can interpret everything in the Old Testament as being nonfactual if you don't like it (or if it doesn't fit with the prevailing political theory of the day), or say, "Oh, those Hebrews, how quaint." It just means that not everything in the Bible is a statement of doctrine.

Aquinas goes on,

"So, therefore, with regard to the beginning of the world, there is something which pertains to the substance of the Faith, namely, that the world was created to begin with. And this all the Fathers agree in saying. But how and in what order it was made does not pertain to the Faith except per accidens, inasmuch as it is presented in Scripture, the truth of which the Fathers retained in their varying explanations as they arrived at different conclusions.”

He's saying that Augustine and the other Fathers differ in how they interpret the order of creation. Most Fathers interpret it literally, but Augustine thought that the order set forth in Genesis wasn't an order in time but a grouping of categories. Things that are more fundamental are mentioned first, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were created first in time. That's a radically different reading than the literal sense, but Aquinas likes it. He goes on to write that the other Fathers' interpretation of the order of creation as a chronological sequence of events is “seemingly more in keeping with the surface of the literal sense.” But Augustine's opinion that the order in Genesis is not chronological “is more reasonable and defends Sacred Scripture more from the derision of non-believers, a factor which Augustine, in his Letter of Genesis (bk. I, ch. 19) teaches us is to be kept well in mind, so that the Scriptures may be expounded in such a way that they not be mocked by nonbelievers. This opinion pleases me more.”

So you see, while the Fathers agreed on the fact of creation, they disagreed as to the order, and Aquinas did not see a problem with this. The fact of creation belongs to doctrine. The order does not.

Actually, Augustine didn't think the day of creation were literal; rather, creation happened in a single instant, and the "days" of creation represented the understanding of creation as it was revealed to the angels (I can't help but think of Tolkien's Ainulindalë when I read this interpretation). Aquinas thought that a process of creation taking six 24-hour days was probably true (though he had no problem with interpreting it as longer spans of time, or in a different order) but he also believed that Augustine’s emphasis on creation being accomplished all at once was correct.

Wait. On the one hand we have creation as a process over time. On the other hand we have creation being accomplished all at once. Don’t those contradict?

No, because we aren't using the word in the same way for each.

This brings us to the heart of the matter: what is actually meant by creation.

Aquinas makes this point: “Creatio non est mutatio.” Creation is not a change.

Creation is not the kind of cause and effect we see in nature, which is always a change from one thing to another. It’s not a tree creating acorns, or humans making other humans. It’s not a potter changing clay into a pot, or an artist painting a portrait, or a novelist writing a novel.

Change. Not creation.

Even though we use the word “creation” for these things, we use the word only analogously; they are not the same kind of thing as the creation of the universe by God. The creation of the universe is creation “ex nihilo,” from nothing. It is not a change from one thing to another, but a completely different, completely radical kind of causation.

For clarity, from here on I will refer to the everyday, natural kind of creation (making something new out of something that already exists) with a little “c,” and God’s radical causation of the universe (creation from nothing) with a big “C.”

Aquinas believed that even if what we might call the Genesis “process of creation” took time – whether that time was is six days or 13 billion years – still Creation itself, as the radical causation of the universe from nothing, was an all-at-once deal. But even that language is deceiving. “All at once” doesn’t mean “at a moment in time.” For one thing, Creation also creates time itself. And so Creation is not simply a moment in time at the beginning of everything. Rather, everything that is created is dependent at every moment (and even the moments themselves are dependent) upon God for its existence. Creation properly defined is the radical dependence of all things upon God for their very being.

Augustine in The Literal Meaning of Genesis writes:

“In the first instance God made everything together without any moments of time intervening, but now he works within the course of time, by which we see the stars move from their rising to their setting, the weather change from summer to winter . . . For the power and might of the Creator, who rules and embraces all, makes every creature abide; and if this power ever ceased to govern creatures, their essences would pass away and all nature would perish. When a builder puts up a house and departs, his work remains in spite of the fact that he is no longer there. But the universe will pass away in the twinkling of an eye if God withdraws His ruling hand.”

So we see that big C Creation is the radical dependence of all creation on God for its existence. It’s not six days of time, nor even strictly speaking a single moment of time; it is the giving of being by God to everything that he created, and so it is not time-bound at all.

But if this is true, why does Genesis talk about six days of creation? Augustine goes on,

“God moves his whole creation by a hidden power and all creatures are subject to this movement: the angels carry out his commands, the stars move in their courses, the winds blow now this way now that, deep pools seethe beneath tumbling waterfalls and mists form above them, meadows come to life as the seeds put forth grasses, animals are born and live their lives according to their proper instincts, the evil are permitted to try the just. It is thus that God unfolds the generations which he laid up in creation when he first founded it; and they would not be sent forth to run their course if he who made creatures ceased to exercise his provident rule over them."

In other words, God “unfolds the generations,” via natural causation. Natural causation is a real thing. When a bird soars through the air, its flight is natural. Its wings are shaped for flight, its muscles move those wings in just the right way to catch the air, the air is molecularly structured in such a way as to be able to hold the bird in motion between earth and sky. But it is God who keeps the bird itself and the natural laws that govern its flight and the movements of its muscles and the flowing of its blood and the structure of the air and the entire system of cause-and-effect in existence at every moment. He underlies it, upholds it, creates it, holds it in being. It is caused naturally. It is caused by God. They are different kinds of causation. Neither rules out the other.

This is important. If we do not have a proper understanding of God’s causality and natural causality, we can fall into the same error in one of two ways, depending on whether we are religious or atheist. The first way is what the Muslims fall into. Their idea of God’s causation is that God directly causes everything, and natural causation is an illusion. As philosophy professor Dr. Michael Tkacz so colorfully put it, “When a camel poops in a tent, that’s not the camel pooping. That’s God doing that.”

Atheists fall into the same error in another way. They point to nature and say, “We can explain why these things happen naturally, therefore there is no need for God.” But St. Thomas would respond, “Why does nature exist? Where do the rules that govern it come from? If everything relies on something else to explain its existence, as we see in nature, how could anything at all exist? There must be something that exists outside of the natural order, something which does not rely on anything else, that never came to be but always Is. This is the ground of all other being.”

Can you see where we are going with this? Given this Catholic understanding of natural causation and God’s Creation, is evolution a problem?

Natural causation is real, and yet it is also dependent upon and indeed is itself caused by God. Every natural process is both natural (that is, explainable in terms of natural cause and effect) and dependent upon God (who explains the whole system of natural cause and effect). This is true of the growth of a tree from acorn to oak. Why should it not be true of the universe itself?

And in fact Genesis supports evolution more than you might expect. Since we know that Big C Creation is not a process in time at all, why does Genesis talk about "days" of creation? When God creates from nothing it doesn't take him time. He doesn't even exist in time. So the days of creation probably don't mean repeated instances of specific, from-nothing creation (that seems a pointless way for God to act), but rather the “unfolding of generations,” the little c creation of new things from “the power which stars and elements received at the beginning.” Remember, just because something is natural doesn't mean God isn't causing it; his is a more fundamental way of causing.

For that matter, if God is going around creating individual things from nothing, why is man exempt? Genesis says that God created man from the earth. Did he create man from the earth but the plants and animals by special from-nothing creation? That isn't very consistent.

Concerning the length of the days of creation, why would God bind himself to our invented human time classification, especially before the creation of the sun and earth by whose motion we measure hours and days? It is more likely that the days of creation denote simply a period of time, not strict 24 hour segments.

For that matter, why was light created before the sun? The Hebrews, like all ancient civilizations, thought of the sun as the greatest light source in the universe, and yet Genesis talks about light coming before it, before any source at all. That doesn't fit any ancient cosmology. But it does fit rather well with the Big Bang.

Let there be light.

But if all this is true, what of the atheist claim that evolution is completely godless? Well, that’s exactly the claim we need to attack, not the claim that evolution is true. See, atheists are not content only with the scientific theory of evolution as a natural process. They graft a philosophy onto it, a philosophy called metaphysical naturalism, or, by its detractors, scientistic materialism. This is the belief that the only things that exist are material things that we can study with the scientific method (they believe science is the only valid form of knowledge, hence the word scientISTIC, not to be confused with scientific). They claim that there is no transcendent purpose or meaning to the universe; everything is pure chance. These are not scientific claims. They are philosophical claims. We need to call them out on it and demand that they disentangle their philosophy from science.

So the next time an atheist brings up evolution to debunk God, shrug and say, “So?” Don’t waste time and open yourself up to defeat by accepting their premise that evolution disproves God. Don’t fight the battle on their ground. Instead, hit them with St. Thomas.

Ex nihilo nihil fit, baby. Ain't no way around it.
And don't go redefining "nothing." I'm looking at you, Krauss.

(Important note! When I say that evolution is not godless I don't mean I believe in what is called “Intelligent Design.” Intelligent Design theory holds that God reaches into the natural order and tweaks evolution to go where he wants. But he doesn’t need to do that. He underlies the natural order. He upholds it. It is what it is because of him. The idea that he needs to tweak it accepts the atheist view of the natural order as something that is not dependent on God but independent, such that it runs by itself and he needs to adjust it. That relegates God to just another being alongside of nature, even if a very powerful one. And it means that the natural order doesn't have the foundational, transcendent cause that it must have to exist at all.)

Always remember Thomas Aquinas’ distinction between primary (doctrinal) matters in scripture, and secondary matters. Here's a little more from Augustine:

"In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines our position, we too fall with it."

But what about those liberal Catholics who follow Teilhard de Chardin? Isn't evolution part and parcel with their heterodoxy? I've experienced this, actually. Jesuit priests at my undergrad interpreted the doctrine of Original Sin in such a way that it was unrecognizable. Instead of an actual transgression by an actual human being, the consequences of which are inherited by his descendents, they see it as what they call "systemic sin;" it is simply a feature of the universe that bad things can happen. (This belief means that they can no longer have a proper understanding of the Redemption, which in turn means that they no longer understand the sacrifice of the mass correctly, or the Real Presence . . . it's a heckuva mess.) They taught this because evolution seems to deny that there were two first parents from whom the whole human race descends, and it also claims that death was a part of creation from the beginning, seeming to undermine the doctrine that Original Sin brought death into the world. So yes, in large part because of evolution these Jesuits descended into heterodoxy. But evolution doesn't have to lead us to such conclusions. I don't have time to go into it here, but Edward Feser, that awesome Thomistic philosopher, has given a very good two-part breakdown of the question here and here.

We do need to be careful not to extend evolution to theology, as Teilhard de Chardin did. Even if bodies evolve it doesn't mean that consciousness evolves or that human nature itself is always rising and improving and didn't suffer a fall. Yes, I know that Benedict XVI has quoted Teilhard de Chardin. But he's dangerous. You might be able to squint and interpret him in something like an orthodox fashion, but the Jesuits at my undergrad sure didn't. They were out-and-out heretics. So are the nuns of the LCWR.

“Let us evolve the church through a mystical presencing, solidarity with Earth, building community as “whole-makers,” genius for cooperative self-governance and decision making, and bringing love and hope for the future into the lives of millions as we evolve consciously as a new whole planetary system.”

As Pius XII made clear in Humanae Generis, we can talk about evolution, but when it comes to theology, "all [must be] prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith."

Now, does all this mean I believe in evolution? Not necessarily, at least not in biological macroevolution, but that's because it doesn't seem to add up scientifically, not because I'm scared it steps on my faith's toes. What I don't understand is how something that is only beneficial to an organism in a perfect, complete form, like the ability to fly or a spiderweb, could evolve through natural selection. I also don't understand how life could evolve from non-life. There are a lot of gaps in evolutionary theory, and it sometimes seems to me as if atheists ignore them because they believe that evolution has to be preserved in order to disprove God. But if someone could explain these apparent gaps to my satisfaction, I would accept them. The point is, if evolution is false, it doesn't matter. If evolution is true, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

So don't waste time attacking evolution. Hit them with St. Thomas instead.

And let there be light.

Pio's First Easter and First Hand Sewn Outfit!

Happy Easter season to all!

We had a lovely Easter with my family and we hardly held Pio at all except for feedings and diaper changes with all the family members lining up to hold him!

My first sewing project for Pio was his Easter outfit! I wanted him to be dressed all snazzy for Easter but the little onesie suits ran $25 - $30 online! I was inspired by my Mom's creative cousin Anne Marie who made Pio the sweetest little onesies with bow ties and straight ties as shower gifts (and who runs the most amazing blog).

Onesie decorated by Anne Marie

I decided to take a dress of mine and convert it into a little vest and bowtie.

Pio all dapper with his pipe.

Then I became really ambitious and decided to created a little newsboy cap for him! I really didn't know how it would turn out as it was a bit of an experiment. The little hat I made loosely following this pattern. It was easier than expected but was just time consuming as it was hand stitched.

My little man. So grown up already!

The vest was easy especially since I used the buttons and seams that were already on the dress. I cut out a vest shape by looking at some ideas online, sewed the top of the vest in place and then used a "sewing glue" for the sides since I don't have a sewing machine (and since the material frays easily I didn't think my hand stitching would secure it enough). I also used the sewing glue to put a ribbon trim around the vest in order to prevent fraying of the vest fabric.

I'm definitely going to jazz up more of his onesies. It's much more exciting than the plain white! Bow ties, western vests and fun appliques: the possibilities are endless!

Happy Easter!

Having the time and energy to be creative has been an awesome perk of being a SAHM! I know that gets fewer and far between with more kiddos, but I'm loving this stage a ton!

And as a fun side note, Pio has started his social smile at only 3 1/2 weeks! We're very happy parents!

Doctorate Degree to Factory Worker to Homemaker

This past week has been my official first week at my new job as a homemaker and I must say I feel much more at peace. I'm definitely in the easy phase as our little Pio has not yet arrived, but that will soon change in a matter of weeks! 

35 weeks with Pio at my baby shower with my sisters recently

Ever since I was in high school, my aspirations were to be a physical therapist. I did everything I needed to and more in order to achieve my goal. I worked as a rehab aide in a hospital during undergraduate school which solidified my desire even more so to become a physical therapist.

I entered graduate school and studied harder than I ever have in my life. Along with school studies, my time in graduate school was quite a time of personal maturation and spiritual growth. I had moved away from home for the first time and lived alone in a rented room within an old Victorian house. I had a claw foot tub next to my bed. As a funny side note, I would do my dishes in the tub because there was no kitchen sink and the bathroom sink was tiny! The atmosphere of the house was very quiet and perfect for reflection. There was even a perpetual adoration chapel a five minute walk away from the house!

I loved my tub!

It was in this house and city that I started contemplating more about my life. I was praying more regularly than in the past, making holy hours more frequently, I formed more of my opinions regarding femininity and feminine dress (see modesty post here), I grew to love G.K. Chesterton and his cheery Catholicism through the Chesterton society meetings I attended,  I attended the Traditional Latin Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe and met some brilliant and lifelong friends as well as learned to sing the chant during mass, I met a likeminded friend in my program who also loved to discuss religion, and I also realized that I had a calling to the vocation of marriage and that I would love to be a stay at home wife and mother someday.

Statue of St. Raphael in the Adoration chapel.
I know he helped greatly with my discernment process!

Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, WI

What a time to realize I wanted to be a homemaker! Smack dab in the middle of graduate school. Well, the practical thing to do was to finish schooling of course which was a little bit harder because I didn't see the same purpose in it as I had before.

I really hadn't come across any likeminded men in this college town. So I took a leap of faith and signed up for an account of Ave Maria Singles. I'll save our courtship story for another post of its own, but in summary, Anthony and I met, and after six months of long distance (cross country) and six more months of a shorter long distance (2 hours distance), Anthony proposed.

Earlier days of our courtship and
Anthony visiting my family for the first time!

Not long after our engagement on July 8, 2012.
My good friend baked us a celebratory ginormous cookie!

During our courtship and engagement, I was still in graduate school and Anthony knew and wholeheartedly supported my desires to be a homemaker. He desired it as well! However, although we both knew I wouldn't be using my physical therapy profession long, he continued to encourage me through my tests, clinicals, and board exams. I could not have gotten through that program without his support and the support of my parents and close friends. In April of 2013, I passed my board exams. In May, I graduated with my doctorate and gave a class speech (quite a horrifying experience in my mind as I do not care for public speaking in the least!).

With the supportive hubby and classmate (as well as dear friend)!

Eek! Public speaking!

My parents were so incredibly helpful throughout my schooling!

In July, Anthony and I married in what ended up being the most beautiful and perfect day of my life thus far.

So happy!

We decided that I would work to pay down some of my loans until the baby came and then at that point I would be able to stay home. I found a job as a physical therapist at a nursing home and started the position in August.

As a new graduate, I was optimistic and full of zeal to help patients. I truly loved my coworkers, the healthcare staff and the patient's at the nursing home. However, the company I worked for had productivity standards. Now this doesn't seem like a bad concept in itself, but the application of these productivity standards lacked common sense.

The idea behind productivity standards is that they want a certain percentage of your clocked time to be billable time. So, at this particular facility, it was 86%. In general, in an eight hour day, they wanted seven hours to be billable time and one hour to be used for paperwork, patient transportation, communication with healthcare staff, etc.

Disproportionate amount of focus on this.

Now, it may be feasible in other facilities, but in this particular facility it was not. So what therapists ended up doing was to clock less hours than they actually worked in order to keep their productivity percentages up. It's quite a sneaky method to get free labor.

And overtime without pay at that.

There were days that I would work ten hours but if I wanted an acceptable productivity percentage, I would only clock eight hours. I worked overtime more often than not in order to feel like I had completed all my work in quality fashion.

Working as a physical therapist in a nursing home can be both emotionally and physically draining. It involves a lot of lifting, coordinating, and rationale for the therapy provided. Add the extra stresses of pregnancy on top of that and I was just spent by the end of a day. Life was a matter of eat, work, come home and eat dinner, watch one show with my husband and sleep.

Yep. Definitely had some of these signs. Source.

The other difficult aspect of the job was that no positive feedback was ever given for our work. We heard more about keeping our productivity up than giving quality care to our patients. I honestly felt like a factory worker that had to bill as much as possible during the day. I did not feel like someone who had spent the last seven years in school, where one would think enough education was provided to work smarter not harder.

I think this is harder in bigger companies.

However, upper management did nothing to change the situation. They kept repeating the same "solutions" to increase productivity at our facility. I suggested a rehab aide to help us in patient transportation as our facility had four floors of patients and it was often time consuming to get our own patients. Upper management's response: "We can't justify that until your productivity is higher." Talk about Catch-22.

Going in circles...

In any case, this seems to be where the healthcare world is headed. As it is largely out of the hands of religious these days, it is strictly business. A business that profits from the sick and infirm. And that's not the kind of job I signed up for. I loved the patients I worked with at the nursing home. But the company I was working for did not make helping them easy.

I have joked with my husband that if I ever complain about being a homemaker, he can threaten to send me back to graduate school or the career world. Maybe the reason why God brought me through graduate school and the career world is so I know that the grass isn't always greener on the other side. I was never in the field of physical therapy to move up the career ladder or to make loads of money. I just wanted to help and care for people.

Now as a homemaker, I can do just that for the people I love most: my own growing family. All my energies will go into supporting my husband, raising all the children God blesses us with, and making our house a home.

I know it won't be easy,
but my husband's productivity standards
are much more realistic!

It gives me the freedom and time to help others more easily as well. Whether it's helping relatives who need assistance or even visiting the nursing home. One thing I found as a physical therapist is that the patient's benefit from therapy, but they benefit equally and in a different manner from having someone to talk to and listen to them. Nursing homes are truly very lonely places. Our elderly deserve much better.

I am really looking forward to this new phase of life. I have much to learn and I am not a domestic goddess in the least, but I have a really wonderfully patient, easy going, and supportive husband. He'll often remind me that in the big picture, it's not about being able to cook or clean perfectly. Rather, the important job is that we have a peaceful household and impart the Faith to our children.

We are so excited about teaching our children about the Faith!

I look forward to sharing more of this journey with you all as our family grows.

Maybe we'll do a future post on why we feel strongly about the having the woman in the home and the man in the workforce. That one is always a fun and interesting (not to mention controversial!) topic of conversation!

Until then! God bless!

                            Sincerely,

                                         Andrea Rose

Is it Chilly in Here? Scholastic Logic vs. Mystery

Anthony here. I have a friend who pitches his tent over in the Ukrainian Catholic branch of our universal Church, and we like to jab at each other about the relative merits of our respective traditions. He accuses the Roman tradition of being too scholastic, by which I think he means too exacting, too nitpicky, too coldly rational. The other day we had this little text exchange starting with the discussion of whether “gluten-free” hosts are valid matter:

Me: The USCCB approved some low gluten hosts. That’s probably what these are. Not truly gluten free but low enough not to cause a reaction.

Him: OK . . . this is all very scholastic for me. #leavened

Me: #scholasticsrock #gottabeexact #nofuzzylogic

Him: #mystery

Me: #touche

Now, I’ve heard before that Aquinas, the premier scholastic philosopher, is too coldly rational. But this has always puzzled me. My experience of scholasticism is of a great and thundering beauty, a profound insight into the Truth that underlies “life, the universe, and everything” (if I may use a Douglas Adams phrase for such a profound concept).

 

Fortunately it's more meaningful than this.

But then again, my first introduction to Aquinas came simultaneously with my first introduction to neoplatonism (Plato applied to Christianity) via C.S. Lewis, who is more an Augustinian than anything else. While I don’t find neoplatonism tenable when followed out to its greatest extent (it seems to lead to a denial of God’s freedom, concluding that he had to create because he pours out his being of necessity), it has a quality of transcendence (those wonderful Platonic forms!) that is beautiful and hits on an emotional level, especially when you relate it to God.

 

"I'm pointing up for a reason, you know."

We all long for some perfection, some ideal that we just can’t get on earth. Lewis delves into this in great depth with his concept of “Joy,” or sehnsucht, that piercing longing that is more wonderful than any other having, that comes unexpectedly and leaves almost instantly, but renders you breathless with wonder and clenched with aching loss all at the same time. It is brought on by little things – Lewis listed “the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of ‘Kubla Khan,’ the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves” (The Prilgrim’s Regress, afterward to the 3d edition) – but those things do not contain what you are longing for. They are shadows, reflections, pointers to some greater Ideal. Augustine’s insight was that this longing is ultimately for God. As he wrote, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”

 

Restless heart.

Aquinas did not discard these beautiful insights of neoplatonism. On the contrary, his systematic explication of reality gives us logical reasons to believe that God really is our heart’s greatest longing. First he gives us insight into the nature of God, and then insight into our own nature, and we can see how these relate.

Aquinas demonstrates in his famous “Five Ways” not only that God exists, but what kind of a being he is. He is perfect being, complete in himself, relying on nothing else for his existence. For we humans, our nature does not include our existence. We could easily not exist. We receive existence from something outside of ourselves; it is added to our nature. But for God, his nature is existence. The two are one and the same. He is Being Himself.

It follows from this that he is also Goodness Himself. Goodness and being are the same thing. Evil is not a thing in itself but a lack of being, like a hole.

Not a thing.

When we say that a person is sick we are saying that their nature is impaired: they have a lack in their ability to operate as a human should. They lack the fullness of the being they are meant to have as a human. When we say that a human is evil we mean something similar: their human nature is impaired; they are not being all that they are meant to be. (This is because they are misusing free will to seek the wrong ends – I’ll get to that in a moment.) Goodness is being, so God, who simply is being rather than having being, also simply is goodness rather than having goodness.

God is also Truth Himself, because, as Aquinas says, “the truth is what is.” What is, is true, and what is not, is not true. “What is” is a definition of God, since his “is-ness,” his being, is his nature. What God is is Is. (That’s a fun sentence.) God’s “I am who Am” to Moses is an insight into his nature. So if God is Being Himself, or “Is-ness” Himself, then he must also be Truth Himself.

Definition of God.

Seeing the relationship of goodness and being and truth also helps us to understand beauty. As made famous by James Joyce, Aquinas said that beauty consists of integritas, consonatia, and claritas: integrity, proportionality, and clarity. Denis McNamara explains it succinctly in his book Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy:

In the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, a beautiful object is understood as one that gives the viewer knowledge of the inner logic of its being. As a quality of being, beauty is therefore not separated from being itself, and is made up of three constituent elements: integritas, consonantia, and claritas. Integritas, or wholeness, means that a beautiful thing has all it needs to have in order to be what it is. Otherwise it is deficient and less beautiful than it could otherwise be. Consonantia, or proportionality, speaks not only of the physical dimensions of a thing, but also of its correspondence to an ideal, most often to the “end” to which it is put, its purpose in being at all. Claritas speaks of the radiant clarity of a thing’s inner being, the power of a thing to impress knowledge of itself on the mind of a perceiver.

 

Integritas, consonantia, claritas.

If you want to know more about Aquinas’ thought on beauty there’s a more in-depth but still short and very plain-English explanation here.

As we can see, beauty can’t be separated from being. A beautiful thing is beautiful in that it has all of the being it needs to have for its nature, in proper proportion, thereby demonstrating that nature with a radiant clarity. I think we’ve all had the experience of “drinking in” something beautiful: a sunset, rolling surf, a mountain, a tree on a hill, a symphony, your wife’s beautiful face. You stare at it in a kind of awe and you even feel that it is speaking to you somehow; it is impressing you with its being, with its “it-ness.” You get a sense of what it is, what it truly is on a deeper level than would be explained by breaking it down and examining its parts (which is why modern reductionism tends to miss so much). It is precisely that “is-ness” of the thing that you are responding to.

(This is also why Mother Teresa was beautiful, even as a short, hunched woman in her eighties. I could do a whole post -- and probably will -- on why Mother Teresa, though lacking physical beauty, nevertheless had as a whole being more beauty than any modern supermodel or pop star. Bodily beauty is a real thing, but human beings are more than bodies and can be beautiful in more than physical ways.)

If beauty is directly related to being, then God, since he is Being Himself, must therefore also be Beauty Himself.

Aquinas is just as logical (and his logic just as surprising to modern minds) when talking about human nature. Starts with the concept of perfection. Perfection is a fullness or completeness of being according to the nature a thing has. So, for instance, an oak tree that grows to its full height and has a crown of leaves all busily carrying out photosynthesis while strong roots pull up water and nutrients from the soil, is fulfilling its nature as an oak tree. It is perfecting itself according to its nature. But an acorn that does not grow into a tree, or that grows into a stunted and unhealthy oak, is not fulfilling its nature to its fullest potentiality. It is imperfect.

 

Fulfilling its oak-ness.

Animals have more to their nature than plants. They are animated and sensory beings, that is, they are capable of moving about and of using their senses to perceive and to feel. An animal is perfected when all of the abilities of its nature are fully developed and operational. So an animal that is blind, or that has a lame leg, is suffering an imperfection.

Now, just as an animal has a nature with elements beyond what a plant has, a human being has a nature with elements beyond what an animal has, namely, the intellect and the will. Humans have the ability to reason, to abstract from particulars to universals. We also have the ability to freely choose between paths of action. Our perfection involves the development or “flowering” of both of these faculties. So an education is a good thing, as it develops our rational faculty. And the proper exercise of the will in choosing the good, i.e. virtue, is also necessary for our perfection.

Since God is both Truth Himself and Goodness Himself, he is the “final cause,” or ultimate end, of both the intellect and the will. He is what they are ultimately directed towards. And if our intellect and will are directed towards God, then they are also directed towards perfect Beauty, since God is perfect Beauty. So that glimpse of beauty that leaves us breathless, that moment of aching longing for some greater reality that gives the reality we see its beauty and goodness, is pointing us towards God. It is, as Tolkien said in Letter 89, a “sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Anankê [constraint] of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us.”

So yes, Aquinas is very systematic, very logical. But that logic is applied to our heart’s greatest longing. What Lewis had to say about "Joy" or sehnsucht matches what Augustine wrote about the longing for God ("our hearts are restless until they rest in thee") which in turn matches what Aquinas wrote about God being perfect Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. And it also means that truth and goodness and beauty are the same thing at the highest level. Which is why someone like Tolkien can so deeply demonstrate truth by entwining it with beauty. 

I think when my friend wrote "#mystery" he was not talking about a lack of knowledge, but that sense of a greater reality – call it Truth, Goodness, or Beauty, or simply God – that you can grasp or feel in a way that goes beyond reason. As Tolkien wrote in Letter 89,

I was riding along on a bicycle one day . . . when I had one of those sudden clarities which sometimes come in dreams. . . . I remember saying aloud with absolute conviction: 'But of course! Of course that's how things really do work'. But I could not reproduce any argument that had led to this, though the sensation was the same as having been convinced by reason (if without reasoning). And I have since thought that one of the reasons why one can't recapture the wonderful argument or secret when one wakes up is simply because there was not one: but there was (often maybe) a direct appreciation by the mind (sc. reason) but without the chain of argument we know in our time-serial life.

We might call this “apprehension via mystery,” a more direct apprehension of the reality underlying everything that exists than we normally get through a process of reason. But this apprehension is not opposed to reason; on the contrary it seems perfectly consonant with reason (which makes sense if it is an apprehension of something true, since reason’s goal is truth) though it was not arrived at through a process of reason.

For me, Aquinas’ rational explication does not diminish mystery in this sense, but offers an “apprehension via logic” that exists side-by-side with this “apprehension via mystery.” Suddenly I’m not feeling these things in a vacuum: I know what the feelings are and why I have them. I know what I long for. The longing is not any less beautiful, painful, or mysterious for the logical explanation; indeed it still transcends that explanation in a way that makes me think of Aquinas’ words after he had a mystical experience of God: “All that I have written is as straw compared to what I have seen.”

"Straw"

On his deathbed not long afterwards Aquinas asked that the Song of Songs be read to him. The greatest rational mind in history prepared himself for death with poetry.

This is my experience with the scholastic tradition. For me, it has always been mediated through imagination, visible in art, poetry, myth, and it appeals to me because of the beauty of both its flawless logic and what that logic gives insight to: my heart’s deepest longing.

No, I’ve never found Aquinas cold.