Special thanks to S.G. with whom I discussed this topic at length.  The following is based on that discussion.

PARISHIONER: Father, I would like your spiritual advice on how much I should donate of my income.

PRIEST: You can begin by donating a minimum of 10%.

PARISHIONER: Sure, that is common knowledge Father.  But my question is whether that 10% should come before taxes, after taxes, or after taxes plus expenses.

PRIEST: I’m not here to tell you what is haram and halal, but to help you think through what you should honestly give to God as a matter of conscience, not just as a command.  What do you think you should do?

PARISHIONER: I personally think I should donate 10% of what remains after taxes and expenses.

PRIEST: How much do you make a year, just so I can have a reference?

PARISHIONER: Our household income is $120,000 a year.

PRIEST: Okay, continue with you reasoning.  Remember, you are asking for my advice, so I will be honest and open with you.  What is your income after taxes?

PARISHIONER: We make a little over $102,000 after taxes (including tax deductions for the kids and the house) or $8500 per month.

PRIEST: What are your expenses?

PARISHIONER: So we pay $2500 a month for our mortgage and property tax.

Then we have a $1000 a month car payment for my wife’s car and my car.

We also pay $200 a month to insure our cars.

Then our monthly credit card payment is $1000 a month (we partially paid for our European vacation using a credit card.  It cost us $20,000).

            Then we have a monthly allowance of $2000 for restaurants.

Then we also pay $500 a month for our son’s car.

It also costs $300 to insure his car since he is a teenager.

PRIEST: So how much do you donate a month?

PARISHIONER: We donate exactly $100 a month from what we have left after taxes and all these expenses we mentioned.

PRIEST: So let me just sum up your practice of almsgiving: You make $8500 a month after taxes, and you spend all of it except $1000, and from that measly $1000 left, you donate a grand total of $100 a month to the Church.  Do you feel good giving exactly 1% of your total income to the children of God?

PARISHIONER: It’s not 1%; I give 10% after taxes and expenses.

PRIEST Call it whatever you want, but $1200 out of $120,000 is a total of 1% of your income.  You make six figures; people would think you were rich, but you sound like a poor man counting his quarters rather than someone well off.  I’ve never met a poor man as rich as you.

PARISHIONER: Huh?

PRIEST: I would suggest you donate 10% of the amount you make per month after taxes only.

PARISHIONER: Out of the $8500?!

PRIEST: Yes.

PARISHIONER: That’s $850 a month!  That’s a total of $10,200 a year!

PRIEST: Yes, I know how to count.

PARISHIONER: But that will mean cutting back on everything we spend, possibly getting rid of some of the expenses.

PRIEST: Exactly.

PARISHIONER: But, but…

PRIEST: But what?

PARISHIONER: I was coming to you for your advice.

PRIEST: And I gave it to you.  I told you I would help you think the matter through, not just tell you what’s haram and halal.

PARISHIONER …

PRIEST: You seem sad.

PARISHIONER: I’m more frustrated.

PRIEST: I would be too if I were in your place.  You spend nearly $10,000 a year for your teenage son’s car.  If I were to take a guess, it’s a higher end car than entry level.  Why?

Touch.

It is something we experience and take part in every moment of our lives, but it slips our notice.  We are touched by the air and the wind; we are touched by the water vapor in the air and the ground we walk upon.

Unlike the other four senses, we continuously experience touch from the moment we are born to the moment we die.  With sight, we can close our eyes.  With hearing, we can cover our ears or wear noise cancelling headphones.  With smell and taste, there might not be anything to smell and taste depending on where we are.

But touch is diffuse throughout the body.

For this reason, touch is the main indicator of presence, of being present in a place and time.  We cannot touch or be touched by what is past nor can we touch what is yet to be.

“Reaching out” (2009)

by andrew and hobbes

Touch and Relationships

Throughout the Old Testament, we see that at certain times there were prohibitions on touch.  Such as when God commanded the Israelites not to touch Mount Sinai because He was present on the mountain.  Other holy things are not permitted to be touched unless people are in a certain physical state of purity.  And of course, sexual intimacy (a type of touch), is prohibited for those outside the relationship of marriage.

But why these prohibitions?  The prohibitions on touch indicate that the conditions for the right time and place have not yet been met.

To expand, the expression of any relationship takes the form of touching.  Depending on the nature of the relationship, it takes a different form of touching.  If we are being introduced to someone for the first time, we shake their hands; we don’t hug them.  If see our close friends, we’ll hug them; it is weird if we just shake their hands.  We can tell the nature of a relationship by the orientation of bodies to one another and the type of touching that occurs.

But again, what about time?  In the Song of Songs, there is a phrase that repeats three times.  It is, “Do not stir nor awaken love until it pleases” (Song 2:7, 3:5, and 8:4).  In the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, the word for pleases is actually “wills.”  So it reads, “Do not stir nor awaken love until it wills.”

This is an indication of meeting the conditions for the appropriate time.  On the surface level, the Song of Songs describes a relationship between Solomon and a woman referred to as the Shulamite.  The structure of the book can be divided into three parts: Union, Separation, and Reunion.  In each one of the phases, the Shulamite says this phrase, being keenly aware of the relationship between presence and having fulfilled the conditions for the right time.

This also reflects our relationship with God with whom we have been in union, separation, and reunion. When God reunited with humanity, He took on flesh.  The Apostle John emphasizes the meaning of the Incarnation as God’s becoming present to us when he says, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life—the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us” (1 John 1:1-2).

When the time was right, we were able to touch Him.  And we still do in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.  These preconditions for being present in front of Christ at the right time is what the Apostle Paul referred to as a worthy manner.  In 1 Corinthians 11:27-28, he writes, “Whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.  But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.”

The Right Conditions

The relationship between Christ and the Church is referred to as a marriage throughout the Scriptures as the Apostle Paul expressed in Ephesians 5:28-32, as the Apostle John showed in Revelation, as the early Christians interpreted the Prophets, and as they also interpreted the Song of Songs.  Marriage can become an experience for contemplating the relationship between God and ourselves through committing oneself to another person in the bond of love, but the problem with this is that our culture interferes with the image in two ways.

First, the widespread culture of encouraging premarital and extramarital sexual activity destroys any conception of place, time, and intimacy.  I often wonder if the rise in premarital sexual activity, which has been documented over the past several decades and across the world, is a form of psychological compensation due to having poor familial relationships, poor friendships, and a low estimation of oneself.  The data confirms this in that more than 72% of teenage girls and 55% of teenage boys who engaged in premarital sex wish they waited, while 69% of both men and women who remained celibate until marriage did not regret their decision to do so.

Why do they now wish they waited?

Part of it is the perspective gained through what has happened.  It’s no shocker that most teenagers have no perspective.  This is partly due to their lack of being properly formed by a solid education, partly due to not having a wise adult guide them, and partly due to age.  But the interesting part is that nearly equal inversion.  Those who remain celibate until marriage are doing so out of a vision and values for what it means to enter into an intimate relationship.

Those who engaged in premarital sexual activity, even if once, have it cast a shadow on their future relationships, and even if does not express itself in the conversation between husband and wife, it does so between the individual and their thoughts.  For that reason, the marriage does not lead to the satisfaction that it should have led to, nor does it become the object of contemplation lifting the mind to God.

But our culture also interferes with the image of marriage in another way, by making career primary.  There is this superstition that if someone gets married during their education, training, or early on in their career, it will lead to not completing their courses of study, training, and thus to financial ruin.  But it is a matter of time management and value.  I don’t know anyone who married during this stage of life who failed to complete their course of study or experienced financial ruin.  This has been causing people to push marriage further into their 30s.  But if people wait until their late 30s to get married, which is likely to happen based on the current trend (For reference, here is a chart by the United States census on the median age of first marriage), then it will lead to a shorter time of life spent in intimacy because the body can only experience such for a set period of life.  This will lead to resentment, regret, frustration, stress, and depression, and the following generation will be adversely affected by these things and might be encouraged to do the opposite.  And you see, it becomes a vicious cycle of alternating between late marriage to premarital sex in the teenage years.

The Pandemic and Touch Starvation

With all this reflection on touch, it brings to attention the reality of touch starvation, which is akin to hunger.  I would think that most people have experienced far less touch during the pandemic than was normal for them, even if they totally ignored social distancing protocols.  The workplace environment has still not gone back to normal, and many people are still not comfortable meeting their friends casually such as over a cup of coffee.

Interestingly enough, touch in the context of good relationships has spiritual effects.  Regular physical contact such as shaking hands and even pats on the back for a job well done cause the body to break down cortisol, which lowers stress and boosts the immune system.  It also lowers heart rate and blood pressure, which allows us to refocus, which are essential to paying attention and meditation (both essential to spirituality).

We have lost these things during the pandemic.  And I suspect that this has to do with the frequent feelings of fatigue and difficulty remembering things that most people I know have expressed during the pandemic.

We were created to be present, and this presence is expressed through touch and being touched.  It is expressed in our relationships, in our interaction with the world, and in the liturgy, and in a way all three of these aspects of life make up a Grand Liturgy of Life.

Let’s pray that we get this essential part of our lives back soon.

If you found benefit from this blog entry, click here to like my Facebook page here OR sign up to my email list to receive my latest blog entries every week in your inboxes, and you will also receive my free eBook The Way of Christ.  Click here to sign up.

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few” -Our Lord Jesus in The Gospel of Luke 10:2.

What if the harvest is plentiful, the laborers are few, and you put in people not fit to labor?  How will we be judged if we allow this to happen?

What do I mean by those not fit to labor?

I mean those who are not able to pass down the faith properly, and thus so many who could have entered into the Kingdom of God will not enter.

Two Ways of Speaking

As a background to preaching the faith, we must understand that there are two ways of speaking.

• One way is the combination of words to make a meaning, such as in lecturing in a classroom.
• The other way is the communication of an experience, like a child describing what gifts he received on Christmas morning.

If we preach the faith by the first way of speaking, if you think about it, it is actually a type of magic.  We think that by combining words a certain way and speaking about certain topics and repeating what we tried to memorize that we will magically turn those we serve in our churches into saints.  This thinking is perverse.

Why?!

Because whenever we as Christians are called to speak, it should be the second way of speaking;  we are to communicate the experience of the life in Christ.

For those of us that serve in teaching ministries, sometimes the service becomes a self-congratulatory farce where we are putting in undeveloped or incompetent people to serve.  This could be for many reasons: maybe we want to win the approval of those we invite into the service, or maybe they are well-known in the community, and we think that by inviting them into the service it will raise the prestige of the parish church.

If this type of selection becomes a culture in a church, then lack of clarity and confusion will arise over what it means to serve in a teaching ministry.  It may even become just a title: “Oh look!  She’s serving.  She must be a woman of high character and dedication.”  We begin to confuse the title for the substance of service.  If we try to “teach” the faith by “lecture,” then it can’t go far because this is not what it means to preach the faith.

Rather, preaching the faith is like the type of speaking which communicates an experience like a child describing what he got for Christmas.  No matter if it’s an adult or a child, those hearing will want to listen.  This is because the child is sharing his life with you.  It is personal.  The talk is not just an order of words that gives a specific meaning, but an invitation to share a part of his life with him.

In many places in the New Testament, we read that we are “called unto [insert the gospel, or repentance, or the faith, or the fellowship of the Son, or the grace of Christ, or the marriage supper of the Lamb],” but what is not readily apparent to the reader of the New Testament in English, or even in a superficial reading of the original Greek word kaleo, is that the word kaleo also means “to invite.”  In the sentence above, that is how the word “called” is to be interpreted.  So the idea is that we are not called as in we are commanded to believe, but we are called as in we are invited into the faith and the Church that is the steward of that faith.

By definition, an invitation is a communication to share in something.  This invitation is the basis of how we should preach and “teach” the faith.  It is an invitation to a life.

Interestingly enough, of all places where such an idea would appear clearly, it appeared in my classroom.  I remember I had a student years ago, and one time as we were having a class discussion (I think it was about growth), he mentioned that he had a cousin who had went to a church and that church had transformed him.  Now I am fairly certain that my young student did not know much about the faith, and from the way he was speaking, it did not appear that he went to church, but he bore witness to the transformed life that results from the ministries of the church.  The grand irony (and the working of the wisdom of God) is that even this young child recognized the essence of true Christian ministry.

So what about us who are called to teach in our churches?  Are we communicating the lived Christian life or are we combining words with a meaning and lecturing the young in our churches?  Even in education, the method of lecturing is not effective.  In the classroom, it is only after one models the skill being taught that lecturing becomes effective.  The lecture makes sense after the modeling.  The same is true of Christianity: we must first model the Christian life before we can properly pass down the faith.

There is a problem in how we view Christ today.  Most Christians would agree that He is their teacher, but there is something that slips by with this characterization.  This is because He is also the Lesson.

Jesus Teaches the People by the Sea

by James Tissot, between 1886-1896

There are no teachers who are the actual lesson, but they only teach lessons.  But Christ is both the teacher and the lesson because He did not come to give us some rules to live by.  God did that by creating us with a moral sense, and later He gave the Israelites the Law; the Law was a codification of the morality that He had already implanted in us in creation so that we would refer back to them in the times we have lack of clarity.

How so?

In the Old Testament before the Law, we see people living moral lives such as Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.  We even see those who did not know God distinguishing between good and evil actions such as Pharaoh in the days of Abraham, or Abimelech the Palestinian king, or Laban’s covenant with Jacob after he was deceived by Jacob.  Even Laban with all his deception was capable of good moral actions!

So what is it that Christ was doing?  Was He not coming to teach us how to be good?

No.

Christ was coming to save us from sin.  To give an analogy, it is like a doctor saving your life versus a person throwing himself in front of a bullet to save your life.  One is by healing; the other is by taking what was meant for you.

The idea of salvation in the New Testament is healing, not taking the bullet for you.  Indeed, the Greek word for salvation, which is soteria, also means healing.

So Christ came to correct the fundamental illness in human beings, which is sin.  This can’t be done by rule giving, or trying to follow the rules as all of us have noticed by now.  In the Old Testament, they had the Law, but sin became worse and the Law had little effect.  Even today, children who have clear rules in the home or classroom have a difficult time following them.

The rules are a standard and a diagnostic; they are not the cure.  Rather, they codify what the symptoms of the disease of sin are.

Christ healed us of sin by becoming the exemplar for us to imitate.

Imitation?  What’s so special about that?  Everything, actually.

The Imitation of Christ

One word that we see diffused throughout early Christian literature is imitation.  We see this in the context of the martyrs and how in their deaths they imitated Christ’s death. We see it in the context of Christian living, and how this living is an imitation of Christ.  If you begin reading the writings of the early Church with this word in focus, you will be surprised how frequent it is.

But imitation is just a choice to be like someone else, you may say.  Or, imitation is not necessarily authentic.  Or even imitation is not significant.  But the reality is, mainstream Western culture and education both present a very limited understanding of the significance of imitation, even though insights from modern anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience have confirmed the essentialness of imitation in humanity.

The anthropologist, philosopher, and literary theorist Rene Girard masterfully argued that while there exists in us desires that are biological impulses such as the impulse to eat, how those desires are actualized as in what specific food we eat, is the result of imitation.  He called this mimetic desire.  How we actualize our desires is wholly mimetic.

Girard also pointed out that rivalry arises from such attempts to actualize our desires where the object of our desires shifts to become the people having the same desires by us, and thus sin comes by this mimetic process whether it is envy, or pride, or anger, or sexual indulgence, or gluttony, or murder.  Sin is a contagion with no natural immunity.  Commandments are deterrants to the contagion, but they don’t heal us of the contagion.  They also make us very aware of the contagion like when taking aspirin when we ache, we realize how bad the aches really were.  By the commandments, we also recognize that the contagion of sin is passed between humans.  This is what we see in the Old Testament, and just as in larger cities contagions are severe, so usually in large cities sin is worse than it is in smaller communities.

What heals us is providing the right model for us to imitate, whose object is not people but God.  Authentically imitating this individual heals us.  Christ’s healing happens through His providing the right model for mimetic desire for humans.  He heals us of sin by the same way the contagion entered humanity.

If I may give an image, Christ provides us (the Church) with the antibodies against this contagion.  And the Church as our Mother, just like a mother when she breastfeeds her children gives her immunity to her children through the milk, the Church through the Gospel, Baptism, the Eucharist and the Liturgy, and its reflection upon its history including the lives of its own members gives us Christ.  Without her, we have no immunity against the contagion.  Without Him, she has nothing to give.

The imitation of Christ and the imitation of those who lived a life imitating Christ is an idea that pops up over and over again in the early Church.  This is originally why Christians wrote down the lives of the saints, and especially the sufferings of the martyrs.  It was to allow the Image of Christ to give full expression in how it was manifested in so many lives, and thus we can have that example to imitate.

The imitation of Christ solidifies with what the Church gives us.  What she gives us allows us to focus completely on Him.

Psychology has also added to this understanding of imitation by showing how our essential human traits such as acquisition of language, behaviors, and ways of thinking happen by imitation.  By living in the Church community, we acquire what St. Augustine called “The Lord’s way of speaking,” and we develop lives of prayer, and we think with the mind of Christ and the generations of the Church.

In addition, Neuroscience has discovered an entire neural network that exists in humans called mirror neurons, which means that we are structured to imitate, which is why sin has had such a tight hold on humanity.  But the science also shows that by imitation, things don’t have to be this way.  To interpret that from a Christ-centered lens, it means there is potential for healing through the imitation of Christ.  This engages well with the early Christian emphasis on the imitation of Christ.

The Ground is Love

But how do we properly imitate?  I said authentically imitate above.  How?  That may seem like an unnecessary question based on everything I said above including how sometimes imitation is unconscious.  But this is a fitting question.  The answer is we imitate those we love.  Yes, it becomes unconscious, but it does so because of the free response of love that we have for Christ and the Church.

The love that we have for Christ and those who are His causes us to unconsciously imitate Him (and Him in them).  This true love leads to imitation of life, and thus the healing takes effect in us.

If you found benefit from this blog entry, click here to like my Facebook page here OR sign up to my email list to receive my latest blog entries every week in your inboxes, and you will also receive my free eBook The Way of Christ.  Click here to sign up.

Photo by Eberhard Grossgasteiger

DEFICIENT FASTER: It’s been tough fasting these past few weeks.  You know it’s not the same when you switch the ingredients.  It’s not as delightful eating soy cheese and soymilk ice cream.  And tofu beef tacos are not the same as regular tacos on Taco Tuesdays.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: What are you babbling about?!

DEFICIENT FASTER: Fasting, of course!

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I heard you talking about something you called Taco Tuesday, not fasting.

DEFICIENT FASTER: Oh yes, but that’s on fasting days during Great Lent.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I’m sorry, but if you may please teach me; I don’t think I know what you mean by fasting.  I do not think that word means what you think it means.

DEFICIENT FASTER: Sure!  I’d be happy to teach you!  Fasting is when you change the type of ingredients you eat because they are not allowed during periods of fasting.  It is a way to please God and to store up treasure in Heaven for ourselves.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Why though?

DEFICIENT FASTER: Uh… because… uh, we should show our gratitude to Christ for what He did for us.  If He died for us on the Cross, then the least I can do is fast for Him all the fasts during the year.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: Dear brother ANCIENT CHRISTIAN, I must apologize for this uncultured barbarian who thinks fasting is changing ingredients and has no idea what fasting is nor why we do it.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I was hoping that he was sharing his own opinion and nothing that he has actually heard taught at church.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: I hope not as well, brother; there are so many ignorant people out there with strange ideas.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I am glad to hear there are other sensible people out there who don’t believe such things.  Please explain to this fellow here what the nature of fasting is.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: Certainly!  Fasting is when you try to destroy all desire in your body so it does not cause you to sin because desire is the origin of sin.  Thus, fasting is a virtue because one has worked so hard to uproot this problem in themselves.  Then they can be well pleasing to God.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Why though?

EXCESSIVE FASTER: Because in this way we are pleasing Christ who destroyed desire in His body too.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Are you being serious or are you being sarcastic with our brother here who was talking about Taco Tuesday?

EXCESSIVE FASTER: I am serious.  Why would you even ask such a question?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Oh boy, I am afraid of these strange modern times in history.  I would rather go back to the grave than spend my leisure with you too.

DEFICIENT FASTER: Hey, that’s not very nice.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: I finally agree with you on something, Mr. Taco.  How insulting of this ANCIENT CHRISTIAN!

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: You are a sensitive lot aren’t you?

Both modern Christians were silent.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: The least you could do is ask me “Why though?” and not call me “insulting.”

DEFICIENT FASTER and EXCESSIVE FASTER: Why though?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Because that is not how we understood fasting in the early Church.

DEFICIENT FASTER and EXCESSIVE FASTER: How did you?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: We understood fasting as a sort of training (Gr. askesis) for a competition.  Just like when athletes of different sports train, their bodies’ orientations change so that some muscles are prominent and others not quite.  For example, a swimmer has a different build than a runner and both are different than a wrestler.

Now training by itself is worthless unless we use our training to win the competition.  But what is the competition that we are training for?  The competition is our day to day life, and the championship is inheriting the kingdom of God.  By reorienting our person to God, we compete successfully.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: That’s quite a thought-provoking analogy.  Explain that further.

DEFICIENT FASTER: So where do the ingredients come in?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Fasting is not a virtue like love is a virtue.  Love by its very nature is the goal of the Christian life: love for God and love for others and the two are interwoven as we learn from the First Epistle of the Apostle John, if we love one another then we are able to love God, so the two are intimately related.  The Apostle John says, “In this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest: Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother.  For this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another” (1 John 3:10-11) and “If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (1 John 4:20).

Another virtue is hope because hope is the state of being that drives you to act because you believe you will receive the promises which the One you love has promised you.  Hope is also the sign that you have a real faith in the One who promised.  I’m sure you can tell that fasting is nothing like faith, hope, and love.

DEFICIENT FASTER: I guess not.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: No, fasting is not like those three.