It’s a common stereotype that Christians, and in particular Catholic people are extremely happy, and they tend not to be wrong. However, it is more complicated than that, it’s not nearly so cut and dry. This is because we are human beings too, sinners who fall into temptation and can become discontent. Obviously, we have our Savior who provides us with merciful forgiveness, but we still cannot totally buy in for some reason. Somewhere in our human nature, there is something holding us back from embracing this grace. These doubts are found in the lower levels of inauthentic happiness that prevent us from reaching our full potential. We tend to be fixated on small stuff that is superficial which prevents us from looking towards the greater gift we have been given. We for one reason or another can’t accept in our earthly selves the reality of eternity and the life after this. This gift should be our hope and joy, and it should be enough to conquer daily struggles.
Now, even though this blog is starting a little bleak, it is in fact a happy tone that I am writing with. It is a desire for not only myself, but those around me to work on their personal happiness. And it is those around me who I can both derive and spread happiness to. It is this cycle that is so important in keeping this happy spirit alive, and God will deliver these people into our lives at these integral moments. Transitioning now, it is going to be a major jump, but the truth is that being baptized into the Catholic Church was one of the happiest things I have and probably ever will do. This allowed me to be baptized with holy water into Jesus’ death and resurrection. To receive confirmation through holy oils and be anointed with chrism. And of course, I received the blood and body of Christ through the Eucharist. Now by living as tabernacle that contains communion, I have become a happier man.
This happiness is shared amongst my family of faith, but more could be done and more people could be welcomed into this joy. These Catholics who are in a similar situation of steady practice at Mass, prayer, and love with God might answer the same way. It is the backbone of our life, our spirituality, and religion. Frequently, it is our main source for happiness that propels us in life, something to depend on. But sadly, our lives are unpredictable and can take turns that we don’t expect, not always in the most positive direction either. It is probable that hardships will arise, and that can lead down a scary road very rapidly. This crucial time is when the Holy Spirit intercedes by showing us those in our surrounding who will look after us. God works wonders in all of us, but in his own time; so we can fill that earthly void. No one should have to go at sadness alone, but should be surrounded by their friends and family that can lift them up. So, if you or someone you know is feeling this pain, please don’t allow them to feel any worse than they already do.
It is inevitable for something to go askew in our lives, at one point or another. What’s important is our reaction to this, how we cope and get past it. Some folks blame God for not helping earlier, when we should really be figuring out the root of what that means in our hearts. One ought to be addressing the struggle and finding its origin, especially how it does relate to God. Is he giving us this obstacle to overcome to give us more strength or maybe providing us with a perspective into reality? And Jesus and the Holy Spirit are usually the ones who help us get out of this funk, through deeper prayer and intercession. We must remember this when encountered with something less than ideal.
It is also equally as vital for our friend groups when assisting one another to not look at our friends or relatives as higher or lower than us. Avoiding this comparison saying someone is happier than you at that particular point can be catastrophic. This will only create a toxic environment where you can’t be happy with what you have done and therefore are jealous of your loved ones. We as people naturally do place ourselves amongst those around us in aspects of relationships, jobs, and of course money. These factors only lead to a more superficial sense of happiness that is artificial and temporary. Versus the internal, long lasting happiness that comes from true love of God and knowing he has a plan for you that culminates with seeing him in all his glory. And it is this love of God for us, that in order to enter into full happiness, we need to love him back as much as we can.
The following post first appeared on a short lived blog of mine called the The Comic Book Catholic which I posted on early in my college career. Now nearing the end of that journey, I thought it appropriate to share this post which I was reminded of around the Easter season and while the world of Marvel comics weighs on my mind due to the recent release of Avengers: Endgame. It itself was written at an emotional time for me, having recently dealt with the death of a beloved family member and moving towards spiritual direction. That all aside, it is mainly a review of the spiritual elements in the classic Frank Miller story Daredevil: Born Again, a brutally beautiful comic. Originally entitled “The Immensity of Evil”, it begins its story by focusing on the comics’ primary antagonist. It is adapted in some minor ways to fit the content of this blog.
There are few Marvel villains who match the enormous presence of Wilson Fisk. A massive block of muscle in a white tuxedo, Fisk is a criminal mastermind and mob boss known as the Kingpin . According to Frank Miller, that means he is “the boss of everything bad that makes money in what must be most of the free world.” Sure, he isn’t a Nazi super-soldier like Red Skull or a costumed madman like Green Goblin; he has no powers, no costume, no army of robots or aliens at his disposal. But that makes him all the more terrifying. He operates “on the ground”, so to speak, or perhaps under it. He doesn’t dream up plans to conquer the world but rather runs it from behind the scenes. He’s not just another criminal. He is the criminal. The Kingpin of crime.
Though a long-running adversary of both Spiderman and the Punisher, Kingpin is best known as the arch-nemesis of Matt Murdock – aka Daredevil. Lawyer by day and vigilante by night, Daredevil is also one of the most visibly Catholic characters in Marvel comics and his stories on print and screen are often tinged with spiritual themes.
It is in facing Daredevil where Kingpin’s evil genius is most on display – matched against a single enemy who proves his opposite in almost every way. Take, for instance, one of the best story arcs to come out of Marvel comics, Daredevil: Born Again. In this story by acclaimed writer Frank Miller, Kingpin finally learns the true identity of the man who has been giving his operations so much trouble. He uses this information to systematically and sadistically dismantle Murdock peace by peace. He freezes his assets, strips him of his law practice, destroys his home and threatens all those close to him. Ultimately, this leads him to a confrontation with Murdock, who he beats into a pulp and sends careening of a peer in a damaged vehicle, making it look like a drunken accident. This is why the Kingpin is such a sinister character. He doesn’t merely want to kill the hero – he wants to annihilate him, to devour him, to destroy him and corrupt his reputation. He enjoys the torture, the sadism, the feeling of being in control of a whole city while crushing the one man that will fight for it.
Kingpin’s overbearing presence haunts the entire run. Everybody seems to be in his pocket- hitmen, assassins, corporations, and even government agents all run to his aid as an endless arsenal of assets to use against Daredevil and his allies.
This is what makes Kingpin a unique and memorable villain. He seems to have his fingers in everything – the police, hospitals, the press. His power is frighteningly close to our everyday lives – of the real evil that grows just beneath the surface of human society. Fisk’s enormous facade is that of a legitimate businessman – civilized, dignified, and attached to the finer things in life. This is all to hide the sadistic interior, the lust for power, and the animal-like fury and rage which is captured by his brutal physical presence. This strength of body is bested only by his horrifying omnipresence in the city – the way he fills up space with all the men and women and institutions who he has paid off.
We often feel this way about evil. Like the Kingpin, it appears to lurk everywhere we look – overlaying all reality like a fog. Human trafficking thrives even in the smallest of cities. Heroin and meth claim lives in our backyards. Cops gun down innocent youth in the streets. Priests molest children and bishops cover it up. The list goes on and the bodies pile up. The fight continues but evil still sits behind the scenes, fat and bloated with the blood of countless victims.
Christ’s passion alone gives us comfort in this time. As Christians, we believe that God’s answer to the problem of evil was answered in the sorrowful passion of Christ. In that act upon the cross, he let all the toxins and corruption of the world cling to him. He bore our sins and suffered through mockery and blasphemy. The cross is the answer to evil, but even there the elusiveness remains. Even Jesus felt betrayed and alone as the sky grew dark: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” We can only take comfort in this cry for help. Even God knows what it feels like when all hope is lost. He knows what it feels like to think that evil has won. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, God had been forsaken of God. The devil had won the day.
Daredevil: Born Again presents Kingpin in this way. Like the devil, he thought he had finally got the best of his enemy. After all, the hero had come to his doorstep and invited his own destruction. He had dug his own grave. All the devil had to do was give him a tiny push.
But like the devil, he was wrong.
For Matthew Murdock had his own resurrection. He escaped from the drowning vehicle like someone emerging from baptism. It is here where the title of the overall work hits home. The symbolism is ingrained in the story, but far from subtle. In historic Christian belief, to be born again is to be baptized – to be born of water and spirit. As St. Paul proclaims: “Do you not know that all we who have been baptized into his death? For we were buried in him by means of Baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ has arisen from the dead through glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life.” (Romans 4:3-4)
The Catholic Church teaches us in baptism we undergo “regeneration”. That is, we are given the divine life capable of blotting out original sin, though a tendency to sin remains to be battled throughout life. There is a reason that we as Catholics each year at Easter we recommit ourselves to our baptismal vows and reject the devil and all his empty show. In the time between, we cross ourselves with holy water, reminding ourselves of our sacramental defense against the darkness which hangs overhead.
Our share in the resurrection of Christ through baptism gives us an experience not unlike that of Matthew Murdock. With the image of Christ imprinted on our soul, we have the power of resurrection, even when we seem most destroyed and broken. We can surprise the devil by leaping from the grave again and again. We drive him mad as he repeats the threefold despair of Kingpin in Born Again when he discovers Matt has escaped from drowning: “There is no corpse, there is no corpse, there is no corpse.” That dauntingly massive and smug figure of evil can be defeated, even when death and despair appear to rule supreme. With a drop of holy water and a simple sign of the cross, we acknowledge the power of the resurrection even when pitted against the foreboding shadow that is the immensity of evil.
You can blame it on my personality type (ENFP) or being Enneagram 4 or my heritage or my Patron Saint (St. Therese of the Child Jesus, the patroness of a vocation to love).
I have a deep need to love others and to be loved. I get excited about loving others–my kids, my friends, strangers. Have you ever hugged a perfect stranger in the grocery store? I have.
To love and to be loved is essential; it is what we were made for and from. God is love and we were made from a creative act of the love of God. The first paragraph of the catechisms says, “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.” (CCC n.1)
But what does it really mean to love?
The Greeks didn’t just have one word for love that they applied to everything the way we do. In the course of a single day I could say that I love my 3 year old, my husband, my best friend, and cheesecake and it all means something kind of different. The Greeks used four different words: Eros, Agape, Storge, and Phileo.
I propose to love well we need to know the difference and appreciate each unique expression of love. For to understand these unique expressions of love means that we can encounter a different aspect of God. All forms of love lead us to back to God in one way or another, because God is love. Apart from God, we can do nothing.
Let’s break it down:
Eros: CS Lewis called this Romantic Love. This is intimate love, that has the underpinnings of procreative urges. It sees beauty in another and leads to an appreciation of beauty itself (if you believe Plato). But this isn’t to be confused with lust or simple sexual urges. Eros is not sex. It may result in intimacy, but it is not interchangeable with it. It wills the good of the other (to borrow from Thomas Aquinas) to such an extent that the lover will literary lay down his life for the beloved. “Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros.” (CS Lewis, The Four Loves)
Storge: Lewis translates this Affection. This affection is tenderness, and often familial love. It’s what makes us go “aaawwwwwww…” when something is so cute. It’s what parents feel when looking at their adorable offspring. Lewis writes, “Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”
Phileo: Lewis calls this Friendship. “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves,” says Lewis, “the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.” Why is this? Could it be that Friendship is “unnecessary”? Lewis thought so. He writes, “I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” It’s this amazing affectionate regard, usually between equals. This is also the “brotherly love” that wills the good of our fellowman and society.
Agape: Also called Charity. This is the love of God for mankind and the love of an individual for a good God. It’s unconditional, self-sacrificing, and mature. It is the love of I Corinthians 13, that you have no doubt heard at countless weddings. Patient, kind, hoping all things, believing all things, does not fail. God shows us exactly what this looks like in the passion and death of Jesus. “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing – or should we say “seeing”? there are no tenses in God – the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a “host” who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and “take advantage of” Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.” (The Four Loves)
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
In some sense Storge, Phileo, and Eros are a training ground, the baby-steps if you will, that hopefully lead us to Agape. That is not to say, however, that we abandon them when we find Agape. Rather, the are enriched and deepened and we see them for what they truly are.
This time of year, Valentine’s Day, everyone is looking for Eros. The candlelight dinners, chocolates, wine, and flowers. Everyone hoping they will be snuggled up to someone who makes their heart beat faster.
However, I propose that this holiday is far more phileo and Storge in its ethos than eros. As the story goes, in the year 269 a priest named Valentine was sentenced to death for defying the emperor and performing Christian weddings in secret, despite an edict outlawing the Sacrament. While in prison the judge asked Father Valentine to pray for his daughter who was blind. When she was healed the judge converted to Christianity. Valentine, who had been sentenced to beating, stoning, and decapitation, allegedly wrote a note to the judge’s (formerly) blind daughter, signing it, “From Your Valentine.” (source)
This should lead us to consider not Romantic love this Valentine’s Day, but affectionate love between friends and family. Is that not what we are really missing in our every day lives? Is it not this affection and tenderness that makes the mundane bearable and the unbearable redeemable?
Yet, it’s a challenge to find, nurture, and grow Phileo in an Eros soaked world. Our culture wants to romanticize and sexualize everything–from advertising for fast food and cars to our relationship with our brothers and sisters in the pews. We often struggle to see one another as occasions of grace because so often we have misused our relationships and sexuality as occasions of sin. But, I believe we can do better. With the help of the Holy Spirit, we can retrain (or shall we say renew) our minds.
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:2
Holy Friendship
The most loving thing we can do, whatever state of life we find ourselves–single and searching, celibate, or married–is to ask for the Holy Spirit’s help in mastering our passions and bringing them under His control. (2 Timothy 2:11-13, Galatians 5:22-26)
We can ask for God’s help in growing in our Phileo and Storge. This is what St. Paul suggests in 1 Timothy 5 when he tells us to treat one another as brothers and sisters. This is risky. To draw close to another person and not have romance in the mix may be uncharted territory. What does that even look like in our hook-up culture?
Of course there are those in the Church and in the world (thank you, Harry and Sally) who say that true friendship without sex doesn’t exist–especially between single men and women. To this, CS Lewis ahead of his time wrote, “Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.… In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets… Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves.’ For in this love ‘to divide is not to take away.”
Bill Donaghy of the Tobin Institute writes, “This is holy ground. This is sacred ground, and in this place we are called to a deep self-mastery, and a healthy recognition of our own hearts and where we stand in the ability to truly see one another. I….encourage readers to go further, to pray more deeply about this lost art of friendship, of holy friendship. It must be rekindled. It will take work and prayer and much patience, especially in this present darkness. But with grace we can reclaim a beautiful gift, and our vision of one another can indeed be restored. It is a hope within reach. It is our inheritance and a promise too. “Jesus came to restore creation to the purity of its origins.” (CCC n. 2336)
The alternative is to either succumb to lust–which is really a counterfeit eros–or lock up our hearts and not learn to love. I say, let’s do it. Let’s ask the Holy Spirit for new hearts and renewed minds. Let’s learn to master our passions. Let’s learn to love one another well, deeply, truly, purely.
And occasionally hug strangers in the grocery store. (But, ask first. Don’t be that guy.)
We live in an age where religious literacy seems to be simultaneously more needed while at the same time being more scarce. As such, I have no problem with the academic movements that seek to provide students with a greater understanding of Islam. This is important to me for two major reasons. Firstly, I personally see any academic work that seeks to illuminate students about the historical reality of the medieval era valuable. For a variety of reasons, many modern Americans seem to have inherited a great deal of misinformation about that particular era of history, so showing the relative lack of darkness in the “Dark Ages” can be very illuminating. So, anything that seeks to elaborate the intelligence, ingenuity, and triumphs of medieval peoples is a boon to me as a future educator, especially as a Catholic – given that our religion saw a great deal of development during that time in history.
The other reason is more contemporary and perhaps more controversial (though hardly unheard of). It is based on the belief that in our current political environment Muslim Americans and immigrants (or even just individuals from countries conventionally considered “Muslim”) are often subject to a sort of paranoia and suspicion which is similar to, though not analogous, the struggles that predominantly Catholic immigrants faced in ebbs and flows throughout the 19th century. In other words, newcomers holding an “Old World” (a ridiculous designation at least in the case of Catholicism – I’m looking at you Our Lady of Guadalupe) faith that is somehow incompatible with American government and freedom. In any event, I feel that learning about the history of the Islam in a general sense in social studies education is important and something I would stand beside and defend as a Catholic.
However, I’ve noticed certain trends that run through a lot of these materials, ones that makes me scratch my head and wonder about the intentions of their creators. For whatever reason, instead of coming from the perspective of traditional religion in a broad sense, (As I would personally value more) secular creators of these documentaries nearly always seek to elevate Islam by appealing not to shared Abrahamic heritage but to the secular-post-Protestant world. Take Islam: Empire of Faith, a somewhat aged documentary still widely used in secondary and post-secondary classrooms. Though it does a good job explaining the world in which Islam emerged and operated in, it commits two running errors that I would like to address.
The first is the point I brought up earlier about appealing to that particular flavor of secularism which rests mainly in prejudices about the medieval era in general and about Catholicism in particular. For example, when attempting to explain the technological advances in the Arab world, the narrator will make an aside like “meanwhile Christians were praying to the bones of their saints”. Now it is true that at the time, the Middle East and North Africa tended to have more developed, urbanized societies that preserved much of the engineering and technological feats of the Romans and indeed, improved upon them. However, a statement like this seems to me to be a blatant example of anti-Catholic prejudice, treating the idea of relics as a mere superstition instead of something with serious theological consideration. The only difference between this and something any anti-religionist would say is that it is just adapted to say something nice about Islam in the same breath.
In other words, instead of attempting to educate about the medieval era’s triumphs in a broad sense the trend seems to be to merely christen the Muslim world the more “modern” and refer to the Catholic world (a much less concretely defined geographic area) by the same old anti-premodern tropes. At one point I felt like saying, “your viewers likely already hate the Catholic Church, you really don’t need to drive that point home.” However, it is an interesting, if baffling strategy: attempt to correct one prejudice while bouncing off another, pre-existing one.
The other point is less about rhetoric or the way in which the documentary presents itself, but more about the history it seeks to tell about Islam. By ignoring Christian history completely and using Islam as its starting point, it tends to glaze over that many of the aspects of Islam it presents as unique or “new” were already very visibly present in the Christian (or even Jewish) worlds. Most notable is the documentary’s emphasis on Islamic philosophy being combination of tenets of Abrahamic origin and Greek philosophy and thus a union of faith and reason. The problem is that this tradition is at least as old as Philo Judaeus in the century before Christ, and something we see throughout the Patristic era (even going as far back as St. Paul) as a foundation of Christian thought.
Though it is true that medieval scholasticism owes much to Arab and Persian sources, this fact seems to say more about the Catholic Church’s receptivity to wisdom from any geographic or philosophical arena rather than about its nonexistent intellectual deficits. This receptivity is described very well in recent a First Things article, where Remi Brague describes this uniquely Catholic process of acquisition. After describing the Church’s acquisition of Greek and Roman language and ways of thinking he writes, “Later on in Christian history, Germanic and Slavic mores, Celtic legends, and other materials were included. Arabic and Persian lore and science entered the melting pot.”As GK Chesterton says, the Church is the “trysting place of all the Truths in the world.” Therefore, it should come as no surprise to us that medieval monks benefited from Arab science to hone their mathematical or scientific skills. It is what the Church has always done, just as Justin Martyr perfected his defense of the Faith using Roman skills of rhetoric in the Patristic age.
This may say more about the relative historiographic inattention to the Patristic era more generally, but it certainly plays into the post-Protestant prejudices described above. Rather than conclude that an interest in the relationship between reason and faith was held by Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike, the documentary seems to portray this as a novelty in Islam rather than a continued tradition from its predecessors.
Overall, what I would like from a documentary like this is an overview of the development of Islam that doesn’t feel it necessary to simultaneously trash and ignore Christianity. The way the narrators go about this seems to say more about the latter than the former. That being said, I feel it is probably difficult to understand Islam without understanding Christianity first. To me Islam is historically interesting as something smaller than the Church but a little larger than a heresy. Something to be admired, but not imitated. Indeed, the Catechism itself praises them as fellow followers of the one true God, though it is obvious that Christian theology cannot mesh with Islam’s view of Christ or revelation.
“The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. ‘The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.'” CCC 841
However, it seems hard for many of these narrators of the documentary and other like minded scholars to talk about the Islamic faith without falling back on old prejudices about Catholicism, even given that the Church officially does not see them as an opposite or an adversary in the broadest sense. Perhaps this is misunderstood because of the rather tumultuous relations between Catholics and Muslims in the Middle Ages, though recent scholarship tends to see even this as overstated.
Whatever the reason, with videos like these, you get a room of dusty academic guys and gals who don’t like Christianity thinking they’ve found a nobler religion (the same thing tends to happen with Buddhism by the way, though not as much in academic circles). In the process ,we may indeed leave with more comprehensive view of Islam, but simultaneously a dimmer, more ignorant one of Christianity. It’s not that I wouldn’t use portions of this film in a world history classroom, it’s just clear from my point of view that it requires more contextualization, which is quite obviously missing, in a misguided attempt to educate about what is to me one of the most interesting eras of human history. It may seem ironic for a member of an ancient faith to describe this documentary as “dated”, but some of the sentiments expressed in it certainly belong in the dust bin.
The Farmington Fish-Eater 