Integrity

Home At Last!

Well, after a day's delay, I finally walked in the door at my house about 6pm.  Much to do, so the reflections on the papal audience will have to wait a bit.  But in the meantime, here's a couple of pictures, a link to a Flickr photo album of the raw digital files and the audio broadcast of Vatican Radio's coverage.  (I'm guessing they will indulge me in my posting of it.)

Exhausted, I'm now off to do what I must do and get some rest.  But soon, I'll post tales of the trip.  It was wonderful!

Update:  Alex rightly noted that I didn't post any links or pictures.  Which means of course, I mistakenly hit the "publish" versus "save as draft" button.  I've updated with some pictures (click on them for larger versions) and now YouTubes of short movie captures I did at the papal audience.  I apologize for the quality of some of the pictures you will see in the coming weeks.  Once I learned that Rome was so dark, I decided to forego my flash.  But I am not as patient as I should be, without a tripod as well, to do the camera tricks (the limited ones my cheap digital camera can do) to compensate for that.  Also, does anyone know where I might be able to host the audio for free? YouTube limits length to 10 minutes and if I were to just host it as a file here on the side a mere 7 of you downloading it would eat up all my bandwidth.  Any suggestions?

See You When I Return

Well, I hope that those two new The Religious Sense posts keeps my few readers busy for the next couple of days.  As those of you who follow Intentional Disciples know, I am heading to Rome for a papal audience in honor of the 25th anniversary of pontifical recognition of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, which is the lay movement founded by Fr. Giussani.  When I return, we will resume our look at Fr. Giussani's writings.  Plus, I'll have stories from my trip.  If you are interested, EWTN is broadcasting the papal audience both live (5:00 am,  CDT) and an afternoon replay (3:00 pm,  CDT) on Saturday.  If your cable company doesn't get EWTN, you can watch it live over the Internet at this link on their website.

Also, if you live in the Chicago area and are looking for some way to make a concrete expression of your faith this Good Friday, consider joining us for the Way of the Cross, through downtown Chicago.  More information can be found at the event's website.  Bishop Paprocki will be participating this year.

Religious Sense: Chapter 4

Recap:  We have finally worked our way through the three premises -- realism, reasonableness and the need for a love of truth more than yourself -- that Fr. Giussani finds critical to understanding any element of human experience.  Fr. Giussani summarizes this all by saying, "one must be open to the demands imposed by the question [the thing being studied] itself."

Intro:  Now we will begin to look at the phenomenon of religious experience, or the "religious sense", as Fr. Giussani likes to refer to it.  This chapter presents us an introductory look at this phenomenon.

How to Proceed:  The first question that Fr. Giussani asks is how do we begin to take a look at the religious experience.  As we talked about in earlier chapters, Fr. Giussani identifies the religious experience as one about the human person, and thus requiring existential inquiry.  (The method is determined by the object.)  So we must look at our own experience, in all its factors, and see it for what it is.

But what does it mean to start "with ourselves"?  Who is me?  And how do I avoid defining "me" as some mere abstract thing, that falls short of all of who I am?  Fr. Giussani suggests that it is by examining ourselves in action, by looking at our experiences.  So to start with ourselves is to

"observe one's own movements ... within his or her daily experience.  Hence the 'material' of our starting point will not be any sort of preconception about or artificial image of oneself, or even a definition of oneself, perhaps borrowed from current ideas and the dominant ideology.

Religious Sense: Chapter 3

Recap:  In the previous summaries, we took a look at two of the three premises that Fr. Giussani wants us to consider.  First, in the summary of Chapter 1, we looked at the need for realism.  Second, in the summary of Chapter 2, we looked at the nature of reasonableness, how it is the capacity to become aware of reality and how we perceive a behavior as reasonable if it indicates adequate reasons for itself.  Today, we will look at Chapter 3 of The Religious Sense, and the final introductory premise:  the impact of morality on the dynamic of knowing.

Intro:  You will recall in the last summary we noted how there are a diversity of procedures for reaching certainty.  That the way in which we become certain that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen is different than the way in which we become certain that we can trust a business partner.   Fr. Giussani notes that this latter act -- trusting a person -- depends on something more than just "the soundness of the reasoning process". It depends on "a new factor, namely, the attitude of the person -- usually called 'morality'."  In this chapter, we will look at how morality impacts how we come to know something.

Reason Inseparable From The Unity Of The "I":  Fr. Giussani begins this chapter with two examples of people doing poorly in comparison to their ability.  The first, a young woman who is an ace at math, does badly on an exam because of a stomachache.  The second, an aspiring writer, writes a barely passable composition after having eaten and drunk too much at a dinner party.  In both examples, the person didn't lose their ability to do math or write well.  They simply were feeling ill.  The point?   Fr. Giussani wishes to indicate how  there is a unity between "the instrument of reason and the rest of the person."

"Man is one, and reason is not a machine that can be disconnected from the rest of the personality and then left to operate alone like some spring mechanism in a toy.  Reason is inherent in the entire unity of our self; it is organically related to it."

We have all had experiences of this.  Think about the last time you got hurt in an accident or a girlfriend/boyfriend unexpectedly dumped you.  How was your reasoning affected by those events?

Religious Sense: Chapter 2

Recap:  In these first three chapters of The Religious Sense, we are examining three premises about the human experience that will help us in examining religion in particular.  In the summary of Chapter 1, we looked at the need for realism in our approach to the things -- the objects -- we encounter in life.  And from that we considered that the method to learn the truth of an object is given by the object and how matters of human experience need to be examined through existential inquiry and that that can result in learning of objective things.

Intro:  In Chapter 2 of The Religious Sense, we turn our attention more closely to the subject doing the investigation:  man.   And the specific premise that Fr. Giussani wishes to explore here is the need for man to act with reasonableness.  But before we get in too deep, it is worth defining what Fr. Giussani means by reason and reasonableness.  Because our modern ears have been trained to think quite narrowly about these terms.  (Often associating reason with only the scientific method, for example.)  Fr. Giussani defines the terms this way:

"[Reason is] the capacity to become aware of reality according to the totality of its factors.  The term reasonableness, then, represents a mode of action that expresses and realizes reason, the capacity to become aware of reality."

It is worth pondering over these definitions for a moment.  If you followed Pope Benedict's Regensburg lecture and the outcry around it, one of the things Pope Benedict was pointing out was the need for this broadening of reason beyond the narrow terms we have become used to in modern times.  What is appealing about Fr. Giussani's definition of reason is that it doesn't deny anything a priori.  It is ready to tackle all of reality.  It doesn't tie reason to a specific method, thus denying the possibility that anything not discoverable through that method could in fact be reasonable.