Grace is everywhere

Our culture works against anyone having a deep understanding of suffering. We only want to get through it as soon as possible, or else we obsess with the theological problem of how to reconcile the suffering of innocents with the idea of a loving God. As a result of our narrowing our response to suffering to these two choices, we miss out on seeing just how central to our understanding of grace is our ability to experience limitations. Life without limitations--without death and suffering--is life without grace. There is, in short, no way to measure the value of our lives without the experience of them as a temporary gift.

I have been wanting to read The Diary of a Country Priest for years. But I had no idea how beautiful this book was until I finished it. This is one of the most poignant portraits of a limited human being who is beautiful in that limitation, and through it. I wish that reviewers had never used the word "luminous" to describe prose so that I could save it for this description. Passages of this book are luminous. Read it; cherish it.

Persons are more than their properties

I just finished Robert Spaemann's wonderful book: Persons: the difference between someone and something. It is a difficult read, but worth it, as his argument that persons are constituted by their membership in humanity is one of the best answers I can find to the arguments of utilitarians such as Peter Singer. There is a lot at stake here, but my favorite part of the book was the last chapter, when he explained how the severely disabled give more to human society than they require from it. They do this by being an "acid test" for our humanity--they force society to think of persons as more than the sum total of their properties.

“In fact, however, they give more than they get. They receive help at the level of sustaining life. But for the hale and hearty portion of mankind giving this help is of fundamental importance. It brings to light the deepest meaning of a community of persons. Love or recognition directed to a human being is not, as we have seen, directed merely to personal properties, though it is the personal properties that allow us to grasp that a person is there. Friendship and erotic love develop mainly in response to the beloved’s individual personal properties. A disabled person may lack such properties, and it is by lacking them that they constitute the paradigm for a human community of recognizing selves, rather than simply valuing useful or attractive properties. They evoke the best in human beings; they evoke the true ground of human self-respect. So what they give to humanity in this way by the demands they make upon it is more than what they receive.” (244)