Arlington Burial Closes Case of Missing D-Day Soldier

From the Columbus Dispatch.

Bill Poveromo of Charlotte, N.C., never knew his uncle, John Simonetti — only the stories. Long before Poveromo was born, Uncle John died at age 26 in a French pasture on June 16, 1944, 10 days after the D-Day invasion of Normandy. No one ever found a body, so Simonetti’s parents never held a funeral. They died in the late 1960s. But today, 120 far-flung members of Uncle John’s family will gather at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C., to bury his remains — miraculously found in late May 2009, days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.

A happy ending to a sad story. Read it all.

Christine Scheller: How Far Should Forgiveness Go?

Niebuhr’s moral equivalency statement asks me to place my sins on par with those of sexual abusers and their accomplices. I instinctively don’t believe it. Nor do I believe that the difference between the sins of “the good man and the bad man” is insignificant in God’s eyes.

A very thought-provoking article that cuts to the heart of what it means to be a Christian. Forgiveness is not easy and is closely tied to repentance, something that we often overlook. Read it all.

What do you think?

CT: Burned by the Qur’an Burning

The good news: Editors and publishers now know that their readers want to read about religion. The bad news: Editors and publishers now know that those readers are more likely to click on an inflammatory rehashed column on homosexuality, Islam, atheism, or evolution than on a deeply researched report that illuminates important but less controversial issues.

With fewer professional religion reporters on the beat, mainstream religion coverage is falling back to tropes and shop-worn narratives that we thought were being laid to rest, especially, “Religious people sure are crazy,” and, “Religious leaders condemn [insert current outrage here].” It’s not surprising that Jones’s name first spread through a wire service story prompted by a press release from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group known for perpetual outrage.

A good op-ed piece. Read it all.

From the Morning Scriptures

[Jesus said,] “When an evil spirit comes out of anyone, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.”

–Luke 11:24-26 (TNIV)

Nature abhors a vacuum and if we believe our Lord, so apparently does the spiritual world. Jesus here is reminding us that it is not enough to be cleansed of the spiritual ills that beset us (he tells us this in the wake of just having healed a demoniac). Something must fill our souls, either good or evil.

What our Lord is telling us, therefore, is that we need to fill our spirits with the Power and Presence of God. If you ignore your spiritual disciplines and the means of grace available to us–e.g., regular Bible reading and study, prayer, worship, partaking of the eucharistic sacrament, et al.–you will be inviting spiritual maladies to visit you. “You are what you eat” goes the old saying and it is true as well with our spiritual lives. If we focus on, and put our energies in, the things of this world and things secular, we will become like that on which we focus. If we focus on, and put our energies in, Christ and do your part to develop the relationship, we will become like him.

The choice is clear. We either turn into something good or evil and we only do the former with the help of God’s Spirit living in us. As Jesus reminds us earlier in this passage, we are either for him or against him. Neutrality or non-decision becomes a decision to be against him.

Think carefully about these things. In our modern-day world, we tend to poo-poo things spiritual, but we do so at our own peril. If you care at all about your own holistic well-being–mind, body, and soul–you will heed Jesus’ advice and populate your spirit with the Spirit and Source of all life.

C.S. Lewis: This Week’s Featured Anglican Writer and Theologian

This week, I am featuring the writing and theology of Clive Staples Lewis, better known as C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). Lewis was arguably the most popular Christian writer of the latter half of the 20th century. You may have heard of Lewis if you have ever watched the movie, The Chronicles of Narnia, one of his many books.

Lewis was a brilliant man who wrestled with the most perplexing of religious questions. He had no formal theological training and did not consider himself to be a theologian. But he wrote about theology in ways that made it speak to the common reader. He had an extraordinary ability to find an image, illustration, or analogy to bring into focus even the most complex theological ideas.

Richard Schmidt notes that, “undergirding all Lewis’ work is the conviction of a reality unseen, another world over and beyond the world of time and space, in which good and evil conflict, and with which our lives are intertwined, whether we know it or not” (Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality, 278).

Lewis was not a Christian as a young man. In fact, he dabbled with atheism before his gradual conversion in the 1920s and 30s. Known for his incisive logic, he had not patience with sloppy or sentimental thinking and you can see his logic shine brightly in his book, The Problem of Pain (1940) and Mere Christianity (1952). Both are classics and if you have not read them, I wholeheartedly commend them to you.

As you read excerpts from Lewis this week, see if you can find examples of these characteristics. I have always profited from Lewis’ writings and I pray you will too.

On theology:

Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you… They all say “the ordinary reader does not want Theology; give him plain practical religion.” I have rejected their advice. I do not think the ordinary reader is such a fool. Theology means “the science of God,” and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about him which are available. You are not children: why should you be treated like children?

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.E, an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, “I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!”

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real, to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from real waves to a bit of colored paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only colored paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

Now Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But the map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you or I are likely to get on our own way are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.

The Joyful Christian

On heaven:

Scripture and tradition habitually put the joys of Heaven into the scale against the sufferings of earth, and no solution of the problem of pain which does not do so can be called a Christian one. We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning Heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about “pie in the sky,” and of being told that we are trying to “escape” from the duty of making a happy world here and now into dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But either there is “pie in the sky” or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric. If there is, then this truth, like any other, must be faced, whether it is useful at political meetings or no. Again, we are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man’s love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.

The Problem of Pain

Hungering for Righteousness

Whoever hungers for righteousness wants to live actively according to God’s righteousness; this is proper for the person with a good heart. One who thirsts for righteousness wants to acquire the knowledge of God that one can gain only by studying the Scriptures. This is fitting for the person with an attentive heart.

–Anonymous, Incomplete Work on Matthew, Homily 9

Perfect Blessedness

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The Lord taught by way of example that the glory of human ambition must be left behind when he said, “The Lord your God shall you adore and him only shall you serve.” And when he announced through the prophets that he would choose a people humble and in awe of his words, he introduced the perfect Beatitude as humility of spirit. Therefore he defines those who are inspired as people aware that they are in possession of the heavenly kingdom. Nothing belongs to anyone as being properly one’s own, but all have the same things by the gift of a single parent. They have been given the first things needed to come into life and have been supplied with the means to use them.

–Hilary of Poitiers, On Matthew 4.2

What We Shall Be

The believer in Christ has already died to his old life and has been born again by faith, but it is not yet clear what the full extent of that new life will be. However, we do at least know that we shall be immortal and unchanging, because we shall enjoy the contemplation of God’s eternity. Because we shall be blessed we shall be like Christ, yet at the same time we shall be unlike him because he is our Creator and we are only creatures.

–Bede, the Venerable, On 1 John