Category Archives: Faith

Tony Blair contradiction?

Back on this earlier post Herb drew my attention to a piece in The Times about Tony Blair. His link didn’t work, so I went there and hunted for the piece on my own, and found two items of interest.

Well, three. The first is that I hadn’t checked in with my hero Tony in a while, and last I knew he was thinking about converting to Roman Catholicism, as I did long ago. According to both pieces in the Times, that’s a done deal now. Good. Welcome, Tony.

The other two things suggest a contradiction in thinking, which may result from bad reporting as Herb suggests, but there is the remote possibility that our Tony has been caught being inconsistent. In a piece about Iraq, he suggested that sometimes, in order to do the right thing, you have to look past the polls:

In an interview with Time magazine last year he said: “The worst thing in politics is when you’re so scared of losing support that you don’t do what you think is the right thing. What faith can do is not tell you what is right but give you the strength to do it.”

Tony’s certainly right about that, and he was always right about Iraq. I used to wish HE had been in charge of the Special Relationship, as he was actually able to explain clearly why we were there, unlike a certain chief executive I could name over on this side of the pond.

But then, in another piece — and I think this was the one to which Herb meant to refer — he suggests something very different. After telling the Pope he should “rethink” his ideas about homosexuality, he goes on:

In the interview Mr Blair spoke of a “quiet revolution in thinking” and implied that he believed the Pope to be out of step with the public.

“There are many good and great things the Catholic Church does, and there are many fantastic things this Pope stands for, but I think what is interesting is that if you went into any Catholic Church, particularly a wellattended one, on any Sunday here and did a poll of the congregation, you’d be surprised at how liberal-minded people were.” The faith of ordinary Catholics is rarely found “in those types of entrenched attitudes”, he said.

In other words, the magisterium should bow to the popular view of the moment.

Contradiction? You be the judge. If it is, it’s a natural human failing. We all tend to admire individuals standing against the herd when we agree with them, and not so much when we don’t.

Do you know what your sin is?

Yes, that’s a quote from “Serenity” — the Operative, in point of fact. Do you know, I once took a quiz online to find out “which “Firefly” character are you?,” and it said I was the Operative. Some of my libertarian friends out there will get a chuckle out of that, but I didn’t like it a bit. Then I took it several more times — going the other way on questions that had been close calls — and each time I was somebody else. Never did get to be Jayne, though, which was disappointing. I didn’t even get to be Mal (I was stuck with the doctor — my least favorite character — and Shepherd Book).

But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that I did the first reading in Mass today, which is a rare privilege. I much prefer doing the 1st reading (Old Testament, usually), but I almost always get scheduled to do the 2nd (usually Paul’s epistles). I really get into the Old Testament readings — they tell stories; they take you somewhere — while Paul is usually too dry and abstract to mean as much to me as it should.

So it fell to me today to do the 1st reading, and this was it, from Jeremiah 31:

The days are coming, says the LORD,
when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
and the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers
the day I took them by the hand
to lead them forth from the land of Egypt;
for they broke my covenant,
and I had to show myself their master, says the LORD.
But this is the covenant that I will make
with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD.
I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts;
I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives
how to know the LORD.
All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD,
for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.

One of the ways that my faith manifests itself is that I see meaning in my being chosen to read this to the people. And this reading seems particularly pregnant with meaning for me.

You see, I’m going through a rough patch in my professional life at the moment — what with being laid off and all. And it reminds me of when I went through a much worse one, almost exactly 22 years ago. And God delivered me and my house from that. I’ll tell you the story of it in greater detail another time, but suffice it to say that the four seemingly interminable days it took my wife and me to drive our two cars and (then) four young children out of the Western wilderness to the East Coast caused the 40 years of wandering in the desert to be much more immediate and real for me. And I have always thanked God for leading us out of there, to the land of my fathers, where we have been blessed.

So that part of the reading, about the earlier covenant when God took the people by the hand and led them out of Kansas — I mean, Egypt — is a reference I personally find applicable.

But God says through Jeremiah that that deal is now off, just as my time of being blessed in my job at The State is over.

So that leaves me with two questions:

  1. What was my sin, if indeed sin there was? Maybe there wasn’t one in particular, since I don’t feel all that much of a sense of loss. But if there was one, I should know what it was.
  2. What’s the new deal?

Mostly lately, my mind has been focused on the new deal, the new covenant that lies before me. As it has begun to take shape — just bits of it so far — I’ve gotten pretty excited about it. And the mind naturally turns to “What’s next?”

But this reading causes me to wonder: Is there a lesson yet to be learned from where I was? If so, I need to figure that out. I’m planning on going to the Lenten Reconciliation Service at St. Peter’s Monday night. So I’m reflecting upon this…

Too heavy for you? Well, then go to the mall, as Jack Black’s character said in “High Fidelity,” just to bring us back to the realm of pop culture, for those who are more comfortable there.