Welcome!
Thank you for visiting. I hope you will enjoy the variety of topics to enhance your spiritual life. You can read them below or download them and read at your leisure. I have also added my Sunday Homilies.
CURRENT TOPICS: Notes for Presentation on Mary + God Is Beautiful + Short History of the Eucharist in Five Questions + Outline of History of Eucharist.
ENJOY!
*(Updated, Sunday 2nd March 2025)
8th Sunday OT – Luke 6:39-45
The author Peter Kreeft writes, “Of the five parables or analogies in this passage, the most important one is Jeus’ poking fun at pride and our sense of superiority by saying, ‘Can a blind person guide a blind person?’ The image of blind leading the blind is straight out of Charlie Chaplin, or Monty Python.
“…Jesus is deliberately poking fun at pride here in using an outrageous image like a log in the eye. If we take the analogy literally, as a robot or a computer would, we will think it really stupid: logs don’t fit into eyes. But that would only prove our own stupidity. The point is not literal but analogical; as a log is much bigger than a splinter, so our own faults are much bigger than the fault we criticize in others.”
In the gospel of John, the passage of the Man Born Blind, shows the blindness of the Pharisees by their refusing to admit Jesus’ miracle because he cured the man on the Sabbath. Jesus’ reply was, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.” The above passage is really about the eyes of faith. But it cannot stop there, since faith is the beginning of our journey to follow Christ in love; a tough love that reminds us to examine ourselves first before we criticize others.
Sister Verna Holyhead writes in Give Us This Day, “What Jesus teaches, he lives, and in today’s continuation of the Sermon on the Plain he is the wisdom teacher who voices his expectation of this same integrity in his disciples. If we are blind to our own shortcomings, yet judgmental about those of our sisters and brothers, we have no right to guide them with our advice; we will only succeed in dragging them down into the metaphorical ditch rather than helping them out of their difficulties.”
The third parable concerns trees and their fruits. The tree is a common biblical image for the wise individual or for the people as a whole, as in the preaching of Isaiah and of the Baptist. In Jesus’ parable of the fig tree in Luke and in his cursing of the tree in Mark, it symbolizes unfruitful Israel. Here, it must also be applied to Jesus’ Sermon on the Plains in Luke’s gospel. The fruit that the Christian disciple is expected to bear, is the teaching of the Sermon on the plains put into practice. This is what a good man produces from the treasure of his heart, the hundredfold that comes from faithful listening to the Word of God through contemplation. The words that the believer speaks, are to well out of a heart full to the brim with the teaching of Christ.
That is where a well formed conscious is so important that even the Church realized this, even though they do not always respect our conscious especially when they tell us how to vote. John Henry Newman writes, “Conscious has to do with persons and with actions only insofar as they are “personal”—though not insofar as they concern any persons; rather, my conscience is concerned with me alone and with others…”
What Newman is saying is that our conscious is personal simply because God is directing us in our actions from within each and every individual. And he continues, “If I am asked why I believe in a God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, for I feel it impossible to believe in my own existence without believing also in the existence of a God who is a Personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being in my conscience.”
If you truly believe in this human mental faculty called conscious that separates our actions into good and bad, along with but separate from our memory, imagination and our sense of beauty, then how can anyone not believe in a personal God?!. But unlike memory and our sense of beauty, which have to do with objects, conscience has to do with persons and with actions only insofar as they are our own.
If you can understand this, then today’s gospel will not only make sense, but justifies Jesus’ exaggeration of someone trying to take the splinter out of another person’s eye! Only God can see into someone else’s personal life history and guide that person how they should act day by day because of our personal relationship with the Divine.
We only trust other people’s judgement if we sense that they are open to understanding ourselves and my personal situation. And the more the other person has experienced what we have experienced, the more we trust them. That rarely includes the Church unless a minister of the Church is that person. Newman clarifies that, “The fact that besides me there is another participant who has a concern in my behavior is contained in the experience of conscience, and our conscience knows that it is dealing with Someone, not something…” which is God!
And what is the foundation of this relationship between God and our personal conscious? It is agape, Divine Love, a love that died for us and personally knows what we are going through. It is a Divine Love that is willing to suffer for us until the end of time when the last human being on this planet ceases to exist. Think about that!
GOD IS BEAUTY
BEAUTY IS GOD
PART TWO: Emmy Noether’s Beautiful Theorem
Most mathematicians would agree that Albert Einstein’s equation, ‘E=mc2’, to be beautiful. In fact, they would also agree that an equation needs to be simple and beautiful for it to be true. This seems strange at first, and “…most physicists still find it somewhat staggering” as quoted from Richard Feynman by Jim Holt in his book, When Einstein Walked with Godel, published in 2018. Feynman’s remark was about the intimate connection between symmetry and conservation proven by Emmy Noether as “a most profound and beautiful thing.”
“Emmy Noether was among the greatest pure mathematicians of the twentieth century,” Jim Holtz writes.
Born in Bavaria in 1882, she obtained a Ph.D. at Gottingen in 1907. Though the equal of such illustrious colleagues…she was, as a woman, barred from holding a full professorship, but she was allowed to give unpaid lectures as a Privatodozent. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Noether, a Jew, was stripped of her semiofficial position at Gottingen. She fled to the United States, where she taught at Bryn Mawr and gave lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1935, she died suddenly from an infection after an operation.
“Noerther’s Equation connects symmetries of the abstract mathematical theories of matter to quantities that experimenters can measure,” Public Domain. What that means is that mathematical descriptions of nature can be tested in the real world – a crucial relationship between the abstract and the concrete. Otherwise, the mathematicians can dream up all sorts of formulas that may not necessarily have any meaning in the real world, and especially if they cannot be tested.
Generally, especially with abstract mathematics, physicists see mathematicians with their heads in the clouds. Only recently have both worked together, mathematician and physicists. Einstein almost pleaded with them to work together since he believed that both would profit in the long run for each other. It was really not until the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century that more cooperative work has been done, especially in particle physics between the disciplines. Even among the different fields, like astronomy and particle physics have more cooperation yielded results and more than enough work for the future in those fields.
James Clerk Maxwell, in response to Questionnaire by Francis Galton, 1870, “I always regarded mathematics as the method of obtaining the best shapes and dimensions of things; and this meant not only the most useful and economical, but chiefly the most harmonious and the most beautiful.” There is that word beautiful again used by one of the great mathematicians of his century. Ironically, he was initially a philosopher and country gentleman. His theory of electromagnetism was later encapsulated in the most important set of differential equations ever to be used to describe the real world. He was even an inspiration to Albert Einstein who developed the theory of relativity. He was also a strong believer of experimentation. “I have no reason to believe that the human intellect is able to weave a system of physics out of its own resources without experimental labor.”
However, it wasn’t until Dirac’s lecture in 1939 in Edinburgh that the word beauty was specifically used in mathematics. He proposed a new principle of mathematical beauty, “…that researchers should always strive to maximize the beauty of the mathematical structures that underpin their theories of the natural world.” Most in the audience would have believed the opposite since it would have been to them notoriously subjective. “Dirac tried to forestall this objection by declaring that mathematical beauty – in common with beauty in art – cannot be defined, asserting that people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating it,” (from Graham Farmelo’s book The Universe Speaks in Numbers, 2019).
This idea was certainly not new – Plato developed ideas on these lines, including Dante, whose Divine Comedy included includes many signs of the medieval preoccupation with the mathematical principles believed to underlie the structures and functioning of the cosmos. Dirac’s basis for his talk was that even “…the research worker, in trying to express the fundamental laws of Nature in mathematical form, should strive for mathematical beauty.”
In PART THREE we will look next to the philosophers on beauty.
See Below – contains both files:
Five Main Questions on the Eucharist and
Outline of History of Eucharist