Misiorowski and Kwietniewski

  

Jacob Misiorowski

Jacob Misiorowski is a Phenom for the Brewers.  He reminds me of Casimir Kwietniewski because of his Polish name.   

Cass Michaels

I saw Cass as a 17-year-old recruit for the White Sox.  It was 1943.  Luke Appling was about to be drafted into the army.  It was 17-year-old Cass to take over.  I remember him being delighted at mixing with the older players. 

Cass quickly became a star as a Rookie.  He was moved to the Washington Senators in a big trade.  Cass changed his name to Cass Michaels.  In the trade, the White Sox got Nelson Fox who unexpectedly became an even better player than Cass Michaels. 

Nellie Fox

Cass Michaels had outstanding years as a second baseman, but he was beaned as a player for the Detroit Tigers.  His career was shortened and he died in 1982 at age 56. 

Jacob Misiorowski, as he goes forward, looks to an outstanding career.  I hope his fortune will be better than Cass. 

What Is True Catholic Faith? by Bill Droel

  

Catholics are schooled in the faith by memorizing dogmatic points and lots of Catholic trivia. What are the colors for various liturgical seasons and special feast days? What are the three possible destinations upon one’s death? Name the seven sacraments. Name the glorious mysteries of the rosary. Name the four gospels.

This quiz show format is perhaps acceptable for primary-grade children. It is regularly used in parish-based religious education programs and in a few light-hearted card games and skits. However, today’s Catholic young adults--with exceptions--exhibit little interest in or basic understanding of essential dogmas like the Trinity or the Real Presence in the Eucharist. When young adults do not know or do not comprehend or are uninterested in essential beliefs, their practice of Catholic faith wanes.

Nonetheless, many young adults are humanists. They are good people who episodically help with charitable efforts. They are conscientious on the job. They are loyal to friends. They possess some humor.  In a sense they are good enough Catholics, even though they don’t proudly identify as such.

In addition to basic knowledge of the faith there is another component to Catholicism. Catholics and other Christians have faith because in some manner Jesus fills their hearts and souls. Maybe the points of dogma and the elements of Catholic culture come first; maybe they come later. Likely the two are in a blender. But without a relationship with Jesus/God, faith is unsustainable.

Our Catholic bishops, deliberating at Vatican II (1962-1965), concluded that in daily life the deductive method must be complemented by reflection on one’s experience, leading to wise application. For example, there is a philosophical explanation of how Jesus is present in the Eucharist. There might be found here and there a young adult or two who has learned some of Aristotle’s distinctions and can articulate that explanation of the Real Presence. That same young adult, however, might never know or feel Jesus’ presence as they go about their job, their family life, or any of their other involvements. Another young adult can recite Psalm23 from memory without ever knowing the Shepherd. An exclusive reliance on the top-down approach of transmitting the faith potentially stifles creativity, inhibits research and expansion, distorts understanding of complexities, discourages action and cheapens relationships. Therefore, experience must be prior to any theory or ideology—not necessarily prior chronologically, but it is an essential ingredient to faith.

Vatican II teaches that religious experience is not separate from daily experience. In fact, faith begins with so-called ordinary encounters. To use a theological catch phrase: grace builds upon nature.

Yet, experience alone is insufficient. A person can fly through the months—a job promotion, new “friends” through social media, travel, a full social life, a positive health report and the like. Vatican II asks such a person, and all of us, “what is the meaning of this feverish activity?” Am I holy? Do I really love? How do I get my conversations past the superficialities? Why is my experience so episodic? Where will I be in five years? What’s the point of my prayer? Where did I put my moral compass?

Experience plus reflection equals faithful wisdom. A faithful person needs quiet time. The mobile device is locked away for an hour, or at least 45 minutes each day. The laptop is also asleep. The TV is disconnected. Still, wisdom does not arrive on the first try. It must be nurtured and sustained, especially through the dry times. Wisdom is particularly hard to gain in our individualistic, vacuous culture. It takes practice.

 The multitudinous rules of Catholicism are useless without faith-based wisdom. Catholicism admittedly comes with faults galore, some of which are scandalously immoral. However, Catholicism is a carrier of a sophisticated ethic, a rich culture with interesting symbols, a profound liturgy, inexhaustible Scripture and a heavenly host of role models. Going forward, the challenge is to observe and act in one’s surroundings, to judge the signs of the times and with discipline to reflect on growth in the love of Christ. Does it sound too pious? Well, be sure to put perfection aside. Then, holiness is possible in the here-and-now. Experience counts.

 

Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629).

 

Catholicism and AI by Bill Droel

 

With hammer in hand, Martin Luther (1483-1546) struck a significant blow against clericalism and for the laity in the world by insisting on the universal call to holiness. A cobbler’s work is as valuable to God as is a priest’s, he explained. The vocation of a homemaker is no further away from God than that of a priest in the pulpit.

Subsequent leaders of the Reformation lost sight of Luther’s significant contribution on the primacy of baptism and the centrality of lay spirituality. Instead, those leaders preached the “utter depravity” of each person and claimed that the world was a playground for the devil. Temptation lurked all around. This pessimistic turn in Protestant thinking only reinforced the heaven and earth dualism, the difference between clergy and laity.

Gradually, Protestants found a way to balance the good that people can do in the world and the persistence of worldly evil. For example, successful industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) pointed to the philanthropic responsibilities for monied Christians, in his 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth.”

Max Weber (1864-1920), a founder of sociology, popularized the balanced approach in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Penguin, 1904). Certain Christian virtues (like thrift, competence, loyalty, efficiency, measured charity) reinforce habits that are important to success in a capitalist economy, he wrote. Unfortunately, the Christian side of this philosophy has been eclipsed these days by a laissez faire style of capitalism that prizes utilitarian ethics, individualism, and consumerism.

What does Catholicism have to say about work?

Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were greatly disturbed by the downside of capitalism: crowded housing, dangerous occupations, child labor, in a word, misery. Their radical proposals included the abolition of private property.

Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) came to the defense of private property in his 1891 encyclical, On the Condition of Labor. Leo XIII added, however, that capitalism must have restraints, like government regulation, labor unions, professional standards and more.

In his Theology of Work (Regnery, 1966), Fr. Marie-Dominique Chenu, OP (1895-1990) further developed Catholic doctrine about the laity at work. His perspective, like that of other contributors to Vatican II (1962-1965), was pegged to an industrial economy with its impoverishing downside.

Before his election as pope, Saint John Paul II (1920-2005) was a stonecutter in a limestone quarry. He was employed in a chemical plant and as a railroad maintenance man. He was a dramatist and a theater promoter. He was also quite fluent in the Marxist perspective on work. As pope, he wrote a September 1981 encyclical, On Human Work. It stands as a masterful Catholic reflection on the philosophy and theology of work.

Kate Ward of Marquette University brings the topic into our post-industrial context with Making a Life: Catholic Social Teaching and the Meaning of Work (National Center for the Laity, 2026).

Ward begins with a contrast between a work-until-you-drop mindset and a Catholic worldview. Our current economy is premised on what she calls workism. It values activity in the world exclusively by “outputs that can literally be counted.” Workism is associated with long hours on the job, with unpredictable job schedules, and with side hustles (aka entrepreneurship or gigs).

By contrast, as she details, Catholicism uses “an inclusive definition of work.” For starters, Catholic theology regards work as “more than what we do for pay… Unpaid work is work.” It is “any activity through which humans transform the world.”

Ward heaves aside the pessimistic idea that work is a punishment for sin. Adam and Eve were (in one translation) “dressing paradise” before the Fall and they continued to work thereafter. Rather than a punishment, work in and of itself contributes to holiness.

Though Catholicism maintains ideals about work, it is realistic; work--on the job, around the home and in the community--is irksome. Nonetheless, keep in mind that through toil and accomplishment the “primary importance” of our activity “is how it shapes the worker, rather than what work produces,” Ward urges.

Injustice finds its way into the world of work—again, on the job, in the home and in the community. Inadequate wages are a prime example. Yet, a person’s employer might be paying “the best they can afford,” Ward interestingly acknowledges. She goes on to explain the concept of indirect employers. These are the entities that set the terms within which a person’s direct employer (like a small business owner, a non-profit agency, or a franchise) operates—factors like government regulations, the sector’s expectations, the corporate office that controls significant variables.

Ward concludes Making a Life with applications of Catholic doctrine to caregiving, to art and leisure. She also examines food preparation from farm to table. Like all products of work, a meal is “a larger reality that can be called sacramental.” It stands “for something larger; the labor that produced it.” That labor is an extension of God’s ongoing creation and thus a meal (like other products or accomplishments) contains grace.

Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name, he says, precisely to build upon the Catholic theology of work begun in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII. Specifically, Leo XIV says Catholicism must reflect on an AI-economy. Kate Ward’s Making a Life is a good start to such reflection.

Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629). It distributes On the Condition of Labor by Pope Leo XIII (free), On Human Work by Saint John Paul II ($7) and Making a Life by Kate Ward ($18).

 

Dilexi Te – A Root of Anti-Semitism?

Pope Leo XIV's 1st Encyclical

"Now I am going to make the synagogue of Satan--those who profess to be Jews, but are liars, because they are no such thing--I will make them come and fall at your feet and admit that you are the people that I love."  Rev.  3:9  

After the destruction of the Jewish temple in the year 70, the Jewish community was split between the synagogue Jews and the Christian Jews.  There was hostility between them as indicated by John’s book of Revelation and other scriptural passages.

Does Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical serve as a follow-up to Leo XIII’s inaugural Encyclical on social justice, Rerum Novarum 1891, or simply a demonstration of a root of anti-semitism? 

Machine Politics and the Church by Bill Droel

 

The Catholic church and the political machine had a symbiotic relationship in Chicago and elsewhere for many years. So argues Dominic Pacyga in his latest book: Clout City (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Chicago politics was “a mixture of the sacred and the profane, a combination of cultural and religious roots and more worldly pursuits,” he writes. “Chicago is a secular, capitalist city, but one with a religious core.” Pacyga includes synagogues and Jewish organizations on the religious side. Both the machine and the church/synagogue were compassionate alternatives to the Protestant establishment, popularly called downtown or big corporate.

Within his timeframe, 1870 to 2023, Pacyga profiles many of the key actors in the machine, most of whom were Democrats. The machine’s efficient years were 1930-1965 when it was largely associated with Richard J Daley (1902-1976), whoserved 21 years as Chicago mayor and 23 years as the party’s chair in the county.His son Richard M Daley, now in his mid-80s, subsequently served 22 years as mayor.

The machine was hierarchical. The boss relied on faithful commissioners to oversee city services. With rare exceptions the boss also controlled the city council. The council member (called the aldermanin Chicagolingo) was paired with a ward committee person. The next level (covering maybe four to a dozen blocks) was the responsibility of a precinct captain, whose day job was often with the city.

The machine had a practical communitarian mindset in contrast to society’s dominant philosophy of individual achievement. A collective mentality was nurtured, in part, by ethnic and religious culture, says Pacyga. He uses De La Salle High School in Chicago’s near southside as an example. It was “a political incubator” for machine politicians, Pacyga details. Five mayors including the Daley’s graduated from De La Salle. Plus,the school educated two county presidents and “countless other politicians, judges and city officials [and] numerous businesspeople, police officers, firefighters and a host of city workers.” That high school stressed order, hierarchy and loyalty. It “encouraged Catholic attitudes toward fairness, duty and sin, often in deep contrast to the rampant individualism and unbridled capitalism” of Chicago.

Of course, the machine had corruption. However, neighborhood people overlooked it, as long as the community at large benefited from jobs, emergency assistance, license considerations, snow removal, trash collection, fire and police protection. The machine “existed side by side with an approach to political governance that derived from and centered on the communalism of Chicago’s immigrant and working-class communities.”

A similar description of New York’s machine, called Tammany Hall, is found in Terry Golway’s Machine Made (W.W. Norton, 2014). Again, political corruption was taken for granted. But for New York’s immigrants, especially those from Ireland, Tammany was able “to mediate the capriciousness of laissez-faire capitalism.” It delivered jobs and social services to working families in a respectful manner, untainted by paternal noblesse oblige.

As in Chicago, the New York machine relied implicitly on a foundation in the Catholic experience. Golway devotes several pages to Archbishop John Hughes (1797-1864), describing him as “aggressive and political to his very marrow.” Hughes, originally from Ireland, explained the feeling of Irish and other immigrants: For the first five days of my life, I was “on social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British Empire. Then I was baptized asa Catholic and became a second-class citizen.”

In time the machine model of urban politics disintegrated, Pacyga says. The corruption became too enriching for too few while service delivery declined. Further, the post-1960s reform movement within the Democratic Party drew its leaders into elite circles. They associatedwith tech barons and favored focus groups over the word on the street. The Democratssupportedseveral cultural causes foreign to the Catholic sensibility. Suburbanization was the big factor in the machine’s decline. As immigrants left the city, they took on aspirations of the upper-class. Their Catholicism, if it remained at all, was like the individualism of evangelicals.

Nowadays, does a local politician or a pastor have any influence on one’s difficulties with health insurance or with internet providers or with immigration policies or employment opportunities? Does the notion of community have any traction in a society where the sum of striving individuals is the ethical norm? Is a government or church model based on services in any way compelling to today’s young adults?Should there be a new machine and what form would it take?

Droel edits a printed newsletter on faith and work: INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)

Prayer in Dodge County Detention Center

 

Dodge County Detention Center in Juneau, Wisconsin

God and Our Father, you are present here with us.                                                                    Thank you for bringing us together today in your honor.                                                            We ask you to light up our path                                                                                                  That we now walk in this world.                                                                                             

                                 You are the hope that we and our families                                                  Receive, the hope that you give us.                  Help us continue forward          With faith, and with love and dignity.                                                                                                                    God our Father, it is good that you are at our side                           Teach us to be resilient                        And thus overcome adversities.                                                                                                                                           Love for always,  For our families.                                                         But soon we will be back together                                          To carry on loving each other as always.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          This poem is the English translation of a song composed and sung by a volunteer visitor to the Detention Center.  After the visits with the immigrant detainees, individuals offer a prayer from their hearts.

Christmas 2025

 The word Evangelization is almost the same in Greek and in Latin.  

For the Romans it meant Good News, Pax Romana through military victory.  

For Christians, the Good News was announced on Christmas night by the angels singing, 

"Peace on Earth to men of good will."  

Evangelization meant peace through nonviolence, a direct contrast to the Roman Empire.  

For Christmas Donald Trump sent planes to bomb Nigeria, a Christmas present of the anti-Christ.  

People inspect the scene of a deadly bombing in a mosque in Maiduguri, Nigeria,  on Dec. 25, 2025.

Democratic Socialists - Who are they?

 In reference to the election of Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani in New York City in November, 2025, we propose to present some defining information on Democratic Socialists.

Our Tastes Are Not the Same

by Frank Zeidler, Democratic Socialist Mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  (Reflections:  the Poetry of a Young Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee Public Library)

The 'Brotherhood of Man' becomes a trap and snare

    Unless a man reflects;

For only by a knowledge of our differences can we dare

        To remedy defects.

    Our tastes are not the same;

    We do not thrive in equal ways.

    And useless is the aim,

    Without this sight, for peace that stays.

Frank Zeidler

Frank Zeidler is among Milwaukee's most beloved and respected citizens.  A noted historian and statesman, Zeidler was mayor of Milwaukee from 1948 - 1960 and the Socialist party presidential candidate in 1976.

From The Making of Milwaukee by John Gurda, p. 211, Milwaukee County Historical Society.  Photo from the Milwaukee Public Library

Caption: The party press pictured the Socialist landslide of 1910 as "Milwaukee Welcoming the Sunrise."

After rising to a sustained ovation at the 1910 victory party, Victor Berger spoke, for once, with genuine humility:  

"Comrades, I want to ask every man and woman in this audience to stand up and with lifted hand take a pledge that we will do all in our power to help the men that the people have chosen to do their duty and to fulfill our promises.  The eyes of the country will be upon us.  We must make good for the faith that is in us." 

Victor Berger, the pragmatic idealist who became the Moses of Milwaukee Socialism.  (The Making of Milwaukee, by John Gurda, p. 205)

GIVE THANKS FOR IMMIGRANTS by Bill Droel

 

Our flag is the number one symbol of our country. Its design of 13 stripes and 

50 stars means unity through pluralism. It represents our belief in a layered government

with authority given by citizenry.

 The flag stands for all the positive values of our experiment in democracy.

There are other symbols of our country. This month features pictures and displays of the harvest rituals and feasts that occurred in the early 1600s in Massachusetts, Virginia and elsewhere. These serene images obviously compress history. They are influenced by famous paintings, including one from 1915,The First Thanksgiving by Jean Louis Ferris (1893-1930) and one from 1943, the still popular Four Freedoms by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978). Thanksgiving was celebrated regionally until 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) designated a national day of Thanksgiving to “Almighty God…for fruitful fields and healthful skies.”

The Statue of Liberty is another symbol of our beautiful, bounteous country. It is a fitting image to link with Thanksgiving.

Frederic Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), whose Italian parents immigrated to France, was involved with a circle of people who were aware of how France aided our struggle for independence. They considered the United States a model for their own movement for liberty. They raised money to donate a statue symbolizing their appreciation for our country. They wanted the spirit of their gift to keep moving in the sense that the United States would support and sustain liberty among freedom-seeking people around the world.

A preview of the gift appeared at the Philadelphia Expo in 1876, but it took until 1880 before a complete statue was delivered to the United States embassy in Paris.

It wasn’t until 1886, however, that the statue was dedicated in New York’s Upper Bay. In the meantime a private fundraising campaign in our country was needed to secure the statue’s site, particularly to finance its pedestal. Part of the fundraising was the auction of a 14-line sonnet, The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). Her ancestors were Jewish-Russians who emigrated here before our Revolutionary War. At the time her poem was commissioned, Lazarus, sufficiently known in literary circles, was volunteering at Emigrant Aid Society on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The poem was mostly neglected but in 1903 it was written on a bronze tablet and only in 1945 was it mounted on the statue’s pedestal. The poem and the statue came to represent the generosity of our country’s residents. So thankful, in fact, that we generously open our hearts to “…your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The statue’s symbolism of thanksgiving is, of course, reinforced by its proximity to Ellis Island, where from 1892 to 1954 many freedom-seeking immigrants entered our country, including my grandmother. (For the record, Ellis Island is mostly in New Jersey and Liberty Island itself is in New York.)

Each generation of arrivals enriched our country with creativity, social capital, unique culture, patriotic service and faith. These are their gift to subsequent generations. Thus our table prayer on November 27^th  2025, is not only one of thanks for God’s bounty, and thanks for the privilege of residing in this country, and thanks for the family and friends gathered, but also thanks for our ancestors and for those new arrivals who keep the gift moving.

P.S. Fr. Gary Graf of Chicago is walking all the way from the boyhood home of Robert Prevost/Pope Leo XIV in Dalton, Illinois to Ellis Island to raise awareness about the plight of today’s immigrants. Follow him at www.ourladyoftheheights.org.

 

 

NIHILISM, the lack of a point of reference

 

       
                                                                                        Painting by Albrecht Altdorfer

Nietzsche said, “God is Dead.” 

                                                                                                         Nietzsche :  Wikipedia

The question:  what is the point of reference for Trump? 

The answer:  ethno-nationalism, politics, America First! 

But it will fall apart, it is not inclusive. 

                                                                                                       Guernica

Let’s bring back the Shema, love of God and neighbor

God is love

politics

the Common Good! 

a path to joy.

Julius Schnorr von Carosfeld 1819

Joy and social stability:  the Wedding Feast of Cana

We Hold These Truths

It is apparent that Governor Cox of Utah believes, "We hold these truths that all men are created equal and have the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  (See Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1992)

To move forward, can we agree?  

Love Revisited by William Washabaugh

So, after considering two thousand years of history, and after surveying debates about the amorous needs of the sovereign self, we arrive at two quite different conceptions of love. On the one hand, there is love between sovereign selves, the popular conception of love that is mediated by desirous gaze. Lovers, seeing each other from afar, discern beautiful qualities, and then they come together in order to experience existential completion as the beauty of their beloveds compensates for the lacks and deficiencies that they see in themselves.

On the other hand, I propose that love is a corporeal entanglement through which “metastable” lovers become persons —personhood, in this account, being a continuously developing, never resolved state. Lovers are never wholly relieved of the tensions that prevail from their first moments of life.lxxvii Their negotiated intertwinements persist throughout life. And so, it has to be for persons who are processes rather than substances, and who are verbs rather than nouns—as Ulysses S. Grant confessed on his deathbed, when he said, “I think I am a verb.”

At every stage in their development as persons, lovers deserve care and respect. Even after their life-courses are apparently completed, they deserve care because loving entanglements never end. They are endlessly ramifying, never completely discernible intertwinements that are not terminated, even in death.lxxviii Lovers, I argue, develop into persons by engaging each other. They nudge, tug, and wrestle. With various tactics of demand, appeasement, conflict, and reconciliation, lovers accommodate their needs with the needs of their beloveds.

Breastfeeding models such engagement.

Entangled lovers, I contend, are gifts to each other. True, they tug and wrestle, but their wrestling is itself a component of their giftedness. Sometimes their gifts to each other are tied up in ribbons of exasperation, but they are gifts, nonetheless. And the exasperation itself is instrumental in advancing the development of both the giver and gifted.

The thing about gifts, though, is that the giving and the gifter can sometimes be hidden from view. A gift can be grabbed, embraced, and coveted as if it were a thing unto itself. Such a coveted gift can seem like self-standing object.  But its self-standing-ness is just an appearance; it is an illusion that hides the relational saturation of the gift that anthropologists since Marcel Mauss have long recognized.lxxix The giver and the giving are brought together in the gift, suggesting that the gift, like the loving person, is a process rather than an object, and a verb rather than a noun.

Up to this point I have portrayed human love as a saturated experience, one that is infused with entanglements and intertwinements that bring lovers/persons into their unsteady existence. However, there is no good reason for maintaining an exclusively human characterization of love.

I think, for example, of fungi and trees. Their entanglement is no less loving than the entanglement of woman and infant at the breast. Both involve negotiated endeavors focused on the task of supplying nutrients to the self and the other.

If we find ourselves wincing at the thought of “trees in love,”.lxxx it may be because our Western history has steered us away from what lineage-centered people have known without knowing, namely, that life is all about intertwinement, entanglement, and connection; and that true love is to be found nowhere else but in negotiated connections.

Breastfeeding models love, so too do “trees in love.” So, we have come full circle to the conclusion that lovers love each other as parents love their children, as babies love nursing women, and as trees love fungi. Entanglement is love, and love is entanglement. True love is the experience of attunement to the subtle resonances that prevail in and around metastatic processes. This attunement may include romantic feelings and passionate yearnings, but its primary feature is intertwinement.

We are not banishing eros but rather upgrading it. When people kiss on the mouth, like the lovers in Song of Songs, they do indeed become bewitched, bedazzled, starry-eyed, with “fever in the morning, and fever all through the night.” But much more importantly, “they become what they love.”lxxxi 

“They become “embedded in, partially defined by, and sharing a common fate with larger natural and social contexts.”lxxxii Lovers become one, but they retain their distinctiveness. They become one in the sense that a violin and its bow form one instrument. They are functionally complementary, each requiring the other for its completion. They vibrate with one another. lxxxiii

Lovers “encounter and experience the world other than through a solitary consciousness.”lxxxiv They experience “connection with difference rather than union into sameness.”lxxxv This experience of loving connection is arguably analogous to God’s own experience, that is, the perichoresis of the Trinity which models for us the sublunary dances of our entanglements.lxxxvi The three persons of the Trinity are entangled and intertwined; they resonate with each other.

Perhaps now we can appreciate the Biblical observation that “God is love.” It is a metaphor for the persistently resonant cosmos. “God” is our name for ubiquitous and unending relationality.  And, by the same token, we can now interpret Matthew (22:37): “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This new commandment means that we should become engaged in prickly negotiations—like infants at the breast—with everyone and everything that bears down on us.

Just as Jacob engaged that divine being in Genesis, so we are enjoined to wrestle with others throughout our lives. We develop in response to the half-nelsons we put on others and the arm-locks they put on us. Such is the nature of entangled love.  

William Washabaugh, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

<https://sites.uwm.edu/wash>.

 

Praying with Queen Esther By Gianluigi Gugliermetto   8/21/2025

Meditating upon prayer and the four paths, I realize that in our historical moment it is especially the via negativa that must be made present to everybody’s consciousness. It is terribly offensive to see people dancing and having fun in TV commercials while an entire people is scheduled to be deported — or exterminated if they don’t accept deportation.

It is tragically ironic that in the biblical book of Esther we read the same identical story: the powerful decided a date by which all Jews must be gone from the Persian empire, or else they would be slaughtered (Esther 3:7). Queen Esther then immediately started fasting and foregoing all pleasures.

“What Is the Esther Fast? The Power of Absolute Fasting Explained” @DailyGraceReflections-u9n

This must be seen as an expression of awareness, a refusal to pretend that nothing is happening — even though she would not be affected personally by the impending events (Esther 4:16-17).   Substitute the word “Jews” in the previous paragraph with the word “Palestinians” and you get both what we are living through right now and what prayer in the via negativa means at the present time.   The story continues with Esther taking the situation in her own hands and risking her life by interfering with the king’s decision of expulsion/ extermination. By a mix of skillful diplomacy and sheer luck, she is pivotal in reversing the situation and saving all the Jews (Esther 5-8).   This is a clear expression of via creativa — her daring skillfullness — which results in a via transformativa action, i.e. a positive result of social change.

As thousands of Israelis protest the ongoing genocide in a general strike, Netanyahu pursues plans to forcibly displace Palestinians from Gaza. Channel 4 News.

But Queen Esther can obtain what she does largely because she is an insider/outsider. She is part of the ruling class, and yet she also belongs to the oppressed people. She is in the position to forget the last part, yet she places herself in deep solidarity with those

who suffer. I wonder if there is anybody today who can play such a part on the global stage. Is it, perhaps, the huge crowd of Israelis who have taken the streets in the last few days?   Empathy cannot just be words or mere feelings. The via negativa prayer practices are very important because they help us to get out of our stiffened mental schemes and experience what others are experiencing in naked, unfiltered reality. Fasting, imaginative meditations, deep listening to first-hand witnesses, wailing in community… at least some of these things seem to me unavoidable at this time as they help us involve all of our being.   But sorrow can swallow us up and thus become another trap at the service of the empire. Even more is required of us. Our via negativa practices must be followed by some via creativa efforts — just as Esther employed all her skills and powers, showing the heart of a lioness. Show up to a protest! Or do whatever you can do.

Our via negativa practices must also be preceded by some via positiva exercises. At the beginning of this meditation I expressed my disgust at watching commercials with people at ease which feel like scorn (see Psalm 123:4). But now I also say that unless our

Storing up for dry times ahead: camel trains pause to rest by the Nile in Egypt. Photo by Rab Lawrence on Flickr.

bodies are well-fed they cannot afford a fast; unless our minds are pleased by beauty, they cannot afford to hear stories of utter misery; unless our spirits are lifted up high, they cannot afford to descend to hell.   The lion’s courage which Matthew has been invoking in his DMs must both precede and follow our prayer exercises in the via negativa.   Personally — as the decree of utter misery on Palestinians has been signed by those evil people in Tel Aviv — I need the courage of a lion to wake up, do my physical exercises, remember to eat good food, and enjoy my walks.   As Matthew reminded us recently (see DM August 12) all prophets, all spiritual warriors, need to take care of themselves. This is the via positiva root of our spirituality that we should never forget, and yet is only the beginning of the whole path.