The Valiant Karen

+Karen Ruth Laub-Novak, August 25, 1937 — August 12, 2009 Mass of Christian Burial, Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, Washington, D. C., August 17, 2009, 11:00 a.m. Proverbs 31.10-31; Psalm 23; Revelation 8.2, 7-13; 9.1, 3, 5-6, 13, 15-17; 12.1-6; John 1.1-5

Homily delivered by The Reverend Kurt Pritzl, O.P on August 17, 2009

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The opening of the book of Proverbs, the first nine chapters, contains an exultation of Wisdom as a figure out in the streets exhorting those who would live rightly to be guided by her and to accept her invitation to come home with her. The closing of the book of Proverbs, which we have just heard, is a poem describing the attributes of the “valiant woman” (Proverbs 31,19), that woman of “extraordinary and ceaseless activity” who is beloved and praised as wife and mother.[1] This is the exalted Wisdom of the first nine books, now at home, in ordinary and practical and everyday ways, caring for those who have accepted her invitation to dwell with her. We depend on the sacred scriptures to find God, who gives us in them his revelation of his mind and his promise, something we would not otherwise know of or have. But as the living Word of God, we are also to find ourselves in the scriptures and to let ourselves be cared for by them in all the circumstances of life. And so in these closing verses of the book of Proverbs we know that we find Karen, the valiant Karen, whose funeral we reverently and lovingly celebrate today. This passage gives us Karen in so many ways that her family and friends readily recognize. Among others, one line strikingly fits her: “She hath put out her hand to strong things.” This is clear in the home that she and Michael have built with their children, in the many ways in which she has entered into the lives of countless friends (I am one blessed to be a friend of Karen, who reached out to me in the trouble of my illness before I ever knew how to reach out to her), but also in her art. Here she has “put out her hand” to create forceful and dynamic works of art in several media that invariably deal with “strong things,” not always easy things or pleasant things, but real things of life that we all face. The work of her hands includes a series of six lithographs on T. S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday. A critic once wrote of Ash Wednesday that “[t]he result is a poem at once religious in feeling and contemporary in intention: at once thoroughly personal and without concession to sentiment.”[2] So too Karen’s work, whether starting out from Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, Rilke’s Elegies, or from the verses of John’s Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse, that we just shared in our second reading. Karen once said in a lecture: “I often work with literary themes: T. S. Eliot, the Apocalypse, Kafka. Such starting points sometimes give me relief from the overwhelming demands of self expression, the ‘creating out of nothing’ that faces me from an empty canvas.”[3] This is to say, that Karen started with the word given, and then gave it body, shape, texture, color, concreteness, physicality. The gospel for Karen’s funeral Mass takes us to the beginning Word, not any word or a human word, but the Word “in the beginning,” the Word that “was with God” and that “was God” (John 1.1) and through whom “all things came to be” (John 1.3). It is this Word, uncreated and creating all, to which Karen, in the end, responded and reacted, not only in pondering and incarnating other deep words in her art, but also as she faced life and the prospects of death.[4] It is this Word about which Saint John in the gospel writes: “What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1.4-5). It is this Word, as the gospel continues, that “became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (charitos kai alêtheias, alternately, “enduring love,” John 1.14). Here at this Mass, where we are gathered to pray for Karen, to thank God for her, to rejoice in her life, and to find and share consolation for her loss, we proclaim this Word, there from the beginning, there first for us, there always, this Word become flesh, Jesus Christ, who shares with us out of a boundless love life never to be overcome by death and light shining in the darkness that no darkness can overcome. T. S. Eliot begins his poem East Coker from Four Quartets with the words “In my beginning is my end” and ends it with the words “In my end is my beginning.” For Karen, as for us, there is the Word as beginning and as end (as the Lord Jesus says in the last chapter of the Apocalypse, Revelation 22.13: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End!”[5]). And so another verse from our first reading from the book of Proverbs fits Karen so well: “Strength and beauty are her clothing, and she shall laugh in the latter day” (Proverbs 31.25). Karen was vivacious and brought joy and laughter to others even in times that were hard for her. One great gift of faith in the living God and in the Incarnate Word is to know the truth of these words of scripture—that Karen laughs in this, the latter day, a day for which no night or darkness may now come. Our minds are on beginnings and ends today and in this homily—the beginning and end of a precious and singular life; the beginnings and ends of texts; the beginning and end that come together; the end that is a beginning forever. There is a special beginning and end in Karen’s life that cannot go unmentioned, a beginning and an end that come together. Karen was born within days of the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which the church just celebrated on Saturday, August 15. She was baptized, confirmed, and married in the Church of the Assumption in Cresco, Iowa, and educated in Assumption grammar school and high school. Karen died within days of the feast of the Assumption, having just weeks before made a moving visit with her family and friends to the home of Mary at Ephesus, in present day Turkey, which is the place of Mary’s dormition and going to heaven, body and soul. At the beginning and end of Karen’s life stands this great and beautiful event, which holds as realized and actual for one woman, Mary, what God has planned and makes possible for all through the life, death, and resurrection of the Incarnate Word, namely, a fullness of eternal life for the whole human person, body and soul. The second reading today from the book of Revelation speaks of “a woman that wore the sun for her mantle, with the moon under her feet” whom God brings “to her place of refuge” (Revelation 12.1, 6). The church has often seen in these words a reference to Mary, Mary who stands at the beginning and end of Karen’s life with that mantle of undying sunlight, the waxing, waning, and reflected light of the moon under her feet. I think of them as sharing in the laughter of the latter day with the angels and saints. As we pray for this for Karen today may we also live so to share in that beginning which is also our end and goal. To Michael, to Richard and Tanya and Jana and their spouses, to Emily and Stephen and Wiley and Julia, to all of Karen’s family, we extend our most heartfelt condolences and prayers. Your friends and colleagues, this parish family, and so many others who cannot be here today cherish Karen and you. We want to be relied on in the days ahead.

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[1] The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1990), 461. [2] Derek Traversi, T. S. Eliot: The Longer Poems (New York and London, 1979), 58. [3] Quoted in “Karen Laub-Novak: Painter, Sculptor, Printmaker” at http://laub-novakart.com/biography.html. [4] See T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday, V, 1-9: If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the center of the silent Word. [5] Cf. the counterpart of this verse in the first chapter, Revelation 1.8.

No One Sees God: The Dialogue Continues

By Dean Brooks After reading No One Sees God, a reader sent me the following e-mail that poses a very tough question. I will post my response to his question in the coming days.

I have read a vast number of apologetics and histories of religion over the years -- the specifically Catholic writers include Garry Wills and William F. Buckley, but I have ranged over Paul Johnson, Karen Armstrong, Billy Graham, Lee Strobel, Bishop Spong, C. S. Lewis, the whole gamut. In many ways, No One Sees God is well above the average, but it has a serious flaw in my view.

In my experience, Christians of all denominations uniformly misconstrue the most important atheist objection, casting it as "Why does God let bad things happen to good people?" Mr. Novak does this as well. It is a weak form of the objection and misses the point. In fact, the really divisive question is about authority and mystery -- the passages in the Bible where God actually orders good people to do bad things.

The slaughter of the Midianites would be one example. God doesn't simply watch while wicked men kill women and children. Nor does he kill human beings directly, as he did in the Flood. He orders Moses and the army to carry out the execution. He involves them in the horror. The army of Israel refuses the first time, and Moses has to order them again to kill all the women and male children, and to keep all the virgin girls 'for yourselves'.

I have searched concordances, old and new editions of the Catholic Encyclopedia, literally hundreds of texts over a span of 20 years. Most pass over this episode in silence. A few refer to it as "difficult" but then say nothing more. The closest I have come to a Christian defense of this story was a Protestant writer who insisted that the Midianite women were all wicked whores who deserved what they got, and killing the boys was a kindness as they would have died without their mothers. How it makes sense to kill whores (if they actually were such) but then make their daughters into concubines was not explained.

My reading of this passage is, I think, consistent with core Christian teaching -- but it is very disagreeable to most Christians. The Midianites were the people who sheltered Moses when he fled Egypt. They offered the Israelites shelter, food, and friendship, but they were outsiders, not worshippers of Jahweh. To respond to that offer of friendship by slaughtering them and their children is symbolic of a transcendent scale of values, far above compassion, reason, or human life. I take this episode as expressing the idea that God's authority is absolutely without limit, that there are no values apart from God's will, that man has no rights or dignity on his own account. If he wishes us to slaughter one another, we are in no position to question or disagree. The destruction of Midian does not make sense in worldly terms, but it is not intended to make sense. After killing children on God's orders, the Israelites have abandoned their humanity. They are united with God in a transcendent mystery, by a collective act that cannot be understood, or endured, or justified. They are beyond good or evil, into a realm of pure nihilism in human terms, one that only underscores the vast distance between God and man. It is meant to convey the idea that our humanity by itself is meaningless and worthless.

I have from time to time written to Christian writers and public figures to express my frustration with this episode and its evasive treatment in the literature. My record to date has been near-uniform failure.

The only exceptions have been a very well-respected seminary student who abandoned his studies when he read Ayn Rand, a newspaper columnist, and a street preacher. The seminary student by and large confirmed my interpretation. The columnist explained in very confused fashion that it was just symbolic, and I shouldn't take the Old Testament too seriously anyway. The preacher was very much taken aback by my question, saying in 40 years he had never had anyone raise it as a concern -- but then he said, "If God chose to throw us all into Hell, he would be right." Implying, I guess, that my interpretation is correct.

I don't mean to be impolite. I have experimented with different methods of asking this question over the years, prefacing it with longer or shorter explanations, and all have failed. It surely ought to matter. I cannot quite imagine how mass slaughter of children (followed by human sacrifice) can have been overlooked by so many for so long. But here we are.

I was particularly impressed by Mr. Novak's willingness to deal with the bleaker aspects of religious belief. I would class his arguments as among the most honest I have read. But it still does not go far enough, does not answer the basic question. It is not simply that we are in a dark night, where we cannot see God. If the Old Testament is in any way a reliable guide -- whether it is symbolic or literal is moot -- then this episode and others like it imply we must take the darkness into our souls. We must purge ourselves of all values, empty ourselves of humanity, become nothing but vessels of obedience to a God we do not understand even slightly. What lies on the other side of that act, we will only know after death.

Mr. Novak has a good reputation as writers go, he says some good things about the value of capitalism, and I wish him only the best. I am not trying to start a fight, to rant to Christians about how stupid and bad they are. Obviously, after 20 years of wrestling with this, I am also not a candidate for conversion. The theological argument involved fills me with nothing but horror, and I am not asking to be counselled, to be helped to embrace the faith. But we live together in this world, and unraveling this mystery is a project I find I cannot entirely let go of. I keep thinking that there might be one Christian somewhere who could answer this in an honest and straightforward manner, and break through the suffocating wall of denial and silence that I perceive. If Mr. Novak did, he would be doing the world a real service.

Really, I was touched by Mr. Novak's call for a dialogue. I am a sentimental man, and appeals to brotherhood never fail to attract my attention. So I thought I would try again.

Best wishes, Dean Brooks

A Tribute to Michael Novak by Christopher C. DeMuth

A tribute to Michael Novak on the occasion of his award of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion by Christopher C. DeMuth Christopher C. DeMuth, President American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research May 23, 1994

I don’t know what got into them, those hard-nosed business I executives who sit on AEI’s Board of Trustees, when they invited a theologian from Syracuse University to move down to Washington and join the Institute’s research staff in 1979. But I do know that no other AEI appointment has been so prescient and that no one has contributed more to the AEI spirit or to the progress of its ideals than Michael Novak.

Thanks to the generosity of Mr. Templeton and the perspicacity of the Templeton Prize judges, Michael is now himself a walking illustration of the Novakian principle that wit and creativity, properly cultivated, can produce miracles of wealth. So I am happy to see him back from the Templeton Prize ceremonies in London not yet driving a Mercedes or wearing a Giorgio Armani suit or sporting a Christophe hairdo. In fact, I have been trying anxiously to reach him and have left several voice-mail messages requesting an appointment—just a brief visit at Mr. Novak’s convenience to drop off some AEI literature and tell him about the work of the Institute and answer any questions he may have about our pressing financial needs.

Michael’s Templeton Prize is not only richly deserved but a source of special satisfaction to everyone associated with the American Enterprise Institute. At AEI, our concern for free enterprise and limited government is more than a matter of economics and efficiency (as important as we hold these things to be), and our concern for individual freedom is more than a matter of libertarian principle. Michael’s work has singularly embodied and advanced this spirit. He has never been a utilitarian or libertarian cheerleader; his moral justification of capitalism is not abstract or mechanistic; it convinces where others fail precisely because it is sinewy and particular, comfortable with tradition, and compassionate. He began a socialist and was led to his current position by despair at the extent of poverty in the modern world and extended inquiry into the practical means of alleviating poverty. In the course of becoming one of the world’s foremost supply-side poverty warriors, he developed an appreciation of the institutions of capitalism based not only on their tendency to improve material welfare but also to foster social cooperation and inventiveness. Like his old Congregation of Holy Cross and socialist comrades, he sees material wealth as the manifestation of cooperative human action; unlike them, he sees that effective cooperation springs from individual freedom and that political coercion is often the enemy of such cooperation.

We have discovered in recent years how deeply Michael Novak’s writings resonated with those who suffered at the hands of state Communism; his continuing influence with political and economic reformers in post-Communist and third-world nations is surely as gratifying to him as the formal recognition of the Templeton Prize. In my own rounds as head of a business-supported research institute, I have been equally struck by his repute and influence among those who, like the men who first brought him to AEI, devote their days to the practical managerial tasks of modern capitalism. To reiterate, this is not because Michael is anybody’s cheerleader:

Corporations err morally . . . in many ways. They may through their advertising appeal to hedonism and escape, in ways that undercut the restraint and self-discipline required by a responsible democracy and that discourage the deferral of present satisfaction on which savings and investment for the future depend. They may incorporate methods of governance that injure dignity, cooperation, inventiveness, and personal development. They may seek their own immediate interests at the expense of the common good. . . . They are capable of the sins of individuals and of grave institutional sins as well. Thus, it is a perfectly proper task of all involved within corporations and in society at large to hold them to the highest moral standards, to accuse them when they fail, and to be vigilant about every form of abuse. Corporations are human institutions designed to stimulate economic activism and thus to provide the economic base for a democratic polity committed to high moral-cultural ideals. When they fall short of these purposes, their failure injures all.

That Michael regards the firm and the market not as mere engines of consumer satisfaction but as morally serious institutions—capable of great harm and great good and therefore demanding our highest standards—is, I think, the key to understanding the appeal of his writings with the general public and above all with business executives themselves.

I have noticed, in the weeks since the announcement of Michael’s Templeton Prize, a rush of pleasure among his friends and admirers that goes beyond the usual feelings of friendship and good will. I think there are two reasons for this. First, Michael’s influence has become so pervasive as to be almost invisible; he is like the Nobel economist whose theories seem obvious to everyone who reads about them in the New York Times thirty years after they were first propounded in an obscure journal. Those who remember how very strange the terms democratic capitalism, mediating structures, and empowerment sounded just a decade ago, and how strenuously resisted and ridiculed they were, feel that due recognition has been given. Second, although the terms just mentioned have now become staples of political rhetoric, in promiscuous use across the philosophical spectrum, the ideas they denote are in fact radically out of favor today in official Washington—which regards empowerment as something to be bestowed by a government program and is hellbent on establishing a direct and unmediated dependence of the individual on the state.

Intellectuals often find it gratifying to stand in glorious opposition to the powers that be. But Michael Novak’s friends know him to be more than an intellectual: we know that he is also an activist, that he is out for bigger game than self-gratification, and that he likes to win. What the Templeton Prize has done is to fortify our sense that he has extracted from the slag heap of the twentieth century some great truths about human liberty and the free society, that these truths are continuing to gain ground in the intellectual realm, and that they will in time prevail in the political realm to a greater degree than the current generation of politicians can foresee.