Christos Anesti!
May you have a joyful Easter Sunday and a blessed Easter season. Below you can find our next monthly theme for April. In the meantime, I wanted to share a short reflection with you.
On a certain level, it’s easy enough to understand the basics of what we’ve commemorated these last few days and what we will now celebrate these next few weeks, but the constant challenge for someone like a cradle Christian (me, and I’m sure many of you) is to break out of the routine complacency which can begin to ossify one’s life. I remember reading the following words from The End of Time by Josef Pieper a few years ago:
“An already ‘concluded’ revelation, which has been fashioned into the accepted property of tradition by centuries of theological interpretation and has thereby become, so to speak, historically legitimized, seems to be something less scandalous and aggressive something so little aggressive that it becomes positively needful to ‘render oneself synchronous’ to the fact of the revelation again (as Kierkegaard has put it) by an explicit, almost violent act of reflection and so call to mind the scandalous character of the revelation, its incommensurability with the spheres both of nature and of culture.”
Scandal: this has become one of my special watch words during my young adult life. Neither Pieper nor Kierkegaard mean scandal in the sadistic sense of shocking the innocent and dignified (for example, using profane language in front of young children or one’s grandmother), but in the sense of shattering the caste of complacency, revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly; shocking into wonder and seeing again with new eyes. This was the kind of scandal that Flannery O’Connor sought to capture in her short stories. Having a good sense of scandal, however, entails having a healthy sense of irony. But irony threatens our preconceived notions of how things will turn out. We fear the unknown, even if it is the unknown plan of a loving God. Scandal comes to us all in the end, though—what matters is our response to it.
The word “scandal,” derived from the Greek verb skandalizein, which means “to limp,” can be defined as “a paradoxical obstacle that is almost impossible to avoid; the more this obstacle repels us, the more it attracts us.” We have all been scandalized by sin at a fundamental level; we are sick with the limp of sin, whether we realize it or not. It has caused us to stumble and to fall. We have, furthermore, become complacent in it; comfortable in the muck like swine, yet hardened by indifference.
God has allowed us to limp, and by his scandal of the Cross and Resurrection shocks us because he reveals the limp in each of us, our leprosy, the deep sickness within us in need of a divine physician. Our hearts react to this scandal either like butter or like clay in the heat of the sun—they either harden or they soften. It is grace, furthermore, which allows our hearts to be shocked, sundered, and then softened. But may they not be hardened. We are scandalized because, while we limp, Christ has promised that we will fly. In disbelief, we are scandalized by the excess of God’s love. This is too good to be true, we think.
Jesus Christ crucified and risen is the greatest scandal and the greatest irony of human history. By all measures of limited human reason, even if it makes for a quaint story, the Christian story is preposterous. By all means, it shall continue to be so. May we humbly bear our yokes as fools for Christ and students of irony.
Easter blessings to all of you, fools for Christ!
“Excess is God's trademark in his creation; as the Fathers put it, ‘God does not reckon his gifts by the measure’. At the same time excess is also the real foundation and form of salvation history, which in the last analysis is nothing other than the truly breathtaking fact that God, in an incredible outpouring of himself, expends not only a universe but his own self in order to lead man, a speck of dust, to salvation."
~ Pope Benedict XVI ~
April Monthly Theme: The Philosophy of St. Augustine of Hippo
You might have hoped we would have the wherewithal to plan our themes in accord with the seasons, but this April’s theme is seemingly random. Sed contra: unless you bring it up when the men’s US soccer team has scored the winning goal against Portugal in the 2026 Word Cup quarterfinal, when is the Philosophy of St. Augustine ever random? Not that I bring him up a lot personally. I’m also one of the last people who should be writing about him, but that’s why I pulled men who are smarter than me onboard this little project we call The Broken Binnacle.
I’d also like to share a short apology for the lack of content we shared last month. While the topic of the Protestant Reformation is daunting, the writers due to post were busy with better things, such as preparation for a wedding (Joe is recently engaged) and the raising of newborn child (John Jakubisin and his wife Julia recently had a baby girl, Amelia).
Having shared my excuses, I promise we’ll do better to post more essays this coming month.