John Three Sixteen

DNA

2010-02-17T09:39:00.001-06:00

Vincent of Lérins (d. c. 450), monk
Commonitory, 23

"Do you not yet understand or comprehend?"

But some one will say, perhaps, Shall there, then, be no progress in
Christ's Church? Certainly; all possible progress. For what being is there,
so envious of men, so full of hatred to God, who would seek to forbid it?
Yet on condition that it be real progress, not alteration of the faith… The
intelligence, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individuals as of
all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, ought, in the course of
ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but
yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same
sense, and in the same meaning.The growth of religion in the soul must be
analogous to the growth of the body, which, though in process of years it
is developed and attains its full size, yet remains still the same. There
is a wide difference between the flower of youth and the maturity of age;
yet they who were once young are still the same now that they have become
old, insomuch that though the stature and outward form of the individual
are changed, yet his nature is one and the same, his person is one and the
same. An infant's limbs are small, a young man's large, yet the infant and
the young man are the same…, there were already present in embryo… In like
manner, it behoves Christian doctrine to follow the same laws of progress,
so as to be consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age… Our
forefathers in the old time sowed wheat in the Church's field. It would be
most unmeet and iniquitous if we, their descendants, instead of the genuine
truth of corn, should reap the counterfeit error of tares (Mt 13:24 sq).
This rather should be the result,—there should be no discrepancy between
the first and the last. From doctrine which was sown as wheat, we should
reap, in the increase, doctrine of the same kind—wheat also; so that when
in process of time any of the original seed is developed, and now
flourishes under cultivation, no change may ensue in the character of the
plant… Therefore,… the same ought to be cultivated and taken care of by the
industry of their children, the same ought to flourish and ripen, the same
ought to advance and go forward to perfection.

high post

2010-01-29T08:25:00.000-06:00

The letter to Diognetus (around 200)
§6 (trans.©Maxwell Staniforth; SC 33 bis, p.65)

Sown in the earth

The relation of Christians to the world is that of a soul to the body. As
the soul is diffused through every part of the body, so are Christians
through all the cities of the world. The soul, too, inhabits the body,
while at the same time forming no part of it; and Christians inhabit the
world, but they are not part of the world (Jn 17,16). The soul, invisible
herself, is immured within a visible body; so Christians can be recognized
in the world, but their Christianity itself remains hidden from the eye.
The flesh hates the soul, and wars against her without any provocation,
because she is an obstacle to its own self-indulgence; and the world
similarly hates the Christians without provocation, because they ate
opposed to its pleasures. All the same, the soul loves the flesh and all
its members, despite their hatred for her; and Christians, too, love those
who hate them. The soul, shut up inside the body, nevertheless
holds the body together; and though they are confined within the world as
in a dungeon, it is Christians who hold the world together. The soul, which
is immortal, must dwell in a mortal tabernacle; and Christians, as they
sojourn for a while in the midst of corruptibility here, look for
incorruptibility in the heavens (cf.1Cor 15,50)... Such is the high post of
duty in which God has placed them, and it is their moral duty not to shrink
from it.

the 4th watch

2010-01-06T14:03:00.001-06:00

Saint Hilary (c.315-367), Bishop of Poitiers, Doctor of the Church
Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, 14, 13-14 (trans. SC 258, p. 27 rev.)

"About the fourth watch of the night, he came toward them"

«Then he made the disciples get into the boat while he dismissed the
crowds. After doing so, he went up to pray. When it was evening, he was
there alone» (cf. Mt 14,22-23). If we are to explain these happenings we
must distinguish between the times. If he was alone in the evening, this
points to his solitude at the hour of his Passion when panic had caused
everyone to scatter. If he made his disciples get into the boat and cross
over the sea while he himself dismissed the crowds, and if, having
dismissed them, he went up a mountain, this means that he directed them to
remain in the Church and to sail across the sea – that is to say, this
world – until, at his return in glory, he would grant salvation to all who
are to be the remnant of Israel (cf. Rom 11,5)... and this people would
give thanks to God his Father and be set firm within his glory and
majesty... «During the fourth watch of the night, he came
toward them.» In the expression «fourth watch of the night» we find the
number corresponding to the signs of his care. Thus, the first watch was
that of the Law; the second, that of the prophets; the third, that of his
coming in the flesh; the fourth is situated in his return in glory. But he
will find the Church declining and hemmed in by the spirit of the
Antichrist and all the distresses of this world. He will come when
anxieties and afflictions are at their height... The disciples will be
terrified even by the coming of the Lord, fearing the images of a reality
distorted by the Antichrist and by the deceitful imaginations infiltrating
their sight. But our good Lord will speak to them directly, casting out
their fear and saying: «It is I», dispersing their fear of imminent
shipwreck by faith in his coming.

L'Abandon

2009-09-25T05:42:00.001-05:00

Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus (1873-1897), Carmelite, Doctor of the Church
Poem 52 « L'Abandon est le fruit délicieux de l'amour »

« 'And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.' He said this indicating the kind of death he would die» (Jn 12 ,32-33)

There is on this earth
A marvelous Tree,
Its root, O mystery!Is in Heaven...
In its shadeNever could anything cause pain.
One can rest there
Without fearing the storm.
Love is the name
Of this ineffable Tree,
And its delectable fruit
Is called Abandonment.
Even in this life this fruit
Gives me happiness.
My soul delights
In its divine fragrance.It seems a treasure.
Putting it to my mouth,It is sweeter still. It gives me in this world
An ocean of peace.In this deep peace
I rest forever...
Abandonment alone brings meInto your arms, O Jesus.
It alone makes me live
The life of the Elect.

Behind the Iron Curtain

2009-05-19T21:01:00.002-05:00

found in the basement and uploaded special for Matthew

Come quickly, O Holy One, and save your flock.

2009-04-07T08:31:00.001-05:00

Saint Romanos Melodios (?-c.560), composer of hymns Hymn 34 (SC 128, p.111f.)

Peter's denial

Good Shepherd, who have laid down your life for your sheep (Jn 10,11), come quickly, O holy One, and save your flock... After the meal Christ said: «Children, my dear disciples, this night you will all deny and abandon me» (cf. Jn 16,32). And since all were seized by the same astonishment, Peter exclaimed: «Even though all deny you, I shall not deny you. I shall remain with you and die with you, crying out to you: Come quickly, O Holy One, and save your flock.» «Master, what are you talking about? I deny you? I abandon you and flee? And am I no longer to remember your call and the honor you have shown me? I still call to mind how you washed my feet and do you say: «You will deny me»? Once again I see you coming, carrying a basin, you who uphold the earth and support the sky. With the hands that fashioned me my feet have just been washed, and you assert that I will fall and no longer cry to you: Come quickly, O Holy One, and save your flock ?»... At these words man's Creator answered Peter: «What are you saying, Peter, my friend? You will never deny me? never flee from me? never reject me? I, too, would wish to think so. But your faith is unstable and you do not stand up to temptation. Don't you remember how you might nearly have drowned had I not stretched out my hand to you? You most certainly walked on the sea, as I did myself, but straightaway hesitated and quickly gave way (Mt 14,28f.). Then I ran towards you who were crying out: Come quickly, O Holy One, and save your flock. «See, from now on I tell you: before the cock crows three times you will deny me and, letting yourself be attacked on all sides and your spirit submerged as by the waves of the sea, you will deny me three times. You who cried out to me then and are to weep now will no longer find me stretching out my hand as on the first occasion, for I shall be using it to write a bill of remission on behalf of all Adam's descendants. I will take my visible flesh as paper and my blood as ink to write out the gift I am ceaselessly distributing to those who cry out: Come quickly, O Holy One, and save your flock!»

full text from the Shepherd

2009-02-25T21:08:00.003-06:00

RENDERING UNTO CAESAR:
THE CATHOLIC POLITICAL VOCATION
+Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
Toronto, 2.23.09
I want to do three things with my time tonight. First, Father Rosica asked me to talk about some of the themes from my book, Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. I’m happy to do that. Second, I want to talk about some of the lessons we can draw from the recent U.S. election. And third, I want to talk about the meaning of hope.
As I begin, I need to mention a couple of caveats. Here’s the first caveat. Canada and the United States have a long and close friendship as neighbors. It’s so long and so close that Americans often forget that our histories, our political structures and the ways we look at the world are, in some respects, very different. Obviously I’ll be speaking tonight as an American, a Catholic and a bishop – though not necessarily in that order. Some of what I say may not be useful to a Canadian audience, especially those who aren’t Catholic. But I do believe that the heart of the Catholic political vocation remains the same for every believer in every country. The details of our political life change from nation to nation. But the mission of public Christian discipleship remains the same, because we all share the same baptism.

Here’s the second caveat. Not much of what I say tonight will be new. In fact, I’ve been saying pretty much the same thing about faith and politics again and again, every year, for the past 12 years. So if you’ve heard it all before, please feel free to snooze. I’ve learned from experience, though, that Henry Ford was right when he said that “Two percent of the people think; three percent think they think, and 95 percent would rather die than think.”

Ford had a pretty dark view of humanity, which I don’t share. Most of the people I meet as a pastor have the brains and the talent to live very fulfilling lives. But Ford was right in one unintended way: American consumer culture is a very powerful narcotic. Moral reasoning can be hard, and TV is a great painkiller. This has political implications. Real freedom demands an ability to think, and a great deal of modern life – not just in the United States, but all over the developed world -- seems deliberately designed to discourage that. So talking about God and Caesar, even if it wakes up just one Christian mind in an audience, is always worth the effort.
The most important fact to remember about our discussion tonight is this: As adults, each of us needs to form a strong and genuinely Catholic conscience. Then we need to follow that conscience when we vote. And then we need to take responsibility for the consequences of our vote. Nobody can do that for us. That’s why really knowing, living and submitting ourselves to our Catholic faith are so important. It’s the only reliable guide we have for acting in the public square as disciples of Jesus Christ.

So let’s talk for a few minutes about Render Unto Caesar. When people ask me about the book, the questions usually fall into three categories. Why did I write it? What does the book say? And what does the book mean for each of us as individual Catholics? This last question will be a good doorway into talking about the U.S. election last year, but let’s start at the beginning first. Why did I write this book, now?

One answer is simple. A friend asked me to do it. Back in 2004, a young attorney I know ran for public office in Colorado as a prolife Democrat. He nearly won in a heavily Republican district. But he also discovered how hard it can be to raise money, run a campaign and stay true to your Catholic convictions, all at the same time. After the election he asked me to put my thoughts about faith and politics into a form that other young Catholics could use who were thinking about a political vocation – and it really is a “vocation.”

That’s where the idea started. But I also had another reason for doing the book. Frankly, I just got tired of hearing outsiders and insiders tell Catholics to keep quiet about our religious and moral views in the big public debates that involve all of us as a society. That’s a kind of bullying. I don’t think Catholics should accept it.

Another reason for writing the book is that when I looked around for a single source that explains the Catholic political vocation in a simple way, it just didn’t exist. I found that very strange. Public life is a demanding vocation, but it’s not voodoo or advanced physics. As citizens, we can never afford to abdicate our shared civic life to a political or economic elite. A nation’s political life, like Christianity itself, is meant for everyone, and everyone has a duty to contribute to it. A democracy depends on the active involvement of all its citizens, not just lobbyists, experts, think tanks and the mass media. For Catholics, politics – the pursuit of justice and the common good in the public square – is part of the history of salvation. No one is a minor actor in that drama. Each person is important.

So what does the book say? I think the message of Render Unto Caesar can be condensed into a few basic points. Here’s the first point. For many years, studies have shown that Americans have a very poor sense of history. That’s very dangerous, because as Thucydides and Machiavelli and Thomas Jefferson have all said, history matters. It matters because the past shapes the present, and the present shapes the future. If Catholics don’t know history, and especially their own history as Catholics, then somebody else – and usually somebody not very friendly – will create their history for them.

Let me put it another way. A man with amnesia has no future and no present because he can’t remember his past. The past is a man’s anchor in experience and reality. Without it, he may as well be floating in space. In like manner, if we Catholics don’t remember and defend our religious history as a believing people, nobody else will, and then we won’t have a future because we won’t have a past. If we don’t know how the Church worked with or struggled against political rulers in the past, then we can’t think clearly about the relations between Church and state today.
Here’s the second point, and it’s a place where the Canadian and American experiences may diverge. America is not a secular state. As historian Paul Johnson once said, America was “born Protestant.” It has uniquely and deeply religious roots. Obviously it has no established Church, and it has non-sectarian public institutions. It also has plenty of room for both believers and non-believers. But the United States was never intended to be a “secular” country in the radical modern sense. Nearly all the Founders were either Christian or at least religion-friendly. And all of our public institutions and all of our ideas about the human person are based in a religiously shaped vocabulary. So if we cut God out of our public life, we also cut the foundation out from under our national ideals.

Here’s the third point. We need to be very forceful in clarifying what the words in our political vocabulary really mean. Words are important because they shape our thinking, and our thinking drives our actions. When we subvert the meaning of words like “the common good” or “conscience” or “community” or “family,” we undermine the language that sustains our thinking about the law. Dishonest language leads to dishonest debate and bad laws.

Here’s an example. We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty – these are Christian virtues. And obviously, in a diverse community, tolerance is an important working principle. But it’s never an end itself. In fact, tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil. Likewise, democratic pluralism does not mean that Catholics should be quiet in public about serious moral issues because of some misguided sense of good manners. A healthy democracy requires vigorous moral debate to survive. Real pluralism demands that people of strong beliefs will advance their convictions in the public square – peacefully, legally and respectfully, but energetically and without embarrassment. Anything less is bad citizenship and a form of theft from the public conversation.

Here’s the fourth point. When Jesus tells the Pharisees and Herodians in the Gospel of Matthew (22:21) to “render unto the Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,” he sets the framework for how we should think about religion and the state even today. Caesar does have rights. We owe civil authority our respect and appropriate obedience. But that obedience is limited by what belongs to God. Caesar is not God. Only God is God, and the state is subordinate and accountable to God for its treatment of human persons, all of whom were created by God. Our job as believers is to figure out what things belong to Caesar, and what things belong to God -- and then put those things in right order in our own lives, and in our relations with others.

So having said all this, what does a book like Render Unto Caesar mean, in practice, for each of us as individual Catholics? It means that we each have a duty to study and grow in our faith, guided by the teaching of the Church. It also means that we have a duty to be politically engaged. Why? Because politics is the exercise of power, and the use of power always has moral content and human consequences.

As Christians, we can’t claim to love God and then ignore the needs of our neighbors. Loving God is like loving a spouse. A husband may tell his wife that he loves her, and of course that’s very beautiful. But she’ll still want to see the proof in his actions. Likewise if we claim to be “Catholic,” we need to prove it by our behavior. And serving other people by working for justice, charity and truth in our nation’s political life is one of the very important ways we do that.

The “separation of Church and state” does not mean – and it can never mean – separating our Catholic faith from our public witness, our political choices and our political actions. That kind of separation would require Christians to deny who we are; to repudiate Jesus when he commands us to be “leaven in the world” and to “make disciples of all nations.” That kind of radical separation steals the moral content of a society. It’s the equivalent of telling a married man that he can’t act married in public. Of course, he can certainly do that, but he won’t stay married for long.

Partly because I’m a bishop and partly because I’m older and a little bit wiser, I don’t belong to any political party. As a young priest I worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign. Later I volunteered with the 1976 and 1980 campaigns for Jimmy Carter. So if I have any partisan roots, they’re in the Democratic Party. But as I say in the book, one of the lessons we need to learn from the last 50 years is that a “preferred” Catholic political party usually doesn’t exist. The sooner Catholics feel at home in any political party, the sooner that party takes them for granted and then ignores their concerns. Party loyalty for the sake of habit, or family tradition, or ethnic or class interest is a form of tribalism. It’s a lethal kind of moral laziness. Issues matter. Character matters. Acting on principle matters. But party loyalty for the sake of party loyalty is a dead end.

I wrote Render Unto Caesar with no interest in supporting or attacking any candidate or any political party. The goal of Render Unto Caesar was simply to describe what an authentic Catholic approach to political life looks like, and then to encourage Americans Catholics to live it. And that brings us to the 2008 election and its aftermath.

Three weeks before last November's election, I wrote the following words: “I believe that Senator Obama, whatever his other talents, is the most committed ‘abortion-rights’ presidential candidate of either major party since the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in 1973. [T]he party platform Senator Obama runs on this year is not only aggressively ‘pro-choice;’ it has also removed any suggestion that killing an unborn child might be a regrettable thing. On the question of homicide against the unborn child – and let’s remember that the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer explicitly called abortion ‘murder’ – the Democratic platform that emerged from Denver in August 2008 is clearly anti-life.” I added that, “To suggest -- as some Catholics do -- that Senator Obama is this year’s ‘real’ prolife candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse. To portray the 2008 Democratic Party presidential ticket as the preferred ‘prolife’ option is to subvert what the word ‘prolife’ means.”
I like clarity, and there’s a reason why. I think modern life, including life in the Church, suffers from a phony unwillingness to offend that poses as prudence and good manners, but too often turns out to be cowardice. Human beings owe each other respect and appropriate courtesy. But we also owe each other the truth -- which means candor.

President Obama is a man of intelligence and some remarkable gifts. He has a great ability to inspire, as we saw from his very popular visit to Canada just this past week. But whatever his strengths, there’s no way to reinvent his record on abortion and related issues with rosy marketing about unity, hope and change. Of course, that can change. Some things really do change when a person reaches the White House. Power ennobles some men. It diminishes others. Bad policy ideas can be improved. Good policy ideas can find a way to flourish. But as Catholics, we at least need to be honest with ourselves and each other about the political facts we start with.

Unfortunately when it comes to the current administration that will be very hard for Catholics in the United States, and here’s why. A spirit of adulation bordering on servility already exists among some of the same Democratic-friendly Catholic writers, scholars, editors and activists who once accused prolifers of being too cozy with Republicans. It turns out that Caesar is an equal opportunity employer.

I think Catholics – and I mean here mainly American Catholics – need to remember four simple things in the months ahead. First, all political leaders draw their authority from God. We owe no leader any submission or cooperation in the pursuit of grave evil. In fact, we have the duty to change bad laws and resist grave evil in our public life, both by our words and our non-violent actions. The truest respect we can show to civil authority is the witness of our Catholic faith and our moral convictions, without excuses or apologies.

Second, in democracies, we elect public servants, not messiahs. It’s worth recalling that despite two ugly wars, an unpopular Republican president, a fractured Republican party, the support of most of the American news media and massively out-spending his opponent, our new president actually trailed in the election polls the week before the economic meltdown. This subtracts nothing from the legitimacy of his office. It also takes nothing away from our obligation to respect the president’s leadership.

But it does place some of today’s talk about a “new American mandate” in perspective. Americans, including many Catholics, elected a gifted man to fix an economic crisis. That’s the mandate. They gave nobody a mandate to retool American culture on the issues of marriage and the family, sexuality, bioethics, religion in public life and abortion. That retooling could easily happen, and it clearly will happen -- but only if Catholics and other religious believers allow it. It’s instructive to note that the one lesson many activists on the American cultural left learned from their loss in the 2004 election -- and then applied in 2008 -- was how to use a religious vocabulary while ignoring some of the key beliefs and values that religious people actually hold dear.

Here’s the third thing to remember. It doesn’t matter what we claim to believe if we’re unwilling to act on our beliefs. What we say about our Catholic faith is the easy part. What we do with it shapes who we really are. Many good Catholics voted for President Obama. Many voted for Senator McCain. Both parties have plenty of decent people in their ranks. But when we hear that 54 percent of American Catholics voted for President Obama last November, and that this somehow shows a sea change in their social thinking, we can reasonably ask: How many of them practice their faith on a regular basis? And when we do that, we learn that most practicing Catholics actually voted for Senator McCain. Of course, that doesn’t really tell us whether anyone voted for either candidate for the right reasons. Nobody can do a survey of the secret places of the human heart. But it does tell us that numbers can be used to prove just about anything. We won’t be judged on our knowledge of poll data. We’ll be judged on whether we proved it by our actions when we said “I am a Catholic, and Jesus Christ is Lord.”

Here’s the fourth and final thing to remember, and there’s no easy way to say it. The Church in the United States has done a poor job of forming the faith and conscience of Catholics for more than 40 years. And now we’re harvesting the results -- in the public square, in our families and in the confusion of our personal lives. I could name many good people and programs that seem to disprove what I just said. But I could name many more that do prove it, and some of them work in Washington.

The problem with mistakes in our past is that they compound themselves geometrically into the future unless we face them and fix them. The truth is, the American electorate is changing, both ethnically and in age. And unless Catholics have a conversion of heart that helps us see what we’ve become -- that we haven’t just “assimilated” to American culture, but that we’ve also been absorbed and bleached and digested by it – then we’ll fail in our duties to a new generation and a new electorate. And a real Catholic presence in American life will continue to weaken and disappear.

Every new election cycle I hear from unhappy, self-described Catholics who complain that abortion is too much of a litmus test. But isn’t that exactly what it should be? One of the defining things that set early Christians apart from the pagan culture around them was their respect for human life; and specifically their rejection of abortion and infanticide. We can’t be Catholic and be evasive or indulgent about the killing of unborn life. We can’t claim to be “Catholic” and “pro-choice” at the same time without owning the responsibility for where the choice leads – to a dead unborn child. We can’t talk piously about programs to reduce the abortion body count without also working vigorously to change the laws that make the killing possible. If we’re Catholic, then we believe in the sanctity of developing human life. And if we don’t really believe in the humanity of the unborn child from the moment life begins, then we should stop lying to ourselves and others, and even to God, by claiming we’re something we’re not. Catholic social teaching goes well beyond abortion. In America we have many urgent issues that beg for our attention, from immigration reform to health care to poverty to homelessness. The Church in Denver and throughout the United States is committed to all these issues. We need to do a much better job of helping women who face problem pregnancies, and American bishops have been pressing our public leaders for that for more than 30 years. But we don’t “help” anyone by allowing or funding an intimate, lethal act of violence. We can’t build a just society with the blood of unborn children. The right to life is the foundation of every other human right -- and if we ignore it, sooner or later every other right becomes politically contingent.

One of the words we heard endlessly in the last U.S. election was “hope.” I think “hope” is the only word in the English language more badly misused than “love.” It’s our go-to anxiety word -- as in, “I sure hope I don’t say anything stupid tonight.” But for Christians, hope is a virtue, not an emotional crutch or a political slogan. Virtus, the Latin root of virtue, means strength or courage. Real hope is unsentimental. It has nothing to do with the cheesy optimism of election campaigns. Hope assumes and demands a spine in believers. And that’s why – at least for a Christian -- hope sustains us when the real answer to the problems or hard choices in life is “no, we can’t,” instead of “yes, we can.”

Seventy years ago the great French writer Georges Bernanos published a little essay called “Sermon of an Agnostic on the Feast of St. Théresè.” Bernanos had a deep distrust for politics and an equally deep love for the Catholic Church. He could be brutally candid. He disliked both the right and the left. He also had a piercing sense of irony about the comfortable, the self-satisfied and the lukewarm who postured themselves as Catholic -- whether they were laypeople or clergy. In his essay he imagined “what any decent agnostic of average intelligence might say, if by some impossible chance the [pastor] were to let him stand awhile in the pulpit [on] the day consecrated to St. Théresè of Lisieux.” “Dear brothers,” says the agnostic from the pulpit, “many unbelievers are not as hardened as you imagine . . . [But when] we seek [Christ] now, in this world, it is you we find, and only you . . . It is you Christians who participate in divinity, as your liturgy proclaims; it is you ‘divine men’ who ever since [Christ’s] ascension have been his representatives on earth. . . . You are the salt of the earth. [So if] the world loses its flavor, who is it I should blame? . . . The New Testament is eternally young. It is you who are so old . . . Because you do not live your faith, your faith has ceased to be a living thing.”
Bernanos had little use for the learned, the proud or the superficially religious. He believed instead in the little flowers -- the Thérèse of Lisieuxs -- that sustain the Church and convert the world by the purity, simplicity, innocence and zeal of their faith. That kind of faith is a gift. But it’s a gift each of us can ask for, and each of us will receive, if we just have the courage to choose it and then act on it. The only people who ever really change the world are saints. Each of us can be one of them. But we need to want it, and then follow the path that comes with it.
Bernanos once wrote that the optimism of the modern world, including its “politics of hope,” is like whistling past a graveyard. It’s a cheap substitute for real hope and “a sly form of selfishness, a method of isolating [ourselves] from the unhappiness of others” by thinking progressive thoughts. Real hope “must be won. [We] can only attain hope through truth, at the cost of great effort and long patience . . . Hope is a virtue, virtus, strength; an heroic determination of the soul. [And] the highest form of hope is despair overcome.”
Anyone who hasn’t noticed the despair in the world should probably go back to sleep. The word “hope” on a campaign poster may give us a little thrill of righteousness, but the world will still be a wreck when the drug wears off. We can only attain hope through truth. And what that means is this: From the moment Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” the most important political statement anyone can make is “Jesus Christ is Lord.”

We serve Caesar best by serving God first. We honor our nation best by living our Catholic faith honestly and vigorously, and bringing it without apology into the public square and its debates. We’re citizens of heaven first. But just as God so loved the world that he sent his only son, so the glory and irony of the Christian life is this: The more faithfully we love God, the more truly we serve the world.

Thanks for your time tonight.

shepherd

2009-02-25T21:04:00.000-06:00

"For Christians," he explained, "hope is a virtue, not an emotional crutch or a political slogan. Virtus, the Latin root of virtue, means strength or courage. Real hope is unsentimental. It has nothing to do with the cheesy optimism of election campaigns. Hope assumes and demands a spine in believers. And that’s why – at least for a Christian -- hope sustains us when the real answer to the problems or hard choices in life is ‘no, we can’t,’ instead of ‘yes, we can.’"

i've always hated busybodies

2009-02-06T21:11:00.000-06:00

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.” –C.S. Lewis

counter my recurrent dreams of Iowa City insurrection

2009-02-04T08:43:00.001-06:00

St. Bonaventure - Meditations on the Life of Christ; Opera omnia, vol.12, p.530f.

Thus you see what he did by doing nothing. He made himself despised. Do you think that to be a small thing? For indeed, it was not he who stood in need of it, but us. I know of nothing more difficult, nor of anything greater. They seem to me to have reached the highest degree who, unfeignedly and with all their heart, are sufficiently possessed of themselves as to seek nothing other than to be despised, counted for nothing, and living in the deepest abasement. This is a greater victory than to take a town.

this is true

2009-02-04T08:37:00.000-06:00

Heb. 12:4

In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood.

life

2009-01-22T08:27:00.000-06:00

Saint Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo (North Africa) and doctor of the Church Sermons on the First Letter of Saint John, 1,1 (SC 75, p.113) (©Augustinian Heritage Institute)

Life was manifested in the flesh «What was from the beginning, what we have heard, and what we have seen with our eyes, and what our hands have touched of the Word of life» (1Jn,1). Who touches the Word with his hands apart from the fact that «the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us» (1Jn 1:14)? But this Word which was made flesh, so that it might be touched by our hands, began to be flesh from the Virgin Mary, yet it didn't begin to be the Word then, because [John] said, «What was from the beginning...Perhaps someone will understand this about «the Word of life» as though it were a way of speaking about Christ, not as though it was the very body of Christ that was touched by our hands. See what follows: «And life itself was manifested» (1Jn 1:2). Christ, then, is the Word of life. And how was life manifested (for it was from the beginning)? Yet it wasn't manifested to human beings, but it was manifested to angels, who saw it and who fed on it as their bread. But what does scripture say? «Man has eaten the bread of angels» (Ps 78[77]:25). Life itself was manifested in flesh so that, by being manifested, the thing which can be seen by the heart alone may also be seen by the eyes, so that it may heal hearts. For the Word is seen by the heart alone, but flesh is also seen by bodily eyes. We were able to see flesh, but we were unable to see the Word. The Word was made flesh, which we would be able to see, so that what was in us whereby we might see the Word would be healed.

one day

2008-12-30T08:26:00.001-06:00

1 Jn 2,12-17.

I am writing to you, children, because your sins have been forgiven for his name's sake. I am writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men, because you have conquered the evil one. I write to you, children, because you know the Father. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong and the word of God remains in you, and you have conquered the evil one. Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life, is not from the Father but is from the world. Yet the world and its enticement are passing away. But whoever does the will of God remains forever.

You have created and recreated me

2008-12-05T10:30:00.000-06:00

Saint Anselm (1033-1109), monk, Bishop, Doctor of the Church, Proslogion 1

Now, my whole heart, say to God: «I seek your face; Lord, it is your face that I seek» (Ps 27[26],8). O Lord, my God, teach my heart where and how to seek you, where and how to find you. Lord, if you are not here but absent, where shall I seek you? But you are everywhere, so you must be here; why then do I not seek you? Surely you dwell in light inaccessible – where is it? And how can I have access to light which is inaccessible? Who will lead me and take me into it so that I may see you there? By what signs, under what forms, shall I seek you? I have never seen you, O Lord my God, I have never seen your face. Most High Lord, what shall an exile do who is as far away from you as this? What shall your servant do, eager for your love, cast off far from your face? He longs to see you but your countenance is too far away. He wants to have access to you, but your dwelling is inaccessible. He longs to find you but he does not know where you are. He loves to seek you but he does not know your face. Lord, you are my Lord and my God, and I have never seen you. You have created and recreated me; all the good I have comes from you, and still I do not know you. I was created to see you and I have not yet accomplished that for which I was made. How wretched is the fate of man when he has lost that for which he was created... Let me seek you by desiring you, and desire you by seeking you; let me find you by loving you and love you in finding you.

The Return of the King

2008-11-04T16:18:00.004-06:00

When all is said and done...

Tuesday, 04 November 2008 Tuesday of the Thirty-first week in Ordinary Time
St. Charles Borromeo

Philip. 2,5-11. Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Ps 22(21),26-27.28-30.31-32. I will offer praise in the great assembly; my vows I will fulfill before those who fear him. The poor will eat their fill; those who seek the LORD will offer praise. May your hearts enjoy life forever!" All the ends of the earth will worship and turn to the LORD; All the families of nations will bow low before you. For kingship belongs to the LORD, the ruler over the nations. All who sleep in the earth will bow low before God; All who have gone down into the dust will kneel in homage. And I will live for the LORD; my descendants will serve you. The generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance you have brought.

Lk 14,15-24. One of his fellow guests on hearing this said to him, "Blessed is the one who will dine in the kingdom of God." He replied to him, "A man gave a great dinner to which he invited many. When the time for the dinner came, he dispatched his servant to say to those invited, 'Come, everything is now ready.' But one by one, they all began to excuse themselves. The first said to him, 'I have purchased a field and must go to examine it; I ask you, consider me excused.' And another said, 'I have purchased five yoke of oxen and am on my way to evaluate them; I ask you, consider me excused.' And another said, 'I have just married a woman, and therefore I cannot come.' The servant went and reported this to his master. Then the master of the house in a rage commanded his servant, 'Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in here the poor and the crippled, the blind and the lame.' The servant reported, 'Sir, your orders have been carried out and still there is room.' The
master then ordered the servant, 'Go out to the highways and hedgerows and make people come in that my home may be filled. For, I tell you, none of those men who were invited will taste my dinner.'"

our darkest hour

2008-11-04T09:58:00.009-06:00

Fell deeds await...

Now for Wrath...

Now for Ruin ...

And the Red Dawn!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNvtArnfyRE

death here, life there

2008-11-03T10:53:00.003-06:00

There's a profound difference between the Love of Christ and socialism. Love involves Person and Act. Socialism involves institutions and material. From a positioned framed by a perverted perception of justice, it merely objectifies and commodifies humanity in a different way than does capitalism. But collectivizing and controlling human relations is more dangerous than capitalism because it removes individual freedom. It makes the institution God, and forces a soulless subjectivity. The oppurtunity to give and receive Love is diminished. As Augustine says, the smallest act is equal in Love to the largest. Within a socialist society, those oppurtunities cease to have meaning.

Saint Augustine (354-430), Bishop of Hippo (North Africa) and Doctor of the Church Discourse on Psalm 121 "You will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."
Love has great power; it is our strength. If we have no love then nothing else is of any use to us. «If I speak in human and angelic tongues,» the apostle Paul says: «but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal» (1Cor 13,1). And then listen to this tremendous statement: «If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over to be burnt, but do not have love, I am nothing» (v.3). Even if love is all you have, even if you cannot give to the poor, love. Were you to give no more than a cup of cold water (Mt 10,42), it would be worth the same reward as Zacchaeus had, having distributed half his possessions (Lk 19,8). How is this? One gives but little, the other much and do their gestures have the same value? Indeed yes – their wherewithal is unequal but their love is equal... The Psalmist says: «We will go into the house of the Lord» (Ps 122[121],4). It is up to us to see whether we are going there. Not our feet but our hearts are what take us there. See whether we are on the way; let each one ask himself: What are you doing for the poor believer, for the brother who is homeless or the beggar who holds out his hand? Check whether your heart is closed... «Pray for the peace of Jerusalem» (v.6). What does the peace of Jerusalem consist in? «Prosperity for those who love you» (Vulg). The psalmist addresses Jerusalem: «Those who love you will prosper» – prosperity after deprivation. Wretchedness here below, prosperity above; weakness here, strength there; those who are poor here are rich there. And where do their riches come from? From the fact that here they gave away the possessions they had received for a time from God they will receive there what God gives them for all eternity. My brethren, here below the rich are those who are poor; it is good that the rich man discovers his own poverty. Does he think himself satisfied? This is to be puffed up, not full. Let him recognise his own emptiness so as to be capable of satisfaction. What does he have? Gold. What does he still lack? Eternal life. Let him take good note of what he has and recognise what he lacks. Brothers, let him give away what he possesses so as to receive what he has not.

where have you gone Joe Dimaggio

2008-10-30T21:07:00.003-05:00

Excerpts from a book called Why the Democrats Are Blue. byMark Stricherz (via Amy Wellborn)

It all came to a head in 1972, as most of us know, but even if you do know, Stricherz’s account of the 1972 convention is helpful and even riveting at times. What’s most interesting to me is that the abortion issue more or less came out of the blue. It was only the feminists who wanted it and McGovern’s people were actually rather frantic that it not become a part of the platform, knowing full well what it would do to the traditional party base.
It really is quite amazing to consider the transformation in the priorities of the Democratic party in just those few years - who in 1964 could have imagined that gay rights and abortion rights would become such a focus just a decade later.
As interesting as that was, I’ll tell you that the segment of the book that interested me the most was the material dealing with Carter in 1976. Only three years after Roe was decided, abortion was an ever bigger issue than it had been four years previously and a Human Life Amendment of some sort was a matter of serious discussion as a realistic possibility in many quarters.
Carter played both sides, but the party platform remained clearly in support of abortion rights, with a stated opposition to a constitutional amendment overturning Roe - a fact that prompted many bishops to make extremely strong statements, including - and this might surprise some - Cardinal Bernardin:

Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of Cincinnati, the head of the National Conference
of Catholic Bishops, blasted the party platform as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘morally
offensive in the extreme.’ On the eve of the Democratic convention, ten thousand
people rallied under a blazing sun in Central Park and marched to Madison Square
Garden to urge the party to oppose the abortion plank….The priest chosen to give
the closing benediction at the convention backed out, citing Carter and the
party’s stand on abortion.

It was soon realized that Carter had a “Catholic problem,” one not alleviated even by the efforts of staffers hired to specifically address it. On August 31, he met with six bishops in DC, including Bernardin:

At the August 31 meeting, [Bernardin] left no doubt about the importance he
assigned to the rights of unborn infants. Reading from a prepared statement, the
archbishop stressed the prelates’ insistence on a constitutional amendment that
‘will give the maximum protection possible to the unborn.” As Bernardin
explained, “If there is agreement that aobriotn is a moral evil because it
violated a person’s most basic right, then the only logical conclusion is that
something must be done to correct the evil; and the only remedy is a
constitutional amendment….Indeed without such a remedy, the effort to promote
other human life causes for individual and social betterment, about which we are
concerned, is seirously weakened.”

Carter continued to finesse, being vage about some things, expressing his personal opposition to abortion at times, and pleasing pro-lifers and infuriating pro-abortion feminists by signing the Hyde Amendment in 1977.
In 1980, Carter and his supporters worked against pro-gay rights and pro-abortion rights planks in the platform but were handily defeated, on the latter, by a margin of 2-1 voting in support of planks supporting unrestricted abortion and taxpayer-funded abortion, the vote achieved in great part by maneuverings and decisions made over the previous years to enact a quota requiring a 50-50 female-male split on delegates.
And then came Reagan.
Gee. I wonder why the pro-life activists starting doubting the Democratic party was open to their concerns?

So Crates

2008-10-27T20:59:00.002-05:00

this could easily be Axelrod's advice to The One. The 1st part is totally Palin.

They will tell you that the just man who is thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound --will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled: Then he will understand that he ought to seem only, and not to be, just.

Todah

2008-10-27T20:41:00.005-05:00

Micheal Barber reminds me of something I really need reminding of often.

All Sacrifices Will Cease But One
Some of you may know this already, but there is an ancient Rabbinic tradition regarding sacrifice in the the Messianic Age. Although I've read it dozens of times, I'm still stunned every time I see it. According to Leviticus Rabbah 9:7 and Pesiqta Rabbati 12, several ancient Rabbis taught the following:
In the Age to Come all sacrifices will cease, but the thank offering will never cease;
all songs will cease, but the songs of thanksgiving will never cease." (Cited in
Hartmut Gese, Essays in Biblical Theology 133). In Hebrew, the word for "thank offering" is todah; in Greek, it is eucharistia. The thank offering was a special sacrifice that consisted of both a bloody offering (of a lamb or goat) and an unbloody offering (of bread or wafers) (see Leviticus 7). According to the prophet Jeremiah, the saved will celebrate with thank-offerings at the coming of the Messiah and the ingathering of the exiles (Jeremiah 33). The obvious question raised by this is: Did Jesus see the Last Supper as the eschatological sacrifice which would replace all the other sacrifices in the Age to Come?

The obvious answer?

Judgement Day is coming

2008-10-21T20:59:00.001-05:00

Saint Isaac the Syrian (7th century), monk at Nineveh, near Mosul in present day Iraq
Ascetical discourses

"Light your lamps"

Prayer offered during the hours of night possesses great power, even more than that offered during the day. That is why all the saints were in the habit of praying at night, combating the body's drowsiness and the sweetness of sleep and overcoming their bodily nature. The prophet also said: «I am wearied with sighing; every night I flood my bed with weeping» (Ps 6,7) as he uttered heartfelt sighs in impassioned prayer. And elsewhere: «At midnight I rise to give you thanks because of your just ordinances, O just God» (Ps 119[118],62). For every request for which the saints desired to importune God they armed themselves with nocturnal prayer and at once received what they were asking for. Satan himself fears nothing as much as prayer offered during the night watches. Even if they are accompanied by distractions it does not return fruitless so long as something inappropriate is not being asked for. That is why Satan engages in severe combat against those who keep watch at night so as to deter them from this practice if he can, especially if they show themselves to be persevering. But those who are in any way defended against his pernicious wiles and have tasted the gifts God grants at these times of vigil and have had personal experience of the greatness of the help God gives them, wholly despise him, he and all his craftiness.

the foolishness of God is wiser than man

2008-09-24T10:18:00.000-05:00

Saint John Chrysostom (c.345-407), Bishop of Antioch then of Constantinople, Doctor of the Church 4th Homily on 1 Corinthians; PG 61, 34-36 (trans. Mary Hallies)

It was through unlearned men that the Cross brought conviction, and drew the world to itself. It spoke to men, not of chance things, but of God, and of piety in the truth, of the Gospel polity, of future judgment, and it made uncouth and illiterate men philosophers. This is how «the foolishness of God is wiser than man, and His weakness stronger,» (1Cor. 1,25).
How is it stronger? It is stronger in that it spread over the whole earth and seized all men by force, and whereas thousands and thousands did their utmost to stamp out the name of the Crucified One, just the contrary came to pass. For this name took root and was propagated all the more, whereas its enemies were destroyed and consumed, and living men fighting a dead One, gained not a stroke... For publicans and fishermen set up those very things by the goodness of God which philosophers, and orators, and despots, and the whole world vainly striving with all its might could not even devise... This was in Paul's mind when he said: «the weakness of God is stronger than all men put together.» How, otherwise, was it that twelve unlettered men attempted things of this importance?

amen

2008-07-12T00:18:00.002-05:00

the quick & the dead
Posted by: Diogenes - Jul. 11, 2008 11:16 PM ET USA
Amherst Professor Hardley Arkes is Jewish. Yet he has a sounder grasp of Church teaching on life issues than all but a few Catholics. In a recent posting at The Catholic Thing, he registers his bewilderment at the number of Catholics capable of disregarding Barack Obama's pro-abortion stance:
Some of our readers know that I [Arkes] was associated with the drafting of the "most modest first step of all on abortion," the bill to preserve the life of the child who survived an abortion. It was called, in that awful legislative style, the Born-Alive Infants' Protection Act. When it finally passed the Congress in 2002, not a single Democrat in Congress voted in opposition. But Barack Obama, as a Senator in Illinois, actually led the opposition to the comparable measure in that state, and as the chairman of a legislative committee managed to kill it. How does one explain then this close division among Catholics, with a tilt actually in his favor? And what is the worse account: that most Catholics in the country simply do not know about his radical, pro-abortion position, or that American Catholics by now have heard about Obama's position, and they don't especially care?
Perhaps most U.S. Catholics feel some moral discomfort with abortion-on-demand, but have been firehosed so thoroughly by the Seamless Garment treatment (according to which an erroneous position on infanticide, e.g., is neutralized by a liberal position on housing credits) that they are incapable of assigning a meaningful priority to moral issues in the political realm. Arkes acutely points out that even conceding the willingness to reduce abortions is senseless apart from a publicly reasoned conviction that abortion is wrong. Says Arkes:
And the candidate who offers us this "concession": Why should we even trust him to seek a reduction in abortions when he could not possibly share with us any ground of principle to explain why these human lives command our respect and our obligation to protect them?
A liberal might rejoin that abortions should be reduced on the same ground that dental extractions should be reduced: they're vexing, expensive, and painful, and on those grounds to be avoided where avoidable. Every tooth a wanted tooth. But as Arkes argues, having decided to discount arbitrarily the value of human life in one assaying of goods, you can't pretend to be balancing benefits that include goods for human beings whose lives are not thus disvalued. That would be like declaring that Hungarians, in the eyes of the law, are puppies, whence their masters are free to put them down humanely. The term "humane," in such context, attaches to the masters, not to the Hungarians.
During the debate between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, Douglas suggested the diversity of goods at work in our national life: Maine had oysters, Indiana had cranberries, and some of the states used slave labor. Are we being asked now to adopt a similar state of mind, in which the killing of the innocent, on a massive scale, is regarded as just one of several "goods" that our people are equally free to choose, one no better in principle than the others?
It makes no sense to coerce one's fellow citizens to provide education and health care for a child whom you cannot legally protect from homicide. Most Catholic Obama-partisans have not grappled with the abortion problem directly and have no relish to do so; rather they talk more loudly about other issues in the hope that the abortion business will fade into the background by November. I believe it was SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich who asked, What better seamless garment than a body bag?

passing over into act

2008-07-08T17:14:00.002-05:00

Saint Vincent de Paul (1581-1660), founder of religious communities Spiritual talks given to the Missionary Brothers

"Ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest" There are plenty of people who, wanting to be well-ordered on the surface and filled with beautiful feelings about God within, stop there...; they are satisfied with the sweet colloquies they hold with God in prayer... Don't let us deceive ourselves: our whole task consists in passing over into acts. And so true is this that the apostle, Saint John, tells us that our works are the only thing to accompany us into the next life (Rev 14,13). So let us think this over: never more than in our own day are there many who seem to be virtuous, and indeed are so, but who nevertheless tend towards a way that is easy and gentle rather than to hard-working, straightforward devotion. The Church is like a great harvest in need of laborers - but laborers who work! Nothing is more in keeping with the
Gospel than to draw light and strength for one's soul in prayer, reading and solitude on the one hand, but then to go and distribute this spiritual nourishment to other people. This is to do what our Lord did and, after him, his apostles; it is to unite Martha's task with that of Mary; it is to imitate the dove who digests half the food she has taken and then places the rest with her beak into that of her little ones to feed them. This is what we ought to do, too; this is how we ought to show God by our works how much we love him. Our whole task consists in passing over into act

a leaf on the wind

2008-05-21T21:05:00.002-05:00

In The Lord, Romano Guardini says that Jesus was free to face evil because he was without the impotent rage or the secret envy that shackles both the righteous and the wicked. He was free.

the just man is obnoxious to us

2008-03-09T10:51:00.006-05:00

Wisdom talks about our knee-jerk revulsion at those without the stain of sin. Because we are unjust,we find the truly just man unsettling and therefore seek to first make him ugly, then erase him; all as a challenge to God who should defend his own.

Wisdom 2,1.12-22.
They who said among themselves, thinking not aright: "Brief and troublous is our lifetime; neither is there any remedy for man's dying, nor is anyone known to have come back from the nether world. Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he sets himself against our doings, Reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training. He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the LORD. To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us, Because his life is not like other men's, and different are his ways. He judges us debased; he holds aloof from our paths as from things impure. He calls blest the destiny of the just and boasts that God is his Father. Let us see whether his words be true; let us find out what will happen to him. For if the just one be the son of God, he will defend him and deliver him from the hand of his foes. With revilement and torture let us put him to the test that we may have proof of his gentleness and try his patience. Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him."

This text is echoed by Plato in bk 2 of The Republic, where the discussion is about this same fear and rejection of the just man from a philosophical rather than prophetic angle. But Plato seems to imply that the just man - if truly just -will willfully accept this poor treatment to demonstrate his claim to justice is not for self glorification. Truer word have never been spoken.

Now, if we are to form a real judgment of the life of the just and unjust, we must isolate them; there is no other way; and how is the isolation to be effected? I answer: Let the unjust man be entirely unjust, and the just man entirely just; nothing is to be taken away from either of them, and both are to be perfectly furnished for the work of their respective lives. First, let the unjust be like other distinguished masters of craft; like the skilful pilot or physician, who knows intuitively his own powers and keeps within their limits, and who, if he fails at any point, is able to recover himself. So let the unjust make his unjust attempts in the right way, and lie hidden if he means to be great in his injustice (he who is found out is nobody): for the highest reach of injustice is: to be deemed just when you are not. Therefore I say that in the perfectly unjust man we must assume the most perfect injustice; there is to be no deduction, but we must allow him, while doing the most unjust acts, to have acquired the greatest reputation for justice. If he have taken a false step he must be able to recover himself; he must be one who can speak with effect, if any of his deeds come to light, and who can force his way where force is required his courage and strength, and command of money and friends. And at his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and simplicity, wishing, as Aeschylus says, to be and not to seem good. There must be no seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or for the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let him be clothed in justice only, and have no other covering; and he must be imagined in a state of life the opposite of the former. Let him be the best of men, and let him be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the proof; and we shall see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just and seeming to be unjust. When both have reached the uttermost extreme, the one of justice and the other of injustice, let judgment be given which of them is the happier of the two.

(Socrates - GLAUCON)
Heavens! my dear Glaucon, I said, how energetically you polish them up for the decision, first one and then the other, as if they were two statues. I do my best, he said. And now that we know what they are like there is no difficulty in tracing out the sort of life which awaits either of them... They will tell you that the just man who is thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound --will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled: Then he will understand that he ought to seem only, and not to be, just;

And isn't that exactly what the Sanhedrin was tyring to tell Jesus?? Isn't that what the secular world is constantly telling those who teach that truth is objective? Isn't that what the leftist apologists for relativism within the Church tell those who believe we should accept the magisterium; don't they strive to neuter those who insist that Jesus Christ is the one Lord, one Way, one Truth and one Life? There's nothing new under the sun.

2 Sam.11[1]

2008-02-17T23:25:00.005-06:00

This line begins the story of David's adultery. I'd either never read it - or never read it before, but it struck me as among the most profound in the entire Old Testament. When you read the OT after having gotten the Scott Hahn treatment (or Jeff Cavins terrific scripture study overview), you're always on the lookout for the poetic pre-figuring, or the specifically sacramental. It even helps you tune in more effectively to what was written to be both historically descriptive, yet timelessly, and intimately, personal. All three of those elements scream out from 2 Sam.11:1.

2 Sam.11:1

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go forth to battle,
David sent Jo'ab,
and his servants with him,
and all Israel;
and they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah.

But David remained at Jerusalem.

I sort of tinkered with the verse to make it a poem. And as a poem, it is immense in its meaning. David was given every good thing by the Lord. He was given all that was promised to Abraham, to Isaac, Jacob and Moses. What Saul rejected, David was rewared, and with seemingly limitless surplus. When he was hunted, the Lord protected him. When he went to war, the Lord conquered. When he took the city of Peace, the Ark came to him. In all of these things one truth remained constant for David: if he fought, the Lord was his ally.

So David fought and won. Many, many times. David conquered and built and conquered again - all with the help of the Lord. But when David had all the bounty of the Lord that came from his struggles, his desire to struggle became less. Then, in the springtime - a time that could not be better framed by the author of the scripture - David opted out of the struggle to stay within the comforts of the earthly home the Lord had helped him obtain. It was in this place of comfort that he became open to Satan for seemingly the first real time in the story of his life. He rested when the Lord's work was still to be done, and he became immediately vulnerable.

The rest of this story is very pathetic in light of all we know of David before it. The adultery is just the first sin that begins a tale of great tragedy and sorrow for those that David harmed, ultimately resulting in the profoundly tragic death of the son Bathsheba gives birth to. It is David's humility and true penance in the face of his sins that becomes equally profound, showing us again why God chose him over Saul. It also resulted in Psalm 51, the model for all honest pleas for God's mercy.

Time and again in scripture, the Holy Spirit is telling us what we are to be - humble, thankful, contrite, loving and childlike in the presence of the Lord. In 2 Sam. 11:1 the Spirit reminds us that when there is a battle raging for our immortal soul, we jeopardize its outcome by staying home.

creating false enemies

2008-02-08T19:13:00.000-06:00

I like what Harold Fickett has to say about The Chosen One. Why is it so hard for most of the Catholic Left to see this logic?

But here’s why I cannot vote for him. He says he believes that his
Christian faith is all about “the least of these my brothers,” extending justice
to God’s favorites, the poor. And I agree, brother, Amen. But there’s no reason
to fight for the poor, for social justice in education, for policies that
support working families and the health of communities, and for those who are
terrorized and oppressed internationally if life is not sacred. If life is not
sacred, we will end up not serving the poor—having abandoned the defenseless—but
destroying the human person. Obama’s Christianity embraces social justice, but a
social justice that’s not grounded in the primary value of life—from conception
to death—is worthless, and will, in the end, betray itself. The judges Obama
would nominate to the Supreme Court will guarantee that result, even if the
compartmentalization of Obama’s thinking keeps him from confronting this truth.
An Obama presidency would mean a succession of Ginsburgs, Souters, and
Stevens.
As my wife said to me, if Obama would just declare himself pro-life,
he’d sweep the country. That actually might come to pass, at least in a general
election, although he’d never receive the Democratic nomination if he even
hinted as much. But to those politicians who truly want to “unite the country,”
it’s long past time to recognize that its youngest citizens, the unborn, have
rights, too.

then they will fast

2008-02-08T10:45:00.001-06:00

Saint Peter Chrysologus (c.406-450), Bishop of Ravenna, Doctor of the Church Sermon on prayer, fasting and almsgiving; PL 52, 320

There are three actions, my brethren, on which faith stands firm, in which piety consists and by which virtue is upheld: prayer, fasting, mercy. Prayer knocks at the door; fasting obtains; mercy receives. Prayer, mercy, fasting: these three make up one thing and, all together, give life to each other. Thus, fasting is the soul of prayer and mercy is the life of fasting. Let no one set them apart; the three together cannot be separated. Anyone who puts only one or two of them into practice has done nothing at all. Therefore, the one who prays must fast, and the one who fasts must have mercy. Let him hear the man who asks and who, in asking, wishes to be heard. Whoever does not refuse to listen to others when they plead to him will be listened to by God. Whoever practises fasting must understand what fasting is, that is to say, he must sympathise with the hungry man if he wants God to sympathise with his own hunger. Whoever hopes to obtain mercy must show mercy; whoever wants to benefit from kindness must practise it; whoever would like someone to give him something must be someone who gives… So be yourself the measure of the mercy to be shown to you: if you would like others to show you mercy in such-and-such a way, according to such a measure and with just such a readiness, then show mercy yourself to others with the same sort of readiness, according to the same measure, and in the same way. And so prayer, mercy, fasting must make up one, single sponsor to recommend us to God, one defense, one prayer in our favour under this threefold form.

for the record

2008-02-07T16:34:00.000-06:00

The Cult of Obama is being discussed openly now in WSJ and ABC News. I'm proud to declare that I was offended/creeped out by this way before the main-stream media.

didache

2008-02-07T16:20:00.000-06:00

Deut 30,15-20. "Here, then, I have today set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land which you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."

flesh and blood has not revealed this to you

2008-01-28T09:34:00.000-06:00

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Dominican theologian, Doctor of the Church
Summa theologiae

The Prince of this world has been cast out

Christ’s miracles were ordained to manifest his divinity. However, this had to remain hidden from the demons, otherwise the mystery of the passion would have been hindered by them: “If they had known the Lord of glory, They would not have crucified him,” (1Cor 2,8). It would seem, then, that Christ should not work miracles over the demons… Yet the prophet Zechariah
predicted these wonders when he cried out: “I will take away the spirit of uncleanness,” (Zec 13,2). Indeed, Christ’s miracles were proofs demonstrating the faith he taught. Now, through the power of his divinity, was it not fitting for him to do away with the demons’ power in those who would believe in him, according to Saint John’s words: “Now the ruler of this world is driven out”? (Jn 12,31). Thus it was fitting that, among his other miracles, Christ should deliver from demons those men who were possessed by them… Besides, Saint Augustine writes: “Christ made himself known to the demons for as long as he wished to do so, and he wished to do so for as long as it was necessary… through certain material consequences of his power.” At the sight of his miracles the devil came to believe through conjecture that Christ was the Son of God: “the demons… knew he was the Christ” says Saint Luke (Lc 4,41). If they confessed he was Son of God, “it was by way of conjecture rather than by way of knowledge,” Saint Bede comments. As for the miracles Christ accomplished when he cast out demons, he did not do these for their own usefulness but for that of men, so that they might give glory to God. That is why he prevented the demons from speaking about anything affecting his praise. Saint John Chrysostom observes: “It was not fitting that the demons should take to themselves the glory proper to the function of the apostles, nor that lying tongues should preach the mystery of Christ.”

This underscores the truth of how God is revealed to us. Christ said that no one can know the Father but those to whom He is revealed by the Son. The reasoning abilities of created beings (whether human or pure spirit) are insufficient to "know" God. God has to be revealed to us, and we have to accept this revelation through the faith that is also given from God. It makes sense that Satan did not truly know who Jesus was when tempting him in the desert. It's also apparent that the demon in Mark 1:24 and Luke 4:34 is limited in knowledge of Christ since it refers to Jesus as "the Holy One of God" - which is truth, but not the whole truth. Christ IS God. In a similar way, Peter reaches that peak of human capacity to understand when in John 6:68-69 he too calls Jesus "the Holy One of God". But Peter's admission is one of total abandonment to Jesus in humility towards the mystery of the Eucharist that just caused so many disciples to leave Jesus in disgust. This humility in asking for and receiving the gift of Faith is the foundation (the Rock) on which the Father places the highest revelation of Truth in Matthew 16:

[13] Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesare'a Philip'pi, he asked
his disciples, "Who do men say that the Son of man is?" [14] And they said,
"Some say John the Baptist, others say Eli'jah, and others Jeremiah or one of
the prophets." [15] He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" [16] Simon
Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." [17] And Jesus
answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not
revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. [18] And I tell you, you
are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death
shall not prevail against it. [19] I will give you the keys of the kingdom of
heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever
you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

When the demons claim knowledge of Jesus it is out of self-interest and with hatred - almost an attempt to control their enemy by showing off their special knowledge of who Christ is. This is an easy sin for intellectuals in the Church to fall into, as B16 has pointed out.

mounted on an ass. on a colt, the foal of an ass.

2008-01-17T10:59:00.000-06:00

Compare the following:

"We need a president who can reintroduce America to the world – and actually reintroduce America to ourselves," Sen. Leahy said in the conference call endorsing Barack Obama.

22. The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery
of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to
come,(20) namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown. (Gaudium et Spes)

If I didn't know any better...

master/slave dichotomy

2008-01-11T11:44:00.000-06:00

I had to swipe this from Carl Olsen . This is the Catholic left in a nutshell. Most of them aren't aware of just how locked in they are to a Marxist perspective on the Church and society as a whole. It's hard to "dialogue" on specifics when the structures are built on such disparate foundations.

Cardinal Ratzinger, from Salt of the Earth (Ignatius, 1997):

There is an ideology that fundamentally traces all existing institutions back to
power politics. And this ideology corrupts humanity and also destroys the
Church. Here is a very concrete example: If I see the Church only under the
aspect of power, then it follows that everyone who doesn't hold an office is
ipso facto oppressed. And then the question of, for example, women's ordination,
as an issue of power, becomes imperative, for everyone has to be able to have
power. I think that this ideology, which suspects that everywhere and always
what's at stake is basically power, destroys the feeling of solidarity not only
in the Church but also in human life as such. It also produces a totally false
point of view, as if power in the Church were an ultimate goal. As if power were
the only category for explaining the world and the communion present in it.
After all, we are not in the Church to exercise power as if we were in some kind
of association. If belonging to the Church has any meaning at all, then the
meaning can only be that it gives us eternal life, hence, real life, true life
as such. Everything else is secondary. If that isn't true, then all "power" in
the Church - which then sinks to the level of a mere association - is nothing
more than an absurd "spectacle". I think we have to escape from this theology of
power and this reduction that derives from Marxist suspicion

awesome God

2008-01-10T20:48:00.000-06:00

gaudium et spes, baby!

2008-01-08T12:58:00.000-06:00

I'm glad Jesse brought up Revelation (not plural). When one is depressed about how screwy the world is, it helps to read Ch 21 and remember that Jesus Christ will come again to establish the new creation - the octave of our chronotope, if you will. Islam's rise is a logical outcome in many ways to the failure of the West to truly embrace the Gospel and see our salvation in the person of Jesus. Israel had a covenant relationship with God that aspired to the personal but did not fully accept this as a true possibility. Read the Psalms or Song of Songs for a better picture of the dual love (eros and agape) that the Jews yearned for and knew existed in potential. However, the separation between man and Yahweh was bridged by the Law of Moses - the Word on paper. When we put word on paper, there is an immediate separation between author and work. And when someone reads what you write, there's an effort to know the author, but there is still a vast space separating him from you.

Islam took up the Word-based theology of Judaism, but expanded the covenant from with a people, to with the individual. That was and is it's primary draw, for it says that the God of Abraham is now asking the same level of sacrifice from all people. However, though Allah is a "personal God", he is even more distant than Yahweh because he demand pure submission without the hint of dual love characterized by Jewish yearnings.

Why do Muslims reject the Christ of Christianity? Because he called God "Father", declared himself one with the father and thereby brought the divinity down to the level of man and - what's more drastic - in SERVICE of man in a spirit of pure eros and pure agape.

Why did the Jews reject Christ? Jesus sums up the whole conflict of His mission to the Jews and the ultimate reason for the Crucifixion in Matthew 19:

And behold, one came up to him, saying, "Teacher, what good deed must I do, to
have eternal life?" [17] And he said to him, "Why do you ask me about what is
good? One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments."
[18] He said to him, "Which?" And Jesus said, "You shall not kill, You shall not
commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, [19]
Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
[20] The young man said to him, "All these I have observed; what do I still
lack?" [21] Jesus said to him, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you
possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come,
follow me."

When Jesus says "follow me" he inserts himself into the relationship between God and man. Not just as a judge or King (which the Jews had) but as the human Son of the Father, placing himself as the living fulfillment and purpose of both the Law of Moses and the yearnings for intimacy expressed by David and the prophets. Jesus is the living Word, so when we read Scripture from the heart of the new covenant we open ourselves up to the Holy Spirit who allows us to share in the divine life through experiencing the trifecta of faith, hope and love. As Paul said in 1 Corinthians ch 1, "but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, " - and I would add "idolatry to the Muslims."

But worship of God is an ontological need. People can suppress it and dismiss it, but all creation MUST ultimately bow down before the Lord. In Christ we have the opportunity to embrace the Love we're offered now, in our sinfulness, as Mercy. We also have the template for understanding the universe, the purpose of existence, and the nature and destiny of the human body. But we have to humble ourselves before the man Pilate presented as a scourged and humiliated worm and profess him to be the one, true God. This is something Eastern religions have no common reference point with. It is something Jews found to be blasphemous, and something Muslims view as disgusting weakness.

So I say to Nate: have HOPE! Not the Obama kind, but the Revelation kind. No injustice today is greater than that which Christ himself endured. When he comes again we must be of John's mind and know that "every eye will see him, every one who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen." Even when what we have done is shown to us on a mirror we say Amen, because we have faith in Rev 21:

Behold, I make all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true." And he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life without payment. He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son.

the violent bear it away

2008-01-07T10:02:00.000-06:00

Flannery O'Connor named her second novel after Matthew 11:12, and I found her understanding of its meaning in The Habit of Being.

One thing I observe about the title is that the general reaction is to
think that it has an Old Testament flavor. Even when they read the quotation,
the fact that these are Christ's words makes no great impression. That this is
the violence of love, of giving more than the law demands, of an asceticism like
John the Baptist's, but in the face of which even John is less than the least in
the kingdom - all this is overlooked.

It's a little different than Origen and Ireneus, but it sort of completes my understanding.

the palm of victory

2007-12-28T09:14:00.000-06:00

Saint Quodvultdeus, Bishop at Carthage from 437-453
Second sermon on the Creed; PL40, 655

Children, but witnesses to Christ

Why, Herod, do you fear when you hear a king is born? He has not come to
dethrone you but to overthrow the devil. But you fail to understand, you
take fright and fall into a fury. Because you lost the single child you
were seeking, you become the cruel murderer of the many. Neither the
weeping mothers’ love, nor the mourning of fathers weeping for their sons,
nor the screams and howling of the children themselves hold you back. You
massacre these little ones in their bodies because fear is killing you in
your heart. And you think that, if you achieve your end, you will live on
for a long time, whereas it is life itself you are trying to kill! He who
is the source of grace, who is both small and great, who is lying in a
manger, causes your throne to topple. He accomplishes his design through
you without your knowing it. He gathers together the children of your
enemies and makes of them children of adoption. These little ones died for
Christ without knowing it; their parents weep for the death of martyrs.
Although they were unable to speak, Christ made them capable of being his
witnesses. See how this King reigns. Already he is setting free and
bestowing salvation. But as for you, Herod, you are oblivious of what is
happening; you take fright and fall into a rage. And when you get annoyed
with a little child, you are already placing yourself at his service
without realising it. How great the gift of grace is! What are the merits
by which these children won the victory? They could not yet speak but
already they are confessing Christ. Their little bodies are as yet unable
to engage in combat but already they are carrying off the palm of victory.

more on Matt 11:12

2007-12-13T20:33:00.000-06:00

Ireneus Against Heresies:Book IV

And when I ceased, Trypho said, “All the words of the prophecy you repeat, sir, are ambiguous, 221 and have no force in proving what you wish to prove.” Then I answered, “If the prophets had not ceased, so that there were no more in your nation, Trypho, after this John, it is evident that what I say in reference to Jesus Christ might be regarded perhaps as ambiguous. But if John came first calling on men to repent, and Christ, while [John] still sat by the river Jordan, having come, put an end to his prophesying and baptizing, and preached also Himself, saying that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and that He must suffer many things from the Scribes and Pharisees, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again, and would appear again in Jerusalem, and would again eat and drink with His disciples; and foretold that in the interval between His [first and second] advent, as I previously said,2109 2109 Chap. xxv.
priests and false prophets would arise in His name, which things do actually appear; then how can they be ambiguous, when you may be persuaded by the facts? Moreover, He referred to the fact that there would be no longer in your nation any prophet, and to the fact that men recognised how that the New Testament, which God formerly announced [His intention of] promulgating, was then present, i.e., Christ Himself; and in the following terms: ‘The law and the prophets were until John the Baptist; from that time the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. And if you can “Are willing.”
receive it, he is Elijah, who was to come. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

the Violent take it by force

2007-12-13T09:10:00.000-06:00

Today's Gospel:

Mt 11,11-15.
Amen, I say to you, among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent are taking it by force. All the prophets and the law prophesied up to the time of John. And if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah, the one who is to come. Whoever has ears ought to hear.

Origen's comments...

Homilies on Joshua, no.5 (SC 71)

Joshua crossed the Jordan to attack Jericho. But Saint Paul teaches: “Our
struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the unseen powers, with the
world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the
heavens,” (Ep 6,12). Those things that were written down are images and
symbols. For Paul says elsewhere: “These things happened as an example;
they have been written down as a warning to us, upon whom the end of the
ages has come,” (1Co 10,11). If, then, these things have been written down
as a warning, well then!, why delay? Like Joshua, let us set out to war,
attacking the greatest city in the world, namely wickedness, and let us
throw down the arrogant walls of sin. Would you look around for which path
to take, which battlefield to choose? No doubt you will find my words
extraordinary; nevertheless, they are true: limit your quest to yourself
alone. In you lies the combat you are going to engage, within yourself the
structure of evil and sin to pull down; your enemy emerges from the depths
of your heart. It is not I who say this but Christ. Listen to him: “From
the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, false
witness, blasphemy,” (Mt 15,19). Do you realize the power of this enemy
force that advances against you from the depths of your heart? Those are
our real enemies.

he who made them from the beginning

2007-12-06T12:25:00.000-06:00

The attempts to reduce, deconstruct, and denounce the sacrament of Marriage have apparently been a focus of those in the historical profession of late. What I chuckled at while in grad school has now become the basis for graduate assistantships no doubt.

Michael Fragoso's article is very instructive. But to me the best response - and only one that will ever matter - to the question of what marriage should or should not be was given by Christ to the Pharisees pestering him about divorce laws.

Matthew 19:
[1] Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan;
[2] and large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.
[3] And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?"
[4] He answered, "Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female,
[5] and said, `For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?
[6] So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder."
[7] They said to him, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?"
[8] He said to them, "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

This was where JP II launched from at the beginning of his Theology of the Body catechises (and then he bounces back to Genesis and all around Scripture on this same "from the beginning" theme).

Like Stan Lee always used to close with in the letters page of Marvel Comics: "Nuff said."

how Jesus said he would meet the Greeks

2007-11-30T09:18:00.000-06:00

John 12:

[20]Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks.
[21] So these came to Philip, who was from Beth-sa'ida in Galilee, and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus."
[22] Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew went with Philip and they told Jesus.
[23] And Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified.
[24] Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
[25] He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
[26] If any one serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also; if any one serves me, the Father will honor him.
[27] "Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? `Father, save me from this hour'? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.

The Greeks were curious gawkers, gentiles who wished to study rather than follow. Christ's response to their request to meet him was to describe how he would truly engage the gentile world: through the Bread of Life offered to all in the Eucharist. It is His sacrifice that becomes the source of salvation for the Jews (who had the scriptural and covenantal understanding) and for the gentiles to whom the Word of God was proclaimed after it had been fulfilled.

Here is B-16's take on this Gospel passage:

Pope Benedict XVI
General audience of 14/06/06 (©Libreria editrice Vaticana)

Saint Andrew, apostle of the Greek world

The first striking characteristic of Andrew, brother of Simon Peter, is his
name: it is not Hebrew, as might have been expected, but Greek, indicative
of a certain cultural openness in his family that cannot be ignored… In
Jerusalem, shortly before the Passion, some Greeks had come to the holy
city… to worship the God of Israel at the Passover Feast. Andrew and
Philip, the two Apostles with Greek names, served as interpreters and
mediators of this small group of Greeks with Jesus… Jesus said to the two
disciples and, through them, to the Greek world: "The hour has come for
the Son of man to be glorified. I solemnly assure you, unless a grain of
wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if
it dies, it produces much fruit" (Jn12, 23-24). What do these words mean in
this context? Jesus wants to say: Yes, my meeting with the Greeks will
take place, but not as a simple, brief conversation between myself and a
few others, motivated above all by curiosity. The hour of my glorification
will come with my death, which can be compared with the falling into the
earth of a grain of wheat. My death on the Cross will bring forth great
fruitfulness: in the Resurrection the "dead grain of wheat" - a symbol of
myself crucified - will become the bread of life for the world; it will be
a light for peoples and cultures…In other words, Jesus was prophesying
about the Church of the Greeks, the Church of the pagans, the Church of the
world, as a fruit of his Pasch. Some very ancient traditions see in Andrew…
the Apostle to the Greeks in the years subsequent to Pentecost. They enable
us to know that for the rest of his life he was the preacher and
interpreter of Jesus for the Greek world. Peter, his brother, travelled
from Jerusalem through Antioch and reached Rome to exercise his universal
mission; Andrew, instead, was the Apostle of the Greek world. So it is that
in life and in death they appear as true brothers - a brotherhood that is
symbolically expressed in the special reciprocal relations of the Sees of
Rome and Constantinople, which are truly Sister Churches.

not the Obama kind

2007-11-27T15:25:00.000-06:00

from Carl Olson:

Pre-Pope Hope

Communio, the theological journal that Joseph Ratzinger helped found shortly after the Second Vatican Council, has posted a 1985 article by then-Cardinal Ratzinger titled, "On Hope." It is well worth reading for its own sake, but especially so considering the soon-to-be presented encyclical by Benedict XVI on the theological virtue of hope. Here is an excerpt, to whet the appetite:

Hope rests first of all on something missing at the heart of the human condition. We always expect more than any present moment will ever be able to give. The more we follow this inclination the more aware we become of the limitations of our experience. The impossible becomes a necessity. But hope means also “the assurance that this longing will find a response” If this experience of a void, of a desire which carries one outside oneself, comes to move the person to despair over self and over the rationality of being, then inversely this hope can be transformed into a secret joy that transcends every experienced joy and suffering. This way a person is enriched by the very need which causes him to conceive a happiness that he would never be able to experience without this decisive step. Hope could accordingly be described as an anticipation of what is to come. In it, the “not yet" is in a certain way already here, and so is the dynamism that carries one beyond oneself and prevents one from ever saying, "Linger a while: you are so beautiful.”
This means, on the one hand, that to hope belongs the "dynamism of the provisional,'' going beyond all human accomplishment. On the other hand, that through hope, what is "not yet" is already realized in our life. Only a certain kind of present can create the absolute confidence which is hope. Such is the definition of faith given in the epistle to the Hebrews: faith is the substance ("hypostasis") of what is hoped for, the certitude of what one does not see (11:l). In this basic biblical text both an ontology and a spirituality of hope are affirmed. It is recognized today even in Protestant exegesis that Luther and the exegetic tradition which followed him are misguided when in their search for a non-Hellenistic Christianity they transformed the word "hypostasis" by giving it a subjective meaning and translating it as "firm confidence." In reality this definition of faith in the epistle to the Hebrews is inseparably linked to two other verses of the same epistle which also use the term "hypostasis." In the introduction (1:3), Christ is presented as the splendor of the glory of God and the image of the "hypostasis." Two chapters further on, this Christological and fundamentally Trinitarian affirmation is expanded to the relation between Christ and Christians-a relation established by faith. By faith Christians have become participants in Christ. Now everything is going to depend upon maintaining their initial participation in his "hypostasis." These three texts fit together perfectly: the things of this world are what pass away; the self-revealing God who speaks in Christ is what endures, the reality that lasts, the only true "hypostasis." Believing is leaving the shadowy play of corruptible things to reach the firm ground of true reality, "hypostasis"--quite literally therefore, what stands and that on which one can stand. In other words, to believe is to have touched ground, to approach the substance of everything. With faith, hope has gotten a footing. The cry of waiting wrung from our being is not lost in the void. It finds a point of solid support to which we must for our part hold fast.
Direct link to the PDF file.

are we the beasts in the Ark?

2007-11-16T09:23:00.000-06:00

I wonder about this after reading Origen's take on today's Gospel:

Origen (c.185-253), priest and theologian
Homilies on Genesis, II, 3 (SC 7b, p.89)

The ark of the Church

Insofar as the meanness of my mind allows, I think that the flood which
almost put an end to the world in those days is the symbol of the end of
the world, an end that must truly happen. The Lord himself declared it when
he said: “In the days of Noah, men were buying, selling, building, marrying
and giving their daughters in marriage, and the flood came and destroyed
them all. So will be the coming of the Son of Man.” In this text it would
very much seem as though the Lord describes in one and the same way both
the flood that has already taken place and the end of the world that he is
pointing to in the future.

And so, in days of old, the aged Noah was told to make an ark and take
into it with him not only his sons and family but beasts of every kind.
Similarly, at the consummation of the ages, the Lord Jesus Christ, our new
Noah, the only “good and blameless man” (Gn 6,9), was told by his Father to
make an ark of fashioned wood, giving it measurements that are full of
divine mysteries (cf Gen 6,15). This is shown by one of the psalms, which
says: “Ask of me and I will give you the nations for an inheritance and the
ends of the earth for your possession,” (Ps 2,8). And so he built an ark
containing various shelters to house all kinds of animals. One of the
prophets speaks of these dwellings when he writes: “Go, my people, enter
into your chambers; hide yourselves for a brief moment, until the wrath is
past,” (Is 26,20). Thus there is a mysterious analogy between that people
which is saved in the Church and all those creatures, both men and animals,
saved from the flood inside the ark.

It's possible to see the story of the Ark as a parallel to the Apostles, Paul in particular, being told to go forth and make disciples of all nations - to bring them into "the barque of Peter". It was on Peter's boat in Luke 5 that Christ demonstrated his ability to call the multitudes (in this case fish) out of the sea and into the boat. And Paul went from place to place by ship, ultimately taking the Church Peter was entrusted with to Rome. And at Rome, this Ark - the barque of Peter - found its new iteration as it brought us beasts from all nations on board for the journey to and with Christ. This ties in with Henri de Lubac's description of the Catholic Church as Israel in the wilderness, carrying the Ark of the Covenant as a fellow refugee.

But anyway, we are beasts that were created on the 6th day, and Christ came to be the Word and Bread of Life for the beasts with the distinction of being made in His image.

with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars

2007-11-15T09:21:00.000-06:00

Wisdom 7,22-30.8,1.

for Wisdom, the artificer of all, taught me. For in her is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, Manifold, subtle, agile, clear, unstained, certain, Not baneful, loving the good, keen, unhampered, beneficent, kindly, Firm, secure, tranquil, all-powerful, all-seeing, And pervading all spirits, though they be intelligent, pure and very subtle. For Wisdom is mobile beyond all motion, and she penetrates and pervades all things by reason of her purity. For she is an aura of the might of God and a pure effusion of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nought that is sullied enters into her. For she is the refulgence of eternal light, the spotless mirror of the power of God, the image of his goodness. And she, who is one, can do all things, and renews everything while herself perduring; And passing into holy souls from age to age, she produces friends of God and prophets. For there is nought God loves, be it not one who dwells with Wisdom. For she is fairer than the sun and surpasses every constellation of the stars. Compared to light, she takes precedence; for that, indeed, night supplants, but wickedness prevails not over Wisdom. Indeed, she reaches from end to end mightily and governs all things well.

Mary and Hope (pt.1)

2007-11-02T09:13:00.000-05:00

Faith, Hope and Love are the three divine virtues - meaning that people are not able to possess or exercise them with their own powers. They are gifts from the Holy Spirit, and can only truly be experienced or exercised through the Holy Spirit. The idea that Faith is a gift from God is at the heart of wrestling with being a Christian, and the how and why of our salvation. Love is also easily seen to be from God and through God, since so much of what people do for themselves causes other people to suffer. I hadn't given the divine nature of Hope too much thought until recently. What I've come to realize is that it is the most absurd and jarring of the virtues. That's when you know it's from God.

I was thinking about the joyful mysteries, and - as I've liked to do recently - I tried to strip away the sentimentalism that has become so attached to their iconic nature. I try to re-picture something like the Annunciation, and blind myself to the traditionally venerated imagery Catholics have in their consciousness. Images like this El Greco:

This painting attempts to capture the glory of the Incarnation and depict it in a way that assists devotion, and draws the heart towards the wonder of God's gift, and the perfection of Mary's humility by accepting it. As a devotional prompt, it succeeds. You've got Gabriel and his angel cohorts on clouds, the Virgin Mother is catching her breath from the shock. All very true and appropriate, but the whole scene is too idealized. In fact it's more a representation of the Glory of God, then the humility of man. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does serve to put this pivotal event- no, THE pivotal event - in human history somewhat out of reach for us. This meeting between Gabriel and Mary is inaccessible to most people based on their day to day experience. It is a picture that tries to depict the Incarnation as a grand spectacle of the Heavens and if we're honest about it, we'd have to say it falls well short of what God's perspective of the event actually was. All these types of paintings do. We don't view things from God's perspective, and that was the purpose behind the Annunciation in the first place. As John said, "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." Here's a picture that I'm absolutely, totally in love with. (Ann, you sooo saw this coming, didn't you?)

This depiction of the same event has the same necessary elements, but its perspective and accessibility are completely different. In Tanner's painting, Mary is experiencing the Annunciation in a way that is much more intriguing to our everyday experience. First, she's an ordinary looking person - made even more ordinary by the fact she's been woken from her sleep.

Everyone can relate to that moment of being forced out of sleep - how we look, and what our surroundings are more likely to look like. This is what Tanner captures so beautifully and the profound point it communicates is that the Annunciation happened to someone who would have appeared quite ordinary to all around her. Maybe even less than ordinary since she did not have original sin and was not self-promoting in any way.

Who woke her up? In depicting the angel Gabriel as bright and formless tear in space, Tanner has definitely updated the imagery to something more meaningful to modern imaginations than little fat babies, or heroes from Greek mythology. This is an encounter with a being who is not confined to the physical world. Gabriel, after all, stands in the presence of God. It would stand to reason that without serious disguise on his part, meeting him would be a singular frightening and confusing experience. Think of John in Revelation, who was so awestruck by the angel that he nearly bowed to worship.

So here is this simple, unassuming girl in her typical un-sterile, non-idyllic environment being roused from her sleep by a being that exists beyond her sensory limits. The look on her face is one of genuine apprehension, but not (as you might expect from the Angel's appearance) one of fear. That's an image of Mary which does not bring her down to our level, but instead presents an opportunity for us to enter into a contemplation of the Incarnation as it actually was communicated:

From God - To Flesh - In the World.

The world we live and breathe in. The world that is frequently confusing, often painful, and rarely glorious. However because Christ came into the world, it's physical phenomena (and the ways we experience them) are mysteriously sanctified. And this is where the virtue of Hope comes into play. Look at that scene and imagine the exchange from Luke taking place there:

[28] And he came to her and said, "Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!" [29] But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be. [30] And the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. [31] And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. [32] He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High;and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David,[33] and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever;and of his kingdom there will be no end."

This young woman in Nazareth is being told that SHE has found favor with God. Not the Emperor, not the kings of the earth, not the priests of the Temple, but this young woman in her humble setting has found favor with God. And she is being promised the sum of all Israel's yearnings and then some!

Fast forward to the Visitation and you have Elizabeth saying, "How is it that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" Most images of this mystery are just as idealized as the Annunciation. What I enjoyed most about The Nativity Story was its depiction of this scene. The exchange has Elizabeth spontaneously abandoning her work to greet Mary with the Gospel words. While she's doing that people are mulling about them, concerned with their own activities, and they don't pay any attention. This pivotal greeting, and first acknowledgement of the Messiah (by another child in-utero) likely took place in front of a bunch of people who noticed nothing special about it. It was one woman talking to another. And in that meeting Hope is declared by Mary in the most beautiful and worthy prayer ever uttered by human lips prior to the Our Father. The Maginificat is the precursor to the Our Father in many ways since it is Mary's acknowledgement that God has chosen her flesh for his Son, and then Jesus in turn invites all flesh (including his mother) to call God "our Father".

to be continued...

Dim String AS String (syntax error)

2007-10-24T20:41:00.000-05:00

Someone should try to infiltrate this cult. You don't get a capital B unless you become a member.
We've got a couple Steven Pinker books, and I'm not surprised he's a B. In his last book he actually supported Peter Singer's notion that humans are not fully human until they reach a certain capacity for reason - thereby excluding infants and the mentally retarded from the ranks of people entitled to their subjective understanding of "human rights". This should make me laugh, but it's got sci-fi horror movie written all over it.

When I was doing my thesis research I read an article in a scientific journal from the late 60's about population control and the author's argument was that progress would never occur until people's cultural attachment to a "family" unit based on monogamous heterosexual unions which treated procreation as a cultural "good" was done away with. I chuckled at the time, picturing this bald, fat Poindexter in his lab all upset that chicks didn't dig him. I also chuckled cause that periodical's circulation wasn't quite up there with "Good Housekeeping", so he had a ways to go. But as with all social engineering endeavors, it only takes an enlightened cadre with commitment, money, and political power to realize their dreams. We did, after all, forcefully sterilize thousands of "morons" in the US back in the 20's and 30's - before the Nazi's sort of took the fun out of it.
So now you got The Brights, who also want to remove people with non-materialist philosophies from posts of influence in American society. And I realize how important bible-thumping, redneck, gun-packing hillbilly morons in the south have been and will be in keeping these eggheads at bay.

I do not want these men reshaping civilization.

every single day

2007-10-24T09:44:00.000-05:00

Luke 12:

[35] "Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning,
[36] and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the marriage feast, so that they may open to him at once when he comes and knocks.
[37] Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes; truly, I say to you, he will gird himself and have them sit at table, and he will come and serve them.
[38] If he comes in the second watch, or in the third, and finds them so, blessed are those servants!
[39] But know this, that if the householder had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have left his house to be broken into.
[40] You also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an unexpected hour."
[41] Peter said, "Lord, are you telling this parable for us or for all?"
[42] And the Lord said, "Who then is the faithful and wise steward, whom his master will set over his household, to give them their portion of food at the proper time?
[43] Blessed is that servant whom his master when he comes will find so doing.
[44] Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions.
[45] But if that servant says to himself, `My master is delayed in coming,' and begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink and get drunk,
[46] the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will punish him, and put him with the unfaithful.
[47] And that servant who knew his master's will, but did not make ready or act according to his will, shall receive a severe beating.
[48] But he who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, shall receive a light beating. Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required; and of him to whom men commit much they will demand the more.
[49] "I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!
[50] I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished! [51] Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division; [52] for henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three;
[53] they will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law."
[54] He also said to the multitudes, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, `A shower is coming'; and so it happens.
[55] And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, `There will be scorching heat'; and it happens.
[56] You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky; but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
[57] "And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?
[58] As you go with your accuser before the magistrate, make an effort to settle with him on the way, lest he drag you to the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer put you in prison.
[59] I tell you, you will never get out till you have paid the very last copper."

what the Lord wants from me

2007-10-22T12:04:00.000-05:00

Saint Augustine (354-430), Bishop of Hippo (North Africa) and Doctor of the Church
Sermon 34: on Ps 149

"Be rich in what matters to God"

Brethren, carefully inspect the place where you dwell interiorly; open your
eyes and consider the capital of your love; then increase whatever sum you
discover within yourselves. Keep watch over this treasure so that you may
become wealthy within. Goods of great price are called ‘dear’, and with
good reason… But what could be more dear than love, my brothers? What is
its cost, in your opinion? And how are you to pay it? The cost of land or
wheat is your silver; the cost of a pearl is your gold; but the cost of
your love is you yourself. If you want to buy a field, a jewel, an animal,
you seek the necessary means, you look around you. But if you want to
possess love, look no further than yourself: it is yourself you must
find.What are you afraid of in giving yourself? Of losing yourself? To the
contrary, it is by refusing to give yourself that you lose yourself. Love
itself speaks through the mouth of Wisdom and calms with one word the
confusion into which this saying threw you: “Give of your own self!” If
someone had wanted to sell you a piece of land, he would say to you: “Give
me your silver” or, for some other thing: “Give me your cash.” Now listen
to what Love says to you through the mouth of Wisdom: “My child, give me
your heart” (Pr.23,26). Your heart was in a bad way when it was your own,
when it was in your own hands. You were a prey to emptiness, not to speak
of evil passions. Remove it from all such things! Where will you take it?
Where offer it? “My son, give me your heart!” says Wisdom. Let it only come
to me and you will not lose it… "You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind," (Mt 22,37)...
He who created you desires the whole of you.

no man's land

2007-10-01T08:50:00.000-05:00

Sam Harris has this to say about the Eucharist:

Of course, Catholics have done some very strenuous and unconvincing theology in this area, in an effort to make sense of how they can really eat the body of Jesus, not mere crackers enrobed in metaphor, and really drink his blood without, in fact, being a cult of crazy cannibals. Suffice it to say, however, that a world view in which “propitiatory sacrifices on behalf of the living and the dead” figure prominently is rather difficult to defend in the year 2007. But this has not stopped otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people from defending it.

To some extent - if we are to look at reality from purely materialist viewpoint - you'd have to say he was spot on. What the Church believes occurs at the consecration is no small absurdity. And no matter how well the arguments are phrased to support transubstantiation they can't be expected to "convince" anyone that the Eucharist is true. What we are asked to accept and believe defies our senses and can only be embraced through the gift of faith. Atheists like Harris are only being honest when they make declarations like the one above.

Recently, when I've been in front of the Blessed Sacrament in our local adoration chapel, the absurdity of the experience has become very present for me. Here is this inanimate round white disc, encased in an ornate gold monstrance - and here am I, a living, breathing man on my knees worshipping it as my God!

Scientific investigation doesn't bring me there.
Logical reasoning doesn't bring me there.
Rational philosophical structures don't bring me there.

None of those things are incompatible with my Catholic faith. In fact they owe much of their current evolutionary development to the Christianity's far-reaching quest to know the face of God. However, they cannot be - and are not - the foundation for my personal, physical worship of something so visually insignificant. It is not ironic that the host is placed in expensive and ornate monstrances as much as it is a cultural and psychological attempt to give something a degree of worldly glory that our faith says it deserves, but our senses find disturbingly absent.

No arguments can ever convince anyone that this "source and summit" of our faith is in fact the Lord. But, when God gives you the grace to believe (even just a little!) the scriptures open up, Tradition opens up, and the world opens up for the light of God to pour upon it and lead you to a means of understanding that transcends the ultimate dead end of human reason. Here, in the Eucharist, is the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords - in a form more humble and less assuming of those titles then when he was a slick, red-stained infant amid the smells of livestock and manure. In the Eucharist, Christ is even more vulnerable to abuse and disrespect than when he was presented to the chief priests on Good Friday. And in the Eucharist, Christ gives mercy and life in an even more personal way than when he surrendered it from the cross.

Humanity's alpha and omega are present in the Eucharist, but we cannot, through our own devices, concoct a grand-unification theory to quantify this reality. As Christ told Peter after his outburst of faith in Matthew 16, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. "

But those who pretend to be on the solid ground of rational, materialist reality are really just avoiding the inevitable consequences of looking down. Our universe - our experience of space and forward-moving time is the by-product of our fragile consciousness. Our lives and thoughts occur in a vast absurd abyss. It is where we turn when this cold truth becomes real to us that matters.

Neils Bohr once said "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. " This is an accurate description of the universe Sam Harris bases his philosophy on. The Eucharist is the only thing in the universe about which that statement can be reversed. It is more real than the "reality" in which it resides.

letting Scripture interpret itself

2007-09-19T10:19:00.000-05:00

I've heard many sermons where the following story from Matthew is used to bolster the image of a hippy Jesus who doesn't want people to burden themselves with bummer rules and what not.

Matt.12
[1] At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat.
[2] But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, "Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath."
[3] He said to them, "Have you not read what David did, when he was hungry, and those who were with him:
[4] how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests?
[5] Or have you not read in the law how on the sabbath the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are guiltless?
[6] I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.
[7] And if you had known what this means, `I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless.
[8] For the Son of man is lord of the sabbath."

But then I read B16 explain that story a different way on pgs. 106-112 of Jesus of Nazareth. As he so often does, the Holy Father gives the most weight to Jesus' own words, and the purposeful reference to two significant claims that the Jews would understand:

By comparing his actions to David, Jesus calls them to recognize him as the "Son of David", the King.
By reminding them that the priests in the temple could violate the rules of the Sabbath only because they were in the presence of God, he is making a direct claim to being one with the Father, and thereby establishing the disciples he chose as the new priests of the new temple.

We have a school of thought in the church that wants a "do what you like" Messiah so desperately, they really miss out on the most powerful moments in Scripture - and have hidden them from others for so long. It's a shame.

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

2007-08-09T08:49:00.000-05:00

The first half of the 20th century was a furnace in which steel was forged and useless ore was cast to the side. Evil was everywhere and death appeared to rule the world - there's no escaping that. The materialist and nihilist philosophies that were driven to power in the east and the west found their path cleared by Satan and the numbed submission of the masses.

No matter what ugliness the future holds, can anything be more barbaric and senseless than the battlefields of WWI? Thousands died within hours in attempts to move their side of a front an absurd handful of feet.

No matter how cruel we become, can anything top the brutal control mechanisms of Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Dong? Millions died on more than one occasion when either man issued decrees of societal re-structuring.

And though we live in a cold and vicious world, we only practice the art of inhumanity which was mastered by the Nazi's. Though even in America we kill more innocents in our abortion clinics, we do it behind tinted windows and in unmarked buildings. We've yet to reach the unashamed efficiency of herding and facing those who we slaughter in broad daylight.

But how often do we look back on that world and instead focus on those who overcame? How often do we frame the story of WWII in light of Europe's liberation? Or of the Soviet Union in context of its peaceful defeat in 1989? Do we wallow in the blood and filth of Verdun or the Somme, or do we instead concentrate on the profound impact those killing fields had on western thought, literature, and socio-political development? It is this drive - the drive to see light in the darkest darkness - which demonstrates the most meaningful evidence that we are children of God. We do not want to live in the evil world we create, so we are constantly searching for the smallest speck of light and often allow that to grow until it is what we see, rather than the darkness which frames it.

This is why the early 20th century gave us figures who are not just beacons, but legends, heroes, and saints. Some are all four. Dietrich Von Hildebrand. Dorothy Day. Mother Teresa. Padre Pio. Karol Wojtyla. Edith Stein.

The last two are especially important as we try to take the flames which burned in that darkness and hold them as torches as we journey into the next. John Paul II survived the Nazis and the Soviets. He witnessed the noble and the wretched among his occupiers and his own people, yet he was given enormous grace which kept him always under the heart of Mary, and allowed his mind to understand his world through the lens of the cross. With this unique, unprecedented, and humble understanding of people, their inner mechanisms, and the world their actions create, he was able to wander among the hearts and minds of his fellow man unnoticed. Then, in turn, he bestowed the fruits of his wanderings to us and future generations. His shepherdship, teaching, and example is given to us as a gift by the Blessed Mother, who protected him and presented him to the world just as she did her own Son.

Edith Stein did not survive. But those that commit to Carmel do not aspire for that sort of survival. They desire to go where they have nothing, where they know nothing, and where their self is emptied completely so that their house is ready for the Lord. Like Karol Wojtyla, this woman was a part of the reassessment of western thought in the wake of the horrors of WWI and the depression and pestilence that followed. She was immersed in the academic world where her friends quixotically attempted to redefine being as "just being", or "being there", or even "being in the moment". Every stab her colleagues took found something that was perhaps closer, but still elusive. But the school of thought they laid the foundations for could be seen as nothing less than an indictment of enlightenment thinking. And as modern physics painted increasingly chaotic and shaky pictures of what we experience as "reality", those who looked long and hard at those pictures were sent in every direction away from pursuits of idyllic truths. The darkness brought many of them to the conclusion that there was no truth. The darkness taught Edith Stein a different lesson.

However there is also a nocturnal light that reveals a new world deep in the interior and at the same time illumines the outer world from within so that this outer is given back to us as entirely transformed... Night, however, the cosmic as well as the mystic, is something shapeless and something comprehensive whose fullness of meaning can only be indicated but not exhausted. An entire world-view and grasp of existence is resolved therin. And precisely here what they have in common is to be found: the fact of the character of this worldview and grasp of existence. Something intangible here and something intangible there and yet clearly one overlays the other and can be used to access the other, not by arbitrary choice and systematic comparison, but in symbolic experience that strikes upon primitive connections and thus find a necessary figuration for what is conceptually unutterable.

Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross
pgs 41-42

So really, she did survive. According to her understanding, the death of this world is merely a primitively accessible symbol of the 2nd death which is to be avoided. A tangible, yet intangible scarecrow. If the entire realm of experienced phenomena are to be understood as illusion (which is bolstered by quantum theory) her understanding is the most plausible one for those who believe in God and an ultimate purpose and destiny for humanity. She lived her life to the most bitter end as a witness to us all to reject this 2nd death above all things - to turn away from sin and embrace the Gospel.

St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross - pray for us.

familiarity breeds contempt

2007-08-03T08:46:00.000-05:00

When reading the Gospel for today, it reminded me of something from the beginning of B16's book where he criticizes modern theologians for pretending to have access to Jesus' "inner life". He argues that the current schools of thought which claim to know the moment Jesus knew who he was or understood his mission (ie. the Baptism in the Jordan, the Transfiguration, or Peter's pronouncement) presume a higher position over the Lord himself. They treat Christ as if he were their patient in therapy, or worse, a character in a novel whose makeup and motives are open to multiple valid interpretations and who developed from one point in his life to the next.
B16 rightly labels these Christological ideas as presumptuous and absurd. We cannot KNOW God's inner life, it can only be REVEALED to us. We are below, He is above.

This quest for scholarly and pastoral ownership of Jesus, is based on fear and insecurity. Fear of the God who is truly hidden in many ways, and insecurity regarding our infinite smallness before his majesty. The people in today's Gospel thought they had that same ownership of Christ. They knew his family and whatever skeletons were in their closet. They saw him grow up and knew whatever worldly skill and charisma he demonstrated. Many of them may not have been impressed - or, more likely, were jealous.

So their hearts were hardened by this closeness and familiarity. These obstacles to faith were based on their place and time. But today, people manufacture this level of familiarity through convoluted exegesis and patronizing theological concepts.

Why?

novena to Edith Stein - day 1

2007-08-01T12:14:00.000-05:00

Through sin, human nature represented by the first humans, lost its honor–it’s original perfection and graced elevation. It is raised up anew in every individual human soul that is reborn through the grace of baptism into the state of the children of God. It is crowned in the chosen souls who attain to bridal union with the Redeemer. This happens “under the tree of the cross”, as the ripened fruit of the death of the cross and in co-suffering this death on the cross.

But how are we to understand that the place of this elevation and that of the fall are one and the same place, the tree of the cross and the tree of paradise, one and the same? It seems to me the solution lies in the mystery of sin. The tree in the paradise, the fruits of which were forbidden to human beings, was, after all, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Human beings could only get an authentic experimental knowledge of evil and its radical opposition to good by doing evil. So we may see in the tree of paradise and emblem for human nature in its openness to sin and in the fruit of the tree, actual sin (the first as well as every succeeding one) with all its consequences. But the most terrible result of sin, and therefore the revelation of its terrifying effectiveness is the passion and death of Christ.

St. Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross
pg. 260

first-uh lesson: must learn patience

2007-07-27T12:20:00.000-05:00

Another gem from the USCCB email. I really love these things.

Saint Padre Pio of Pietralcina (1887-1968), Capuchin
Ep 3: 579; CE 54

To bear fruit, free from worldly anxiety

Advance with simplicity on the pathways of God, and do not worry.
Hate your defects, yes, but quietly, without excitement, nor anxiety. It is
necessary to be patient with them and to benefit from them through holy
humility. For if you lack of patience, your imperfections, instead of
disappearing, will only grow. Because there is nothing which strengthens
our defects as much as anxiety and obsession to be rid of them. Cultivate
your vineyard together with Jesus. To you the task of removing stones and
pulling up brambles. To Jesus, that of sowing, planting, cultivating and
watering. But even in your work, it is still him who acts. Because without
Christ, you could do nothing whatsoever.

no one takes it from me

2007-07-23T10:24:00.000-05:00

Saint Peter Chrysologus (around 406-450), Bishop of Ravenna, Doctor of the Church Sermon 3

“You have a greater than Jonah here.” It was Jonah himself who decided to be thrown out of the boat: “Pick me up and throw me into the sea,” he said (Jon 1:12), which points to the passion of the Lord Jesus, which he freely took upon himself. For why did the sailors wait to be given the order…? It is because, when the salvation of all requires the death of one single person, that death depends on the free decision of the person concerned… Thus, in this story, which completely prefigures the Lord’s story, they await the decision of the person who must die, so that his death might not be a necessity to which he submits, but a free act: “I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it up again. No one takes it from me,” (Jn 10:18) says the Lord. For when Christ delivered over his spirit (Jn 19:30), it was not because his life was slipping away from him. He who holds in his hands the soul of every person could not lose his own. The prophet said: “I constantly hold my life in your hands.” (Ps 119:109) And in another place: “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” (Ps 31:6; Lk 23:46)

This excerpt that came with today's USCCB daily gospel email, touches on the massive (and so easily overlooked distinction) between Christ's death and anyone else's. He alone had the power to lay down his life. This may be semi-heretical, but it seems that Jesus makes it clear no one could kill him. Judas didn't kill him. The Jews didn't kill him. Rome didn't kill him.

But, even more radical, Jesus didn't kill himself. He alone of all human beings had the claim to own his own life, and with that claim the ability and right to surrender it. Suicide is sinful specifically because we do not own ourselves. Our whole person (body and spirit) belongs to God. Since Jesus is one with the Father, his life was his own and he could do with it as he saw fit. What he saw fit to do was the will of the Father - and the will of the Father had been prefigured by the cries from the sea that Jonah be thrown into it. Jonah surrendered himself to this fate, but did not seek to kill himself. Christ surrendered his spirit on the cross to the the will of the Father, in the final holocaust of Mercy. He laid down what belonged to the life of the Trinity, and what it would have been objectively impossible for any human being to take from him.

not very Christian of them

2007-07-23T10:16:00.001-05:00

The United Council of Churches has pulled Virginia's etext version of the RSV.

WWJD?????

Oh well, I found the Catholic Edition on line at http://www.geocities.com/sacra_scriptura/eng_bible_index.html

thanks to Fr. Tim Finigan

a covenant without rationing

2007-07-11T09:47:00.000-05:00

In today's reading from Genesis, Pharaoh tells the people suffering from the famine to go to Joseph for assistance.

Genesis 41
55: When all the land of Egypt was famished, the people cried to Pharaoh for bread; and Pharaoh said to all the Egyptians, "Go to Joseph; what he says to you, do."
56: So when the famine had spread over all the land, Joseph opened all the storehouses, and sold to the Egyptians, for the famine was severe in the land of Egypt.
57: Moreover, all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, because the famine was severe over all the earth.

Compare to the Cana story:

John 2
1: On the third day there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there; 2: Jesus also was invited to the marriage, with his disciples.
3: When the wine failed, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine."
4: And Jesus said to her, "O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come." 5: His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."

In Egypt, Joseph is given the power by Pharaoh to ration out the abundance they have stored up to those from all lands who come in need. The generosity of Pharaoh is certainly uncharacteristic of demi-god autocrats of the old world. It was prompted by his love and gratitude towards Joseph, whose insight and faith spared Pharaoh's kingdom from the horrible famine. Joseph is the inspiration and source of Pharaoh's mercy, just as Jesus is the source of God the Father's mercy. When we look at the episode between Joseph and his brothers, another clear parallel appears.

Genesis 42
5: Thus the sons of Israel came to buy among the others who came, for the famine was in the land of Canaan.
6: Now Joseph was governor over the land; he it was who sold to all the people of the land. And Joseph's brothers came, and bowed themselves before him with their faces to the ground.
7: Joseph saw his brothers, and knew them, but he treated them like strangers and spoke roughly to them. "Where do you come from?" he said. They said, "From the land of Canaan, to buy food."
8: Thus Joseph knew his brothers, but they did not know him.
9: And Joseph remembered the dreams which he had dreamed of them; and he said to them, "You are spies, you have come to see the weakness of the land."
10: They said to him, "No, my lord, but to buy food have your servants come.
11: We are all sons of one man, we are honest men, your servants are not spies."
12: He said to them, "No, it is the weakness of the land that you have come to see."
13: And they said, "We, your servants, are twelve brothers, the sons of one man in the land of Canaan; and behold, the youngest is this day with our father, and one is no more."
14: But Joseph said to them, "It is as I said to you, you are spies.
15: By this you shall be tested: by the life of Pharaoh, you shall not go from this place unless your youngest brother comes here.
16: Send one of you, and let him bring your brother, while you remain in prison, that your words may be tested, whether there is truth in you; or else, by the life of Pharaoh, surely you are spies."
17: And he put them all together in prison for three days.
18: On the third day Joseph said to them, "Do this and you will live, for I fear God:
19: if you are honest men, let one of your brothers remain confined in your prison, and let the rest go and carry grain for the famine of your households,
20: and bring your youngest brother to me; so your words will be verified, and you shall not die." And they did so.
21: Then they said to one another, "In truth we are guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the distress of his soul, when he besought us and we would not listen; therefore is this distress come upon us."
22: And Reuben answered them, "Did I not tell you not to sin against the lad? But you would not listen. So now there comes a reckoning for his blood."
23: They did not know that Joseph understood them, for there was an interpreter between them.
24: Then he turned away from them and wept;

So it is clear that Joseph prefigures Christ in that he was cast off into death and slavery by his brothers and then instead, prepared the Kingdom for a time of there suffering and need. However, the key to me is the direct connection with not just Christ's life on earth and His passion, but the veiled nature of the Risen Lord, both to the Apostles...

Luke 24
25: And he said to them, "O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!
26: Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?"
27: And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
28: So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He appeared to be going further, 29: but they constrained him, saying, "Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent." So he went in to stay with them.
30: When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them.
31: And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight.
32: They said to each other, "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?"

...and ultimately to every single human being...

Matthew 25
34: Then the King will say to those at his right hand, `Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world;
35: for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,
36: I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.'
37: Then the righteous will answer him, `Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink?
38: And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee?
39: And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?'
40: And the King will answer them, `Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.'

What Joseph had for his brothers was surplus from the earth that had been acquired through obedience to the wisdom of God. But it was still a surplus produced by the sweat of man's brow, according to the curse upon Adam. What Jesus gave to the wedding guests at Cana was undeserved and excessive - a true outpouring of generosity of a kind and quality meant to symbolize the infinite mercy Christ offers us from the cross. Just as Jacob's sons received from Joseph with a guilty conscience, we too must recognize our own sins as we ask for the mercy of our Lord - a Lord who is disguised to us every day, and who calls on us to search for him in the darkness so that we will be "surprised by joy" when he is revealed to us in the light.

Footprints in the sand

2007-07-02T15:35:00.000-05:00

I always hated that poem. More specifically because it would be forcibly recited to us in elementary school by women who were pathetically dissatisfied with their lives and used their students as a substitute Oprah audience.

But these footprints are a whole nother deal. After reading this post, I had to let out a Keanu-level "Whoah." I'm always running accross references to the rabbinical commentaries and such like the Mishnah and Midrash in the writing of top notch biblical scholars like Brant Pitre. All it does is make me want to learn Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek - whatever can get me closer to the source.

not like it isn't hard enough

2007-07-02T13:47:00.000-05:00

For two knuckleheads from Creighton (with letters after their names and Church money in their pockets) to propose something so silly as "nuptial cohabitation" is testament to the reality that there's major pruning in order. Tired of waiting around for the dreams of the 70's to be fulfilled, and desperately irritated by the continuing existence of the CCC, they decide to completely take matters into their own hands and re-invent the sacrament of marriage.

From Omaha.

Not that this sort of crap would read any better coming from South Bend or Kuala Lumpur, but how many self-infatuated intellectuals does it take to declare a new definition of marriage from Nebraska? Only 2????? I would think you'd need at least 4 to take turns driving the long distance to anywhere interesting.

Archbshp Chaput does a real good job of destroying their ridiculous proposal.

What's especially sad about the continuing presence of knuckleheads in Catholic academia, and Diocesan chanceries, is that they do nothing but undermine the difficult journeys faced by those who try to live according to the faith.

How harmful is it for people struggling with same-sex attraction to be encouraged to give in to temptations of a destructive lifestyle by priests and nuns who don't give a rat's ass about their eternal well-being?

How much does it weaken society when morons in Catholic schools and the hierarchy give tacit approval to couples that use artificial contraception? It doesn't take a PhD to notice that women have never been more physically abused, objectified or degraded as we've seen in the contraceptive era. The perverted clerics and busybodies who saturated Catholic schools with absurd and insidious sex-ed curricula are partially responsible for the confused and over-sexed environment we live in. It's an environment where children reach maturity amid social climates that more and more resemble the sad and horrible world described by a Frontline episode a few years ago. Junior High and High School kids living like they're in a director's-cut edition of Caligula - kids losing part of their humanity as they insanely throw their bodies into a mindless fire of sexual excess. And all within the confines of modern comfortable suburbia.

What brings us to this? What brings us to a world where women and children are bought and sold as a commodity in an exploding sex trade industry? Surrender to Satan. There's no other answer that more aptly explains the tremendous exponential growth in human misery that we see all around us, and it all starts with the refusal to resist at the beginning. The will to resist Satan - to enter fully into the struggle of striving for God's grace to live a life of faith and virtue must be supported by the Church. That is the purpose of the Church! It exists to model and shepherd all Christians, and all humanity in the journey towards Jesus and our ultimate end. When the Church allows knuckleheads in Omaha to spew crap like this - crap that is so strained in its credulity and desire to be hip - it fails the people of God, and it fails the Lord Jesus Christ.

It's also pretty effin depressing.

the suffering of the bridegroom

2007-06-13T16:08:00.000-05:00

There is a complete melting of identities which occurs in the mystical marriage between Christ and His Church. The image of Christ as the bridegroom is presented to us by Jesus himself in the Gospels, and elaborated on with amazing insight by the great saints, theologians, and mystics throughout history.

But within that image exists a great paradox.

Christ was the bridegroom, but Christ gave birth to the new creation. He was scourged. He carried the cross. He labored to deliver our salvation from the cross, and we are made anew from His pierced side.

But it is not the bridegroom who gives birth - it is the bride. It is not the man who suffers from the cyclical preparation of his nature. It is not within the man that the burden of pregnancy is entrusted. The man does not walk among friend and stranger as a sign of something that both ennobles and ostracizes him at the same time. Pregnancy can be seen as stripping the woman of her own independent identity and making her a vessel for another. Motherhood calls women to an intimate level of frightening sacrifice no man is able to physically experience. Women can attain a level of tangible familiarity with what is the universal call to women and men from the Father. To surrender themselves totally so that new life can be formed within them. A father can walk around undetected, but a pregnant woman whose body is a visible vessel no longer has that luxury. Therefore, it is easy to understand the temptation by woman to view this as an affront - an occupation of her identity by a foreign host.

I can never experience this. Yet, in the language of creation spoken through my body, I am called to represent the bridegroom. ????

What has become crystal clear from living with my bride is that the experience of the true Bridegroom is not physically accessible to me. Sure, men can suffer all sorts of ways, and all suffering is redemptive when given over to Jesus on the cross. I think of Maximilian Kolbe, or Miguel Pro and it is easy to see (and be humbled by) the power of declaring in the darkest hour with your entire being that Jesus Christ is Lord.

But redemptive suffering is not creative suffering. Jesus was the only man to experience that within his flesh. And while it is appropriate that the male priesthood serves as a biological sign of Christ's redemptive sacrifice in the body of a man, that is as far as a man can go in imaging the fullness of Christ's suffering. There lies the paradox of the Bridegroom giving birth to his bride. The male priesthood does not encapsulate the totality of this. I believe it can be more fully understood in the context of the Christological symbolism that existed "in the beginning" and exists once again through the sacrament of matrimony.

As a husband, I am certainly a part of my wife's pregnancy and of our children, but I am not a part of her suffering. I am only allowed to witness it as a bystander. The more I commit to sharing in her suffering, the more powerless I become. Our sexuality, as emblematic of the relationship between Christ and the Church, becomes complete. We occupy opposite perspectives of the Calvary experience.

She is up on the cross. I am at her feet in sorrow.

I would endure any pain and bear any burden for her, but in those moments I am utterly powerless to do so. Sometimes it is through her suffering that God's creation is made visible to everyone. Other times it is only made visible to those for whom the veil has been lifted. Both instances are the pure bodily expression of those words in Romans and in Revelation.

Romans 8
18: I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
19: For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God;
20: for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope;
21: because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.
22: We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now;
23: and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
24: For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?
25: But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
26: Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.

Revelation 12
1: And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars;
2: she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery.

These are not mere words. They describe the truth of our ultimate destiny in the language of a physical reality which can be experienced by women, but only witnessed by men. The power of understanding that is hidden in these moments is certainly like that mustard seed Christ spoke of. Beneath the surface of the sensory "travail" is the voice of God, calling us out of this world and into His, just as He spoke to Elijah on the wind.

The Holy Spirit makes this clearer to me each day I'm allowed to share in the life of my bride. Every time I look at this woman I breathe in humility.

Amen.

heart, liver, and gall

2007-05-29T09:31:00.000-05:00

Michael Barber has an awesome post today that discusses Pentecost in its Old Testament context. It gave me additional insight into what I was thinking yesterday when reading Tobit. The story of Tobias and Sarah is totally a parable of Christ and the Church, but I've completely skipped over the fact that the book is framed by the festival of Pentecost at the start of ch. 2 as Michael points out.

Tobit 2
1: When I arrived home and my wife Anna and my son Tobias were restored to me, at the feast of Pentecost, which is the sacred festival of the seven weeks, a good dinner was prepared for me and I sat down to eat.
2: Upon seeing the abundance of food I said to my son, "Go and bring whatever poor man of our brethren you may find who is mindful of the Lord, and I will wait for you."
3: But he came back and said, "Father, one of our people has been strangled and thrown into the market place."
4: So before I tasted anything I sprang up and removed the body to a place of shelter until sunset.
5: And when I returned I washed myself and ate my food in sorrow.
6: Then I remembered the prophecy of Amos, how he said, "Your feasts shall be turned into mourning, and all your festivities into lamentation." And I wept.

This gives important dimension to the story that unfolds. Tobit is celebrating Pentecost according to the law with the anxious anticipation for what is promised in Jeremiah 31:33 and Ezekiel 36:24-28, but he is drawn out of that earnest hope by the reality of sin in the world - the reality that the Spirit does not dwell in the hearts of men. This internal dwelling of the Spirit is no doubt signified by the use of leavened bread in the Jewish Pentecost festival. That is also key in the use of unleavened bread for the Eucharist, since the yeast of the Holy Spirit is given to us from the Resurrected Jesus - but not before giving it up, and then reclaiming it in glory.

John 19
30: When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, "It is finished"; and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
John 20
22: And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit.

And it is truly yeast for the milled wheat of our mortal existence, as Paul says:

1 Corinthians 5
7: Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed.
8: Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth

We must live and appear as unleavened so that there is no competition within us for the leaven that comes from the Holy Spirit. But even as we live and appear unleavened, Pentecost (and the sacrament of Confirmation) enact a reality of fulfillment that remains hidden to everything but faith as long as Christ's glory remains veiled to the world.

Micheal points out that in Acts 2 Peter talks about Pentecost in eschatological terms - as if Christ had returned. In a very real way he had, for at Pentecost, his body on earth - the Church - was sacramentally established. This is where the beautiful connection with Tobit comes in. Tobit, a just man, has been afflicted with suffering a la Job. He prays for the Lord to remove these burdens or release him from this world as Job does AND as David does in Psalm 22 in words ultimately written to be prayed from the cross. At the same time 7 men had died on their wedding night while seeking to consummate their union with Raguel's daughter Sarah.

Tobit 3
7: On the same day, at Ecbatana in Media, it also happened that Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, was reproached by her father's maids,
8: because she had been given to seven husbands, and the evil demon Asmodeus had slain each of them before he had been with her as his wife. So the maids said to her, "Do you not know that you strangle your husbands? You already have had seven and have had no benefit from any of them.
9: Why do you beat us? If they are dead, go with them! May we never see a son or daughter of yours!"
10: When she heard these things she was deeply grieved, even to the thought of hanging herself. But she said, "I am the only child of my father; if I do this, it will be a disgrace to him, and I shall bring his old age down in sorrow to the grave.
11: So she prayed by her window and said, "Blessed art thou, O Lord my God, and blessed is thy holy and honored name for ever. May all thy works praise thee for ever.
12: And now, O Lord, I have turned my eyes and my face toward thee.
13: Command that I be released from the earth and that I hear reproach no more.
14: Thou knowest, O Lord, that I am innocent of any sin with man,
15: and that I did not stain my name or the name of my father in the land of my captivity. I am my father's only child, and he has no child to be his heir, no near kinsman or kinsman's son for whom I should keep myself as wife. Already seven husbands of mine are dead. Why should I live? But if it be not pleasing to thee to take my life, command that respect be shown to me and pity be taken upon me, and that I hear reproach no more."
16: The prayer of both was heard in the presence of the glory of the great God.

So the righteous man and the righteous daughter are both seeking the mercy of God. God sends the archangel Raphael to lead Tobit's son to the house of Raguel where he will take Sarah from the demon and join with her in marriage, which results in a wealth of liberating grace for both families. There's all sorts of sacramental imagery with the fish and smoke and restoration of sight to the blind. But above all there is the typological representation of the Church. God's people have been freed from the clutches of Satan by the union Christ. This marriage was consummated on the cross and our new life in the Spirit was proclaimed at Pentecost. And though that is the true reality of the situation, our full understanding of it will not come until the film is removed from our eyes.

Tobit 11
1: After this Tobias went on his way, praising God because he had made his journey a success. And he blessed Raguel and his wife Edna. So he continued on his way until they came near to Nineveh.
2: Then Raphael said to Tobias, "Are you not aware, brother, of how you left your father?
3: Let us run ahead of your wife and prepare the house.
4: And take the gall of the fish with you." So they went their way, and the dog went along behind them.
5: Now Anna sat looking intently down the road for her son.
6: And she caught sight of him coming, and said to his father, "Behold, your son is coming, and so is the man who went with him!"
7: Raphael said, "I know, Tobias, that your father will open his eyes.
8: You therefore must anoint his eyes with the gall; and when they smart he will rub them, and will cause the white films to fall away, and he will see you."
9: Then Anna ran to meet them, and embraced her son, and said to him, "I have seen you, my child; now I am ready to die." And they both wept.
10: Tobit started toward the door, and stumbled. But his son ran to him
11: and took hold of his father, and he sprinkled the gall upon his father's eyes, saying, "Be of good cheer, father."
12: And when his eyes began to smart he rubbed them,
13: and the white films scaled off from the corners of his eyes.

This is similar to Paul's experience:

Acts 9
8: Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.
9: And for three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.
10: Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Anani'as. The Lord said to him in a vision, "Anani'as." And he said, "Here I am, Lord."
11: And the Lord said to him, "Rise and go to the street called Straight, and inquire in the house of Judas for a man of Tarsus named Saul; for behold, he is praying,
12: and he has seen a man named Anani'as come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight."
13: But Anani'as answered, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to thy saints at Jerusalem;
14: and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call upon thy name."
15: But the Lord said to him, "Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel;
16: for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name."
17: So Anani'as departed and entered the house. And laying his hands on him he said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit."
18: And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized

The message of Pentecost - as with the book of Tobit, and the story of Paul's conversion - is that Christ has already made "all things new" but that we must search for, discover, and be remade by the Spirit as living organisms that grow and develop in the fullness of time.

the luminous mysteries

2007-05-22T08:58:00.000-05:00

It just occurred to me (and I'm sure it's probably spelled out purposely in Rosarium Virginis Mariae) but the 5 luminous mysteries are strung together beautifully by the Gospel statements which encapsulate each.

1. The Baptism in the Jordan - Matthew 3:17
And lo, a voice from heaven, saying, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased."

2. The Wedding Feast at Cana - John 2:5
His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."

3. Proclamation of the Kingdom of God - Mark 1:14-15
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, 15: and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel."

4. The Transfiguration - Matthew 17:5
He was still speaking, when lo, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him."

5. The Establishment of the Eucharist - Luke 22:19-20
And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." And likewise the cup after supper, saying, "This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood."

There is such beauty in the way these phrases flow from one to the next - affirming, instructing, and establishing the scriptural, liturgical, and sacramental life of the Church, and the spiritual path each of us is called to walk. It's not rocket science, and it's not something only available to the intellectual and accomplished. These are the words of the Gospel that flow with the Holy Spirit for all. By embedding them in these Luminous Mysteries, John Paul gave all the faithful a means to learn them and lean on them under the care and guidance of Christ's Blessed Mother. I'm very grateful to him for this pastoral gift.

and He shall purify

2007-05-14T12:05:00.000-05:00

Continuing on the topic in the post below , these verses from Malachi allow things to be developed in different directions.

Malachi 1
1: "Behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple;

Suddenly. If our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, then the day of the Lord will present each of us with a moment where we "suddenly" behold this reality. If we are not diligent in building up an awareness of this inevitable revelation in our hearts, it will come as an unwelcome shock. It will be a shock, nonetheless - but someone striving to build their faith recognizes that humility is the key to accepting God's grace. If met with humility, the shock of that super-reality which transcends our current abilities to comprehend will be accompanied by the grace needed to endure it. And grace will be needed...

2: But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? "For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap;
3: he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, till they present right offerings to the LORD.

When we read about the purification of the temple in Maccabees (or at any point in the OT when Israel underwent violent refresher courses in covenant love) it is purposefully frightening - a marker on the road that points away from the journey of sin and back to obedience to the Father. Any sin is like a blot of ink in glass of water. In comparison to the "good" that is God (see Matthew 19:16-17) it is an infinite stain. The only way to remove comes from the infinite mercy of the Cross. And it is no small thing to behold the reality of our sin. It is the crucified Jesus. And as Zechariah and John both tell us, we "will look on him whom we have pierced." Asking for God's mercy in the face of this reality, with the veil of this world lifted, will be an experience similar to enduring the refiner's fire.

There is no way to avoid the implication in Scripture that our physical bodies - the temple of the Holy Spirit - are meant to physically endure this experience. But there is also no way to avoid that with the Holy Spirit within them, they will not endure it alone. Christ said, "my yoke is easy, my burden is light". Jesus plans to purify each one of us from within - to give us hearts of flesh, (Ezekiel 36:26) and then, in turn, make us into living stones to build the new temple of his body, the Church.

Malachi then describes what will become of us based on how we've endured the purification.

4: Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.
5: "Then I will draw near to you for judgment; I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the sojourner, and do not fear me, says the LORD of hosts.
6: "For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.
7: From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the LORD of hosts. But you say, `How shall we return?'
8: Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, `How are we robbing thee?' In your tithes and offerings.
9: You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me; the whole nation of you.

How do we rob from God? If all we have is from the Lord, and we choose to keep anything for ourselves - including any part of our hearts, minds, and bodies - then we have stolen. We must give all. Totus tuus. When we give the Lord all, he implores us to ask for more!

10: Bring the full tithes into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house; and thereby put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.

And the next two verses are exemplary of the only person in creation to give all, ask for more, and whose body was thus made a perfect realization of the new temple. The daughter of Zion. The New Jerusalem. The Ark of the Covenant.

11: I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil; and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the LORD of hosts.

Compare with Revelation 12

1: And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars;
2: she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery.
3: And another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads.
4: His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth;
5: she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne,
6: and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God,

12: Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the LORD of hosts.

Compare with Luke 1

46: And Mary said, "My soul magnifies the Lord,
47: and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48: for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
49: for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened

2007-05-09T08:56:00.000-05:00

The ability to work with women in crisis, to allow them to voice their fears, grief, and weaknesses is a true gift. not every one could do what we do. and i say that not to brag about what we do, but rather in humility that we were given this ability to "walk with women and men in their darkest hours". we do not judge, we do not run away, we do not fear to hear the unspeakable. this is the work we do. some divine power has allowed us to be present in others' lives and bear their burdens for a bit, yet still have our own lives, our own joys. it can not have been an accident that we were granted this ability.

Diogenes at CWNews pulled this from an abortion clinic blog. He goes on to quote Hannah Arendt talking about how the rank and file Nazis were empowered to commit atrocities by self-pity. They were the victims for having to endure witnessing the suffering. This is the same shift in personal focus that was at the heart of Satan's first temptation of Christ in the desert.

Matthew 4
1: Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
2: And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry.
3: And the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread."
4: But he answered, "It is written, `Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.'"

Jesus is hungry. Satan wants Jesus to focus on how he is hungry, and that it is not fair for him to be hungry. After all, he's the Son of God. This is completely true. It was unjust for Christ to endure suffering of any degree. But that inequity is suffered intentionally out of love for us. As Christ said even about his own crucifixion.

John 10
17: For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.
18: No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father."

There is no self-pity in those words. Though they describe what is an ultimate, unapproachable degree of injustice, there is not a hint of "woe is me". Were Christ to have felt a smidgen of self-pity, we would all be dust once more. Love perseveres through slights and burdens upon our person. That is why Jesus directed Satan to the source of his ability to elude the temptation to self-pity - obedience to the will of the Father:

Deuteronomy 8
1: "All the commandment which I command you this day you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD swore to give to your fathers. 2: And you shall remember all the way which the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments, or not.
3: And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know; that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the LORD.
4: Your clothing did not wear out upon you, and your foot did not swell, these forty years.
5: Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the LORD your God disciplines you. 6: So you shall keep the commandments of the LORD your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him.
7: For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills,
8: a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey,
9: a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper.

It is a simple decision to make. Self or God. Good or Evil. Beauty or Perversion. Truth or Lie. But once the wrong decision is made, the poisoning evil of self-pity wraps us up like a spider, and smothered in its numbing cocoon of death, our intoxication can present us with a reality where doing evil is doing good, slaughtering the innocent is harsh but noble burden, and glorifying our pathetic selves is actually doing the will of God.

The book Ordinary Men, by historian Christopher Browning, is another revealing study of how quick and completely we can surrender our humanity by making that one terrible decision and giving into the self-pity which transforms our evil undertaking into first a thankless necessity, and finally a divine charge.

if the body is the new temple...

2007-05-08T14:31:00.000-05:00

...then what is the abomination Christ is referring to?

Daniel 11
31: Forces from him shall appear and profane the temple and fortress, and shall take away the continual burnt offering. And they shall set up the abomination that makes desolate.

Matthew 24:
9 "Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death; and you will be hated by all nations for my name's sake.
10: And then many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another.
11: And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.
12: And because wickedness is multiplied, most men's love will grow cold.
13: But he who endures to the end will be saved.
14: And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.
15: "So when you see the desolating sacrilege spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand),
16: then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains;
17: let him who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house;
18: and let him who is in the field not turn back to take his mantle.
19: And alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days!
20: Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a sabbath.
21: For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be.
22: And if those days had not been shortened, no human being would be saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.
23: Then if any one says to you, `Lo, here is the Christ!' or `There he is!' do not believe it.
24: For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.
25: Lo, I have told you beforehand.
26: So, if they say to you, `Lo, he is in the wilderness,' do not go out; if they say, `Lo, he is in the inner rooms,' do not believe it.
27: For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of man.
28: Wherever the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together.

I'm sure a very detailed case could be made using the language of JP II's Theology of the Body, that something which dramatically severs the relationship between the physical body and God the Father and Creator is an "abomination that makes desolate".

Since we are the branches of the vine, and the living stones of the new temple, what makes us desolate physically serves to reject the life of the Spirit that should be allowed freedom to transform us. And, through the covenant relationship that God set forth "in the beginning" with Adam and Eve - which is also reaffirmed throughout sacred scripture - the Spirit completes the building of the new temple, that same Body of Christ into which we are baptized.

So, what abomination makes our bodies desolate?
Contraception.

Since we are called to become one with Christ - who rebuilt the temple of the Lord's presence in three days - purposefully making the marriage union desolate is an abomination of the first order. It's bad enough that we as a people so easily dismiss the covenant bond necessary for physical union, its worse still for those who have joined in the sacrament of marriage to use artificial contraception. If our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit, and our union in marriage a living echo of the love of the Trinity, then to make ourselves desolate is a much worse offense than the pigs slaughtered on the altar by Antiochus Epiphanes.

do whatever he tells you

2007-04-24T09:32:00.000-05:00

If you have a view of marriage that does not include all mankind, all the natural world, the physical cosmos, heaven and earth, the dawn of time and its consummation in eternity, then your view of marriage is a cramped and hole-and-corner affair.

This comes from Anthony Esolen, English Professor at Providence College. I don't recall that message being communicated in the marriage prep program the Arch Diocese of Dubuque forced us to endure.

for the birds

2007-04-13T09:04:00.000-05:00

I've always been attracted to the puzzle that resides in Matthew 24:

26: So, if they say to you, `Lo, he is in the wilderness,' do not go out; if they say, `Lo, he is in the inner rooms,' do not believe it.
27: For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of man.
28: Wherever the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together.
(Also in Luke 17:37)

The omni-present experience of Christ's return is certainly a transcendent concept that the lightning imagery can help us understand. Similar apocalyptic descriptions echo throughout the Bible in Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, the Gospels and Revelation and provide ample witness to the degree of tumult (both personal and communal) that we can expect when this age is consummated. However, the imagery of the eagles swarming to the body is a mystery to me? What are these birds, and what body are they swarming to? Are they good, evil, or neutral agents of inevitable consequence?

Lately I've been stumbling upon that image in other parts of scripture, so my fascination is growing, as is my belief that in this Gospel reference there lies an interpretive key for the wider understanding of our faith that shouldn't be overlooked. Much like when Jesus utters the first words of Psalm 22 from the cross, or when he quotes Daniel in front of Caiaphas (Matthew 26:64), there is a proclamation of immense importance being delivered at a crucial time. Here are a couple examples with exact replicas of Christ's imagery. There are also many more verses that reference the swarming, swooping, and hunting of birds (vultures, eagles, ravens et al) in justly retributive sense, or as confusing attacks on those cast out of the sight of the Lord.

Genesis 15
9: He said to him, "Bring me a heifer three years old, a she-goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon."
10: And he brought him all these, cut them in two, and laid each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two.
11: And when birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

Job 39
26: "Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads his wings toward the south?
27: Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes his nest on high?
28: On the rock he dwells and makes his home in the fastness of the rocky crag.
29: Thence he spies out the prey; his eyes behold it afar off.
30: His young ones suck up blood; and where the slain are, there is he."

I'm going to dig deeper on this issue. If anyone is reading this and has resource suggestions, please ante up.

Totus Tuus

2007-03-27T12:51:00.001-05:00

The GodFearinFiddler writes about his struggles with Mary's place in Catholic Tradition and devotion.

That was terrifically honest!

Oddly, as my own appreciation of Mary has grown, I've become less angry at folks who vocally reject her or her place in Catholic faith and devotion. Since the reason for her brightness is her perfect humility, it’s easier to understand why her queenship is so hidden. We are dumb sheep, and if we were to truly see Mary for what she is, there would be a temptation to bow down and worship. Since hers is the body from which and in which the Son of God was knit, her reflective radiance would be too much for us if it was revealed fully. Think of John in Rev 19:10 - so overwhelmed by the glory he was being shown that he flopped down to worship the angel. And this was a man who was at the foot of the cross! A man who ran to the empty tomb! If he got star-struck by the messenger, how backwoods will we be when the veil is lifted?

I think a component of the confusion in Protestant understanding of Mary (and most Catholics for that matter) stems from what is really a limit that we place on the power of God. Among those Christians that still believe in Satan and hell, there's a pesky dualism slithering below the surface of their approach to faith which needs to be expunged. The “God vs. Devil” dichotomy is completely false. God has no opposite. And there’s certainly no created being that should be placed in opposition to God in the human heart. This is a lie propagated by Satan, and it handicaps our full acceptance of the Father.

But if the Good, Truth, Beauty, and Life of the Trinity has no opposite, who is Satan, the created being, at war with? He is at war within the confines of creation with the perfect creation – Mary. Her humility and her fiat are the opposite of Satan’s pride. She is “full” of God’s grace and love, while he is void. Her acceptance of life in Christ via Christ’s life in her is the covenant of the New Creation. Satan’s rejection is the pathway to second death.

Rather than placing her as an obstacle to God, elevation of Mary in the heart and faith journey of the Christian is acknowledgement that chapter 21 of Revelation is our future! She is the perfected creation, and it is with her help that we too can be perfected. Giving praise to that reality is truly giving praise to the Word and will of the Father. In fact, participation in the sacramental life of the Church by any Christian unknowingly acknowledges a personal devotion to Mary. We're clued to the reality of this mystery in Christ's dialogue with a perplexed Nicodemus:

3: Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God."
4: Nicode'mus said to him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?"
5: Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
6: That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
7: Do not marvel that I said to you, `You must be born anew.'
8: The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit."

The new life we are being called to is a mystery, and the means by which we get there is a mystery as well – but a mystery that we are given the key to understanding, requiring that we first accept it in faith.

14: And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up,
15: that whoever believes in him may have eternal life."
16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
17: For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

Is this an answer that Nicodemus understood? I doubt it. We have the whole of revealed truth at our disposal, but we have loads of trouble. So it shouldn't surprise us when we fail to connect the dots from one mystery to another. And there are two mysteries at play here: Christ's salvific mission, and the mystical economy of his bride, the Church.

The first (and only) real question that Nicodemus asked Christ…

"How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?"

…is actually answered from the lips of our Lord as he hung on the cross.

John 19
26: When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, "Woman, behold, your son!"
27: Then he said to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!" And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.

When we take Mary into our home – into our hearts – and let her name ring in every corner of the House of the Lord, we are heralding our own rebirth, and we plead for protection from her opposite. Saints have prodded the Church into giving her titles, pronouncing on her nature and destiny, and acknowledging that she is the distributor of all graces. This is scandalous to Protestants, but that is tied into their obstacles in recognizing that there is one true Church on heaven and on earth. When you accept this, it is easier to start seeing its parallels in Mary and its dependence on her to nurture and protect the Mystical Body of Christ in the logical extension of her calling as Theotokos. She made it clear as a bell in her words to Juan Diego:

Hear me and understand well, my son the least, that nothing should frighten or grieve you. Let not your heart be disturbed. Do not fear that sickness, nor any other sickness or anguish. Am I not here, who is your Mother? Are you not under my protection? Am I not your health? Are you not happily within my fold? What else do you wish?

The radical (and hidden) message from John, chapter 3 is this:
It is from the womb of the Blessed Mother that we must be “born anew”.
Try preaching that one at a Pentecostal revival!

les Nouveau Obscur

2007-03-23T16:20:00.000-05:00

Mike Aquilina has rooted this summation of Alexandria’s Christian heritage from April’s Smithsonian:

“The go-go era of the Ptolemies ended with the death, in 30 B.C., of the last Ptolemy ruler, Cleopatra … Rome turned Egypt into a colony after her death, and Alexandria became its funnel for grain. Violence between pagans and Christians, and among the many Christian sects scarred the city in the early Christian period.” New paragraph: “When Arab conquerors arrived in the seventh century A.D., they built a new capital at Cairo.”
Christianity, you see, brought violence and a seven-century Dark Ages upon the land. There’s nothing really to report from that period — except, of course, the murder of Hypatia. Get this: “Early Christians threatened Alexandria’s scholarly culture; they viewed pagan philosophers and learning with suspicion if not enmity.” Is he talking about Pantaenus? Clement? Origen? Can he be serious? Alexandria’s scholarly culture was transformed, not destroyed, by the Christian schools of Alexandria. And those guys knew and cited the pagans as well as any pagan. Here’s the author’s conclusion: “Most historians assumed that Alexandria’s learned glow dimmed as the new religion gained power.”
Most historians? Really? You can only say such things if you hold these truths to be self-evident: that Christianity is a bad thing for the intellect and for art, and that faith is opposed to reason. “Most historians” know better, because they read history. One need not be Christian to appreciate the high culture of Christian Alexandria. There are historians who are not Christians, who believe that Christianity revived an exhausted classical culture by transforming it, by giving it a new voice.

If you want to study the Dark Ages we only need to look around. There's no other way to describe a climate of academia where irrational and baseless pronouncements from Dan Brown and James Cameron are given the treatment of scholarly work, while CENTURIES OF EXTANT PRIMARY SOURCES are dismissed out of hand because their authors believed in Jesus Christ.

YOU are to blame!

2007-03-22T12:26:00.000-05:00

And you know who you are...

Christmas Eve Mass-goers Enable Evil Fascist Takeover

Summary: The reason there are still hate-filled, "Iron Age" Christians and Muslims out there is because of those milquetoast, lukewarm, agnostics that prop up and protect the legitimacy of whackos who really DO believe in stuff.

Either Richard Dawkins plagiarized this guy or this guy plagiarized Dawkins - but the love coming from them both is just as warm. As are the falsehoods and closed-mindedness. Not to mention the silly, self-proclaimed position as arbiter of objective truth. Considering folks like Harris really don't believe in objective truth, its ironic that they point to materialist-flavored social "sciences" like psych and econ as the firm rocks upon which they shall build. Psychology? As in Jung and Freud? Nothing mythological there...

And cosmology?? That is certainly a field where objective facts are easily quantifiable and contribute to a firm, unshakable understanding of the universe. No "faith" required for string theory - nosireeBob! And Relativity, should really be called Objectivity. And don't forget the closed-minded Christian persecutors of scientific progress. Narrow-minded rubes like Georges Lemaitre are so blinded by their religion, they lack the scientific integrity to truly understand the universe.

The sad fact is, nothing in the Catholic magisterium limits the bound of what is too be known in the material universe. Not even the early Church (or their Jewish contemporaries) took a literalist approach to scripture interp and application. Even in Paul's letters you find references to typology in relation to the Creation account as well as other events in the Old Testament. Harris and Dawkins lack all credibility when they fail to acknowledge that the Catholic approach to scripture (as well as to knowledge) preceded the various fundamentalist theologies spawned from the first Reformation. They lack all credibility when they fail to acknowledge that the materialist philosophies of Descartes, Voltaire et al were spawned from the enormous deposit of knowledge made available to them by the Church (Jesuit schools in particular). And when you get right down to it, their lives, their freedom, and their education is owed to the faith-inspired beliefs of people who resisted capitulation to the Soviet Union and its plan to over-run Western civilization with objective God-free truths. But they'll never be convinced of that since evidence for it cannot be accurately quantified or proven.

I read a take on original sin recently (and I can't remember who it was - I'm thinking either Edith Stein or B16) that said it's primarily a rejection of fatherhood. Specifically: God's Fatherhood. So in essence, all sin is a perpetual recycling of an initial tantrum against "the old man". And the ultimate need of those who wish to persist in this rebellion is to kill off God.

That was tried already.

Social Action

2007-03-20T10:42:00.000-05:00

Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard (Archbishop of Paris 1940-1949), from a retreat he gave to his own clergy, published in a book called Priests Among Men:

To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

Diogenes at CWNews has dropped that quote twice now. It's so good I need to post it so I don't forget it.

blood and water - Eros and Agape

2007-02-15T13:29:00.000-06:00

"Him whom they have pierced"

Dear brothers and sisters, let us look at Christ pierced in the Cross! He is the unsurpassing revelation of God’s love, a love in which eros and agape, far from being opposed, enlighten each other. On the Cross, it is God Himself who begs the love of His creature: He is thirsty for the love of every one of us. The Apostle Thomas recognized Jesus as "Lord and God" when he put his hand into the wound of His side. Not surprisingly, many of the saints found in the Heart of Jesus the deepest expression of this mystery of love. One could rightly say that the revelation of God’s eros toward man is, in reality, the supreme expression of His agape. In all truth, only the love that unites the free gift of oneself with the impassioned desire for reciprocity instills a joy, which eases the heaviest of burdens. Jesus said: "When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself" (Jn 12:32). The response the Lord ardently desires of us is above all that we welcome His love and allow ourselves to be drawn to Him. Accepting His love, however, is not enough. We need to respond to such love and devote ourselves to communicating it to others. Christ "draws me to Himself" in order to unite Himself to me, so that I learn to love the brothers with His own love.

Blood and water

"They shall look on Him whom they have pierced." Let us look with trust at the pierced side of Jesus from which flow "blood and water" (Jn 19:34)! The Fathers of the Church considered these elements as symbols of the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. Through the water of Baptism, thanks to the action of the Holy Spirit, we are given access to the intimacy of Trinitarian love. In the Lenten journey, memorial of our Baptism, we are exhorted to come out of ourselves in order to open ourselves, in trustful abandonment, to the merciful embrace of the Father (cf. Saint John Chrysostom, Catecheses, 3,14ff). Blood, symbol of the love of the Good Shepherd, flows into us especially in the Eucharistic mystery: "The Eucharist draws us into Jesus’ act of self-oblation … we enter into the very dynamic of His self-giving" (Encyclical Deus caritas est, 13). Let us live Lent then, as a "Eucharistic" time in which, welcoming the love of Jesus, we learn to spread it around us with every word and deed. Contemplating "Him whom they have pierced" moves us in this way to open our hearts to others, recognizing the wounds inflicted upon the dignity of the human person; it moves us, in particular, to fight every form of contempt for life and human exploitation and to alleviate the tragedies of loneliness and abandonment of so many people.

From the 2007 Lenten message of B-16

Eucharist

2007-02-05T16:42:00.000-06:00

Isaiah 6
1: In the year that King Uzzi'ah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple.
2: Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
3: And one called to another and said: "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory."
4: And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.
5: And I said: "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"
6: Then flew one of the seraphim to me, having in his hand a burning coal which he had taken with tongs from the altar.
7: And he touched my mouth, and said: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven."
8: And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" Then I said, "Here am I! Send me."

Geshem

2007-02-05T14:04:00.000-06:00

Continuing on the subject of water...

John 7
35: The Jews said to one another, "Where does this man intend to go that we shall not find him? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks?
36: What does he mean by saying, `You will seek me and you will not find me,' and, `Where I am you cannot come'?"
37: On the last day of the feast, the great day,

(pause)
The feast is the Festival of Tabernacles, or Festival of Booths (Sukkot in Hebrew). The "great day" is the eighth day, Shemini Atzeret, which transcends the 7 day festival. On this day there is public prayer of the Geshem (גשם), an evocation for rain after the dry months.
(resume)

37: On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, "If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink.
38: He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, `Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.'"
39: Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

arbitrary, dumb, pointless and patronizing

2007-01-23T15:57:00.000-06:00

I refer to the gender-neutral language in the NAB. In reality, it's not gender neutral, its just anti-masculine. Otherwise how do we explain the change in Psalm 1:

From the RSV
1: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
2: but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.

From the NAB
1: Happy those who do not follow the counsel of the wicked, Nor go the way of sinners, nor sit in company with scoffers.
2: Rather, the law of the LORD is their joy; God's law they study day and night.

... vs. the lack of change in Proverbs 9?

From the RSV
1: Wisdom has built her house, she has set up her seven pillars.
2: She has slaughtered her beasts, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table.
3: She has sent out her maids to call from the highest places in the town,
4: "Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!" To him who is without sense she says,
5: "Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.
6: Leave simpleness, and live, and walk in the way of insight."

From the NAB
1 Wisdom has built her house, she has set up her seven columns;
2 She has dressed her meat, mixed her wine, yes, she has spread her table.
3 She has sent out her maidens; she calls from the heights out over the city:
4 "Let whoever is simple turn in here; to him who lacks understanding, I say,
5 Come, eat of my food, and drink of the wine I have mixed!
6 Forsake foolishness that you may live; advance in the way of understanding.

I just don't get it.

"one is not born a woman..."

2007-01-11T14:19:00.000-06:00

The new covenant was made with woman.

It was promised to her in Genesis, and it has always been subverted, diminished, and despised. No matter how hard the Church has attempted to work for the Kingdom and spread the Word across the face of the earth, it has always been mired in the world of sin and its master. Men were picked by Christ as his apostles, because they needed to be kept close. Men fail relentlessly because men are physically separate from the covenant. Men try to “create” and organize on a grand and visible scale, and thus destroy and dissemble on even grander visible scales.

Women have an innate and unquantifiable connection to the “other” of God’s covenant. The mere capacity to conceive and bear children was the language by which God spiritually communicated the new covenant through one woman in words which can be understood by all women even at the potential level of physical experience represented by the menstrual cycle. It was a covenant with the virgin who was conceived without sin; a joining with a fullness of physical, psychological and spiritual union only possible with one newly created and who has not joined herself with man. This is not because union between man and woman is bad, but because union with God is the perfection that the marriage of a man and a woman imperfectly pre-figures. Thus, it is also true that Joseph was wed to Mary in the “more perfect” way that religious marry the Church. It is a surrender of self to the un-seen by giving the physical body to an abstract bride centered on a commitment to the transcendent echo of the promised Kingdom of God. The Holy Family is the icon of the Kingdom. Mary is the Church, through which Christ is born to Joseph who is the first of the faithful after Mary. Joseph took on the role of caretaker for both the covenant, which was Jesus, and she who the covenant was with. This is the charge given to all the faithful, personally and collectively.

Much of paganism and wiccan cults which focus on the female connection to earth and moon and water are not without meaningful expression. Whereas Adam was formed from the mud, Eve was formed from Adam. Adam had a distinctly separate existence from God, being formed from out of creation and given the imprint of God through the type of life and freedom that came with being made imago dei. Eve, however, was formed out of Adam; formed as a distinct nature-within-nature not using the mud, but using the flesh already imbued with the imprint of God. This is also tied in with the concept of “begetting”. God made man from nothing. Woman was made flesh out of flesh; a concept that is an echo of the incarnation. Jesus is God from God.
We say in the creed that Jesus was “begotten”, which means that though the Son is a distinct person from the Father, he shares completely in the single life of the one true God. The role of man on earth is the same. In the act of procreation, the man’s relationship is distinct and separate, and acts as a symbol of the ultimate relationship between God the Father and God the Son.

It’s important to always remember that we should not view God in terms of our human experiences, but instead view our experience in light of the revealed Truth of God in scripture and Tradition. All nature, all space and time, and certainly all human experience, can only be viewed as a shadow and a symbol of God’s plan. This is difficult to do, since our predisposition is to understand and explain things from a perspective of ownership; when we can explain or describe something, the mind symbolically claims ownership via knowledge. We need to concentrate on avoiding the pitfalls of ascribing human characteristics to the divine, and instead view those characteristics as emblematic of a greater mystery. “God’s ways our so above our ways as the heavens are above the earth.” Really think about that one. The earth is like a grain of sand on the beach of the Milky Way galaxy, and the galaxy is smaller than a grain of sand would be to a universe the size of the Earth. The very idea that human physicists and astronomers can see, quantify and contemplate this is absurd. It only loses absurdity when the enormity of the universe and the weirdness of the laws which make it that way are seen for what they represent – the proportional insignificance of our lives, knowledge, and will to that of the Father. It’s either that or nihilism. Anything in between is silly and logically untenable.

Historical Man (male-dominated civilizations) has tried to use skill, intellect and force to create within this world and (often subconsciously and on a small personal scale) to make himself and his creations like God. But he has failed and will always fail. Man mimics domination over the created world but ultimately ends up worshipping the created world - himself included. To grow, man must submit to the will of God in a very focused and self-destructive way, destroying not the body, but the individual will. This is the way things are, precisely because man is a copy of the Word. God made man from dirt, and Jesus came into the world as a man. The purpose of man’s existence is to mimic the life of the Son by dying to himself. As Jesus lived in submission to his earthly parents, to the Law, and above all to the will of the Father, so must men. Jesus called men to keep them close to him because they needed constant instruction. The male has an inordinate predisposition towards aggressive failure because he does not have an innate understanding of the language of this life – which has translational connections with, and is capable of crossing over to, the language of the next life. In begetting children, the male contributes of himself, but in an act of offering that “dies” since the physical connection is ultimately severed. The conjugal act is as far as the male’s physical participation goes. No child is formed within a man. The man’s blood and tissue is not continuously used to build another human being. In the order of creation, that happened only with Adam. With the fall of Adam, the covenant God made with him was destroyed. All subsequent covenants with men were contingent on the Law and when man failed, the covenant was broken by those failures.

But at the fall, God foretold the opportunity that would be given to woman. It would not be a covenant communicated with words alone, as with Moses, David and the Prophets – in other words it would not be a covenant based solely on the separate relationship between Creator and the creation he loved. This would be a covenant sealed with the blood of God, thereby making it eternal and unbreakable. Woman, by her nature, experiences the language of life – of blood. This language taps into something that cannot be comprehended fully with the human mind, and though it’s not true to say each woman fully understands the language of blood, men have only an observational, secondary point of reference. The sacrificial rites which offered up the blood of the created world to Yahweh were the means by which men were given to atone on behalf of humanity for the tendency to worship creation and to reject the will of God in favor of earthly things. But this was an offering separate from himself, and from the human race as a whole. Priests killed the animals and performed the rituals, but did not offer of themselves; therefore the offerings were never complete. They were contingent on fidelity to the covenant oath with Yahweh and to the written law.

By her fiat, Mary offered her own flesh to the Father. This was a more complete personal offering than Abraham, who offered Isaac as his flesh both as "possession"(someone he had claim to and could offer) and as "self" in that Isaac was a continuation of his blood. Mary unites those two since she possessed herself, and by giving herself totally to the will of the Father, completes the sacrifice God asked of Abraham. And while Abraham could only offer the separate flesh of Isaac as a sacrifice, it is Mary's own flesh which the Spirit uses to shape the flesh of the Son of God. In a very real way, Mary's "yes" was an agreement to give her own flesh, her own self, over to be sacrificed. This is the intimacy of the new covenant which is best understood when viewing it through the prism of a woman's physical existence.

the sea shall be no more

2006-12-15T16:53:00.000-06:00

There are two scripture verses that deal with blood imagery which made me do a double take when reading (one in Exodus, the other in Esther). I want to write my thoughts about them, but before I do that I need to put down in a coherent form how blood is a poor but necessary substitute for water and how that physical reality ties into our need for grace. This leads to my understanding that our need prefigures a destiny when the specific deficiency we experience as sinners will be transformed into something unimaginably greater.

Science tells us that blood is a mechanism developed to replace the omnipresent source and sustenance available in the early phases of the evolution of life on earth: the sea. It is the localized, mobile and efficient method of sustaining life that replaced the osmosis of water through the cell walls as life evolved within water.

The Sea

Genesis 1
6: And God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters."

In Genesis, God separates the "waters" and creates the dry land which depends on the water, but is substantially separated from it. The whole statistical miracle of life on earth revolves around the multi-faceted union of water and earth - be that in the atmosphere, the oceans, the polar ice caps, the lakes, rivers, streams, and from that union water and earth join in the expression of their union through LIFE. No matter how far up the food chain an animal is, it depends on earth and water, because it originated from earth and water. Total separation of earth and water = death.

While it is true that we are "stardust" physically, in our essences we are much more than that. Living things, (and most uniquely, human beings) are the urgent poetry of all creation - the galaxies, the stars, the sun, the earth and, from the other direction, the protons, electrons, neutrons, quarks, gluons, and theoretical strings. The Spirit tells us this through Paul.

Romans 8
18: I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
19: For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God;
20: for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope;
21: because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.
22: We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now;
23: and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
24: For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?
25: But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

So much of creation is unseen to us, whether practically or purposefully - especially the presence of God in creation! This makes the poem urgent, and if living things are the poem, life is the language of the poetry. As massive and all-encompassing a mystery as this is, it is not wholly unknowable, since we've been given the Rosetta stone which allows us to learn and speak the language of all creation - even if our rational capacity to comprehend what's being said reaches its inevitable limit.

We have the one Word necessary to know all things...

john 1
1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2: He was in the beginning with God;
3: all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
4: In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
5: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

...and to accomplish all things.

john 14
6: Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.
7: If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; henceforth you know him and have seen him."
8: Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied."
9: Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, `Show us the Father'?
10: Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.
11: Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.
12: "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father.
13: Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son;
14: if you ask anything in my name, I will do it.
15: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
16: And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever

To know and love Jesus, is to know the why, what, how and Who of all creation. But that knowledge is not attained, it is given to us in the innermost rooms of our hearts without merit - so that we may join in the spirit of that gift and give of ourselves to each other without expectation of reward.

John leads us to the final stanza of the poem of life by emphasizing that Christ will recapitulate all creation in himself and make us heirs and children, not only by healing the wound of original sin, but by speaking a new creation into existence!

Do we think that the universe is a static and inert canvas? Not in hands of God. The fact that if the universe were the size of the earth, our galaxy would be a grain of sand, should be enough to convince anyone of the silliness of a person making himself the center of his own heart, let alone the world around him. Everything is so unfathomable big (or unfathomably small) to underscore the even greater position of the Father towards creation.

The divide between the Father and creation was bridged by Christ. In the end, John tells us, there will be nothing for the bridge to cross over. That is truly truly good news. Frightening, exhilarating, joyful, overwhelming - all the things that make love so awesome.

Rev. 21
1: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
2: And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband;
3: and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them;
4: he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away."
5: And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true."
6: And he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life without payment.
7: He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son.

salvation in the syntax

2006-12-12T16:19:00.000-06:00

I wonder if the change in placement of the phrase divider (comma or colon, depending on Bible version) from Isaiah to Luke was purposeful by the Evangelist, or just an accident? Since the Holy Spirit is involved, you'd have to say it was a "happy accident" a la Bob Ross. It changes the meaning of the text, but both are true and provide platforms for meaningful reflection.

Isaiah ch. 40:
3: A voice cries: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

This is telling us that the way needs to be prepared IN the wilderness. John of the Cross expanded on that concept quite a bit!

Luke, ch. 3
4: As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

Luke is alluding to John the Baptist, as well foretelling all the voices in Church history calling people out of the world and back to Christ.

This certainly includes Mary, circa Revelation ch. 12
5: she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne,
6: and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which to be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days.

Fascinating stuff...

Feeding the animals

2006-11-30T09:17:00.000-06:00

Start with the fact that Bethlehem...

בית לחם

...means "house of bread" in Hebrew.

Jump forward to chapter 6 in John for Jesus' definitive declaration of himself as the "bread of life" and we can see the obvious significance. The nativity narratives tell us more specifically that Christ was born in a stable and placed in a manger. But the manger is where the animals - domesticated beasts of burden - come to eat, and they aren't given bread. Is there significance in that? I think there is a connection here with the Creation account in Genesis, and with an episode of horrible inhumanity in 2 Kings ch. 6.

In Genesis, God created both man and beasts on the 6th day. The beasts came first, then man was created. Man was made from the earth, like the beasts - but was made imago dei (more specifically, made in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ, but that's another angle that I've got to remember to write down before I forget it!) Jeff Cavins makes a big point about how the sinister nature of the number 6 in scripture can be tied to this "day of the beasts" connection. Man is rooted as creature with the other living creatures of the earth by being made with them on the same day. But man was made greater than the beasts with the capacity (via existence in time) to become greater through obedience to the Father.

In light of this, the significance of Jesus being born among beasts can be seen.

There was a section in 2 Kings that struck me last year when I was reading it durning Advent. There are those verses in the Bible that stop you dead in your tracks and are so easily dismissed as abberations . I've heard Psalm 137 used as an example of why scripture is not free of error, but when you actually READ it, anyone can see that the babies being dashed on the rocks are the children of Babylon - the small tormenting demons that lead us astray - it makes complete sense.

Back to 2 Kings! Here are the verses that woke me up:

25: And there was a great famine in Sama'ria, as they besieged it, until an ass's head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and the fourth part of a kab of dove's dung for five shekels of silver.
26: Now as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, a woman cried out to him, saying, "Help, my lord, O king!"
27: And he said, "If the LORD will not help you, whence shall I help you? From the threshing floor, or from the wine press?"
28: And the king asked her, "What is your trouble?" She answered, "This woman said to me, `Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.'
29: So we boiled my son, and ate him. And on the next day I said to her, `Give your son, that we may eat him'; but she has hidden her son."
30: When the king heard the words of the woman he rent his clothes -- now he was passing by upon the wall -- and the people looked, and behold, he had sackcloth beneath upon his body -- 31: and he said, "May God do so to me, and more also, if the head of Eli'sha the son of Shaphat remains on his shoulders today."

Fighting over whose baby to boil! Pretty jarring imagery for sure, but I couldn't help thinking it had a greater meaning. You've got the King witnessing the horror visited upon his people. Why? Because he failed in faithful obedience to God's covenant. Who does he blame? He blames the Lord and seeks to kill the prophet in retaliation.

I'm seeing Gospel allusions here that I can't quite list in confident detail, however there is an immediate connection that can't be ignored. The suffering people had resorted to eating their children. What's worse is they end up were bickering over whose baby to eat when and reneging on their initial macabre arrangement.

As uncomfortable as it is to think about, on Christmas day, God answered the demand of the desperate woman of Israel, "Give us your son that we may eat him." What's more, the Bread of Life was first shown to the world in a manger, in a stable, amid the sounds, sights, and smell of beasts. This is a setting which should remind humanity of our own nature as lowly creatures. And when we look at the Eucharist, we should also ponder the unfathomable humility of our God, who became low so that we may rise up with Him.

And Christ is given to us, as vs 27 alludes, from the threshing floor and from the wine press.

Done and Done

2006-11-21T16:30:00.000-06:00

There is such a simple, yet awe inspiring distinction between Hannah's praise to God when presenting Samuel in the temple...

1 Samuel, ch. 2
1: Hannah also prayed and said, "My heart exults in the LORD; my strength is exalted in the LORD. My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in thy salvation.
2: "There is none holy like the LORD, there is none besides thee; there is no rock like our God.
3: Talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth; for the LORD is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed.
4: The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength.
5: Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry have ceased to hunger. The barren has borne seven, but she who has many children is forlorn.
6: The LORD kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.
7: The LORD makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts.
8: He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the LORD'S, and on them he has set the world.
9: "He will guard the feet of his faithful ones; but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness; for not by might shall a man prevail.
10: The adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces; against them he will thunder in heaven. The LORD will judge the ends of the earth; he will give strength to his king, and exalt the power of his anointed."

...and the Magnificat...

46: And Mary said, "My soul magnifies the Lord,
47: and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48: for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
49: for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
50: And his mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation.
51: He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
52: he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree;
53: he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.
54: He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
55: as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity for ever."

The covenant promises are all in past and past perfect tense. Mary is declaring that the covenant Hannah praises in the OT has been fulfilled by the Incarnation. Considering Christ was in-utero when she proclaimed this, these are words of immense power and faith!

Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

True God and True Man

2006-11-17T15:52:00.000-06:00

The man loves his run-on sentences, but this one's a beauty!

To regard Christ's knowledge as though he carried out his actions in time from some vantage-point of eternity - rather like a chess player of genius who quickly foresees the whole course of the game, and simply moves his men through a game which for him is already over - would be to do away entirely with his temporality and so with his obedience, his patience, the merit of his redemptive existence; he would no longer be the model of a Christian existence and of Christian faith. He would no longer be qualified to narrate the parables of expectation and waiting which describe the life of his followers.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar - A Theology of History, pg 39

At the beginning of that chapter he declares that "Christ's existence is receptivity". Since you have to say that our existence is subjective (JP II and Edith Stein really hammer that philosophy out well), it follows that our subjectivity relies totally on the receptivity of Christ to the Father. Our best hope is to be a reflection of that reception. So when we waste time in life trying to "find ourselves" it truly truly is a waste of time. The words of Paul frame the experience all creation is ultimately preparing for:

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. - 1 Corinthians 13.12

mediocrity vs. sainthood

2006-10-18T16:47:00.000-05:00

Mother Teresa on the Christian life:

"This imposes a great responsibility on us to fight against our own ego and love of comfort that would lead us to choose a comfortable and insignificant mediocrity. We are called upon to make our lives a rivalry with Christ; we are called upon to be warriors in saris, for the church needs fighters today. Our war cry has to be 'Fight not flight.'

The church of God needs saints today. We shall go freely in the name of Jesus, to towns and villages all over the world, even amid squalid and dangerous surroundings, with Mary the Immaculate Mother of Jesus, seeking of the spiritually poorest of the poor with God's own tender affection and proclaiming to them the Good News of salvation and hope, singing with them His songs, bringing to them His love, peace, and joy. In spirit, to every part of the vast creation of God, from the furthest planet to the depths of the sea, from one abandoned convent chapel to another abandoned church, from an abortion clinic in one city to a prison cell in another, from the source of the river in one continent to a lonely mountain cave in another, and even into heaven and the gates of hell, praying with and for each of God's creation to save and sanctify each one for whom the blood of the Son of God has been shed."

Quoted from No Greater Love

in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti

2006-10-13T15:32:00.000-05:00

From Isaiah ch. 59:

19: So they shall fear the name of the LORD from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun; for he will come like a rushing stream, which the wind of the LORD drives.
20: "And he will come to Zion as Redeemer, to those in Jacob who turn from transgression, says the LORD.
21: "And as for me, this is my covenant with them, says the LORD: my spirit which is upon you, and my words which I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouth of your children, or out of the mouth of your children's children, says the LORD, from this time forth and for evermore."

Apart from revving up the base, these verses relate to what Jesus says to Nicodemus in John 3.5. In talking to Israel about the triumph of the new covenant, Isaiah compares the coming of the Lord to water driven by Spirit. The "rushing stream" is living, not inert and the same wind that blew across creation in Genesis and spoke to Samuel and Elijah forces that water to prepare the way of the Lord. Not only does this tie in with the prescription for being "born anew", it also is connected with the imagery of Psalm 42:

1: As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God.
2: My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?
3: My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me continually, "Where is your God?"
(skipping ahead...)
7: Deep calls to deep at the thunder of thy cataracts; all thy waves and thy billows have gone over me.

The author of the psalm calls to life the imagery of our unconscious need, and unceasing search for water by comparing it to the deer chasing after flowing streams. Again, this is living water, and the living seek it. But water is also deeply connected with sorrow, suffering, and the feeling of abandonment. Tears are swallowed by the man who is mocked for his faith in a God that abandoned him. When this experience (the door between hope and despair) is endured with humility and patience, it is glorified by God who answers a simple need for "water" within the human heart by sending a flood of mercy. Deep calls to deep. IT swallows US. The flood of retribution has become, through Christ, the tide of salvation.

This is the same water that flowed from Christ's side, and it calls us to be formed anew in the womb of His heart. Our subconscious associates security with the intimate warmth of our initial environment of liquid darkness. The Gospel is an invitation to envelop ourselves in this new womb of Christ's love.

Edith Stein argued that the primary function of the created world was to serve as symbolic expression of that which is higher. Night, light, darkness, water, life and death - all things are mere shadows of what they are meant to describe. If we accept that this world will one day fall off us like a cocoon, this is a logical way to see things. In light of this, the imagery and characteristics of water first and foremost provide insight into the failure of man, and the redemption offered by God. This new covenant incorporates water and spirit as specific signs of God's offer and our act of acceptance.

Isaiah talks about the words of the new covenant being placed in the mouths of all who receive the spirit.

21: "And as for me, this is my covenant with them, says the LORD: my spirit which is upon you, and my words which I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouth of your children, or out of the mouth of your children's children, says the LORD, from this time forth and for evermore."

They came from the Word, with the water and we have them forever. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Blood of Christ

2006-10-06T10:30:00.000-05:00

When Jesus talks to Nicodemus, he hammers home the concept of being born anew (as opposed to "again")

John 3
1: Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.
2: This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him."
3: Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God."
4: Nicode'mus said to him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?"
5: Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
6: That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
7: Do not marvel that I said to you, `You must be born anew.'
8: The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit."

Water and Spirit. Those are the two requisites, and those coincide with Baptism easy enough. But Nico is stuck in the imagery and concept of physical birth. He has every reason to be stuck there because that's the only "birth" he's familiar with. It's the only one I'm familiar with! Why does Christ present birth as the process for entering the kingdom of God, and yet associate birth with tangible images that are abstract and confusing?

Like with everything old, Jesus brings the new not to replace but to fulfill. And now, thanks to JPII, we should learn to look carefully at scripture when imagery and activity of the human body are present.

Human birth involves:
a. Time: human sexual impluse > conception > 40 weeks gestation > labor > birth
b. Pain: see Genesis Three Sixteen (big coincidence there) or ask your mother.
c. Water: the amniotic fluid literally floods out at some point prior to delivery
d. Blood: a birth is a messy affair

Three of these things are missing from the recipe for rebirth Jesus gave to Nico. Water is the one thing in common - Oh, and the part about a mother's womb! So what are we to think? Is it that being born anew does not require time, pain, blood and a mother? These questions are answered for Nicodemus - and the rest of us - by John later in the story.

Time - John 17
1: When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, "Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son that the Son may glorify thee,

A Mother - John 19
26: When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, "Woman, behold, your son!" 27: Then he said to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!" And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.

Pain - All of John 19

Blood (and water) - John 19
34: But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.

Jesus is taking on the Pain of the woman giving birth, he is delivering the new creation at the fullness of our collective 40 weeks, and what's more it is blood and water coming from his side! We are born from our mother's womb - only Eve was born from the flesh of a man. Birth into the Kingdom of God has been accomplished through Christ's Passion and the profound image of his side being pierced in the presence of John and Mary is the answer to the confusion expressed by Nico and shared by me.

Being born anew, is being born from the new Adam. Christ took care of the labor and delivery, and he left us the Spirit for everyone to reap the eternal reward of life through Him, with Him and in Him.

There is some crazy stuff in the Bible.

True dat

2006-10-05T16:34:00.000-05:00

From Fr. Stan's Oct. 5 message:

St. Faustina is right-in-there in the “big leagues” with little t and francesco. In the amazing #303 of her diary she says:

Great love can change small things into great ones, and it is only love, which lends value to our actions. And the purer our love becomes, the less there will be within us for the flames of suffering to feed upon, and the suffering will become a delight! By the grace of God I have received such a disposition of heart that I am never so happy as when I suffer for Jesus, whom I love with every beat of my heart.

The source of this unfathomable abyss is the God of mercy who is rich in mercy, who “out of the great love with which he loved us, even when were dead in our sins, made us alive together with Christ (Ephesians 2:4-5). I pray that Francesco, little t, faustina and jp will pray for us that as they did their part, Christ will teach us ours. Blessed Mother Theresa certainly did her part and advised us along the same lines: “Do not seek great things, but do everything with great love.”

Not as the world gives...

2006-10-04T11:40:00.000-05:00

I was reading the beginning of Job, ch. 40 the other day and it struck me how God is describing to Job what humanity will eventually do to his Son.

And the LORD said to Job:

2: "Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it."

3: Then Job answered the LORD:

4: "Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee? I lay my hand on my mouth.

5: I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but I will proceed no further."

6: Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind:

7: "Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you declare to me.

8: Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be justified?

Job had asked in Ch. 31 for just this type of judgment on himself - so that he could see if there were indeed reasons for his suffering.

33: if I have concealed my transgressions from men, by hiding my iniquity in my bosom,

34: because I stood in great fear of the multitude, and the contempt of families terrified me, so that I kept silence, and did not go out of doors --

35: Oh, that I had one to hear me! (Here is my signature! let the Almighty answer me!) Oh, that I had the indictment written by my adversary!

36: Surely I would carry it on my shoulder; I would bind it on me as a crown;

37: I would give him an account of all my steps; like a prince I would approach him.

38: "If my land has cried out against me, and its furrows have wept together;

39: if I have eaten its yield without payment, and caused the death of its owners;

40: let thorns grow instead of wheat, and foul weeds instead of barley." The words of Job are ended.

And we are told that when it says the words of Job are ended in Hebrew it simply reads:

Tav in Hebrew - the last letter of the alphabet. The origins and functions of this letter are quite interesting when considered in the light of this passage from Job.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taw_(letter)

Tav was translated into Greek as Tau. This is a letter whose imagery and meaning we are all familiar with.

Peace of Christ,