This is part of an occasional series of line-by-line meditations on Psalm 103.

People often get sin wrong.

It’s not that we don’t understand it or do it or repent of it or argue what is or isn’t sin: we certainly do all those things. We just do it the wrong way around.

Before we consider sin as falling short, moral wrong-doing, violations of the divine law, or anything else, we must understand it as damage done to an individual’s relationship with God. Theologically, the word is fundamentally relational. It’s not abstract. It’s not a box checked on a list of things we shouldn’t do. It is, rather, wounding, if not outright destroying, our relationship to God.

That wound is fundamental to who we are because it’s been propagated through all humanity down from the first sin. And what was that sin? Disobedience. Breaking communion with God. Baptism heals the wound, but the scar remains, a reminder that we are exiles from the city of God, and will always struggle as did our parents before us and theirs before them.

The Greek word for sin in the New Testament, hamartia, means missing the mark, and translates the Hebrew verb ḥāṭā’, which means to go wrong or miss a goal, while the Latin peccatum is an error or fault. Other the meaning underlying other Hebrew terms, such as ’āwen (guilt) and ’āšām (iniquity), suggest things like fatigue, moral weakness, and painful burdens. may derive.

In all these words, there is an inescapable sense of failure. We knew the proper way to walk in God’s light, and we chose the darkness instead. That failure is not abstract or harmless. We know our personal sin can damage not only ourselves but those around us and entire communities.

But before and above any of those considerations, sin damages a relationship with the Triune God, Who is in essence a relationship. The profound mystery of the Trinity is not so mysterious at all, because nothing that matters in our lives exists apart from some form of relationship. We are utterly dependent. All things other than God are contingent upon relationship. God, not contingent, is relationship: Father to Son to Holy Spirit.

The Trinity is certainly a mystery, but it can’t left at that. There’s a triune echo in each life, with everyone relating to themselves, others, and the Trinity. A sin damages each of these relationships in some way, but none so profoundly as the relationship to God, who has made us for Himself. Sin was so grave a problem that the solution was for God to pour Himself out upon the cross. Our sins rupture of the very fabric of existence, and repentance, forgiveness, and penance is the medicine for healing that rupture.

Thus, when we sin, we wound something essential, and cannot repay that on our own. The Church (the Body of Christ) mediates the action of Jesus on the cross through the sacrament of reconciliation.The Logos bridged time and space to share with us a divine essence, and then with His own blood repays that debt eternally.

And after all that has come upon us for our evil deeds and for our great guilt, seeing that you, our God, have punished us less than our iniquities deserved and have given us such a remnant as this, shall we break your commandments again. Ezra 9:13–14.

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A homily for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time (A).

When I first started teaching RCIA a couple decades ago my mother, a lifelong Catholic who never missed mass, asked Why would anybody want to become Catholic?

Fair enough. As I’ve said up here before: the Church is a mess. Of course, all the other churches are also a mess, and we have something they don’t.

Our readings today include one of the key passages for establishing the authority of the Catholic Church, and that authority is what distinguishes us from many of our non-Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ. Even more, these passages from Isaiah and Matthew help establish the central role of the priesthood in the church, and show us its roots in the Old Testament.

In the reading from Isaiah, we hear about Shebna and Eliakim. For the Lord of Rings fans here today, I can make this one easy for you. Shebna--is Denethor. He is the steward who forgets his duty and his place, and mistakes himself for the king. So the Lord sends Isaiah to cast him out, and replace him with someone who understands his role.

But what is that role? This is where things get interesting. Eliakim becomes the master of the palace: a royal steward. The badge of his office was a key that he wore on his shoulder. With this key, he locked or unlocked the palace doors so people could have access to the king. We’re told When he opens no one shall shut and when he shuts no one will open. We heard a very similar phrase in the gospel.

Some of the language used in Isaiah suggests a priestly quality to the steward’s role. We’re told Eliakim wears a sash, which is a priestly garment. His father’s name is Hilkiah, a name used by the Levites, the priestly tribe. Finally, he said to be a father to the house of Judah. Father is sometimes used in the Old Testament as title for a priest (Genesis 45:8; Judges 17:10; 18:19).

When we come to the Gospel, even many Protestant scholars agree that Jesus is inviting Peter to be the royal steward of his kingdom. That meaning is inescapable because Jesus is quoting Isaiah here. “Binding and loosing” and “opening and shutting” are very similar, and they both referred to the way priests helped people live out the divine law.

Jewish scholars absolutely understand this. They explain that binding and loosing was the rabbinical term for forbidding and permitting. Jesus claims this authority over and over again. It’s a source of his conflicts with the Jewish leaders, and that conflict grows as he slowly reveals his identity. In today’s gospel, he calls himself the son of man, which at the time was a title for the messiah. He asks his followers who people say the messiah is, and they answer John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah.

Then he asks the apostles Who do you say that I am?

I am is a divine title. I am who am God says to Moses. So when Jesus asks these questions, he wants to know if they understand the role of messiah, and if they understand that Jesus is not only the messiah, but God incarnate.

That’s when Peter blurts out “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.”

As Jesus is quick to point out, no one can make that declaration without the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Those of us who confess that Jesus is Lord can only do so because we answered that call of the Spirit. It spoke in our hearts, and we had a choice. We could ignore that call, which comes in countless different ways through our lives and our experiences and the people we meet, or we could respond to it, fall to our knees in prayer, repent, and turn to the church the Lord left for us.

That church takes shape in the next thing Jesus says. Blessed are you Simon, Son of Jonah. The Hebrew name Simon means obedient. Jonah, means dove, which is a sign of the Holy Spirit. Jonah also reminds us of Jonah and the whale, which Jesus himself claims is a sign: as Jonah spent three days in the whale so the son of man will spend three days in the tomb.

Then Jesus turns all this around, and he gives Simon a Greek name. Petros: the word for rock. This rock is the foundation stone, and Jesus himself will use Peter to build the church that will continue his mission through all time and space, right down to this very parish, this very day.

He gives Peter the authority of the royal steward, making him his representative on earth. He invests him with the sign of the king’s foremost representative: the keys to the kingdom. But these aren’t the keys to the throne room of a king. These are the keys to the kingdom of heaven itself.

Jesus gives the power to lead his people here on earth to Peter. Peter goes to Rome. He establishes his seat of authority there, becoming the first pope. Pope just means father. Peter dies in Rome, and is buried on the Vatican Hill. Before he dies, he ordains two men: Linus and Cletus, who become the second and third popes. That office and mission is passed down century after century, all the way to Pope Leo XIV.

Without that line of apostolic succession, we’d have to believe that Jesus invested Peter with awesome power to rule his church, knowing that it would all vanish in three decades when Peter was executed.

No. It was meant to continue. It does continue.

For us, this is a great cause for hope. First, in our priests, who stand in the person of Christ at this altar, to make Jesus present to us through the sacraments, but also in the bishops, who receive the fullness of holy orders to lead the community of believers, and even in the deacons, who represent Christ the servant, and all of you, who make up the very body of Christ, which is the Church itself, all of it flowing from these ancient roles and divine promises, united under Peter, and built on solid rock. Knit together like this, not even hell itself can prevail against us, and that’s why people are still drawn to the Church.

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Weird Catholic

The Coronation of St. Agatha’s Skull

A wonderful video was shared this week…

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13 days ago · 44 likes · 4 comments · Deacon Tom

This is part of a series of occasional meditations on the Prologue to the Rule of Benedict.

God created light on the first day. Before the Sun (the golden source of our earthly light) or the Moon (the silvery reflection of that source), there is light. It is His first command: “Let there be light.” Along with the heavens and the earth it is the first thing to exist which is Not God, and thus the foundation of all that follows. It sometimes appears as a “gotcha” to young atheists as an example of the ignorance of Biblical writers: the fools made light before the sun!

Quite obviously, ancient man knew the sun and knew the patterns of rising and setting, light and darkness, perhaps better than many today. The sun doesn’t arrive on the scene until Day Three, and yet here we are bathed in the very light of God, Who is also Himself light, and in Whom there is no darkness. By the time the source of light in our solar system arrives, the darkness of chaos has been banished. When scripture speaks of heavens and the earth it doesn’t mean sky and soil. The deep is not the oceans. The waters over which the Spirit moves are not the seas. The day and night are not cycles of the sun. All this comes later.

God does not make darkness: darkness is the absence of light. The light of the sun cannot be the light God speaks of because all creatures perceive it differently. Leaves and birds and humans are all fed differently by the sun, but the light of God feeds the human soul, and gives it life.

In the Latin1, the phrase in the Rule of Benedict often translated as “divine light” is deificum lumen. This is often rendered as “divine light,” but “deifying light”2 is a more accurate reading: the light that makes us like God. It’s often translated as “divine” on the assumption that Theosis was not accepted in the West during Benedict’s time, but this is reasoned poorly. The early Latin Life of St. Anthony used the word in this sense, and Benedict was surely familiar with it. Augustine, not generally mistaken for an Eastern Father, wrote in Sermon 192: “To make human beings gods, He was made man who was God”3. When I prepare the chalice, upon adding the water I whisper By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

The word use for “astonished” in this line is attonitis, which at its root means “deafened by thunder.” So here we have a kind of theophany of light and sound not unlike the Transfiguration, in which Jesus shines with a dazzling divine light in all his glory and God speaks with a voice of thunder. In the gospel of Luke, we read that “Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep,” but when the voice of the Father and light of the Son manifest before them, “they became fully awake” and “saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.” (Lk 9:32)

So in this line--Let us open our eyes to the divinizing light, and let us listen with astonished ears to the warning of the divine voice--the Holy Father Benedict is calling us not merely to theophany, but to theosis: allowing the full force of God’s divine light to burn away the dross and elevate us to a share in His divinity.

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A homily for the 17th Week in Ordinary Time (A)

What is your treasure?

Most of us understand that the answer is not our bank account or our house. It’s our family, our friends, our values—and most importantly, our faith. But Jesus is talking about something very particular today. Something hidden. Something that must be sought and revealed. The kingdom of heaven.

There are many ways to think about the kingdom of heaven: it’s Jesus, the church, the Christian life, baptism, the fulfillment of the Old Testament. For example, last week we heard about the weeds and the wheat, and this week about the net taking in good fish and bad. These signify the mixture of good and evil found even among Christians. So in those parables, the kingdom of heaven represents the mixture of saints and sinners who will be judged at the Second Coming.

Then there’s the treasure buried in the field, and the pearl of great price: Why are they hidden? Let’s look at the first reading to see if it provides some answer.

In the Book of Kings, we learn about the Wisdom of Solomon. God is pleased because Solomon doesn’t ask for power or money or glory. He asks for wisdom: a knowing heart. In ancient Israel, Wisdom was often addressed as a person. It was considered the working of God in the world. God is hidden, but Wisdom creates, teaches, guides.

With the revelation of Christ, these ideas about Wisdom are seen in a new light as references to the Word of God: the Son of God: Our Lord Jesus Christ.

So when Solomon asks for Wisdom, he’s seeking more than even he knows: he’s seeking something that will only be fully revealed in the incarnation. He’s asking for a deeper relationship with the Father, so he can be a father to his people. He’s asking for the spirit to dwell within him, so he may judge more truly. He’s asking for Christ. And when we finally learn in the Gospel of John that “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” that’s when it all comes together. The Word is Jesus, who is both True God and True Man. The hidden God, now walks with us.

So what is hidden in these parables of the treasure and the pearl? God is hidden, just as the divinity of the Son of God was hidden in the flesh of Jesus. This truth--the real, underlying truth of the world--can only be seen with the eyes of faith. And that faith is what allows us to find the treasure in the dirt, to find the most valuable pearl among thousands of lesser gems.

Now let’s bring all of this back to us, because there are two kinds of seekers in these parables.

One kind of seeker finds the kingdom by accident, but recognizes its value immediately. Something happens to this kind of person. They are hit by the bus of life. They suffer a loss, perhaps of work, perhaps a relationship, perhaps a death, perhaps health. And this turns their minds and hearts to the fields out there, and they begin digging.

The other kind of seeker is like the merchant who already recognizes that something is missing from his life. This kind of person is actively searching for meaning. Often, they are searching in the wrong the places. There are no shortages of anti-Christs in the world. Everywhere you turn someone is telling us that this thing or this person is what will fill the emptiness inside us.

It becomes very hard in this situation to tell the synthetic pearls from the genuine, priceless pearls. You’ll notice that the pearl found by the merchant is not buried like the treasure. The pearl is hiding in plain sight, but only the person actively searching for it can recognize its true value.

In both of the cases--we’ll call them the accidental seeker and the intentional seeker--the only way to find something is with the eyes of faith. God must touch our hearts and inspire us to seek and to find what is hidden, and the willingness to sacrifice everything for it.

Today, the fastest-growing religious population is the Nones: people with no faith. They don’t particularly reject God over doctrine or the authority of the church or scripture. They just don’t see a reason for Him. He doesn’t fit into their view of the world. He doesn’t seem to matter.

Many of us have relatives like this, or maybe we were even like that ourselves. Perhaps people haven’t “rejected” faith, but the modern world is so complex and so distracting and so filled with shiny things that faith just kind of fades away. Our greatest treasures are just cast aside, and forgotten.

When we find that treasure, it’s usually by accident. It’s a revelation. It may be the church of our youth, or it may be something entirely new.

But I can tell you this much--we all have a part in this search. It’s our job to go out there in the fields and say, Have you tried digging over here? I know about a treasure that was discarded there. I can even give you map.

It’s our job to tell them, I found a pearl once. Let me tell you where I was looking for it.

And here’s the thing we must remember: We can’t find it for them. We can only tell them where to look. We have to trust the Holy Spirit to do the rest. That part is tough. It requires patience. It requires prayer. It requires us to live as if our faith is our greatest possession so that a little glimpse of the kingdom of heaven can be seen though us. We must be the map. The kingdom of heaven costs nothing less than everything, and the wonder of it is--that it’s worth it.

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This is a longer post on some of the theology underlying spiritual direction. The TL/DR is: we are all called to holiness, the path of holiness is unique for each of us, the understanding of these paths is studied in spiritual theology, and all of this is important to spiritual directors and those who seek to go deeper into the life of the spirit.

Universal Call to Holiness

Towards the end of his life, the theologian Germain Grisez said he considered the universal call to holiness the most genuinely revolutionary thing to come out of the Second Vatican Council, but that it was not developed deeply enough. (Grisez himself explored the subject in The Way of the Lord Jesus and other work.)

“They didn’t draw the conclusion that needed to be drawn,” he remarked in conversation. “It’s not what God calls you to do which decides how holy you are, but how well you respond to God’s call. In other words, you don’t have a better or worse calling depending upon what you’re called to do, but you can respond well or not so well to what God’s calling you to do. Holiness is, in a sense, a generalized and universalized calling.”

This was not always considered the case. Holiness was the calling of the avowed religious and ordained, a rarefied air breathed only in the monastery or at the altar. Laity could and should strive for a kind of holiness, but there was a lingering sense that ordinary people were stained with the muck of the roads they travelled, and elevated piety was perhaps the most for which they could hope. Marriage, sex, money, possessions, labor, debt, and all the concerns of the world weighed too heavily upon them to join the ranks of St. Benedict or St. Teresa of Avila.

There is an element of truth to this. The traditional purgative ways of ascent are not as easily achieved by one living in the world. And yet, some of the radical penances and asceticism of the avowed religious are themselves a luxury of the monastic cell. The universal call to holiness does not see the avowed or ordained life as the high road to heaven, but as one path among many open to each individual. The road of the Christian life has many branches traversing strikingly different landscapes, but all have a single objective: union with God in Christ.

Holiness is the perfection of graces we all receive with the sacraments of initiation. From Lumen Gentium:

It is therefore quite clear that all Christians in any state or walk of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of love, and by this holiness a more human manner of life is fostered also in earthly society. In order to reach this perfection the faithful should use the strength dealt out to them by Christ’s gift, so that, following in his footsteps and conformed to his image, doing the will of God in everything, they may wholeheartedly devote themselves to the glory of God and to the service of their neighbor. Thus the holiness of the People of God will grow in fruitful abundance, as is clearly shown in the history of the Church through the life of so many saints…. The forms and tasks of life are many but holiness is one.

This should seem uncontroversial to us living now, in an atmosphere conditioned by the Little Way of Therese, the Council, the post-conciliar popes and saints, the example of writers like G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day, and the consistent urging of Mother Theresa for everyone who seeks God to “find their own Calcutta.” Be holy where you are is not a radical statement, but it does represent a shift that needs to be acknowledged as we begin exploring spiritual theology.

Ascetical and Mystical Theology

Theology is not a static discipline, and its contours have shifted over the centuries. Moral theology is, in the most general sense, the study of avoiding sin. That’s not to say it’s a Minimum Daily Requirement kind of theology, but that it deals with living an ethical Christian life. And no, I’m not going to get into the distinctions between ethics and morals. I’d get letters.

Spiritual theology concerns the aspects of Christian life involved in growing closer to God. Quite obviously, moral theology is a factor in that life, but spiritual theology is a discipline unto itself. As Jordan Aumann notes, it goes by various names: spirituality, spiritual life, devout life, supernatural life, interior life, mystical evolution, and theology of Christian perfection (from Aumann, Spiritual Theology).

Today, spiritual theology is mostly understood as the combination of ascetical theology and mystical theology, with ascetical theology concerning the early stages, study, and practices of the spiritual life, and mystical theology concerning the higher reaches of the spiritual life. There are many ways to break this down and a number of technical terms that, frustratingly, can mean different things to different people, but let’s make it very very simple and call the ascetical aspect what you do and the mystical aspect what God does. (If you’re wondering why the church rejects Centering Prayer, it’s because it blurs this crucial distinction.)

We tend to think of ascetical practices as rigorous, penitential, even punishing–as bodily mortification. That’s not all of it, however. From the Greek askeein, ascesis means developing a skill, so when St. Paul uses athletic metaphors, this is what he means.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. 1 Co 9:24–2

The Greek for that last line more literally translates as “I pummel my body and make it a slave.”

Mystical, from the Greek mystikos, means hidden or secret, usually referring to secret rites for initiates to a cult. We need to be careful here because the language can suggest gnosticism, as if there is some concealed wisdom unavailable to ordinary Christians.

In Catholic rites of initiation, it means the person is being formed in the faith. After an adult is fully received into the church, they go through a process of mystagogy, which doesn’t mean they get their decoder ring or secret handshake. Instead, it’s a further unfolding of the faith with assistance of Holy Spirit, who now has pitched His tent in the catechumen. In mystagogy, someone who has received the graces of the sacraments is accompanied deeper into the life of the church so they can more fully understand and cooperate with the Spirit.

In a sense, every Christian is always practicing some kind of ascesis (a discipline) in order to open themselves to a potential mystical experience (a deeper experience of God). The discipline may be going meatless on Friday, fasting, penance, a habit of prayer, a particular devotion, or works of mercy. The word may call to mind medieval spiritual olympians who consumed nothing but a teaspoon of muddy water and a communion wafer each day, but everyone has their own ascesis, their own spiritual discipline. We are all training to run the race all the time.

At the same time, mystical may suggest to us ecstasies, infused contemplation, miraculous visions, and the like, but it also can extend to the person quietly praying who experiences the movement of the spirit in the soul. The discipline clears the field for the encounter with God. It disposes us to the divine. We can’t seize is. But we can make ourselves ready, as the bride prepares for the bridegroom. This is part of the work of faith, and it’s a good reason to seek out a trustworthy spiritual director who can accompany us on the road.1

Inward and Upward

At this point, we should have a clearer sense of the distinctions inside spiritual theology, and why it is relevant to all Christians, particularly those seeking spiritual direction. As Jordan Aumann writes:

Christian spirituality is therefore a participation in the mystery of Christ through the interior life of grace, actuated by faith, charity, and the other Christian virtues. The life that the individual receives through participation in Christ is the same life that animated the God-man, the life that the Incarnate Word shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit; it is, therefore, the life of God in the august mystery of the Trinity. (Aumann, Spiritual Theology)

I’ve cited Fr. Aumann, a Dominican, several times because his text is one of the few systematic treatments of the subject. His Thomism and his systematic methods are, obviously, related, but also point to the limitations of the work–and Aumann was not blind to these limitations. He acknowledges that the dynamic nature of Christian spirituality largely defies a Scholastic approach.

Theology may indeed be “the science of God,” but the theology of spirituality is so interior, and works at such an existential level, that its domain is more properly personal and pastoral than theological. “There is no science of singulars,” so each mystic isn’t a data point that can be ordered along certain lines. Every soul’s path to God is unique, sharing only three common elements:

• it is to the Father

• through the Son

• and by the Holy Spirit.

And yet, the entirety of the Catholic faith draws from the same well, and is inspired by the same Spirit. The same Tradition and the same Scripture are the bedrock of every individual’s experience. Some commonalities can be found. Some traditions are subject to a systematic approach. Certainly, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Benedict of Nursia, Francis and Claire, and others developed spiritual paths that can be called “systems” in the broad sense.

I am not a Thomist. Although I have a deep respect for St. Thomas himself, I think the theological death-grip of the various schools of scholasticism between Cajetan and Garrigou-Lagrange was a bad thing for Catholic theology, and that the Ressourcement was an absolutely essential corrective.

I point all this out because spiritual theology does not function in the same way as moral or dogmatic theology. I’m sure someone from some sub-discipline of Thomism could argue that spiritual theology, per se, doesn’t even exist. Fortunately for me, I don’t care. It’s a useful term for the totality of the religious experience encountered by spiritual directors. Aumann himself offers a pretty good definition:

that part of theology that, proceeding from the truths of divine revelation and the religious experience of individual persons, defines the nature of the supernatural life, formulates directives for its growth and development, and explains the process by which souls advance from the beginning of the spiritual life to its full perfection.

I’ve gone through all this at such length so I don’t have to do it again, nor do I have to fall back on endlessly defining terms and slotting experiences into a system. (Not being a Neoscholastic has its benefits.)

I’m satisfied with my own definition of spiritual theology: how we reach God.

What we see in Aumann’s definition is what makes this an important area of study: it is the way spiritual directors can understand a diverse array of people and their unique experiences of the divine. Each seeker–each spiritual directee–is particular and unrepeatable, and yet the spiritual life can and does fall into recognizable patterns.

We are all called to go deeper, and yet we all travel that road in different ways. I spent 2,000 words explaining this because I hope to explore some of those roads with you. I, too, am still finding my way, and when I sit at a hospital bed or meet a new student, I’m learning as well. Each new soul is a chance to encounter another facet in the infinite, glittering jewel that is God and his creation. And every time, I make the same prayer before I say anything: God, please don’t let me screw this up.

We are also called to be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect, and yet Confession is a sacrament, forgiveness was central to the preaching of Christ, and even the best soul can lose the path sometimes. We’re supposed to spend our lives working this out, walking the pilgrim trail from birth to death so we can behold God face to face and know, at last, as we are known. Spiritual theology isn’t a map of that trail, but perhaps it’s a guide to making that map.

Book Links

Jordan Aumann, Spiritual Theology

Fr. Thomas Acklin and Fr. Boniface Hicks, Spiritual Direction: A Guide for Sharing the Father's Love

Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus (full text)

Homily for the 12th Week in Ordinary Time (A)

It’s not easy to be fearless in our world today, but that’s what Jesus is calling us to do, especially when living our Christian faith.

Our fears today take many shapes. They pile up and weigh us down. Pope St. John Paul II sensed this anxiety when, quoting today’s Gospel, he first urged crowds to Be not afraid. It became one his most repeated phrases, because he wanted to share a message against fear in a time of fear.

Think of the world in the 70s when he was elevated to the papacy. The Russians were at war, Iranian extremists were causing trouble, gas prices were skyrocketing, inflation was out of control. Nothing at all like today, of course.

He would later write that Peoples and nations of the entire world need to hear these words. Their conscience needs to grow in the certainty that Someone exists who holds in His hands the destiny of this passing world … And this Someone is Love.

When you think of it this way, that phrase becomes not just encouragement, but a summary of the Gospel for the modern world. People may ask What does Jesus offer me? What does the Church offer me? There are a lot of answers to that question, but peace of mind and heart can certainly be one of them, and that’s why John Paul made it so central to his message.

In a little while, we will all stand and say the Lord’s Prayer together. After we finish, Father will pray something called the embolism. Not a word you want to hear from the doctor, but it’s okay here because it just means something that’s inserted. We’re all familiar with this prayer, but today let’s think about it a little more.

After the Our Father, listen closely, and take those words into your heart as Father prays that the Lord will deliver us from evil, grant us peace in our days, keep us free from sin, and safe from all distress. In the old translation, the last word was anxiety. The church thought that word had become too clinical, but the meaning is similar. Distress, anxiety, worry. In a word: fear.

And what gives us any reason at all to be free of distress in the lives we live, which can be so upsetting with worries about being Christian a world that has turned against Christ, worries about work and finances, worries about the chaos out there, worries about our kids and their future, worries about sickness and death? How can we face that? How does God expect us to face that?

You already know, because it’s the last words of that prayer. Keep us safe from all distress as ... we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

If love is the heart, the core, of Christian life, then hope is its fuel. I was reading a respected Buddhist once, and he said hope was a bad thing because the most it can do is make the present moment less difficult to bear. I don’t think you could find two more starkly different views of the world. To the Buddhist, only now exists, but to the Christian, now is bound up with a promise from God that He will never leave us alone here in our exile, and that if we remain faithful to Him, He will call us home one day, to Him.

Total peace cannot be found in this life because we are separated from Him. We’re incomplete without him. Our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. And so that hope is a tether between our life here on Earth, and the promise of the life to come. It allows us to strive in faith and love to make these lives a tiny reflection of that promise

So, for example, the union of a husband and wife becomes an image of the union of the soul with God. The eucharist becomes a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. The community of the faithful here at mass participates with the communion of all the saints and angels crowded around the heavenly throne. The beauty we encounter in art, in music, in nature, in a tiny sparrow, is a small reflection of the beauty of the Creator.

All of that is hope. That hope is what allows us to endure the fear that is an ordinary part of our lives. So in the mass, we when we come back to the prayer after the Our Father, what is it that allows us to believe that the Lord will deliver us from evil, will help us find peace, will protect us from sin, will keep us safe from distress?

It is the blessed hope of Jesus.

And how do we all respond that phrase?

With a great outpouring of that hope and statement of the glory of the Lord. What we call the doxology:

For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and for ever.

That phrase doesn’t appear in the Bible, but it’s from an early Church document called the Didache.

It’s a statement of faith in God, and hope for His promises. It means that when the Lord tells us to Be not afraid, those aren’t just words. God has counted every hair on your head, and even if we are cast out by the world, even if we are persecuted and wronged, even if poverty afflicts us and sickness steals us away bit by bit, we can trust the one who shaped every bird in the sky, and every man and woman in this church, with His own hands. Even death is just a birth into heaven for those who remain true to the Lord.

And I say this all out loud as someone with a lot of anxiety. A lot. I say it knowing that when the moment comes, and I need to be free from fear, I will struggle to remember my own words. I say it over and over again hoping that gradually, in my flawed way, I will come to believe one of the most important things as we face our trials. So we can remember, no matter what, three simple words from the Lord Himself--Be not afraid--and for one very simple reason: Because God’s got this.

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Homily for Trinity Sunday, Cycle A

“Tell me what you love, and I will you who you are.”

Those words, from Fr. Antonin Sertillanges, have been on my mind this week as I thought about today’s readings. They include perhaps the most famous line in all the gospels: John 3:16: God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. I want to focus on just three words of that verse, because it unlocks the great mystery we celebrate today: the holy Trinity. Those words are: God so loved.

We experience love in many ways. I love God. I love my wife and my children, my family and friends. I love the people I serve. I love those little peanut butter cups they sell at Aldis.

We all understand that each of these is a different kind of love. No one should mistake love of God for love of family for love of good things, but the problem at the heart of human existence is that we do mistake them. We get it all scrambled up and pretty soon we love money above the good of our neighbors, or power above justice, or personal pleasure above the human individual, or the things of this world above the things of God. Indeed, all our problems are rooted in disordered love.

The mighty Saint Augustine understood this so well. In his masterpiece City of God, he divides humanity into two cities: the City of God, and the Earthly City. Those two cities are defined by two different ways of loving. The earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; and the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.”

He says that the Earthly City “glories in itself” and is “ruled by the love of ruling,” whereas the City of God finds its strength and glory purely in God, and is ruled by those serving one another in selfless love.

Love is the most important thing we do. Work, learning, success. All of these are secondary. Knowledge cannot save us. Success cannot save us. In the words of St. John of the Cross, in the evening of life we will be judged by love alone. If we don’t have a true, selfless love for others, nothing else is of any benefit.

Love is what we need for a life of virtue, because every virtue is a form of love. Think about it. Temperance is a love of moderation. Fortitude is the love of another that allows us to endure trials. Justice is a love of the right. Prudence is a love of choosing the correct path.

The fruits of the Holy Spirit are also a kind of love. Joy is a love of life. Peace is a love of harmony. Patience is a love of enduring. Faithfulness is a love of commitment. Generosity is a love of giving.

People can call themselves Christians and have all the outward signs of being good Catholics, and if they have not love, they have nothing. If we are judgmental, uncharitable, selfish, easy to anger, then love is not in us, and we are not of God. And we need to get it right.

And I definitely say we in that sentence because I don’t know about you, but I fail at it regularly. Every Christian fails at this high ideal. I won’t say that it’s OK to fail, but clearly Jesus expected us to fail, because He left His priests with the power to forgive sins, and help us get back on the path of righteousness.

When you look at all the actions of the world, the good and evil through all human history--all the wonders, all the wars, all the beauty, all the suffering; everything inflicted by people on other people, and all of the good done by people for other people--these are Augustine’s two cities.

Evil, whether it’s war or some petty theft in your neighborhood, is love turned inward and away from God. Goodness, from people who sacrifice for their families to our own St. Vincent de Paul Society, is love turned outward and toward God.

Love is the axis on which the world turns. If the love is centered on God, truly on God, then it will seek the good of the other. If the love is centered on self desire, it will seek to dominate and harm.

Among faith, hope, and love, love is called the greatest of all because faith operates at a distance in space and hope at a distance in time, but love? Love places us at the very heart of God.

And all of this brings us back to today’s solemnity, and the grand mystery of the Trinity. The answer to that mystery is very simple: it’s not that God loves, but that God is love itself, and all true love shares in His very being. Love cannot love alone, and love always produces some fruit, which is the love itself. And so, as Augustine said, the Trinity is the dynamic of love: The Father loving, the Son as the Beloved, and the Spirit as the Love between them.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are united in love, and the greater we love, the closer we draw to Them. The goal of each life is to love as God loves. That doesn’t mean we won’t suffer, because at the center of the Trinity is the suffering and death of Christ. This suffering draws us deeper into the heart of Christ, which was pierced for you and for me.

God so loved us that He gave His only Son. Jesus loved and loves all of us, and tried to teach us to love, and in return, we killed Him. Because His love was infinite, His suffering was so much greater, but so was His victory. And in that victory of love over hate and death, there is hope for all of us, if only we can love as He did, without counting the cost.

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Spring lands differently in modern times. Our electric lights, insulated homes, glass windows, and push-button heat all take some of the bite out of winter. Even our long journeys overland are conducted in warmth and light.

Not so for our ancestors, particularly in the northern latitudes, who greeted the deliverance from the cold and dark of winter with celebrations second only to Christmas. Lent was the turning point, the embrace of suffering in a period when food may have been growing short, and the battle against cold and hunger had begun to wear on our forefather. Easter was the bursting forth of new life in Christ and the world at the cusp of spring. Pentecost marked an embrace of coming abundance.

In traditional practices, all of this converged upon May, the most natural month to devote to the Blessed Mother. Folk celebrations took place at all levels of society to greet spring with signs of purity, fertility, light, and the coming of new life.

As cultures converted to Christianity, the kernel of truth expressed in pre-Christian traditions bloomed into the fullness of Truth found in the Catholic faith. Garlands, maypoles, beating the bounds, casting clouts, going a-maying, bonfires, Morris dancing, giving out Muguet, crowning the Virgin, Whitsunday, and a diverse array of folklore all attached themselves to the month. Ancient customs of Floralia and Beltane took on new meanings through the flower of Mary and fire of the Spirit. Traditional May veneration of pagan mothers, such as Maia Maiestes, fell away with the revelation of the Theotokos.

Proving that it’s never too late to baptize a day, in 1955 Pope Pius XII snatched May 1st from the Godless Commies to make it the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, kicking off a month devoted to the Mother of God by remembering the humble earthly father who raised Him and taught Him his trade. Thus, the workers of the world are already united under the patronage of the Defender of Christ, Guardian of the Virgin, Patron of Artisans, Mirror of Patience, Terror of Demons, and Lumen Patiarcharum.

Newman and the Litany of Loreto

One of my favorite devotional books is the Ignatius Press edition of Newman’s Prayers, Verses, and Devotions. I like this version because it’s the most complete and comes closest to what Newman himself longed to finished, which was a “Year-Book of Devotions,” which would have included meditations for each day of the year.

Although it was never finished, he did complete the month May by writing 31 meditations upon titles found in the Litany of Loreto, grouped under the Immaculate Conception, the Annunciation, the Seven Sorrows, and the Assumption.

You can find the text at The Newman Reader. Here’s a sample:

The Litany Itself

The 31 meditations do not include all of the Marian invocations found in the Litany. Indeed, the precise form of what we commonly call the Litany of Loreto, also sometimes just called the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, has evolved over the years, and its origin is uncertain. Litanies date at least the 6th century, and possibly as early as the 3rd, with the Litany of the Saints being the first, and litanies of Mary evolving from those.

Eventually, the most popular form became associated with the Holy House at Loreto, a popular pilgrimage site in Italy which was believed to be the house of the Annunciation, mystically transported to Italy by angels. The text appears to be derived from a longer version dating at least to the 13th century. Pope Sixtus V formally approved and granted indulgences for the litany in 1587, with Pope Clement VIII reaffirming this approval in 1601.

The number of invocations in the Litany varies, and different popes have added new titles to emphasize particular qualities of the Blessed Mother. Leo XIII, for example, added Mother of Good Counsel, which long had been in use when the litany was prayed at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. John Paul II added Mother of the Church and Queen of Families. Francis added Mother of Mercy, Mother of Hope, and Solace of Migrants. With local adaptations, you may find anywhere from 50 to 70 invocations.

These call and response litanies were very popular because they were devotional, liturgical, catechetical, and could be easily be prayed by one literate leader and any number of people of who couldn’t read. Anyone who has prayed this kind of repetitive prayer knows that it can induce a profound sense of peace which is only partly psychological. The other part is pure grace, and if you give yourself over to it, and devote yourself to contemplating the mystery of the incarnation through the Blessed Mother, you’ll encounter that grace.

Litany of Loreto

Here is the current version found on the Vatican site, which has 54 titles plus the Kyrie, Angus Dei, etc. It is prayed with a single leader announcing the first part, and everyone responding with the part in bold. You’ll find that in practice it develops its own rhythm, and the leader should be attentive to maintaining that rhythm.

Lord have mercy.
Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy.
Lord have mercy.
Christ hear us.
Christ graciously hear us.

God, the Father of heaven,
have mercy on us.

God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
God the Holy Spirit,
Holy Trinity, one God,

Holy Mary,
pray for us.
Holy Mother of God,
Holy Virgin of virgins,
Mother of Christ,
Mother of the Church,
Mother of Mercy,Mother of divine grace,
Mother of Hope,
Mother most pure,
Mother most chaste,
Mother inviolate,
Mother undefiled,
Mother most amiable,
Mother most admirable,
Mother of good counsel,
Mother of our Creator,
Mother of our Saviour,
Virgin most prudent,
Virgin most venerable,
Virgin most renowned,
Virgin most powerful,
Virgin most merciful,
Virgin most faithful,
Mirror of justice,
Seat of wisdom,
Cause of our joy,
Spiritual vessel,
Vessel of honour,
Singular vessel of devotion,
Mystical rose,
Tower of David,
Tower of ivory,
House of gold,
Ark of the covenant,
Gate of heaven,
Morning star,
Health of the sick,
Refuge of sinners,
Solace of Migrants,
Comfort of the afflicted,
Help of Christians,
Queen of Angels,
Queen of Patriarchs,
Queen of Prophets,
Queen of Apostles,
Queen of Martyrs,
Queen of Confessors,
Queen of Virgins,
Queen of all Saints,
Queen conceived without original sin,
Queen assumed into heaven,
Queen of the most holy Rosary,
Queen of families,
Queen of peace.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
spare us, O Lord.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
graciously hear us, O Lord.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
have mercy on us.

Pray for us, O holy Mother of God.
That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray.
Grant, we beseech thee,
O Lord God,
that we, your servants,
may enjoy perpetual health of mind and body;
and by the glorious intercession of the Blessed Mary, ever Virgin,
may be delivered from present sorrow,
and obtain eternal joy.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

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A homily for the Third Sunday of Easter (A).

The readings we hear at mass from Lent to Easter are very carefully chosen. They build upon each other and follow a pattern. On Easter morning we get the empty tomb. Last week was Thomas in the upper room. Depending on the year, this Sunday is either the Road to Emmaus, the easter night appearance to the disciples, or the appearance in Galilee--all them representing Jesus making Himself known to people after the resurrection. Next week, on Good Shepherd Sunday, we move on to the final talks of Jesus, and then various teachings about the Holy Spirit, ending on the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

The whole season is a continual narrative created for a purpose, but what purpose?

What’s Jesus preparing His followers for then, and now?

All of it forms a path of teaching and revelation that gradually unveils Jesus--first, that He is risen; then, today, explaining that His passion and death had to be this way according to the scripture--that is, according to the Old Testament; and then each of the following Sundays He begins to teach a little more, telling His followers, and us, about the Good Shepherd and the Holy Spirit. And when does it all end? With the coming of that Spirit on Pentecost

This road to Emmaus is a central part of it because we’re on it right now. It never ends. It unfolds through all time and eternity, from a dusty track in ancient Judea, right down to the road you took here today. It is all one road. And we are walking it, together. That’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?

It couldn’t be an ordinary road travelled by ordinary people, because God walked on it and sanctified it. Jesus, his feet dusty in his sandals, traveling the roads of his day, is still traveling them. He’s just using our feet to do it.

The road is a familiar metaphor for human life, but here we have Jesus elevating it. It’s the nature of a road to curve, and the same can be said of life. The road I’ve travelled has had its share of potholes. ’ve been broken down in the weeds a few times. I kept trying to find my own way, and all I got was a lot of bad turns and dead ends. But however lost I was, I kept feeling God’s call to return to His road, until I finally was broken down and lost enough to listen.

Today Jesus meets us on the road in the form of two sad and confused travelers. In the tradition of the early church, these two men are the brother of Joseph and his son Simeon. That makes them the uncle and cousin of Jesus, according to tradition. If that is, in fact, Simeon, he will become the second bishop of Jerusalem after James is killed, and he too will be martyred, which gives their talk an added poignance.

As close as these men are to Jesus, they still don’t understand, and so the walk becomes a little catechesis. It repeats the core message of early preaching, the proclamation, called the kerygma. It has four parts, and we heard Peter preach them in the first reading is well. It names Jesus, it proclaims his mighty words and deeds, His crucifixion, and His resurrection. The preaching is accompanied by a call to repentance and examples of how all of this was foretold in the Old Testament.

So that’s what is happening in our Gospel today. We’re told it’s the first day of the week. Sunday. They are debating these rumors of resurrection. At that point, Jesus “draws near.” That’s important. On our own journey through life, when we turn our minds and hearts toward God, God draws near, and travels with us.

In the Bible, it’s not unusual for the Lord or His angels to appear in disguise or in some other form. This isn’t some kind of trick, but rather a way to meet us where we are on this journey. And what does Jesus do? He walks with them. He accompanies them. He uses the words of God to teach them. It is gradual, but it ends in a return to home and a meal.

And then we realize that this whole story has been something else as well. It’s been a little mass.

What happens? Jesus joins us, comes among us. The scripture are explained, as I’m doing right now.

Jesus says a prayer and breaks the bread. In a moment, Father, in the person of Christ which he receives through the sacrament of ordination by a successor of the apostles, will bless the bread and pray the prayers of institution.

He will break the bread, as Jesus did at Emmaus, while we recite the Lamb of God, the very words spoken by John the Baptist when recognized Jesus as the Messiah.

And what happens after Jesus blessed and broke the bread? He doesn’t disappear. That’s not what it says. It says “He vanished from their sight.”

Jesus, the man, is no longer at the table in a visible form. He doesn’t need to be. He’s there in the bread. It’s a eucharist, and Jesus is no longer visible to them as He will not be visible to us when we come up for communion. But He’s still there.

We’re not told the words of blessing Jesus uses in Emmaus, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was something like “This is my body...”

But that is not where the story ends. The men from Emmaus consume their Lord, and with their hearts burning within them, they set out at once and go all the way back to Jerusalem to share the good news of their experience of the eucharist.

On this road to Emmaus, we have a liturgy of the word, and a liturgy of the eucharist, but that’s not where it ends. The men don’t just have some bread, kick off their sandals and watch the Eagles game.

What do they do? They rush to share the good news. That’s what this story calls us to do. To walk with Jesus, Who is here, right now; to learn from His word; and then take and eat and get back on the road to share the good news of Easter: He is risen.

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A prophecy of Zechariah offers a powerful point of meditation here at the sorrowful heart of the Triduum. The Book of Zechariah can be difficult in places, partly due to some obscure language, but also because there are two distinct textual traditions. Chapters 1-8 are the work of the prophet Zechariah himself, written before the inauguration of the Second Temple, possibly around the year 520BC. These initial chapters contain a sequence of visions that are explained to Zechariah by an angel in a series of questions and answers.

Chapters 9-14 are of a very different style and are divided roughly into two oracles marked at the beginnings of chapters 9 and 12. These portions were perhaps written about a hundred years later, possibly by more than one author, sometimes called Second Zechariah.

An Outpouring of the Holy Spirit

It’s important to understand the distinct authorship of these two halves in order to really grasp the message at the heart of the text. There is an optimism in the first part (chapters 1-8), perhaps inspired by the construction of the Second Temple. That tone shifts for the remainder of the book, with a condemnation of the leadership of Jerusalem—the worthless shepherds of chapter 11—and the promise of a messiah, who comes “humble and riding on a donkey.” (Zech. 9:9)

As the second oracle begins, God promises that he will intervene in a battle to deliver Israel. And then we have the enigmatic line:

“And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that, when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.” (Zech. 12:10)

This line is difficult to translate correctly. It may read, as above, “look on him whom they have pierced”, or it may read “look on me whom they have pierced.”

Too many modern exegetes seem desperate to wave away the prophetic nature of this passage, which is a peculiar approach for a prophetic text, particularly when it’s quite clearly designated as “An Oracle” in the original. St. John had no such trouble, and refers to this passage almost immediately after the death of Christ (John 19:37).1

But there is something more to this text beyond the vivid image of a beloved Son pierced and killed by his foes. At the beginning of chapter 12, God is identified as the one “who formed the spirit of man within him.” (Zech. 12:1) Ten lines later, God promises to “pour out … a spirit of compassion and supplication.” (12:10)

Upon whom does he promise to pour this spirit? “The house of David” and “the inhabitants of Jerusalem.”

The spirit will be poured not just upon the Davidic lineage, but upon all whom God is addressing. This new outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which will follow the piercing of the one who is mourned like an “only child” and the “first born,” will provide a spirit of “compassion and supplication.” The “compassion” helps those touched by the spirit to repent of their sins, while the “supplication” refers to the people turning to God in humility.

A Baptism of Blood and Water

After a passage indicating how widespread shall be the mourning for the pierced one (Zech. 11-14), there is a final passage that reaffirms the promise of God:

“On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness.” (Zech. 13:1)

This is the fountain opened from the side of Christ, which poured forth blood and water. (John 19:34) John tells us that Jesus

“is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is the truth. There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree.” (1 John 5:6-8)

Thus, the water and the blood that poured from the pierced one is the “fountain” that purifies us from “sin and uncleanness.”

As we near the end of Lent, we cannot help but be struck by the words of Zechariah, who speaks of a king who will come to us, “triumphant and victorious,” “humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt the foal of a donkey” (Zech. 9:9) with its obvious echos of Palm Sunday? Zechariah’s condemnation of the leadership in Jerusalem makes the passage doubly evocative.

The image of the pierced one is so evocative that it’s easy to be struck by the prophecy and miss the deeper meaning. A righteous shepherd is killed, and his death is a moment of turning for all the people. Death wasn’t hidden away in the ancient world, as it so often is today. Brutal execution was a public event. Compassion was in short supply. Yet the death of this man—so enigmatically described by the prophet—changes the hearts of the people. It becomes to them like the death of a beloved son.

This does not happen by any action of the people. It is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that softens their hearts of stone, turning them away from worthless shepherds and towards God in a new attitude of penitence.

Zechariah thus suggests a small foretaste of our own Lenten journey. Our gaze is drawn to the Messiah. We meditate upon his suffering, reenacting his passion in our devotions and our liturgy. With hearts newly opened by the grace of God, we experience an outpouring of mercy and compassion, and become worthy to stand in the cleansing fountain of the water, the blood, and the Spirit.

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My apologies for the gap in posting. As you will see below, this has been a difficult month for my family as we lost my mother-in-law. I plan to return to a regular schedule of weekly posts.

This weekend, I preached on the resurrection of Lazarus. I am in consolation ministry, and have spent a lot of time serving in hospitals, so the subject of suffering, loss, and grief are a constant theme for me, even when they don't strike so close to home.

I've known Mom since I'm 19 and I'm 57 now, so she has been a major presence for most of my life. She gave endlessly, always making sure everyone was remembered and included and loved. She was a woman of faith, even (perhaps especially) when that faith was sorely tested by trials.

My wife was with her at the last and prayed by her side after she passed. This now means that my wife was the only person present as both of my parents and both of her parents died. I am certain that the dying often “choose” when to let go, and both of my parents waited for me to leave and for her to be alone with them before they let go. For a very long time, I was upset about that. Now that it has happened four times, I can see divine Providence at work even when I do not fully understand it. This is a strange grace for her to have been given, but I do know that she is a person of immense peace and consolation, and her presence was a blessing.

The following homily was delivered over the weekend of March 22, the Fifth Sunday of Lent in Cycle A, at St Mary of the Lakes Church in Medford, New Jersey.

A few days ago we laid my mother-in-law to rest after a long illness, so suffering, death, grief, and resurrection are very much on my mind. I’ve read this gospel at funerals many times, but it landed differently as I studied it this week. Let me share some of the things that occurred to me.

If you wonder where some Jews of Jesus’s time got this idea of resurrection, our first reading offers an answer. Ezekiel is the prophet of resurrection–the prophet of a world made new by the hand of God.

“I will open your graves and have you rise from them”

Why?

“So you shall know I am the Lord.”

This is the promise of God, and we often forget that part when we talk about heaven. Heaven is the perfect bliss of being in the presence of God, but we usually imagine it without our bodies. Only our souls. That’s partly true, but it is not the full and final promise of Christ. Our promise is resurrection. The empty tombs of Lazarus and Jesus are a foretaste of what is in store for all of us.

We are made of dust and that dust will be unmade, until God breathes it to life again

Our idea of heaven is incomplete until it includes the resurrection of the body. And that’s what Jesus shows us in this miracle today: an anticipation of what’s to come.

Let’s look at what happens in this remarkable scene.

Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are Jesus’s close friends. Lazarus is sick. They know that Jesus is nearby and can heal him, but he does not come. His apostles urge him to do something, but he delays. He tells them this illness will not be the end of the story of Lazarus. They don’t understand.

Jesus allows Lazarus, his friend, to die. He allows Mary and Martha to suffer a shattering loss.

They call for Jesus to come and mourn his friend, yet he waits four more days. You need to understand the distances we’re talking about. To reach Bethany, Jesus would walk out Jerusalem’s eastern gate, down through the Kidron Valley, and up the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives: about two miles. Maybe a 30 or 40 minutes. Less than the distance from where we’re sitting right now, to our school.

That changes how you imagine the scene a bit, doesn’t it? It explains why people are so anxious, and when he arrives, why they are heartsick, even angry.

But Jesus had told them that Lazarus is not dead, only sleeping. This is true of all those who die. Elizabeth’s mom, who we laid to rest on Wednesday, only sleeps. Her dad, my parents, my friends, my family, all those I’ve seen go down into the grave. They are gone from us. We will see them no more in this world. But they only sleep.

And yet even to those know that, and believe it in our hearts, it can be very little comfort, for the ones we love are no longer here. Our sorrow is real. It can be devastating.

And this should give us a new understanding of exactly what Jesus is feeling when we come to the shortest sentence in the entire Bible.

Jesus wept.

Why would he weep when he knew Lazarus would rise?

He wept for the grief of his friends. Grief, let us be clear, that he allowed to happen, so something greater could come of it.

He waited so there would be no question that Lazarus was dead. “Lord, there will be a stench” is a hard line. Though her faith is great, Martha is angry. It wasn’t easy being friends with Jesus sometimes.

Jesus wept for her, and for all of us. In that moment, he bore the full weight of his knowledge of all things, all people, all death, all of us who grieve. Jesus was a man. He was also God. He knew all our suffering from the moment the first man ever born was struck down by his own brother, until the end of the world. He felt Eve’s pain when she buried her son. He felt my family’s pain just this week. He feels yours.

But he had something else to offer in that moment. He was the one who came into the world to defeat death. He allowed this pain of his friends to continue for a little while, so that a greater glory could be revealed.

Now let’s expand that scene from one person’s death, to everyone. Let’s expand that grief from two women, to all of us who have ever loved and lost and grieved. Let’s increase those four days, while they waited for some word of comfort from the Lord and the Lord remained silent, to all of us who listen for the voice of God to comfort us in our distress. That silence–God’s silence–is one of the hardest things to live with.

Now imagine their joy. Imagine the glory that erupted from that tomb when Lazarus shook off his shroud and answered the call of God’s voice to rise.

It’s all the history of human suffering and grief in miniature. It’s one small scene, that points to a vast truth. It’s a truth so huge we can’t get it in our heads, so Jesus made it small enough for us to understand. One man. His sisters. A few villagers. And a world turned upside down.

Because what happened in Bethany on a small scale is what will happen on an unimaginable scale to all those who die in the love of the Lord.

Death doesn’t have the last word. The pain of loss we feel will make the joy so much greater when the Lord bends down to kiss away all of our tears. And the glory displayed by Jesus that day for a handful of people, will explode across the universe as all the dead are summoned to the final judgment. That is the promise of resurrection, of the new heaven and the new earth, when the voice of the Lord will call us to come forth, and live again.

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Weird Catholic

The unusual side of Church history

By Deacon Tom

Homily for the First Sunday in Lent (A).

Satan is real.

There’s a famous quote from the poet Charles Baudelaire: “The devil’s greatest trick is convincing you he doesn’t exist.”

When I was younger, I didn’t believe Satan existed. The world had assured me that this was just an idea from a simpler time–a metaphor for the evil in our hearts.

I know better now.

It is impossible for a devout Christian to reject the reality of Satan. No one in the Bible mentions Satan more times than our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. No one. In the gospels, Jesus makes over two dozen references to the devil. The temptation in the wilderness appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It’s a key moment from the life of our Lord, and it is not a metaphor.

Today, on this First Sunday of Lent, the temptation of Jesus is paired with the temptation of Adam and Eve. There’s a reason for this. The temptation proves the faithfulness of Jesus to the will of the father, in contrast to Adam, who followed his own will. Jesus becomes a second Adam, taking on humanity to give us another chance to get it right.

God does not need to be tested: if we are true to Him, He will be true to us.

Jesus is tempted with three things, and this threefold temptation is found throughout the Bible. The Gospel of John calls it the desire of the flesh, desire of the eyes, and pride. It’s a love of the things of the world above God.

Satan appeals to all three to tempt Adam and Eve when he says the fruit is good for food, which is a desire of the flesh; pleasing to the eyes, which makes them greedy; and will give them wisdom, which appeals to their pride.

When Satan takes another try at temptation with Jesus, the new Adam, he appeals to the same things all over again. He urges Jesus three times to use his divine power to end the suffering of his time in the desert.

First, he says turn these stones into bread. That’s the desire of the flesh, because Jesus was certainly hungry after 40 days of fasting. I was hungry on Wednesday after 40 minutes of fasting. Bread sustains the body, but the word of God, which is Jesus Himself, who is also bread!, gives us true life.

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Second, he tells Jesus to throw himself from the Temple to display His power and God’s love for Him, which is an appeal to pride. God does not need to be tested: if we are true to Him, He will be true to us.

Finally, he offers him the kingdoms of the world and their wealth, which appeals to greed: the desire of the eyes. All Jesus has to do, is worship a false idol. We’re asked to worship false idols every day: money, celebrity, technology, power. But God alone is worthy of our worship.

How does Jesus defeat Satan? This is very important, because it’s how we defeat him. We don’t do it on our own and neither did Jesus. He showed us the way by quoting the words of God–by trusting in God–by faith. Those are your weapons as well. Faith, scripture, and trust in the Lord will defeat the devil and his temptations every time.

Temptation is everywhere. The world is a sea of temptation that tries to draw our gaze away from the good, the true, and the beautiful—and towards the wicked, the false, and the ugly.

Temptations are lies. Ridiculous lies, and their author is Satan.

He lies because that’s all he can do. It’s the devil’s one superpower, but it’s a big one because he gets in your head and tells you things and these things can seem true. He tells those who are depressed that they will never be happy. He tells those with addiction that they will never be free. He tells those who are abused that they deserve it. He tells the weak that they will never be strong and the lonely that they aren’t worth loving. He tells those who despair that there is no hope.

And he tells each of us the worst lie of all, the one he uses over and over again: that our sins can never be forgiven—that no matter how much we work or change or repent, our past will always be a stain on our souls. That lie is right from the very pit of hell.

We were bought for a price. That price was paid on the cross. If we repent, if we amend our life, if we let God’s boundless love heal us through the sacrament of confession, then all our sins, be they dark as night, are washed away in the blood of the lamb, and we are made a new creation.

Every time you walk from that confessional and perform your penance, the devil is defeated. And there’s no better way to observe Lent than by defeating the devil.

God does not throw our sins in our faces after they have been absolved. God forgives. How many times have we been happy and at peace, and something from our past, something we’ve already resolved, bubbles to the surface of our minds and makes us feel guilt or shame or hopelessness?

Sometimes that voice may our conscience nudging us to act, to reconcile, to do better. But if we’ve done all that, and we still hear that voice telling us we’re worthless, that’s not God. That’s the devil. Tell him you see him. Tell you’re not fooled by his lies. And then tell him to go back where he came from.

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This is part of an occasional series of meditations on Psalm 103.

If God is love and God is unchangeable, how does He experience anger?

Let’s make the question a little easier by considering God’s regret, as in 1 Samual 15:11, where he says “I regret making Saul king.” Regret would imply that God had no foreknowledge of Saul’s failure, but of course God’s foreknowledge is not merely perfect, it’s not even “fore” knowledge since he experiences neither past nor future as we do, but rather transcends time. God thus experiences anger as he does regret, in an ineffable way that is not like human emotions.

There is no contradiction in God. Anger or hatred is not the opposite of love. Indifference is the opposite of love. Anger and hatred are examples of wounded love. God’s essence, of course, cannot be wounded, but his relationship to man certainly can.

This is expressed most profoundly, of course, in the incarnation, passion, and death of Christ, where in kenosis (self-emptying) God sets aside his glory and walks with us, allowing himself to be wounded in a way unique to the Son. God Himself isn’t wounded in His essence, but he enters into our woundedness and suffering in radical solidarity.

Because that passion cannot be experience in an essential way by God, the suffering is transformed, exploded, redefined. It becomes redemption--an act of pure redemptive love, inflicted upon sanctified flesh, and experienced by God a way that cannot be understood by reason alone.

God is not impersonal. God is truly present to each of us, interior intimo meo (closer than our most intimate being). He cannot be close to us in any meaningful way without also experiencing what we experience, but He experiences it in a way particular to His divinity. God expresses Himself in creation through the action of the Word, and loves that creation through the Holy Spirit.

Returning to anger, then, we understand it, to quote Augustine, not “as any disturbance in his mind, but as the power by which he most justly punishes.” It is a divine mechanism of interaction with creation. 1

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Does God Feel Anger?

The church fathers took two approaches to God’s anger: subjective and objective. In the subjective approach, endorsed by Origin, Cassian, and Clement of Alexandria, God did not “feel” angry but mankind experienced the consequences of His justice as anger. The language is thus metaphorical.

Augustine, on the other hand, suggests that God feels anger but it is not akin to our anger. God’s impassibility does not mean God has no “emotions,” only that he controls them. He is angry without being upset.2

Tertullian paired anger with love, considering them different expressions of a single divine disposition. God is love, and anger flows out of love when God or His creation is wrong. This love becomes a divine fire enflaming the just but consuming the unjust. Divine anger, in this case, doesn’t contradict love, but demonstrates that God is not indifferent to evil.

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Our Anger

That is God’s anger, but what about our own? I have seen people consumed with rage over injustice in a way that extinguishes love. Unlike God, we are not pure, and thus our anger, like our love, can be corrupted. We see this in James 1:19-20:

Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

It’s easy for the notion that human anger against injustice is righteous to veer into dangerous territory, as a brief glance at the world will amply demonstrate. Although Aquinas, Augustine, and others rejected the Stoic idea that anger is intrinsically evil (they followed Aristotle in considering it morally neutral), it is, like fire, a good servant and a dangerous master.

Anger is a rational response to injustice, but it has to be the servant of reason. Too often it veers into contumely (insult), derision, and “clamor,” all things condemned by Aquinas. Gregory the Great listed the offspring of anger--strifes, swelling of mind, insults, clamor, indignation, blasphemies--which are sins that emerge when we yield to even righteous anger without the benefit of charity and reason. Much of our current discourse, and far too much in Catholic spaces, is characterized by people operating under the illusion that they are engaged in righteous anger while they are merely venting their rage under the cover of prophetic truth-telling.

God’s anger is perfect because God is perfect. The anger of the prophets is righteous because they are prophets. Our own prophetic gifts (a grace of baptism) are more limited, and expressing them more fraught. We must remember that we are neither God nor Jeremiah nor even Catherine of Siena.

Even a great saint like Jerome sinned in his anger, and we are no Jeromes. In tradition, St. Jerome is often depicted with a stone used to hit himself in order to “tame his tongue” and curb his angry outbursts. Sometimes he failed. Sometimes we’ll fail. Anger seeking justice is a good. Anger that descends into hate is not. In understanding God’s anger, maybe we can better understand our own.

If that doesn’t work, we can always imitate Jerome and start carrying around a rock.

Prayer

Lord, may we never stir you to anger by our words or actions, and my our own anger always be led by reason and tempered by charity.

Meditation

Who or what angers us and why? Does God share that anger or is it merely our own hatred of something? Before expressing it, do we pause and pray for charity, or merely give in to outbursts? We can never go wrong by following the advice of James: be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger.

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The Wood of the Cross

When Adam was dying at the age of 900, he sent Eve and their son Seth back to Eden to beg the angel guarding the entrance for the oil of mercy to anoint him in his illness. St. Michael appeared to them, saying it was time for Adam to die, and the oil could not be obtained until the crucifixion. Ins…

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7 months ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Deacon Tom

Last week, I wrote about the imprecatory Psalms and passages, which were cut from the revised Liturgy of the Hours without approval of the committee in charge. Louis Bouyer recounted how Cardinal Bugnini achieved his wishes by simply lying to both sides, telling the pope the council fathers wanted something, and the council fathers that the pope wanted it. As he writes in his autobiography (emphasis added):

On several occasions, whether the scuttling of the liturgy of the dead or even that incredible enterprise to expurgate the Psalms for use in the Divine Office, Bugnini ran into an opposition that was not only massive but also, one might say, close to unanimous. In such cases, he didn’t hesitate to say: “But the Pope wills it!” After that, of course, there was no question of discussing the matter any further.1

These Psalms, however, have a rich history of devotional and homiletic use, with figures from Jerome and Augustine to Bonhoeffer defending them. Today, I want to look more closely at Psalm 58 (57 in the Vulgate numbering), and Bonhoffer is as good a way to start as any. He preached a lengthy homily on Psalm 58, and once wrote

Only one who is innocent can pray this psalm. So David cannot pray it. Only David taking upon himself the innocence of Christ can pray it … If we want to turn away from this psalm we have not understood the true nature of evil and violence

Vengeance psalms are fulfilled in the crucified Lord.2

How Bad Are These Psalms?

Let’s look at Psalm 58 as it would appear in the Grail translation if was used in the modern breviary.

Do you truly speak justice, you who hold divine power?
Do you mete out fair judgment to the sons of men?
No, in your hearts you devise injustice;
your hands deal out violence to the land.

In their wickedness they have gone stray from their birth:
they wandered among snakes as soon as they were born.
Their venom is like the venom of the snake;
they are heedless as the adder that turns a deaf ear
lest it should catch the snake-charmer’s voice,
the voice of the skillful dealer in spells.

O God, break the teeth in their mouths,
tear out the fangs of these wild beasts, O Lord!
Let them vanish like water that runs away:
let them wither like grass that is trodden underfoot:
let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime:
like a woman’s miscarriage that never sees the sun.

Before they put forth thorns, like a bramble,
let them be swept away, green wood or dry!
The just shall rejoice at the sight of vengeance;
they shall bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.
‘Truly,’ men shall say, ‘the just are rewarded.
Truly there is a God who does justice on earth.’

We’ll begin with what some find objectionable:

• God’s hands deal out violence

• The wicked have gone astray among the snakes

• They are venomous

• A plea to break the teeth of the wicked and tear out their fangs

• Let them wither like grass and be trodden underfoot

• Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime

• Let them die like a miscarried child

• Let them be swept away

• The just will rejoice in God’s vengeance;

• They shall bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.

All of those are strong images, but they all have one thing in common: they are directed at those who defy God and his justice. They are speaking of the wicked.

The Place of Cursing

But is it right to curse the wicked? Doesn’t Jesus command us forgive them?

One does not cancel out the other. We may offer forgiveness, but those who offend God are God’s to forgive. St. Thomas Aquinas wrestles with cursing in the Summa (STh., II-II q.76) as well as his partial Commentary on Psalms, where he sees them not as hatred or as magic spells, but rather as an expression of divine justice. The Psalms which curse are not a wish of the Psalmist, but rather a desire for justice, a correction of the sinner, and a prophecy of the fate of the wicked.

When the Psalmist utters these phrases, he is not seeking revenge, but that the will of God be manifested, using bold rhetorical figures and images that shock the conscience. Physical trials and punishments are also considered medicinal, punishing the wicked so they may be aware of God’s displeasure and change their ways. This is why Aquinas distinguishes between maledictio (cursing as a vice) and imprecatio (a prayer for justice). For him, the key is always the order of charity.

Furthermore, it is often the sin rather than the sinner which is cursed, for even demons, according to Thomas, should not be cursed according to their nature, which is good, but instead according to their guilt. For even the devil’s “nature indeed is good and is from God nor is it lawful to curse [his nature]. On the other hand his guilt is deserving of being cursed.”

Thomas therefore allows for three “modes” of cursing:

• Prophetic: The Psalmist is predicting a future reality, not wishing for it.

• Justice: The desire is for the restoration of right order, not personal vengeance.

• Charity: The “curse” is actually a prayer for a “useful” punishment that might lead the sinner to repent.

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The Interpretive Tradition

These modes provide one interpretive key to the imprecatory Psalms, but can they be fruitfully prayed by the faithful today? Certainly, all of these modes commend themselves to those who see sin and injustice in the world and seek strong Biblical images to pray for its end. We are talking, after all, about the word of God, which is always good.

We should always recall the traditional Augustinian method of reading them as the words of Christ Himself. If we have trouble imaging Jesus calling for the teeth of the wicked to be broken, then we’ve failed in two respects: 1) understanding the rich metaphorical and imagistic language of Hebrew prayer, and 2) recalling the forceful personality of the Son of God who, Himself, called men vipers to their faces. This diminishes the Lord to a benign, therapeutic “My Pal Jesus,” rendering Him a harmless figure rather than the eternal Word, second Person of the Trinity and Creator of all that was made. Aslan, after all, is not a tame lion.

Some examples of how Church Fathers have used Psalm 58:

• Augustine, in his commentary of the Psalms, likens the “deaf adder” to those who close their ears to the gospel, recalling the lore of snakes found in the Physiologus, which claimed that a snake would avoid the power of snake-charmers by placing one ear to the ground and stopping the other with its tail. (Snakes do not, however, have ears to stop.) In this way to people resist hearing the Word.

• Augustine again: “As it is written, The just shall wash his hands in the blood of the wicked, that is, he shall be cleansed from evil works by the fear of God when he sees the punishment of sinners. That God shows his wrath in bearing with vessels of wrath avails to set a useful example to others.”

• And once more, Augustine on the melting snail (“wax” in his version): Sinners melt away “through their inordinate cravings. Evil craving is a burning force, even a fire. Now if fire consumes a garment, will adulterous lust not consume the soul?”

• St. Jerome, in Against Rufinus, says that we “wash our feet in the blood of the sinner” when we learn from the destruction of the wicked to fear God. We rejoice not in the suffering of others, but in the restoration of divine will.

• St. Robert Bellarmine, in his Commentary on Psalms, says “break their teeth” is a metaphorical prayer, asking God to strip the wicked of their power to hurt the innocent.

• St. Gregory Nazianzus writes in Oration 2: “Like the snake that stops its ears, we are obstinate in refusing to hear the voice of the charmer and be treated with the medicines of wisdom, by which spiritual sickness is healed.”

• St. John Chrysostom in Homilies on Philemon: “Not rejoicing on account of (vengeance), God forbid, but fearing that he might suffer the same things, he will render his own life more pure. This then is a mark of God’s great care.

• Cassiodorus, is Explanations of the Psalms: “By [miscarriage] are meant people who have followed beliefs opposed to the Church, and who do not venerate with loving devotion her sacred womb. They are the ones who have spoken false things, for they have gone astray from her holy traditions.”

• Theodoret of Cyrus: “Now, he washes his hands, not for having soiled and besmirched them with blood, but to show he is innocent and has no association with the other’s wickedness; he is not, in fact, washing them in blood, as some suggested, but washing them of blood, for the reason of having nothing in common with him.”

The exegetical history of this Psalm is quite extensive, but this will serve as a sample of how it has been read. Bonhoeffer’s belief that only the just man can pray this Psalm means–and this is vitally important–that Christ prays it for us, and we pray it only with Him. Only He is fit for calling down this anger, and so we pray this with and through Him, transforming us and the words in the process.

How We May Use It

The effect of these words is not to stoke anger and vengeance, but to deliver us from it, to draw it, “like poison from a wound,” to continue the serpentine analogy. This is what Bonhoeffer means when he says that “Vengeance psalms are fulfilled in the crucified Lord,” Who alone is just and Who alone is fitted to mete out vengeance. Punishment is not in the hands of man, but is placed solely in the hands of God.

All of these images can be allegorized to great effect. The evils we call to be crushed can be cancer, trauma, abuse, poverty, hungry, depression, anxiety, mental illness, and all the evil that swarm about us.

The snakes and lions are our own sins and vices, the maladies afflict us and the dangers that surround us. The teeth we ask to be shattered can silence the devil, or drive off the whispers of doubt and anxiety. They can be seen as those who oppress and harm, as the enemies of God and His faithful.

The striking image of the dissolving snail recalls an ancient notion that snails “dissolved” because they left their essence behind in a slimy trail, essentially using themselves up to no purpose. It’s a meditation on the passing nature of this world, and of the transience of the wicked, who consume themselves, but also a condemnation of ourselves as we consume the lives of others or even our own lives. We are called not leave our own trail of slime behind as we travel through the world.

All the wrongs done to us and all the evils we suffer, within and without, can be turned over to a just God to deal with in His way, with the language of the Psalm providing a way to express our grief, suffering, or anger while also entrusting them to His will and His justice. Finally, of course, it is useful as a Christological hymn prayed in solidarity with crucified Christ, with the final understanding that Truly there is a God who is judge on earth.

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”The Catholic Church has prayed the great Psalter
in its entirety for centuries;
thus, there is no reason
why it should be changed now.”

Abbot Reetz, OSB, Second Vatican Council

I’ve been wanting to write about the imprecatory Psalms for a while now, since I find them powerful and rich, and believe their elimination from Psalter has deprived us of a regular encounter with weapons of spiritual warfare. These Psalms, known for their violent imagery and rhetoric of cursing, are supposedly to sit uneasily on modern ears, but modern man is, like our forebears, perfectly capable of allegorizing these passages with profound spiritual benefits.

Different things annoy me about the post-Conciliar age than annoy others. I think the Novus Ordo is fine, for the most part. I consider myself a rock-ribbed Ratzingerian in things theological, which places me in the Communio camp. I’m glad to see the retreat of Neoscholasticism and Manualism. I like the revised lectionary, although I consider the disruption of continuity a loss. The documents of the Council have never struck me as problematic, and in many cases are quite good.

The problems were almost totally in the implementation. Some decisions of the Council were simply ignored, others were twisted beyond recognition. The insanity that gripped the church in the Council’s wake required a counter-revolution that was, sadly, interrupted for 12 years in the most chaotic way possible.

Two of my personal bugbears are the revision of the calendar and the Divine Office. I’ve written about the calendar before and will again since it’s a low-level obsession of mine, and my deep devotion to the Office in general, and the Psalter in particular, are a recurring theme in these pages.

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2 years ago · 30 likes · 4 comments · Deacon Tom

My thoughts about the Liturgy of the Hours is colored by many things. I was already deeply familiar with the contemporary version before I saw what was lost, so its rhythms and cadences were etched in my spirit by the time I grew more discerning. I am a Benedictine Oblate in part because of the Office, and it is the devotion that speaks to me most directly, and provides the words for me to speak to God. As ordained clergy, I am bound under penalty of mortal sin to pray it daily.

I have tried many different versions of the Office. (I believe I have, in fact, tried literally all of them at some point.) Some of them are simply wretched. At a certain retreat house, I have to pray a Psalter with “gender-inclusive language” and I get the same twitch in my eye that I do when I hear drums at mass. The greatest of them is the Benedictine Monastic Diurnal, but the daily demands of a one-week Psalter are out of reach from a 58-year-old married man who still has to work, as well as minister to others. The Ordinariate’s Divine Office is magnificent in many ways, but its deviance from traditional Benedictine ordering is problematic.

Suppressed Psalms

Perhaps nothing about liturgical reform, other than the elimination of Ember Days and Pre-Lent, angers me more than the suppression of Psalms and portions of Psalms for their imprecatory character. It’s infantilizing. It’s disrupting to the rhythms of the Psalter. It’s unhistorical. It removes key tools for the battle against sin and evil. And it wasn’t supposed to happen.

The eliminated Psalms are 58, 83, and 109, with 78, 105, and 106 limited to Lent and Advent and 19 other cuts. This is 5% of the total book of Psalms, the very voice of the Christ in the Old Testament according to Augustine, deleted from routine patterns worship.

And they are not coming back. There has been nothing to suggest the issue was revisited for the new LotH, and I doubt the modern church has the stomach for a debate that would appear esoteric and misguided to many. That leaves the laity to rectify the loss through personal, private devotion.

Who and Why?

Although Paul VI had final authority, the architect of this fiasco was Annibelle Bugnini, who wrote in The Reform of the Liturgy 1948–1975:

“A certain number of psalms and verses were omitted... because they were considered to be too harsh for the modern spirit... the faithful would find it difficult to pray these psalms as their own prayer.”

Furthermore, the General Instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours (131) says:

“Three psalms (58, 83, and 109) have been omitted from the psalter cycle because of their psychological difficulty, even though the imprecatory psalms are used in New Testament interpretation... In the same way, some verses have been omitted from certain psalms... to avoid the difficulties that can arise from their psychological impact.”

The sub-committee tasked with arranging the Psalms (Coetus XI) wanted to keep the Psalter intact but were overruled. (Much synodality!) In October 1963, during the Council debates, some fathers (such as Cardinal Ruffini) wanted them gone immediately.

“In the recitation of the Divine Office, especially if it is done in the vernacular or by the people—at least by nuns and the laity—I think that some psalms should be omitted: namely those which are called ‘imprecatory’. For there is no one who does not see how sharply they can pierce souls... their expressions represent the very imperfect revelation of the Old Testament and reflect the very imperfect morality of that time... they are less suitable in our day for fostering and expressing the sublime effects of charity.”

Note the patronizing attitude toward “nuns and laity.”

Some council fathers, such as Cardinal Melendro, wanted to cut as much as half of the Psalter.

However, others like Abbot Benedikt Reetz, OSB (Archabbot of Beuron Abbey), pushed back. Speaking for the Benedictine tradition, Reetz argued that the Psalter is an organic whole. He believed that the difficulty of certain psalms was not a reason to delete them, but a reason to better educate the clergy and laity in allegoresis (the spiritual interpretation of the text. His remarks are worth repeating here in full:

Regarding n. 69, p. 186 (On the Psalms). St. Benedict gave the Divine Office, which he names the Opus Dei, to the monks he enjoined it upon, writing: “Let nothing be preferred to the Work of God” (Rule, Ch. 43). The Divine Office, both in the Roman Breviary and in the Monastic Breviary, for the most part contains the Psalms, which were so arranged by the Patriarch of Monks himself that the entire Psalter is chanted once a week. St. Benedict writes in chapter 18: “...so that every week the psalter is sung in its integrity to the number of 150 psalms”.

I see no reason at all why one or another Psalm should be excluded from the Divine Office on account of “execrations and imprecations,” as was proposed in the general congregation last Wednesday by His Eminence Lord Cardinal Ruffini. The Most Eminent Lord will certainly not be indignant with me if I dare to defend the contrary opinion, with all the reverence that is due.

The entire Psalter belongs to the treasury of Sacred Scripture, and we believe it to be inspired even in those parts which are not fully understood by us on account of the fragility and weakness of our intellect and the insufficiency of human expression. Who can claim for himself the right to exclude certain Psalms from the Divine Office, and what will be the criterion for this exclusion? Everyone will have his own ideas, and what pleases one will not please another at all; therefore, the entire Psalter must be retained in its integrity in the Divine Office.

Furthermore—and I shall not cease saying this—Christ himself, the Head of the Body of the Church, prays with us and in us, and he perfectly understands all the senses of Scripture: the literal and allegorical sense, the typical and anagogical sense.

The Catholic Church for nearly twenty centuries has sung the 150 psalms in their integrity, and there is no reason why, in the twentieth century, it should turn away from this tradition.

Reetz was opposed by Fr. Mariano Oscoz, Prior General of the Camaldolese Hermits:

“Regarding n. 69, concerning the Psalms: It is proposed that the psalms be distributed over a longer period of time. This we strongly approve. But, in my judgment, this is not enough. For it is necessary that in this distribution some Psalms, or at least some verses of the Psalms, which are called imprecatory, be entirely struck out. For these psalms, full of the spirit of vengeance, do not seem to be in conformity with the evangelical spirit, and they create a great difficulty for those who must recite them, especially for nuns and lay brothers, who are not always able to attribute a spiritual sense to these words. So that the office may truly be a ‘sacrifice of praise,’ it is necessary that the mind agree with the voice, which can hardly happen when words are brought forth that seem contrary to Christian charity.”

Again we see the patronizing “nuns and laity” argument. They’re talking about the word of God, preached and studied and chanted for centuries without difficulty, but this new “evangelical spirit” means the People of God (such a common refrain in the Council) must be protected from it? It’s offensive. There are good reasons to retain the Psalter in its fullness, and fear of upsetting nuns and the laity is a rotten excuse for censoring the scripture.

Since this is starting to run long, I will continue next week with a look at Psalm 58.

Buy me a coffee.

Note: Quotes from the Council come from the Acta Synodalia, Volume I, Periodus I, Pars II. I did machine translations into English and then proofed them against the original. My Latin is trash, so cat-vet emperor.

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7 months ago · 12 likes · 8 comments · Deacon Tom

A homily for the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Why are you here today? Why am I? Why did we come to church in this freezing weather with an impending ice storm?

We each have a different answer to that question. We may do it from deep belief or just from habit, but I can promise you one thing: it is the movement of the Holy Spirit that calls you, as surely as Jesus calls his apostles in today’s gospel. You were called here. Each of you was called here.

Why do we answer that call? Why do we persist in a world that’s losing faith, in which so many people tell us that belief is foolish, that there is no God or that you can love him just fine by staying home. Why do we come when even the church has failed and disappointed us at times?

Let’s look at our readings today and see if they provide an answer.

First, we have this mysterious mention of Zebulun and Naphtali today: twice! In both the Old Testament and the Gospel. That should tells us that this is important, but why?

Well, who were they? They were two tribes of Israel, and their territory was located in Galilee. And Jesus goes to that region to begin his ministry.

About 700 years before Jesus did this, the Babylonians conquered Israel. And they shipped the Jews off to captivity. And the first two tribes shipped off were: Zebulun and Naphtali.

So when the Prophet Isaiah names them and makes them a promise, they are already in bondage to a foreign nation. And what does Isaiah promise: that the wooden pole, the yoke of servitude, placed on their shoulders will be broken, and the rod of their taskmasters shattered. They will be lifted up from their darkness. They will experience abundance and joy.

And then we come to this beautiful prophecy: “The people who dwelt in darkness shall see a great light.”

We understand that as a promise of the messiah. Of Jesus. The light of the world.

And so Jesus began his ministry there, where those first people were taken into darkness. He did it as a sign that he was restoring the covenant. He was reversing the tragic history of Israel, and at the same time fulfilling one of the prophesies of the messiah.

Later, Isaiah tells of the birth of a new king who will sit upon the throne of David and restore the light of hope to Galilee.

That king has arrived. And you know what? He will have a heavy wooden pole set on his shoulders. The wood of the cross. And he will cast it off when he rises again. And He, Jesus Himself, will be the great light coming into this world.

Matthew quotes these words to make it clear that these prophesies are fulfilled.

Hope. Freedom. Abundance. Joy. Light. This is what Isaiah promised and what Jesus brings. It’s what is missing in so much of our world, and why so many people feel so miserable and broken.

We are like moths in way, in that we are attracted to light. Our eyes go to the light. We each carry around a false light. It shines in the dark but it doesn’t usually bring real illumination. Often, it only brings more darkness. I look at it sometimes and just get angry.

If it were the True Light we would see our neighbor as ourself. We would see the goodness and glory that shines in the world.

Is that what we see? Is that what others see in us.

Long ago, Pope Benedict XVI wrote movingly of the moment we are living in right now. I come back to this passage often, and take such hope from it.

He prophesied a world much like our world today, a world after people turned away from the Church, and he said that people in that world “will find themselves unspeakably lonely... Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.”

That’s the hope we must share.

You are not an accident. You are, each of you--every man, woman, and child--the result of a thought of God. It is good that you exist, which is something else Pope Benedict used to say. And we are glad you are here, part of our St. Mary of the Lakes family, walking with Christ. Walking in His light.

And you are not here by accident, listening to these words in this building, in the presence of our Lord in the eucharist. We are called as surely as Jesus calls the apostles. Light calls to light.

Jesus is calling. He never stops calling. He called the apostles from their fishing nets, and promised an even greater catch. And that call was like a falling pebble that starts an avalanche.

On the shore of a distant sea a wandering rabbi called men from their labor and made a promise, and although the men didn’t know it at the time, that rabbi is the messiah. He is, in fact, God himself, and all of us here are a witness to that call, which echos down through time and across the miles into this very church. It’s humbling to think of our place in that incredible stream of time.

What is our role?

It’s what Jesus calls us to today: a share in his great work, and in his inner life. A call to become fishers of men. We have to continue that work. We must reflect the light of Christ and thus become a light for others to steer by.

May God bless you all, and may He keep us safe in the storm.

Sacramentals--all the stuff and thing-ness of Catholicism--are at once an obstacle and an opportunity for evangelizing. They’re an obstacle, because people see superstition in our statues, gestures, and holy objects. They’re an opportunity, because humans are tactile, sensory creatures, and a faith grounded in the incarnation has something profound to say about the way we use the material world to access the sacred. Here are some questions and answer to help explain sacramentals to people who only encounter holy water and medals in movies.

What is the difference between a sacrament and a sacramental?

A sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible grace. Jesus instituted seven of them, and they are gifts from Him to His Church. They convey grace.

A sacramental is a sign of the power of the sacraments. Think of it as a material prayer. According to Vatican II, sacramentals are

sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments: they signify effects, particularly of a spiritual kind, which are obtained through the Church’s intercession.” They are objects, prayers, and actions that dispose people to receive grace. They provide “access to the stream of divine grace which flows from the paschal mystery of the passion, death, the resurrection of Christ, the font from which all sacraments and sacramentals draw their power. There is hardly any proper use of material things which cannot thus be directed toward the sanctification of men and the praise of God. (Sacrosanctum concilium, 61)

Sacraments bear grace because they are the actions of Christ himself.

Sacramentals participate in the prayer of the Church and prepare us to cooperate with grace.

How do they work?

In the incarnation, the Divine touched the material world and made it an instrument of grace. Thus, in Catholicism, matter matters. The most powerful evidence of this is the Eucharist. Outside of the sacraments, however, sacramentals act as devotional tools which prepare the individual to receive grace, participate in the blessings of the Church, and create tangible, everyday links to the divine. Humans are very tactile. We respond to touch, signs and images, sounds, smells, and tastes. Sacramentals allow the material world to become alive and part of our faith.

What is a blessing?

At the root of all sacramental use is the idea of blessing. A blessing is the invocation of God’s protection and sanctification. The Church blesses people, animals, objects, and even time itself. Thus does she remind us that every day, as we go through our actions, we travel as companions of Christ and His Church. A blessing can be a request for some good to be granted by God on an individual (called invocative) or to set apart something for divine service by imbuing it with a sacred character (called constitutive).

What does it mean for an object to be blessed?

The blessing of objects—for example, water, a building, or a piece of jewelry—is meant to set that object apart for holy use. Water becomes holy water, a building a Church, and jewelry a holy medal. Once a blessing is imparted by a priest or deacon, the object should be treated with respect, and not disposed of casually or disrespectfully. The object, in being blessed, has become the bearer of a blessing.

How is this not superstition?

The use of medals, statues, holy water, and other sacramentals can slide into superstition quite easily, and we must guard against it. We are merely regarding the objects—say holy water or a crucifix—as set aside for sacred use and imbued with a blessing that derives any “power” from God’s will alone. The object itself is not the source of the power. To believe an object is powerful on its own would be a form of idolatry. The object is a sign and a material bearer of a blessing. God alone has power. Once with think of objects as powerful in-and-of-themselves rather than merely signs and bearers of God’s love and mercy, then we are engaging in superstition.

Is it magic?

It’s the opposite of magic. The difference between magic and religion is that magic seeks to bend the power of God (or, more commonly, lesser spirits) to the will of the user, while religion seeks to cooperate with and serve the will of the one true God. Magic orders, faith asks. “Magical” objects are believed to be imbued with power independent of the will of God. Blessed objects merely serve the will of God. A person who presumes to wield a “magical” object wishes to be Lord. A Christian can never be more than his Master, who was a servant even unto death.

Some Examples of Sacramentals

The Sign of the Cross

The most basic prayer of all, the sign of the cross is full of meaning. With our hands, we trace the four points of the cross on our bodies, remembering the method of our salvation. We touch our heads and hearts so God may always be in both. We can do this with two fingers to signify the two natures of Christ, or thumb and two fingers to recall the trinity. With our lips we profess the central mystery of our faith: the trinity. The sign of the cross is a tiny creed united words and gestures.

Postures

Sit, stand, or kneel! Make up your minds already! People often make fun of Catholic postures during mass, but each has meaning for the moments they are done.

• Standing is the posture of proclaiming prayer, so we standing during the opening and closing prayers.

• Sitting is the posture of learning, so we sit during the readings and homily, standing only for the proclamation of the Gospel.

• Kneeling is the posture of devotion, which we assume in preparation for and coming of Christ in the Eucharist.

• Genuflecting is done when we enter a church or take or seat, in order to show respect the Real Presence of Christ in the tabernacle.

Holy Water

Holy water is simply water that has been blessed by a priest according to a standard rite, with some salt added a sign of purity. Holy water recalls our baptism, indicates repentance for sins, and protects against evil. Holy water is used in the rite of sprinkling to remind us that we are sinners in need of repentance and renew our baptismal promises. There’s no reason to use it merely at church. You can mount a small font on the wall in your house. Holy water can be found in any church, put in a suitable receptacle, and brought home.

From the prayer of blessing of water: “Lord, God Almighty, creator of all life, of body and soul, we ask you to bless this water: as we use it in faith forgive our sins and save us from all illness and the power of evil. Lord, in your mercy give us living water, always springing up as a fountain of salvation; free us, body and soul, from every danger, and admit us to your presence in purity of heart.”

Medals

Medals are small pieces of metal with an image or text, worn as an act of devotion. They “commemorate persons (e.g. Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and the Saints), places (e.g. famous shrines) and past historical events (e.g. dogmatic definitions, miracles, dedications, etc.), as well as personal graces like First Communion, Ordination, etc., but they are also often concerned with the order of ideas (e.g. they may recall the mysteries of our Faith, such as the Blessed Sacrament or the Divine Attributes), they are used to inculcate lessons of piety, are specially blessed to serve as badges of pious associations or to consecrate and protect the wearer, and finally are often enriched with indulgences.” (Catholic Answers) They’re a visible sign of your faith, a reminder of the virtues symbolized by the subject of the medal, and a bearer of blessings.

Indulgences

Because of their role in the Protestant schism, indulgences are assumed to be inherently corrupt and a thing of the past. Neither is true. An indulgence is merely the remission of all or part of the penance required for a sin already absolved in confession. They typically involve saying certain prayers, visiting certain holy sites, or other actions. An indulgence does not forgive sins. It only reduces the penance. According to the Catechism, “An indulgence is partial or plenary according as it removes either part or all of the temporal punishment due to sin. The faithful can gain indulgences for themselves or apply them to the dead.”

Scapular

A scapular consists of two small pieces of cloth attached by a string, and worn over the shoulders. The squares of cloth rest on the chest and back, emulating the full size scapulars worn by certain monastic orders. They indicate an attachment to a particular confraternity or religious order, and are traditionally invested during a ritual or ceremony. Indulgences are sometimes associated with wearing one. The most familiar is the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.

Statues, Icons, Images
The images used for Catholic worship and devotion are reminders of the things we revere. Protestants mistakes this for idolatry. Idolatry is the belief that an image is divine, or is itself an object of worship. We do not worship stone, plaster, or paint. We worship that which these objects represent. A crucifix is not Jesus. It is a reminder of His saving passion. An image of the Madonna is not the Mother of God, but an object that points to her Son. Much like we have pictures of loved ones in frames and in our wallets, so we have pictures of the loved ones of God (the saints) in our homes and churches. Through the beauty of the images, our minds and hearts are drawn to what they signify. They are are signs pointing the holy.

Pilgrimage

From ancient times, certain places were regarded as holy, consecrated by the actions of God. Thus, we talk of the Holy Land, where the drama of salvation took place, but also of sites where great saints lived and died. Pilgrimage is the act of prayerful travel, and indulgences are usually attached to visiting a church, shrine, or holy site. Within a short drive from my home, there are the tombs of saints, shrines to Padre Pio and the Medal of the Immaculate Conception, and basilicas and cathedrals.

Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family, Cycle A.

Gospel

Mt 2:13-15, 19-23

When the magi had departed, behold,
the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said,
“Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt,
and stay there until I tell you.
Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him.”
Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night
and departed for Egypt.
He stayed there until the death of Herod,
that what the Lord had said through the prophet might be fulfilled,
Out of Egypt I called my son.

When Herod had died, behold,
the angel of the Lord appeared in a dream
to Joseph in Egypt and said,
“Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel,
for those who sought the child’s life are dead.”
He rose, took the child and his mother,
and went to the land of Israel.
But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea
in place of his father Herod,
he was afraid to go back there.
And because he had been warned in a dream,
he departed for the region of Galilee.
He went and dwelt in a town called Nazareth,
so that what had been spoken through the prophets
might be fulfilled,
He shall be called a Nazorean.

There’s been one perfect family in history. And it wasn’t yours. And it certainly wasn’t mine.

And in spite of all my efforts, it wasn’t the one my wife and I made.

I grew up in a difficult household, and learned all the things I didn’t want my own family to be. I wasn’t going to make those same mistakes.

And I will give Elizabeth and myself this much credit. We didn’t make those mistakes. We made entirely new mistakes.

No family is immune from problems. We all work with the material we’re given: with the examples we’ve learned, with the burdens we carry. But this thing called family is so very important that God chose one for himself, and entrusted the entire history of salvation to it.

God could have come any way he wanted, in any form, at any time. But God chose to be born into a human family. And God chose one man, from among all men who have ever lived, to be his human Father.

He poured all his glory into a helpless infant, and trusted that baby to Joseph. Joseph wasn’t rich or powerful or influential. He was a simple, devout working man, probably not much different than my father or yours. We talk a lot about the Blessed Mother, as we should: but of all the many the mysteries of our Lord and Savior, the mystery of his birth into a small family, in the care of a humble man who never speaks in the text of the gospels, should fill us with wonder.

Today’s gospel is filled with names and events that recall the first two chapters of the Bible. It’s salvation history in miniature, involving a departure and a return.

When we hear the words “Joseph,” “Egypt,” and “dream,” we think of Joseph from the book of Genesis, who is given a marvelous coat by his loving father, and then betrayed by his brothers. Both St. Joseph and the patriarch Joseph have fathers named Jacob. Both are persecuted. Both go to Egypt. Both are spoken to by God in dreams. Both save their families.

And then time passes. In the Old Testament, we come to the Exodus, and the parallels continue. God calls the Jews out of Egypt, led by Moses, and he calls the Holy Family out of Egypt, let by St. Joseph.

In fact, the words of the angel in today’s gospel are almost identical to the words of Exodus: The angel of God tells Joseph “those who sought the child’s life are dead.” And God tells Moses, “For all the men who sought your life are dead.” (Exod 4:19).

So Jesus is a new Moses, coming out of Egypt to lead his people and set them free–to write a new law on our hearts. Moses, sets man free from slavery to man. Jesus, sets man free from slavery to sin.

And God chooses the most unusual way of delivering us. In the Exodus he is a burning bush, a powerful force parting waters and casting chariots and armies into the sea, a towering column of smoke and fire, a swirling whirlwind, a thundering voice from a mountain carving eternal laws in solid stone. He delivers and the guides his people by strength and mighty deeds. When he came, he shook the earth.

But with the birth of Jesus, good fights evil very quietly. The future of the world is fragile at that moment, and God entrusts that future to a family, with a father leading a young mother and a helpless infant through hostile terrain and back again.

We call them the Holy Family. And today is the feast of the Holy Family. And when we think of the Holy Family, it’s of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus.

But the family itself, every family, is called to be holy. It is a means to holiness. It wasn’t one-and-done 2000 years ago. It’s happening right now, in your families, and in all the families to come. We are all called to that holiness. We are all part of a holy family of God.

I hesitate to talk about this next part because it’s very personal, but the night before I had to write this homily, Christmas night, my own father came to me in a dream. You need to understand that my mother was a challenging person, and in the dream he told me, “She did her best.” She did what she thought was right.

I can tell you we didn’t really see it that way at the time.

Maybe you had, or even still have, a parent whose best wasn’t always the best for you. We know all too well that sometimes families fall short of the glory of God. But we hope that each of us does the best we can, and we pray for God to make up whatever is lacking.

The family is the first church, the first school of holiness. That’s why the family is always under attack. If the devil can damage it, if he can drag down some of its members–he can do real harm.

And he has. But that doesn’t mean he wins. If God can snatch victory from the cross, He can do anything. And sometimes the most important lessons we learn in that school of holiness are the ones which cost us the most.

But we keep striving for perfection, we keep following the light, we keep picking ourselves up and trying to build our family into places of peace and holiness. St. Joseph led his family into a foreign land and back again, and raised up our savior, all without leaving behind a single word to guide those of us who follow in his footsteps. I think, in the end, that silence is very important, because he left us instead the Word Himself. All he would want to tell us, he left for his Son to say.

Amen.

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All joy is tinged with grief. The oil burns for eight day to resanctify the temple, but the temple will again be profaned and then destroyed. We await the birth of a miraculous Infant, the one innocent Man of all men, who will walk the earth a mere 33 years before we nail His precious hands to the cross.

All our lives we alternate between the two poles of joy and sorrow, hoping to maximize the one and minimize the other, while in fact they are forever blended, with the shadow of the cross falling on the manger, and the tomb of rock that will soon stand empty.

At Hanukkah, we recall those who stood bravely for their faith: The Woman and her Seven Sons are, in fact, martyrs in our faith, celebrated on August 1st until the revision of the calendar. Their story appears in 2 Maccabees 7, where we find each in turn killed for refusing the betray God by violating His law:

For our brothers after enduring a brief suffering have drunk of ever-flowing life, under God’s covenant; but you, by the judgement of God, will receive just punishment for your arrogance. I, like my brothers, give up body and life for the laws of our ancestors, appealing to God to show mercy soon to our nation and by trials and plagues to make you confess that he alone is God, and through me and my brothers to bring to an end the wrath of the Almighty that has justly fallen on our whole nation.’

2 Maccabees 7:36–38

And still the killing goes on. My prayers are with the Jewish community today, in all their suffering, which goes on and on, uninterrupted from generation to generation. My prayer is for a respite from the violence, and for a people willing to stand against the demons in skinsuits who roam this world breathing lies and hate and death.

And yet we say “Gaudete” this week nonetheless, from an Introit which spans both the Old Testament (Psalm 85) and the New (Philippians 4):

Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete. Modestia vestra nota sit omnibus hominibus: Dominus enim prope est. Nihil solliciti sitis: sed in omni oratione et obsecratione cum gratiarum actione petitiones vestræ innotescant apud Deum. Benedixisti Domine terram tuam: avertisti captivitatem Jacob.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Let your forbearance be known to all, for the Lord is near at hand; have no anxiety about anything, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. Lord, you have blessed your land; you have turned away the captivity of Jacob.

As we pass this midway point, we no longer call upon “The Lord who is to come”, but instead hail “The Lord who is now nigh and close at hand.”

The Lord is nigh.

He is particularly close to the those who suffer, and those who mourn, and so even in our pain, we sing Gaudete.

And Still More

I don’t know why I went to the theater to see This is Spinal Tap my sophomore year in high school. I guess word of mouth? I don’t remember it being a hit at the time, but maybe it was because we were metal fans. We thought it was just about the funniest thing we’d ever seen, and quoted it endlessly. (Why, in my day, kids, we had to remember our memes and just perform them for people!)

I know why I went to see Stand By Me two years later: I was a huge Stephen King fan. I still consider it a perfect adaptation of an essential novella from King’s best book. At the time, as someone who had lost a friend in childhood, it was quietly devastating. It lingered for a long time. I’m not sure it will have the same resonance for later viewers, but I hope so.

Rob Reiner had one of the best runs in Hollywood history, with six classics that have stood that test of time. I only learned today that he co-wrote the pilot for Happy Days, which was a big deal for most kids my age.

The violence of this year just won’t let up: this, Bondi, Brown, and who-knows-what next. I see very clearly the hand of the devil in all this. Perhaps you don’t, which simply puzzles me because an active agency of supernatural evil is literally the only rational explanation for much of our times. I feel the urgency of my position to make sure people 1) know this, 2) take it seriously, 3) don’t fear it, and 4) use the tools and faith and prayer to fight it. And be a people of hope. We win in the end.

God bless. Be at peace, but be vigilant. Be a light in the darkness. Wait with the Lord awhile. Look for His coming. And in the meantime, be the christ the world needs.

St. John Henry Newman:

Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

It seems sometimes as though the world is stuck in a perpetual darkness, but we’ve all felt an added sense of oppression and disorientation in recent years. Old friendships are frayed. Things that once seemed certain and stable have been shaken.

The martyr Fr. Alfred Delp once said, "Man must realize that he is a wayfarer, a scout, hungering and restless. He is dependent upon an angel approaching and touching him with the wing stroke reminder of a higher message.”

Almost two years after he spoke those words in a homily, he was tortured and executed by the Nazis, his body burned and the remains scattered in a vegetable garden so there could be no relics. From Tegel Prison in Berlin in December 1944 he wrote, on small scraps of paper smuggled out by sympathetic guards, that "the deepest meaning of Advent cannot be understood by anyone who has not first experienced being terrified unto death about himself and his human prospects and likewise what is revealed within himself about the situation and constitution of mankind in general.”

One thing his witness makes clear is that, hard as we may find out current times, it’s not new. Something’s always going wrong with the world. It’s just different, and it’s ours. As St. Therese said, the world is our ship not our home, and all ships eventually are buffeted and tossed by stormy seas.

It’s hard to pin down just when and how and where things seemed to ride off the rails. Every time we find a point in history where things appear to have gone awry, we find another further back, and another, until we finally come to the apple and tree and realize that this is the way it has always been.

We only live and experience our own times, however, and these are times of trial for many. Depression and anxiety are now commonplace, particularly among the young. Society is in a constant upheaval, because it serves the tribes who wield power to keep it in a state of upheaval. Information technology brings that upheaval and its myriad arguments and tensions before our eyes a thousand times a day, as a new subject is presented, and often invented, each day to push people deeper into their tribal blocks.

It’s hardly novel to observe that politics has replaced religion in this post-Christian society, but it’s important to realize what that means. By denying transcendent Truth—not merely the superiority of one understanding of this Truth over another, but the very acknowledgement that such a thing as Truth even exists—we’ve lost a common language for communicating with people outside of our tribe.

It’s certainly discomfiting when those tensions roil the world, but when they tear apart the community of believers the pain run deep. When I first turned from covering technology to writing about religion many years ago, the Catholic space on the internet was like an oasis where I could learn and discuss and grow in faith. Now it’s merely a mirror of society, riven by disagreements and dominated by noisy cliques who believe they must fight on all fronts for the very future of the Church.

The Church doesn’t need that from us. Future generations won’t compile an internet Catechism from quips or collect posts into a Blogga Theologica. What we write about the faith won’t change the faith or the course of the Church one bit: it can only change ourselves and those reached by our words. The most we can do is inspire one another, teach, and preach Christ in wisdom, humility, and charity, and always in the truth.

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We have many models to help us through these challenges, Jesus foremost among them. We’re called to have the humble faith, strength, and obedience of the Blessed Mother; the rectitude of Joseph; the missionary zeal of Paul; the impetuousness of Peter; the nearness to God of John.

In this season, however, perhaps we need to emulate the Magi, patiently following that light in the darkness, so far away yet heralding something so near: the coming of God made flesh into the world. It must have seemed distant and remote at times, both in the infinite darkness of the night sky and over their long and difficult journey through a harsh landscape. But these men who could read the stars like a book saw there a sign in light of Light breaking into the world, and so they had no other choice but to make their journey to bring their gifts and bow at the feet of the King.

That’s who we have to be now. The light seems very distant to us in this Age of Anxiety. But, like the Magi, we are not alone on our journey. Tradition depicts them as wise men of different cultures, traveling together in harmony with a shared sense of purpose. Their eyes were fixed a single point, but that point was not the goal. However marvelous the light in the sky, it was a merely a sign of the Light in the world: the Light that shines in the darkness, which has not, cannot, and will not overcome it. All that darkness around us cannot extinguish that Light, and though we lose each other in our own dark nights, we can find always find our way back to the center of all things, where we’ll see the face of Christ. Along the way, we’ll come across other travelers, and despite our shared sins and disagreements, we’ll journey together in peace.

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A Preview of Beddl

I write random pieces on different subjects at another site, called Beddl. Here’s a preview from the most recent post:

A Beddl Preview: From Newman to Holmes, with Stops in Japan and Antarctica

A month of reading, and the answer to the question: who collaborated with both PG Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle, and did a mummy kill him?

I was a few pages into a Trollope novella last night when I realized I’d read it last year for Christmas. I liked it, so I’ll keep reading, but this is exactly why I log all my books and movies. I also just love lists. Also, I probably have some kind of psychological problem.

Advent Reading

I picked two books for Advent devotionals this year: Alfred Delp’s Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writing - 1941–1944, which had been extraordinary so far, and Love Came Down: Anglican Readings for Advent and Christmas. No, I’m not turning Anglican (as if), but this is heavily weighted towards Oxford Movement people so far, and much of the prose is beautiful. We’ll see how it goes as the month continues. I’m very fond of John Donne, John Keble, Lancelot Andrewes, and Austin Farrer, although they lacked Newman’s bravery and common sense.

Areas of Research

I continue reading deeply in spiritual theology and mystical theology, the prime texts being from Aumann and McGinn, plus Guardini and various primary texts of late medieval mysticism.

For Weird Catholic, I’m working on a few things at once: relics will continue as I dig into Felicity and Perpetua and others, but I’m also looking at dragons and werewolves, and in particular angels. My brain is pretty scattered lately (and December is wall-to-wall Things to Do for clergy) so I have to stop sampling from the buffet and just pick a topic and settle in.

Casual reading has been mystery and literature. I picked up a Norton Critical Edition of Moby Dick, which I have not read in a while, so I may do that soon, and I’ll continue with the Japanese fiction. I have a lot of issues of theology journals piling up and need to start whittling those down.

Recently Completed

Eamon Duffy. John Henry Newman: A Very Brief History.

I’m a big fan of Eamon Duffy, and this is a perfect introduction to Newman. At little over 100 pages, it’s not a comprehensive biography by any means, but rather an overview of the main themes of his life and work: the fathers, faith and doubt, Anglicanism and Catholicism, literature, and his legacy. It has a detailed chronology and a very thorough commentary on other sources for further reading. I cannot imagine a better introduction to Newman, or a better writer to do it.

Edgar Allan Poe. Narrative of A. Gordon Pym.

I read all of Poe very young, and last read this, his sole novel, over 40 years ago. I didn’t like it at the time, and although I’ve returned to everything else over the years, I never re-read Pym. That was my loss, because it’s a fascinating, often phantasmagorical mess of a novel that may or may not be unfinished. (It might end exactly where Poe wanted it to end, or perhaps he just gave up.) Scholars consider it a stitch-up of two separate, unfinished nautical texts, and there are certainly jarring turns in style and character, errors, and inconsistencies that might be the result of sloppy writing by a harried man in a state of emotional collapse.

Continue reading by clicking here:

Beddl

From Newman to Holmes, with Stops in Japan and Antarctica

I was a few pages into a Trollope novella last night when I realized I’d read it last year for Christmas. I liked it, so I’ll keep reading, but this is exactly why I log all my books and movies. I also just love lists. Also, I probably have some kind of…

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9 months ago · Deacon Tom