This Week in Madonna House - January 10-16

This week in Madonna House began with a splash. Last Sunday we celebrated our monthly Byzantine Rite Liturgy, observing the feast of the Theophany in place of the Western Rite Baptism of the Lord.

It is the same mystery being commemorated in both feasts—Christ plunging into the waters of the world to claim them for himself and bless them, identifying himself with us in our lowly human state and in that the Trinity being revealed in the voice of the Father and the descent of the Dove.

The Byzantine Liturgy is very beautiful on this feast, which ranks in their tradition among the principal feasts of the year. After the Divine Liturgy itself there is a special blessing of water with a beautiful long prayer that involves a cross being plunged into the water three times, and the celebrant blowing on the waters in the form of a cross, evoking the moment of creation.

Then this specially blessed water is sprinkled on the congregation and on the four walls of the church, symbolizing the entire universe being blessed. After this, we process together to the Madawaska River where a crucifix is thrown into the waters, symbolically blessing all the waters of the earth. This too is a common tradition in the Christian East.

It was a bit of a challenge this year, since last weekend we had the traditional ‘January thaw’ – lots of rain and above freezing weather, all of which made it very slippery and slushy underfoot. But no injuries.

After all of that we enjoyed our usual Sunday, and then happily entered Ordinary Time the next day. The great seasons of the year are wonderful and beautiful and joyful here… and we are all quite happy, thank you very much, to get back to more plain living afterwards.

Our unstable climate seems to have finally decided that it is, in fact, winter, and so after the weekend rain it went back down to normal seasonal temps and a nice blanket of snow falling. The men have been able, then, to finally get in operation the outdoor skating rink off of the tea dock. Hockey games and the like are the recreation activity of choice for our young guests and younger staff.

The guest numbers went up for a little while over Christmas… and then they went right back down. We are a quiet little house right now. If any young adults find themselves at a bit of a loose end this winter, why not come to Madonna House and have a spiritual adventure? We have room!

This time of year the work really is pretty much keeping the place maintained and going. There is always snow to shovel, wood sheds to fill, meals to cook, laundry to do. One job that is a hidden part of our winter is processing the wool from our sheep. Every day a few of the women are down there, cleaning, ‘picking’, carding, all to prepare the fleeces to either be sold to local crafts people or for our own people to then dye and spin it for sale or to make our own handicrafts, themselves sold. It is all about the missions, of course, as the proceeds from everything we sell go to the poor through the work of our shops.

Well, really we are in such a quiet and ordinary time of year that I hardly know what else to say. One of our priests accompanied by an MH lay man are giving a retreat to thirty-plus men this weekend, something we have been doing yearly for quite a few years now. On a personal note, I have a few such things coming up in the next weeks, so my life has suddenly become all about that—preparing talks and such things.

But really, this time between the end of Christmas and the beginning of Lent is one of the most quiet and ‘normal’ times of year for us (so much so that it is quite unusually normal, if that makes any sense). In the midst of it all, do know that we are offering all our work and prayer for the glory of God and for the needs of our troubled world at this time. God bless you all!

This Week in Madonna House - January 3-9

This week in Madonna House was another week of festivity, as we continued our way through the twelve days of Christmas. Last Sunday we celebrated Ephiphany; today we wrap up the season with the Byzantine celebration of the Theophany.

We have a multiplicity of customs for both these feasts. On Epiphany we have the ‘kings’ bread’, a sweet bread for brunch shaped like a crown. In three of the loaves a coin has been hidden, and over the course of brunch three people find the coins. They are the ‘kings’ of the feast, but of course in typical MH style we flip that on its head. Their kingship is expressed by their service to the community, and so each of them is to spend an hour before the Blessed Sacrament praying for the rest of us.

At supper there are two customs. First, chalk is blessed and our door lintels inscribed as follows: 20 + C + B + M + 16. The year, interspersed with what are either the initials of the three wise men Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior, or perhaps the Latin words for ‘Christ, bless this house’.

The symbolism is that the Magi set out on a journey which led them to find the Lord. Every time we pass through a door we are going on a ‘journey’, even if it is just from one room to another, and so we pray that all our journeys this year become pilgrimages bringing us closer to Christ. The custom is of German and Polish origin.

At supper also the kings show up in person (three of our men guests dressed in sumptuous royal robes and crowns) to bring us gifts from the Christ child. These gifts are words that we really do believe to be words from God to us for the year. For myself, it is amazing how often my Epiphany gift really is a meaningful word of God to me. This year I got ‘radiance’.

So that is Epiphany, and I will tell you all about our Theophany customs next week. Otherwise it is the typical post-Christmas season—working our way doggedly through the left overs and the supply of cookies we all worked so hard to bake, and enjoying the decorations which we leave up until after today’s feast.

Our numbers are depleted, both as quite a few guests left after New Years, but also as a wicked flu is making its way through the community. Fortunately it is a ‘low’ time of year in terms of work needs—right now it is just a matter of keeping food on the table, wood in the stoves, and clean clothes on our backs.

Winter came, finally, with our first real cold temperatures of the year. Monday it was – 30C. Mind you, it is pouring rain as I write this, but that is supposed to change dramatically tonight. Get your ice skates on – the world is about to turn into a giant rink!

Now with all this beautiful liturgical stuff, the biggest event of the week was in another venue entirely. And that is that, after twelve years of generous and faithful service, Mark Schlingerman concluded his term as director general of the MH lay men. Larry Klein began his four-year term on Wednesday, with Patrick Stewart filling his shoes as the local director of the men at the training center. If you have a spare prayer or two, you could pray for these three men as it is a major time of transition for each of them personally and for the whole laymen’s branch of MH.

Beyond that, the work has been as I said, pretty much maintenance of the place. The men have been much taken up with ‘winter’ – snow shoveling, plowing, dealing with the thaw of the last two days (flooding is always a danger when this happens), and keeping the wood sheds filled. We have a small ice rink just by the main house in a swampy area. The weather has not cooperated so far to make it work as a rink, but the current melting and subsequent freezing should put it back aright. Ice skating and hockey are favorite winter recreation here.

Beyond that, hard to know what else is going on! Please know that in the midst of all our celebrating and the ordinary life of work and prayer that intersperses it, our world and each one of you is in our prayers continually. As Ordinary Time begins tomorrow, let us walk confidently through those doors, and find the Christ child awaiting us wherever our footsteps bear us this year.

This Week in Madonna House - December 6-12

This week in Madonna House was, to put it mildly, packed. It was the week of feasts upon feasts, feast following feast, each with its own customs and beauty and grace.

It began last Sunday with St. Nicholas, of course not celebrated liturgically. But the Turkish bishop saint (or maybe one of his earthly helpers) was up early leaving candy in all of our boot slots. At supper, while we enjoyed the traditional gingerbread cookies for dessert, the man himself appeared to us, although there are some who insist it was just one of our young men guests dressed up in beard, robe, and miter. And he brought gifts again, this time a gift we could give to each other, the gift of intercessory prayer.

We came up with this custom some years ago, that on the feast of St. Nicholas we would receive the name of another person in the community, for whom we would pray for the next 365 days. As Nicholas ransomed the three young women with bags of gold from their poverty and disgrace, so we can ‘ransom’ one another by generous intercession and sacrifice.

So that was Nicholas. Then Tuesday brought Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, which we celebrated with great beauty of liturgy, decoration, and table. Besides the feast itself and all it means for all creation, it has a special MH significance, as it was the day our first chapel above the dining room was consecrated, and so the day the Lord came to dwell among us in the Blessed Sacrament.

So we celebrated with a festive Mass, brunch, some time off in the afternoon, Vespers and supper, all of it with all the trimmings. I missed the latter part of the day as I was off to nearby Renfrew to give a talk launching the Year of Mercy at some of the parishes there.

A few days of relative normalcy followed, although at this time of the year that normalcy is largely a matter of preparing for the next round of celebrations and feasting. And so today we had my personal favorite feast of the year, Easter aside—Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The day began with the lovely Mexican custom of the mananitas, the morning song. In that culture, women are honored by being serenaded first thing in the morning on their special days. So on the great day of the  Virgen Morena, Reina de Mexico, we tiptoed over to the island chapel where her image had been set in front of the altar on a beautiful blue cloth with many multi-colored vigil lights in front of her. The chapel was otherwise dark, and the effect is just spectacular.

And we had a time of spontaneous singing to our Mother, people chiming in with songs whenever the spirit moved them. Lauds followed, and then breakfast. At that meal, each of us could go to another image of the Guadalupana in the dining room, light a taper before it, and pick a ‘rose’, a paper adorned with a rose pattern on which one of her words to St. Juan Diego was written.

A festive Mass in the evening followed by a fantastic Mexican meal (a  large crew had assembled to make tortillas the night before), and a fiesta where the story of Guadalupe was acted out and then we all had a chance to share our own testimonies of Our Lady’s intercession in our lives.

All of this was going on while we were very busy indeed. The kitchen is a place of constant activity, for example. I personally (oh, OK, with a little help from my friends) made 13 dozen butter tarts one evening, with another evening in the offing to make another batch (smaller, probably just four or five dozen more…).

Besides the usual work in the bush, the men collected greens and Christmas trees to adorn our many houses for the feast, and lights have already begun to go up on the outsides of the buildings. We try to wait for the last minute to do the inside decorating, though. Many guests arrived this week, as we still see quite a number coming through.

Well, that gives a flavor of our life, anyhow. It is a rich time of year, and there will be even more to share next week – the special days are not over yet. In the midst of all this beauty and joy (and yes, lots and lots of quite hard work, too!) know that we are carrying you all and the whole world to the throne of God continually, and asking Him to bless us all in these difficult times.

Open At The Top

My blogging is a bit off-set this week, as I’m about to disappear for a couple of days, off doing a parish mission in the local area. So Wednesday’s blog was yesterday, and Thursday’s is today. Friday’s blog will be Saturday, and then we’re back to normal…

In our commentary on the Mass we have finally reached the Eucharistic Prayer beginning with the preface. The preface is not a part of the Mass that catches many people’s attention especially. If you have a priest who is a decent singer, it may stand out as one of the first longer sung prayers of the Mass, but I have noticed that most priests most of the time opt to recite it, at least in my experience.

The preface, though, along with the Sanctus that follows it, brings out an important dimension of liturgy, one that is important indeed for our living it out in our daily lives. It is a prayer of the Mass that is intensely concerned with where we are in liturgical time, with where we are situated on this wonderful grand wheel of the year that revolves around. Now it is Advent, soon it will be Christmas.

There are prefaces for each season of the year, along with prefaces for some of the ‘mini-seasons’ – the week after Epiphany, the time between Ascension and Pentecost, the last two weeks of Lent. There are prefaces for the various ‘types’ of saints’ days—apostles, martyrs, pastors, virgins. There are specific prefaces for all the major feasts of Our Lord and Our Lady of the year and for solemnities of saints—John the Baptist, Joseph, Peter and Paul. And so on and so forth—I have no doubt missed a couple.

Some of the richest liturgical catechesis we have is found in these prefaces, some of the best explanations of the meaning of the seasons and feasts. Parents raising children would do well to remember them as a resource for religious education.

But beyond that basic catechetical function which is secondary in the liturgy, the preface functions to ground us in the here and the now, that this liturgy which is the eternal action of the Son towards the Father, the eternal act of love and oblation, the very worship of heaven going on perpetually outside of time, is nonetheless happening to us, right now, on December 1, 2015, and we have the preface (Advent I) to prove it!

There is this weaving together of heaven and earth (the Sanctus which concludes the preface and about which I will write next week is the heaven side of the equation), that is so important for our whole Christian consciousness and praxis. Our whole Christian life is to be lived intensely in the now, in the immediate, in the where and the who and the what of our incarnate lives. But this who, what, and where is always opened at the top, so to speak, to the eternal reality of God and heaven and love and worship.

This is why the liturgical calendar has to spill out from the liturgy into our daily lives. This is why in Catholic culture the rhythm of the year is not determined strictly by the secular patterns (September is back to school time! April is tax season! Summer is beach time!) but by the sacred rhythm of time, time redeemed, time ‘open at the top’ to eternity.

And so… Advent wreaths. Christmas trees. Lenten fasts and austerity. Easter breads and eggs. Special meals on the special days, and more ordinary fare on the ordinary days. A candle lit, a bouquet of flowers placed before Our Lady’s image in our homes on her feasts. And other ways of honoring or remembering or sanctifying the home on the other feasts of the year (Nicholas cookies, Lucy bread). Time has been transformed, and we cannot just leave that reality in the sanctuary of the Church; it has to be lived in the domestic Church, somehow. Big ways or small, depending on how we are able.

The preface of the Mass recalls all this to us. We live in time; the liturgy occurs in time; God comes to us in time. But always in time, in liturgy, and in life, there is this upward pull to heaven and eternity. So the preface always starts with where we are right now but ends by mentioning the angels and saints in glory and how, as we contemplate the reality of life lived now, we are called to join with them in singing the great hymn of praise… and that will be next week’s post.