Is This the Life We Want?

Jesus himself is ‘heaven’ in the deepest and truest sense of the word—he in whom and through whom God’s will is wholly done. Looking at him, we realize that left to ourselves we can never be completely just: the gravitational pull of our own will constantly draws us away from God’s will and turns us into mere ‘earth’.

But he accepts us, he draws us up to himself, into himself, and in communion with him we too learn God’s will. Thus, what we are actually praying for in the third petition of the Our Father is that we come closer and closer to him, so that God’s will can conquer the downward pull of our selfishness and make us capable of the lofty height to which we are called.

Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth Vol. 1, p. 150

Reflection – Nice to have a little of the ol’ German Shepherd blogging from time to time. I still have hundreds of quotes from Pope Benedict stored away on my laptop. This one is from his commentary on the Our Father and the petition ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’

It’s the end of the liturgical year, and if you’re one who gets to church during the week, you know that the readings are all focussing on the apocalyptic dimension of our faith, the whole awareness that the here and now and the ‘what is’ is temporary, transient. We are moving, slow or fast, in God’s own time, to ‘what will be’ – something very different, and the process of getting there—based on the Scriptures we have been given—will not be without its difficulties and turmoil.

There is always, and quite properly, an apocalyptic thread in the Christian tapestry. Simply, we are not trying to create some perfect life here on earth, simply fixing up the ‘here and now’ so that by our own efforts a nice little cozy world gets set up. Yes, we strive for justice and peace, but that’s simply out of love for our brothers and sisters and a desire to reduce the suffering injustice and war cause.

To be a Christian is to be well aware that the final resolution of all the world’s woes lies outside of the world and in this mysterious other reality. Call it heaven—we have to call it something—but truly we know little about it. Except that it is where Jesus is, and it is Jesus who will bring us and ultimately all the earth to the heavenly state.

And this heavenly state is not just ‘an end to suffering and want’. It is to do the Father’s will perfectly. And it is Jesus who achieves this in us, both showing us what it looks like (cough ‘the crucifix’ cough), and communicating his life and heart to us so we can walk that path of obediential love.

The question that faces all of us, of course, is whether or not this is really the life we want. Is it genuinely ‘heaven’ to wholly abandon one’s own self-will and give oneself over entirely to the will of God? This is a huge spiritual question that fundamentally shapes each human life. ‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven’, Milton’s Satan says. We can say that, too.

Ultimately the question is whether or not we believe in the absolute goodness, justice, and mercy of God. God is not just some ‘OK’ guy, some sort of nice person vaguely up there. God is Goodness itself, perfect justice, absolute mercy. Only that sort of God can both ask our total and absolute obedience, ask us to dwell in His will utterly and unreservedly, and make of His will for us a genuine heaven—a place of absolute light, joy, peace, gladness, goodness.

It all comes down to our concept of God. And Jesus comes in there, too, to show us something of who this God is, who the Father is, as much as our rather feeble minds can absorb, and enough to at least get us to trust Him enough to let Him in. His grace then can come in, and carry us the rest of the way there.

Happy Thanksgiving, my American readers – as you all gather around the sacred turkey today, do remember to give thanks to God above all for Jesus who makes it all possible, who truly does open heaven to us and who bears us there on the wings of his love and mercy. Amen.

Isn't God Supposed to Take Care of Us?

Christ did not cast himself from the pinnacle of the temple. He did not leap into the abyss; he did not tempt God. But he did descend into the abyss of death, into the night of abandonment, and into the desolation of the defenseless. He ventured this leap as an act of God’s love for men. And so he knew that, ultimately, when he leaped he could only fall into the kindly hands of the Father.

This brings to light the real meaning of Psalm 91, which has to do with the right to the ultimate and unlimited trust of which the Psalm speaks: if you follow the will of God, you know that in spite of all the terrible things that happen to you, you will never lose a final refuge. You know that the foundation of the world is love, so that even when no human being can or will help you, you may go on, trusting in the One who loves you. Yet this trust, which we cultivate on the authority of Scripture and at the invitation of the Risen Lord, is something quite different from the reckless defiance of God that would make God our servant.

Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth Vol.1, p. 38

Reflection – It’s been quite a while since I’ve had anything from Pope Benedict on the blog. Psalm 91 is quite the psalm, if you’re not familiar with it – it is the one quoted by the devil to Jesus in the temptations in the desert: ‘He will command his angels to watch over you, lest you dash your foot against a stone.’

There is quite a bit more along those lines: ‘You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrows that fly by day, nor the plague that prowls in the darkness, nor the scourge that lays waste at noon.’ It is one of the great Scriptural prayers of utter and complete trust in God, a total and unreserved act of faith in the providential care of God.

And yet, as the Pope points out here, this faith and trust are not borne out by a world in which bad things never happen to good people, but only to ‘bad’ people. Jesus plunged into the abyss of death, and in this knew the love and care of his Father in heaven. So often we human beings grapple painfully with that – we try to be good people and live in a way pleasing to God, and then when something terrible happens to us our to someone we love, our faith is shaken. Isn’t God supposed to be taking care of us?

Wasn’t God supposed to take care of his Beloved Son? For a Christian, there should be no challenge to faith even if the worst thing we can think of happens. Even if we are indeed caught in the ‘abyss of death, the night of abandonment, the desolation of the defenseless’, and our emotions are all where they of course must be in that position, we know God is with us, Jesus has gone before us, Love has not and will not fail us.

I’m thinking here of all the Christians who are facing exile or death right now in Egypt and Syria and a handful of other countries. I realize well that it is one thing to write about trusting God and plunging into this or that abyss when, in fact, I am sitting in a chair in Canada on a most beautiful fall day, surrounded by a family who love me, living in a society that is fundamentally prosperous and at peace.

Quite another to entrust one’s life to God when at any moment men with guns might burst in and kill you and your family. And yet these people—our brothers and sisters in Christ—are indeed doing just that, it seems, or at least being called to do that. It is good for us who live in the relatively sheltered world of North America to be aware of these situations, certainly to pray for them, but also to be clear ourselves about what trust and faith is, and just what kind of road God asks us to walk in this world.

In North America, we labor greatly under the shadow of ‘prosperity Gospel Christianity’, which shows up in many forms. Essentially, the idea that if you give your life to God good things should happen to you, and if you turn away from God bad things will happen to you. And so of course the people who have bad stuff happen to them must, on some level, be lousy rotten sinners who got it coming to them, and the people who prosper must deserve it.

We all know this is silly, especially when we’re the poor saps who have the bad things happen to us, and our neighbors across the street who are so horrible have good things happen, but it is a silliness that has put down deep roots into our culture, for long historical reasons that are unnecessary to explore.

Meanwhile, we have a 2000 year history of Christians being asked to lose everything—their homes, their goods, their lives—as the price of following Christ. And we need to be clear about that: God takes care of his children, but this care takes mysterious forms in this life. Our call is to trust him, and that trust is expressed in doing his will, best we can, come what may, and to leave the success and failure, joy or desolation of our life, in the hands of our Father in heaven. To do what Jesus did, in short, which can only happen with his help and by his grace. 

Food and Drink, Foundation and Goal

The fact that Luke places the Our Father in the context of Jesus’ own praying is significant. Jesus thereby involves us in his own prayer; he leads us into the interior dialogue of triune love; he draws our human hardships deep into God’s heart, as it were. This also means, however, that the words of the Our Father are signposts to interior prayer, they provide a basic direction for our being, and they aim to configure us to the image of the Son. The meaning of the Our Father goes much further than the mere provision of a prayer text. It aims to form our being, to train us in the inner attitude of Jesus.

This has two different implications for our interpretation of the Our Father. First of all, it is important to listen as accurately as possible to Jesus’ words as transmitted to us in Scripture. We must strive to recognize the thoughts Jesus wished to pass on to us in these words. But we must also keep in mind that the Our Father originates from his own praying, from the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This means that it reaches down into depths far beyond the words. It embraces the whole compass of man’s being in all ages and can therefore never be fully fathomed by a purely historical exegesis, however important this may be.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 132-3

Reflection – Well, this is certainly a mouthful to ponder, perhaps not just for a day, but for a life. I don’t know about you, but I can certainly rattle off the Our Father, in Mass, in the Office, in the rosary, with hardly a thought about any of it. Ourfatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethyname… Inattention, habit, spiritual shallowness can all make of it an exercise with seemingly little value. So it’s good to read things like this, that remind us of just how deep this prayer is, just what depths of God it contains, just how far into the mystery of God it takes us, if we consent to be taken.

Our Father—perhaps the first two words alone are enough to ponder on. That God is Father, that the ultimate reality is not some nebulous ‘energy’ or some unfathomable unreachable mystery. He is Father—there is a relationship, a possibility of intimacy. There is provision and protection, care and concern, a rushing out of the house to embrace the son in love (cf. Luke 15). Everything good that we can say about the word ‘father’, all that we hope for and desire and perhaps experienced (or, sadly, maybe not) from our earthly fathers, all of this is who God tells us He is in a surpassing way.

But there’s more yet. God is Father in that our whole being comes from Him. He fashions us forth and shapes us into true sons and daughters, bearing his name and image. Our whole self and all it means is from Him and towards Him. God is Father… we can meditate on this one word for months without moving an inch further in the prayer.

He is also ‘our’ Father. And this too has great significance. I am not separated from you. We are not mere atoms bumping up against each other in the cosmic soup. I have a Father and you have a Father and He is the same Father of us both. So you are my brother, my sister. He is ours, and so this whole life of ‘from the Father/towards the Father’ is also a life of you with me and I with you. Called to communion with God, and in God, with one another. And this is the call of the Church.

And it is Jesus who ushers us into all these realities, not as mere words of some fool of a blog from some fool of a priest, but as a living reality, as food and drink for our souls, as a foundation we can live on, a height to which we can ascend. Jesus is the Son, and only in his Sonship and in our shared life with Him, can we know the Father in truth.

So that’s the first two words of the prayer. Perhaps the most important two words in the prayer; arguably the rest of the prayer is a commentary on how to live with God as our Father. But there is a call in all this, and a good call it is in this Year of Faith, to really slow down and look at these basic faith elements, these most common prayers and practices, and really delve into what they mean, why we do them, where they take us.

So… time for another series on the blog. I want to do something a little different for a few days. Since Pope Benedict here invites us to pay this close attention to the Our Father, I am going to let myself be ‘German Shepherded’ to do just that, and for the next days, rather than the usual blog format (quote the pope, discuss the quote), I will simply write meditations on each petition of the prayer. Hope you will enjoy it, and that it will be a spark to your own meditation and delving into the heart of Christ which is the doorway to the heart of the Trinity.

Apocalypse? Now, Please!

What did Jesus bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world? What has he brought? The answer is simple: God. He has brought God. He has brought the God who formerly unveiled his countenance gradually, first to Abraham, then to Moses and the Prophets, and then in the Wisdom Literature—the God who revealed his face only in Israel, even though he was honored among the pagans in various shadowy guises.

It is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the true God whom he has brought to the nations of the earth. He has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him.  Now we know the path we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God, and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope and love. It is only because of the hardness of our hearts that we think this too little.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 44

Reflection – Yesterday we talked about the apocalyptic trends of some historic political movements (Marxism) and some current ones (radical environmentalism and gender politics). So what is Christian apocalyptism, then? After all, it’s our word. If society is not to be reborn in a violent revolution, what is the radical promise of renewal held out by Christianity?

Pope Benedict nails it here. Jesus brings us God. He brings us the truth of our origin, and the truth of our destiny, and the truth of how to get there. Not only does he bring it to us as intellectual knowledge, but he gives us the power to live and act on that knowledge.

He brings us faith, hope, and love—the capacity to know God, to attain God, to be one with God in this world and in the next. I do love his simple sentence: “It is only because of the hardness of our hearts that we think this too little.”

What is this hardness of heart? Well, I don’t know about you, but I personally want what I want. I want gross physical things like plenty of scrumptious food and abundant drink. I want ‘success’ – for me, defined as (now don’t be shocked!) being a best selling author of dozens of books, for you defined in other terms, probably. I want peace, which means that people who annoy me leave me alone, and people I like hang out with me. I want… well, you get the drift.

We want what we want, and all these wants take us far far away from the true center of our being, our innermost hearts. We get caught up in trivialities, like whether we have enough money in the bank or whether or not we are succeeding in our chosen field of endeavour. The world, the flesh, the devil all conspire to pull us out of our hearts into the chasing of temporal goods and will-o-the-wisps of worldly well-being.

All these do not matter; what matters is God and the life God gives us. A great deal of our spiritual life is a matter of getting back into our hearts and actually believing and living as if that were true. And that Jesus actually does give us what our deepest hearts most deeply need – God is with us, truly.

And from that radical satisfaction of our deep desires, we can then go out with wisdom and peace to serve the world, to combat injustice, to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, to restore dignity to those who have lost it, and to proclaim the truth God has given us to the world. We do not try to bring about the apocalypse. On one level, the apocalypse has already happened – God has come and revealed Himself. On another level we await the final revelation of God, and simply strive to live good and upright lives by the help of his grace.

It’s not terribly complicated, although life can get complicated enough sometimes. And it’s not always terribly glamorous, although it really is quite exciting, if you believe it is true.

I think I do believe it to be true—well, at least I'm excited by it! But that’s a choice we all have to make—is God real and has God given Himself to us truly in Jesus, and will He be the one who radically and utterly creates a new heaven and a new earth in His time? Or is all of that… well, not quite true. And so we are left to make our own earth into a rude facsimile of heaven, which generally results in a hell of a mess.

Ours to choose, and ours to live. Take your pick.

Tonight in This Stable There is Peace

The great men and women of prayer throughout the centuries were privileged to receive an interior union with the Lord that enabled them to descend into the depths beyond the word. They are therefore able to unlock for us the hidden treasures of prayer.

And we may be sure that each of us, along with our totally personal relationship with God, is received into, and sheltered within, this prayer. Again and again, each one of us with his mens, his own spirit, must go out to meet, open himself to, and submit to the guidance of the vox, the word that comes to us from the Son. In this way his own heart will be opened, and each individual will learn the particular way in which the Lord wants to pray with him.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 133

Reflection – I have set myself the challenge this week of relating every post and the randomly generated passage I select from Ratzinger’s writings to the Christmas mystery. This rather beautiful passage about prayer lends itself to this in a strange kind of way.

Christmas for most people can become a frenetic time. Lots to do—decorating, cooking, shopping, traveling perhaps—and lots of activities and events: parties, meals, caroling, family rituals, maybe even the odd church service.

While that is the nature of festivity and as such is right and proper (if a bit fatiguing), it can get us a bit out of balance if we are not careful. Prayer is needed at all times to put us back into reality and into interior peace and stability.

To pray at Christmas, in the midst of all the noise and rush and celebratory fuss—this is a great gift. And I think there is a special grace of prayer at this time of year, if we look for it. God comes to us with such delicacy and beauty at Christmas, the little baby lying on straw in the manger, his lovely mother hovering over him, the star shining and the angels singing, the kings and shepherds adoring.

There is trouble and fuss beforehand—getting to Bethlehem was a terribly busy rush for Mary and Joseph. There will be great trouble and fuss and much worse—tragedy and loss—afterwards. The flight into Egypt with a newborn baby must have been a great suffering for them. But here and now, this night, in this stable, there is great peace, great beauty, great silence, deep prayer. And I think this silence and prayer is waiting for us in the Christmas season, perhaps at the crèche set, perhaps before the Lord Himself in the tabernacle, perhaps in the silence of your own heart. Sometimes we do need to step away from all the noise and fuss of the feast to find that silence.

So, while I wish you all a most merry Christmas, I also want to wish you a prayer-y Christmas (ouch). After all, He came for this, that each one of us could find Him readily and certainly and come into this deep and total union of love with Him, and so be conformed to His life and love in the world, and be happy with Him forever in the next world.

This will be my last blog post for at least a couple of days. My own Christmas will have a different kind of ‘fuss’ to it this year. On Boxing Day (that’s December 26 for you Americans), myself and two of the Madonna House lay staff will board a train for Halifax to attend the Rise-Up event hosted by Catholic Christian Outreach, a wonderful Canadian university evangelization group. Since I have no idea whatsoever what will be the schedule, the accommodations, the internet access, or much else indeed about what the next week has in store, I don’t know when regular blogging will resume. Might be December 27, might be January 3!

 

So I do indeed wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year, beg your prayers for me and mine and assure you of my prayers for all of you. I look forward to another year of German Shepherding with you all!

The Legend of St. Nicholas

[In the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector we see] that there are two ways of relating to God and to oneself. The Pharisee does not really look at God at all, but only at himself; he does not really need God, because he does everything right by himself. He has no real relation to God, who is ultimately superfluous—what he does himself is enough. Man makes himself righteous.

The tax collector, by contrast, sees himself in the light of God. He has looked toward God, and in the process his eyes have been opened to see himself. So he knows that he needs God and that he lives by God’s goodness, which he cannot force God to give him and which he cannot procure for himself. He knows that he needs mercy, and so he will learn from God’s mercy to become merciful himself, and thereby to become like God.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 62

Reflection – Happy St. Nicholas Day to you! You know, he really is an important saint in Christian history—it is actually of great value to rescue him from that bloated wreck Santa Claus who has devolved truly into basically a shill for consumerism and materialism—a living vending machine for more and more ‘stuff’ every year.

The saint is actually of great significance, even though we know almost nothing about him as documented historical fact. He lived in the turn of the 3^rd and 4^th centuries; was a bishop in Myra, now part of Turkey, and attended the council of Nicea where he is alleged to have socked the heretic Arius in the nose.

However that is not his claim to holiness, actually. What is significant in Nicholas is the legend of goodness and mercy he left behind him. He is known as the giver of gifts, the lover of the poor, the defender of children, an abundant overflowing fountain of mercy and generosity that resounds through the centuries. And this is of crucial historical significance for the Church.

Prior to Nicholas, saints had been in two categories: martyrs and ascetics. To be a saint, you had to die for the faith or you had to starve yourself in a cave in the desert. Nicholas was neither, living past the age of the Roman persecutions and serving as bishop. And so he revealed a new path of Christian holiness which countless others have walked in the following centuries.

This is the path of mercy, of charity, of loving without counting the cost. We don’t have to die a martyr’s death or leave everything for the deserts of Egypt, so to speak. We do have to love to the point of laying down our lives for our brothers and sisters and leave everything behind that is not love. Sanctity is never easy, but St. Nicholas shows us that it is available for everyone, since everyone can choose to love and be merciful as he did.

And so this beautiful passage from Pope Benedict resonates, doesn’t it? What does it take to be a man or woman of mercy? To know our need for mercy, and to turn to God to receive his mercy.

The Pharisee remains himself, locked in his own person, limited to his own stock of virtue and goodness. Undoubtedly he wasn’t any great villain—the Pharisees in general were the upright decent people of their day, the sort of folks you would see in Church every Sunday and maybe even during the week. But he is stuck being just himself, just a very small, very decent person.

This is not what we are made for. We are made to burst forth from the limitations of our own human flesh and human frailty and even human goodness. We are meant to be St. Nicholas, loving and giving with such a spirit of total generous mercy that the legend of it echoes down the millennia. We are meant to be so open to God that God makes us into lovers of men as He is the Lover of Man.

Well, this is the only way for us. To simply turn to God, to look to God, to cry out to God for mercy, and to have expectant longing hearts that know God’s mercy is real, is given, is here, is for us.

Receiving it, we can give it. Knowing it, we can live it. It is our true home, the home we are made to live in, and living there, we can love there, and so show the world that true joy comes not from ‘Ho Ho Ho’ and a bag full of goodies, but from being, becoming God’s love extended to the world, his mercy acting in the heart of the world for all people, the naughty, the nice, and everyone in between.

Great Gift, Strange Package

What is forgiveness, really? What happens when forgiveness takes place? Guilt is a reality, an objective force; it has caused destruction that must be repaired. For this reason, forgiveness must be more than a matter of ignoring, of merely trying to forget. Guilt must be worked through, healed, and thus overcome. Forgiveness exacts a price—first of all from the person who forgives. He must overcome within himself the evil done to him; he must, as it were, burn it interiorly and in so doing renew himself. As a result, he also involves the other, the trespasser, in this process of transformation, of inner purification, and both parties, suffering all the way through and overcoming evil, are made new. At this point, we encounter the mystery of Christ’s Cross. But the very first thing we encounter is the limit of our power to heal and to overcome evil. We encounter the superior power of evil, which w cannot master with our unaided powers.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 158-9

 

Reflection – Well, nice deep stuff here as we wind up the Church year and prepare for Advent to begin tomorrow. ‘Forgiveness exacts a price’ – how are you doing with that? How am I doing with that?

 

You know, this whole business of forgiveness pulls us quite quickly into very deep waters indeed. Someone injures us, perhaps in a big way, perhaps small. But there is an injury. And immediately, because we are Christians, this lays a burden on us. And this can seem like a further injury – we are the aggrieved party, the innocent (well, at least in this case) one, and yet we’re the ones who have this obligation of forgiveness laid upon us by God. Unfair!

 

Well, it was unfair for Jesus to have to die on the Cross, too. And it really is at that level – the call to forgive, the duty of forgiveness brings us directly and immediately to an encounter with and a sharing of the Cross of Christ. He suffered without having committed any sin; we are sinners, but in this business of forgiveness we are called to suffer precisely where we have been sinned against.

 

And so we enter into a real intimacy with Christ. And, in that, a real encounter with our own poverty. As the Pope writes above, we encounter the limits of our power to heal and overcome evil. This is precisely what the modern world has fled from these past centuries. We think we can heal and overcome evil through technical mastery, through economic and political reform, through all manner of human cleverness and creativity.

 

We have failed, by and large. Oh, there are diseases people no longer die from… but everyone dies still, and most people suffer before they die. The poor are still with us, centuries of economic tinkering and political maneuvering notwithstanding. The evil of humanity and of this world has proven to be ineradicable by human effort alone.

 

And so we are brought again to Christ and his Cross. Really, when you think of it, we should be sending our enemies, that is the people who have hurt us most deeply, lavish thank you letters and bouquets of roses. They keep driving us to Jesus and to the Cross (darn them!), pushing us to a level of reality where we have no other recourse but Christ.

 

They do us a great favor, really. Catherine Doherty used to say that she felt like she was climbing the ladder of spiritual life towards God, and whenever she would get tired and flag a bit her enemies would come up the ladder behind her and jab a hat pin in her behind to get her climbing again!

 

Well, allowing for difference of tone and idiom, that’s pretty much what Pope Benedict is describing in this passage. So… I don’t know how pressing this matter is for you today. Sometimes we aren’t being injured too much at any given time, but it does come to us all one way or another, sooner or later, and usually sooner. Be very mindful, be ‘watchful and wise’ when it does. The moment of injury, of encounter with evil, of call to forgive, of struggle and sorrow—this is the supreme moment of encounter, of intimacy, of union with Christ.

 

So… don’t miss it. Don’t waste it. Don’t run away from it. It really is the most beautiful and precious gift He offers us, wrapped up in a most painful and strange package.

The Deep Realities of God

The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us… [It] no longer seems plausible to us today. Militating against this, on one side, is the trivialization of evil in which we take refuge, despite the fact that at the very same time we treat the horrors of human history, especially of the most recent human history, as an irrefutable pretext for denying the existence of a good God and slandering his creature man.

But the understanding of the great mystery of expiation is also blocked by our individualistic image of man. We can no longer grasp substitution because we think that every man is ensconced in himself alone. The fact that all individual beings are deeply interwoven and that all are encompassed in turn by the being of the One, the Incarnate Son, is something we are no longer capable of seeing.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 159-60

Reflection – Well, we’re on a bit of a roll here at LWAGS, spending the past few days taking a good hard look at the reality of baptism and what it really means to die and rise with Jesus in those waters, and now taking a good hard look at the substitutionary death of Jesus and what that means for us.

Jesus died for us. This is, actually, a really hard concept to grasp. At times it is parodied into a terrible distortion of what it really is. People will say that God the Father was really really mad at the human race and had to take out his anger on someone, and so put his Son to a horrible death as a sort of safety valve or whipping boy or something.

This is not the God we worship, of course—the abusive father of the universe. What is lost in this understanding is the utter unity of the Father and Son in the One Godhead of the Trinity. Jesus is not God’s Son in the sense that I am Raymond Lemieux’s son. The Father and the Son are one, and so the death of Christ is not something happening outside of the one God.

God died for our sins. This alone, if we take it at all seriously, means that our sins are a really big deal, don’t you think? We can trivialize sin and evil all we like; we can assure ourselves that at any rate we’re not such great sinners. Surely Jesus could have saved us just by stubbing his toe!

Well, apparently not. Each of us has the capacity within us—call it original sin, call it what you will—to extinguish the divine life and light within us. Each of us has the ability, awesome and fearful, to cut ourselves off from God. And this is utter and complete death—spiritual, physical, total.

Now I don’t understand all the deep realities of God and how exactly Jesus becoming man and dying on a cross changes that reality in its essential configuration. I don’t think anyone does understand it, and I don’t think we really will understand it until we are in heaven and God explains it to us. The various theories theologians have propounded over the centuries are just that: theories. The Church has blessed and encouraged such theologizing without ever endorsing any particular theology.

What I know is that the very place of death—sin, rebellion, disobedience, the failure and refusal of love—is now a place where we are met, continually, constantly, always, by Life. The place where everything fails in us is now the place where mercy succeeds for us. The place of the greatest evil—and the human person willingly choosing self-destruction is the greatest evil we can attain—is now a place where the Divine Goodness is poured out.

How exactly, and all the mechanisms and underlying spiritual realities whereby this happens, we just don’t know. But we know it happens, because it happens to us, more and more fully, more and more deeply, more and more certainly and joyously, as we place all our hope and trust in the Lord. And this is the salvation God offers us from the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus.

Us Versus Them

[In reference to Matt 5:23 ff], you cannot come into God’s presence unreconciled with your brother; anticipating him in the gesture of reconciliation, going out to meet him, is the prerequisite for true worship of God. In so doing, we should keep in mind that God himself—knowing that we human beings stood against him, unreconciled—stepped out of his divinity in order to come toward us, to reconcile us. We should recall that before giving us the Eucharist, he knelt down before his disciples and washed their dirty feet, cleansing them with his humble love.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 158

Reflection – One of the most painful realities of life in the Church is the reality of division within the Church. There are many forms of this division: deep disagreements about theology and morality, ethnic clashes and historical wounds carried over into ecclesial life, simple personality clashes, unresolvedhurt feelings, political power struggles at the level of the parish or the diocese.

All of these can mean that Sunday Mass can be a gathering of enemies as much as the fellowship of believers. It is a sad and painful reality—or at least it should cause us sadness and pain—a reflection of our wounded broken humanity carried into the sanctuary of God.

We do have ‘something against our brother’ all too often, and we seem not to know what to do about it, not to be able to do it, or maybe even not to care too much one way or the other.

It’s that latter attitude that has to go, or our worship is a lie. I can find myself helpless in the face of a divided church, unsure of how to effect unity and reconciliation, but I must not callously shrug my shoulders and so, ‘So what! That’s their problem, not mine!”

No. It is my problem, even in the unlikely event that I am entirely innocent of wrongdoing in the matter. We are all one another’s problem, and there is no ‘they’ in the Church. Just us. It’s all about God, you see. It’s all about this God who bridged the gap between heaven and earth, infinity and finitude, divinity and humanity. It’s all about this God who did the unthinkable for us, to heal the wound of alienation and separation that our sins created.

What are we supposed to do for one another, then, in the face of what God has done for us? It’s a deep question, and I’m not providing any pat simplistic answers here. The reality of a divided church is very real, very serious, entirely tragic. The petty and not-so-petty feuds that rend Christianity are a major source of scandal that impede our proclamation of the Gospel and make it much, much harder for people to find their way into the Church’s life.

What are we supposed to do? Pray, for sure. Fast, definitely. Take responsibility for our own part in divisions, absolutely. Forgive anyone who has hurt us, totally and unconditionally.

And examine, searchingly and seriously, how we treat ‘the other’, whoever and whyever that other is. How do we talk to them, how do we talk about them, what is our inner attitude towards ‘them’, whether the ‘them’ is the liberals, the conservatives, the Irish, the German, the French, the stuck-up #$%s who run the parish council or the lazy no-good #$%s who maybe show up most Sundays.

What is the deep attitude of our hearts towards ‘them’? Contempt and judgment? Or compassionate love? If it is the former, more prayer and fasting is required. If it is the latter, then let us thank God for his grace. But we must ask God constantly what more we can do to heal the wounded, divided, fractious Church, so that our worship and our witness may go out from us unimpeded and reach its full power and effect.

An Assured Strength, A Virile Tenderness

Contemporary men and women have difficulty experiencing the great consolation of the word father immediately, since the experience of father is in many cases either completely absent or is obscured by inadequate examples of fatherhood.

We must therefore let Jesus teach us what father really means. In Jesus’ discourses, the Father appears as the source of all good, as the measure of the rectitude (perfection) of man. ‘But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven…’ (Mat 5:44). The love that endures to the end (Jn 13:1), which the Lord fulfilled on the Cross in praying for his enemies, shows us the essence of the Father. He is this love. Because Jesus brings it to completion, he is entirely ‘Son’, and he invites us to become ‘sons’ according to this criterion.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 136

Reflection – Well, this is a subject dear to my heart. In fact, I’ve just written a book about it, Going Home, which explores the nature of God the Father and his infinite tenderness and love from the perspective of the parable of the Prodigal Son. When we find out just who and what this ‘Father’ is, at least a little bit, so many things fall into place, become much easier, make so much more sense. When we have very little or no sense of the Father’s love, Christian faith and indeed life in general is a dark heavy sad thing.

I know this, actually, because I have been one of those contemporary men for whom the word father held little consolation. Without going into a big personal testimony that would be inappropriate in this public setting, I did not have the best of relationships with my own father, and consequently the word for me was not associated with very positive associations.

It was Jesus who showed me the true face of fatherhood. Specifically, he told me that he did nothing that he did not see his Father in heaven doing (John 5:19). So everything Jesus does in the Gospels reveals to us the Father’s heart. Healing the sick, raising the dead, casting out demons, feeding the hungry, forgiving sinners, teaching, proclaiming, and loving to the very end of love—all of this is who God the Father is and what He does continually. Even Jesus’ death on the Cross is ‘what he sees his Father doing’. God the Father does not suffer and die on the Cross with Jesus—that is a heresy that has been long condemned. But Jesus’ death is a revelation that there is no limit, no boundaries to God’s love, to what the Father wills to do to save his errant children. Love poured out to the last drop of love—but because God is infinite, there is no last drop. Love poured out eternally, perfectly, utterly, right now, on you, on me, on the whole world: God the Father.

When we know this, we can sort of relax inwardly. We are called into this same love and same outpouring of energy and self, and so our lives may be very busy and hard-working, but inwardly we can sort of collapse into God. A child throwing himself onto his Father, knowing that he will be caught and held by an assured strength, a virile tenderness, Someone he can totally trust—this is us.

So, like I say this is all very dear to my heart, and if you want to read more about my thoughts on the matter, buy my book. If you’re in the Ottawa area, come to my book launch on November 14 at 6.30 p.m. at St. Patrick’s Basilica.

But (slightly more important!) above all, come to Jesus. Go to the only one who can really show you who God the Father is. And He will—it’s what He came to do, after all. And—who knows!—we can then become precisely those sons who go out into the world to show the Father’s love to one another and to all our poor orphaned brothers and sisters who simply do not know about it.

A Spittle-Flecked Rant?

The common practice today is to measure the Bible against the so-called modern worldview, whose fundamental dogma is that God cannot act in history—that everything to do with God is to be relegated to the domain of subjectivity. And so the Bible no longer speaks of God, the living God; no, now we alone speak and decide what God can do and what we will and should do… any exegesis that reads the Bible from the perspective of faith in the living God, in order to listen to what God has to say, is fundamentalism; … only the supposedly purely scientific kind of exegesis, in which God says nothing and has nothing to say, is able to keep abreast of the times.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 35-6

Reflection – You know, at the risk of sounding a bit self-centred, sometimes I wonder if I haven’t actually started this blog as a sort of spiritual exercise in self-control. I seem to delight in challenging myself to write about subjects that I feel extremely passionate about, things that get my emotions all fired up and ready to go… and then try to write about them with some degree of calmness, not devolving into a spittle-flecked wild-eyed rant, a screed which would send my readers running to the hills and (probably) send my superior in MH to tap me on the shoulder and suggest I take up some other hobby that will be not quite so hard on the blood pressure. Knitting, perhaps.

Like yesterday’s post on the liturgy, and today’s post on the Bible, and our modern disease of somehow relegating God to some strange place in both those forums, a place of inactivity or at least no direct activity or presence. A weird (frankly) approach to both liturgy and the Word where it is human action and human thought that bear the meaning and value of the thing, not the real presence of the living God.

I am passionate about these matters. God is real, and the real God is really acting in our lives. If this was not true, I at any rate would be dead, I think. When the real Lord really found me and really spoke to me a word of love and life, all of which really happened when I was 16 years old, I was at that time a pretty miserable wretched specimen of a human being. I don’t honestly think I would have made it very far into adulthood, to be perfectly honest.

God saved me. God saves so many people, and I firmly and deeply believe His whole desire and constant action in time and history is to save every person. And this salvation came to me (really) in the Eucharistic presence of Christ and has been repeatedly and profoundly confirmed and deepened by his living Word where he really has spoken and acted in my life.

So, yes, I get a little passionate about these things. This strange modern attitude which always keeps God at one remove (at least) from human affairs and human history is utterly incomprehensible to me. It is bloodless, lifeless, pointless. When liturgy becomes all about me or all about us, when the Scriptures become mere human documents that can be pulled and twisted to mean ‘whatever’ because there is no actual inherent meaning, then we lose the living God in a cloud of obfuscation and vagueness, entomb him again behind the stones of subjectivity and egoism.

Well, He cannot be entombed, and does not stay so. And that’s the Good News, of course. God breaks through our nonsense—‘creative’ liturgies and bloodless scientific exegesis, and continues to reach down from heaven to earth to save the poor and lowly ones who cry out to Him. It happened to me; it can happen to you or to anyone. God is real.

So there—how did I do today? Anyone flecked with spittle yet? OK - end of rant. See you tomorrow!