The Necessary Price Of Freedom

Our Thursday trip through the Mass has brought us now to this part of the Eucharistic Prayer:

Therefore, Lord, we pray: graciously accept this oblation of our service, that of your whole family; order our days in your peace, and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those you have chosen.

I will pass over the part of the prayer asking that our oblation be accepted—this theme has come up repeatedly in the Mass and I have covered it more than once already in this commentary.

This prayer brings in a dimension of our faith that I don’t think I have written about much at all, but which perhaps I should, at least from time to time. It is not the central focus of our faith, but it is part of our spiritual and moral landscape, and we are foolish to ignore it.

That is the whole matter of ‘eternal damnation’. Hell, to be blunt. That there is such a thing, that we can go there, and that in fact we need God’s mercy and grace if we do not wish to go there for all eternity—this is our Catholic faith, the faith of the Bible, the faith of all the fathers and doctors and saints of the Church.

Hell is not, and cannot be, a comfortable subject to think about. I don’t really think it is meant to be. Uncomfortable to think about, and less comfortable by far to end up there, no? But we have to think about it some time.

It is true that in an earlier era there was far too much preaching about Hell, to the point that it really does look like fear mongering. As one of our wise (and funny) MH elders says of his childhood, “It wasn’t so much a matter of going to heaven, as of backing away from Hell, and at some point the pearly gates would slam shut with us on the right side of them.”

Well, that’s not right. Our eyes, our minds, our hearts are to be fixed on the Lord Jesus and His tender, merciful love. The whole attention of our faith is to be on the Gospel, the Good News of salvation, and the path of life and goodness it opens for us. The positive aspect of our religion—healing, forgiveness, salvation, hope—is far bigger and far more central than the negative—sin, brokenness, damnation.

But… these are real things. And we cannot (and if we understand them rightly, should not) wish them away. The reality of Hell is a necessary corollary to the reality of human freedom. God made us to be free. God made us to be creatures capable of knowing and loving Him, and entering into an eternal communion with Him. But knowledge and love cannot, by their very nature, be forced. Love that is forced is not love at all; it is rape.

But if love and knowledge must be freely given and received by us human beings, this means we can, indeed, refuse them. And this is the sum total of what Hell is, what eternal damnation is—we can refuse the gift of God, refuse to enter the eternal communion of love that is the whole substance of our created being, that for which we are made. Hell is a place of eternal frustration, eternal thwarting of the divine purpose in making us.

Now, where we do have to ponder deeply and think of things that make us rather uncomfortable is that our Catholic understanding is that we can say ‘no’ to God under our own freedom and power, but we cannot say ‘yes’ to Him without His grace to assist us. In other words, we can fall (like any dull heavy body) by the power of gravity and our own innate leadenness, but we cannot fly unless our Father in heaven picks us up and tosses us up, up, and away into the celestial heights.

So we not only need to know that there is indeed a Hell and that we can, indeed, go there if such is our choice in life,[1] but that in fact we need to humbly beseech the grace of God, as we do in this prayer, to be spared such a disastrous consummation of our earthly affairs. The good news of course is that Our Father in Heaven loves us very much, wants with His whole divine wanting to deliver us from this sad fate, and in fact sent His Son to die for us so as to make this grace available to all mortal flesh.

So that’s what I have to say on what I admit is a topic I have neglected and probably won’t frequently return to on this blog. I have now, officially, given you all Hell; let us turn our eyes and minds and hearts to heaven and to the mercy and love that streams forth continually from that happy place.

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[1] Now, this is a mere single blog post, so I am not going into all the reality of what that choice is, and exactly how to get to Hell and how to avoid it. I recommend reading The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, if you want a clear and concise elaboration, highly readable and (best yet!) brief, on that point.

Holy and Unblemished Sacrifices

It is Thursday, and therefore Liturgy time on the blog. I am doing a commentary on the Mass, striving to draw forth how it is a pattern for Christian life and discipleship.

After 22 blog posts covering the Introductory Rites, Liturgy of the Word, and the Preparation of the Gifts, Preface and Sanctus, we are now launching into the Eucharisitic Prayer, the heart of the matter, truly.

It is worth noting at this point that from here on up to the Great Amen in the priest does pretty much all the talking. This is theologically significant. He not only symbolizes Christ in this liturgical moment, but actually is acting in persona Christi. 

The exclusivity of the priestly prayers (i.e. that the laity don’t just join in and pray along with him) means that the liturgy is fundamentally something Jesus does and we receive, something we enter into in the mode of passive reception before active participation. And in fact our deepest entry into ‘full, conscious, and active participation’ lies in knowing that we are primarily graced recipients of the action of the Mass and not the principal actors.

I will be using Eucharistic Prayer I, also known as the Roman Canon, for this commentary. It was until the post Vatican II reforms the only canon we had, the one anaphora, or Eucharistic Prayer, of the Latin Church for over a millennium. That it is not done all that often in many North American parishes is frankly shameful. It is held to be too long, which is ridiculous. 

It is two minutes longer than the other prayers. Anyhow, I don’t want to start ranting about that subject, amusing as that might be for some, but I just want to go on record as saying that it is disgraceful that so many Catholics are deprived of praying the prayer that all their ancestors prayed because we need that extra two minutes for what… another verse or two of Gather Us In?

Anyhow. Back to the Mass! The prayer begins “To you, therefore, most merciful Father, we make humble prayer and petition through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord: that you accept and bless + these gifts, these offerings, these holy and unblemished sacrifices…” As we begin the prayer, we consciously address the Father, through the Son. So important, that. God is Father—this in a sense is the whole point of the Year of Mercy, to recapture the awareness of God as Father. And this is done as we approach Him the way He must be approached in truth—through the Son.

The language of humility is important here. We do not approach God upright, with heads held high as if we are His equals. No – we bow, we prostrate, we kneel, we throw ourselves down before Him. He loves us and delights in us, and wants us to know Him as our loving Father… but let us never forget that He is the awesome God, the Eternal, the Mighty, the Holy… and we are frail creatures of dust.

And we bring Him these gifts and ask Him to accept them. 

At this juncture, the gifts are not the Body and Blood—we are still referring to the bread and wine here. That these gifts are ‘holy and unblemished’ of course recalls the whole Old Testament theme of only bringing sacrifices to God that are whole and intact, not the injured and damaged.

Here, it does indeed imply (since the bread and wine symbolically are the offering of the whole Church of its own self, and of each member of the Church of our own selves), that we are free of grave sin as we approach the altar. I know this is a contentious and hard subject these days, but my brothers and sisters, it is really important. The Church and Christ provide every help possible for us to be clean of grave sin, and all are welcome to be present at the liturgy and participate as much as they can, even if they are burdened with sin. There is no harshness, no rejection in this.

But we must not—we simply must not!—approach the altar of God if there is serious blemish, serious disobedience, serious sin in our lives. It is not a matter of censorious priggishness, but of basic integrity and honesty with oneself and with God. It is spiritually damaging in the extreme to willfully flout this, and demand to receive the Eucharist when one’s life is not in accordance with the commands of God, made known to us through His spotless Bride, the Church.

So we begin the Eucharistic Prayer in a place of deep humility, deep knowledge that we are entering here into the very action of Jesus Christ towards His Father, and deep self-examination that we are indeed disposed to enter this action. As we go about our day today, let us be mindful that our whole life is to be lived right here at this Eucharistic moment, to the Father through the Son, an unblemished offering through Christ to our Father in heaven, in deep humility, amen.

Bathing In The Blood of Our Enemies (?)

Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?

Do you judge people fairly?

No, in your hearts you devise wrongs;

Your hands deal out violence on earth.

The wicked go astray from the womb;

they err from their birth, speaking lies.

They have venom like the venom of a serpent,

like the deaf adder that stops its ear,

so that it does not hear the voice of charmers

or of the cunning enchanter.

O God, break the teeth in their mouths;

tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord!

Let them vanish like water that runs away;

like grass let them be trodden down and wither.

Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime;

like the untimely birth that never sees the sun.

Sooner than your pots can feel the heat of thorns,

whether green or ablaze, may he sweep them away!

The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done;

they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.

People will say, “Surely there is a reward for the righteous;

surely there is a God who judges on earth.

Psalm 58

Reflection – Well, yes. So. When I decided to do this comprehensive commentary on the psalms, I probably wasn’t thinking of this one particularly. And it would be tempting for me to simply pass over this one in silence; meaning no disrespect to the Lord or to the Word of God, it is a bit much.

But no – I am a man of my word, and a commentary on the psalms is what I promised, and what I will deliver. So we have hear this cry of rage against the wickedness of the powerful, against the sins and iniquities committed by people in high places, people in positions of authority. Abuse. Exploitation. The use of power to do evil, not good.

Well, this is real. We can, and if you’re me, usually do, try to exercise some mode of understanding or compassion or analysis of why people come to do the things they do and end up doing things truly monstrous to behold. I am not one to demonize or vilify anyone. I have never had a great urge to bathe my feet in the blood of the wicked, to be perfectly honest. Maybe I’m wrong on that point—I don’t know.

The psalms are really perfect, though, taken all together. They contain the full spectrum of human responses to God and to the world. Here, it is the seething, unfiltered rage that is ours when we do behold, not just someone we disagree with or who does things we deem a little off, but when we see real evil, real wickedness afoot in the land, especially by those who have great power.

And this is real. In our Christianity we can and must strive for a spirit of caritas, for mercy for everyone. We cannot really exclude anyone from the circle of our mercy and our love, even the very powerful who do great wrong. (I am deliberately trying not to name any names here, by the way, as I don’t want this or that politician or media figure to become the focus of this post.)

This psalm with its over-the-top denunciations of such people calls us to a stark realism in this, though. We cannot pretend that we’re all really very nice people at heart and that some people are just misunderstood or maybe confused in their minds about stuff, but that everyone’s a good person, really. No. It is possible for a human being to give themselves over to evil, to wickedness, and to dedicate their lives to a course of action that wreacks death and destruction, misery and pain far and wide in the world.

It is no part of Christian charity to avert our eyes from all that because we just want everyone to play nice. But it is also not the fullness of revelation to just stay in the Psalm 58 place—break out the blood foot bath, folks! It is OK, natural really, to go there, in the moment of confrontation with real evil, real wickedness, but it is not OK to stay there. Jesus doesn’t leave us there, and we have to go where He leads us.

We have to find a way to love our neighbors, even when our neighbors are genuine evil-doers. That love may indeed involve denouncing the evil, may even involve taking strong measures indeed to oppose that evil. I am not a pacifist.

But whatever right and just course we discern that we must do in the face of monstrous evil, if we are serious about Christianity we have to pray for a merciful spirit, a heart that desires not the destruction and damnation of our enemies, but their salvation, their conversion, their return home to the Father’s house. Even when it is people who make our flesh crawl and our blood boil… we have to want to spend eternity with them in the kingdom of heaven, or we are no kind of Christian.

Psalm 58 is good for us, even if we are not going to make it part of our daily morning prayer. It reminds us of just how hard it is to love everyone, just how real evil is, and just how heroic is the call of Christ to us in the face of it. Today, for a practical exercise, think of one powerful person who you truly dislike, distrust, maybe even despise (Obama? Clinton? Trump? Putin? Trudeau? You decide)… and pray for that person, simply, directly, mercifully.

Water and Wine... and Refugees and Terror

Thursdays is 'Liturgy Day' on the blog. I am writing a commentary on the Mass, bit by bit, each week, with a special focus on how the liturgy informs our way of Christian life in the world.

We are at the Offertory Rite at the moment, and in my enthusiasm for last week's section, I inadvertently skipped over a most beautiful and meaningful little sub-rite within the rite. This is the ritual mixing of water with the wine, accompanied by the prayer '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.'

This simple little rite catches so much of the richness of our Christian faith. In the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, it is one of the lessons taught to the youngest age group, so vividly and concretely does it communicate the reality of life in Christ. The children, some as young as three, are shown this rite, with the simple explanation that  the wine symbolizes Christ, and the water us.

Their comments are telling - 'He is so big, and we are so small!' 'You can't get the water out from the wine! Nothing can separate us!' 'We are together with him.' In one small snippet of the liturgy, a ritual that most of us barely pay attention to and easily miss, it is so short, there is a whole theology of grace and communion, incarnation, redemption, and divinization.

This is so crucial when we are faced with genuinely difficult situations in life. In our personal lives, and in our communal social lives. I am thinking, like everyone else, quite a bit about violence and terror, compassion and generosity, risk and refugees. I will probably have a bit more to write about it in a few days - still formulating my full thoughts.

But do we know how much we are in Christ and Christ is in us? Sometimes when people who are people of faith discuss these matters, there seems little sense of this. Like... there's our religion over there, and we go to Church and think certain thoughts and say certain things and do this and that. But when there is a hard situation--a genuinely, honest-to-God hard situation---in the world or in our lives, our Christianity seems scarce in sight.

And I'm not just talking about the people who are all 'Kill the Muslims! Kill 'em, I say!' It's also the people who are openly scornful and contemptuous of those who are struggling with fear of jihadist terror. It's the people who, on the very day of the Paris attack, thought that the best response was to instantly start bitching about Obama or Trudeau and their lousy politics, or about Bush and Cheney and how it's all their fault. The blood was still wet on the pavements of Paris, and that's the first instinct of some? How about praying for the souls of the dead, and for their murderers?

Christ is in us. We are in Him. The water is poured into the wine. He is very big. We are very small. Yet somehow, because He loves us very much, He has taken us into His world, into His life. The beggar maid (humanity, and each member therein who accepts it) has been wed to the Great King.

So we are better than this. And yes, I think we can open our vast rich country and its resources (do we have any idea how good we have it compared to the rest of the world?) to these poor people. Even if some of them are not what they say they are. Even if some of them repay us with violence. The risk of closing our hearts, our home, and our borders is greater, I would say. We risk losing our inheritance--not the inheritance of this beautiful land or the inheritance of Western Civilization, but the inheritance of life in Christ.

At the same time, there are real fears, real concerns, real questions. And it is no part of life in Christ to mock, scorn, shame, deride, show contempt for those people who raise those questions. Can we all please show some self-control, some maturity, and maybe even some charity?

The water goes into the wine. We are not alone in this. There is grace, more grace than we can possibly imagine, available for us in this matter and in all matters. There is never a reason, never a time, a place, a situation, where we cannot be charitable. Not if we remember that water and that wine, that unity, that bigness of spirit which is ours because He came.

Let's try to remember that in what are surely going to be difficult days ahead.