Not a Rock Star, But a Rock

On our own we human beings do not know how to pray as we ought—we are too far removed from God; He is too mysterious and great for us. And so God has come to our aid: He himself provides the words of our prayer, and teaches us how to pray. Through the prayers that come from Him, He enables us to set out toward Him; by praying together with the brothers and sisters He has given us, we gradually come to know Him and draw closer to Him.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 131

Reflection – Sometimes people who don’t want anything to do with the Church and liturgy and all that organized religion stuff will say ‘I can pray to God just fine on my own! I don’t need anyone’s help here!’ We can simply answer this, as the Pope does here, by saying ‘Are you sure about that?’

We have had a great stress in the past 50 years or so on the mercy, the tenderness, the love of God for us. And of course this is right and proper and I would never want us to stop stressing these core and basic facts about Him. But in that emphasis we have tended to ignore or even deny another basic fact—our God is an awesome God, great in majesty, mighty above the heavens, King of kings and Lord of lords. But if we deny or forget this, we have thrown out most of our Scriptures.

So we cannot just walk up to Him all ‘Hey, Buddy! How’s it goin’ today, eh?’ Jesus is not my homeboy—He is my Lord. We can’t just chat him up like He’s some guy somewhere we ran into.

It’s not that God is some touchy VIP rock star, ready to trash his hotel room if he doesn’t get the right color or M&Ms or brand of mineral water. It’s not that He is going to smite us if we don’t say exactly the right prayers in exactly the right tone of voice and exactly the right attitude.

He is not a rock star, but He is a mighty rock. And it is a matter of our own living in truth vis a vis this rock, this God who is our maker, the source and center and goal of our life. Who exactly do we think we are talking to? If we know, really know even a little bit, who this God is, what Mystery we are approaching, what fearsome and wondrous thing we are doing to enter into dialogue with this One, then we won’t be quite so cocksure and casual about it all.

We will, perhaps, realize that we need help to know how to do this properly. And so, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ Or, pick up the psalter, the 150 sacred psalms of Israel which was Jesus’ own prayer book. If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s probably good enough for us, eh?

Or, go to the liturgy. The Mass is in essence Jesus’ own prayer to the Father, His own approach as the Divine Son in human flesh to the One who is the Origin without origin, the Unbegotten, the Absolute Source of all. Yes, the liturgy mediates this divine prayer, this divine communion through human signs and words which may or may not be adequate to the mystery contained therein, may or may not please us with their cadences and colorings… but the mystery is therein nonetheless.

And this is where we learn to pray, by entering Jesus’ own prayer to his Father which is His offering of Himself on the Cross. This is where we most truly learn, in fact, what an awesome and mighty God we have, and how the very reality of his mercy, love and compassion only serve to heighten the awe, the reverence, the profound awareness of our poverty and inadequacy to approach Him.

But at the same time, help has been given us. The Son comes to us, the Spirit empowers us, and so we can pray to the Father as we should. And it is in and through the Church that we receive this help and this power.

Reality is Much Bigger

The First Letter to the Corinthians (1:18-31) tells us that many of the early Christians belonged to the lower social strata, and precisely for this reason were open to the experience of new hope… Yet from the beginning there were also conversions in the aristocratic and cultured circles, since they too were living “without hope and without God in the world”.

Myth had lost its credibility; the Roman State religion had become fossilized into simple ceremony which was scrupulously carried out, but by then it was merely “political religion”. Philosophical rationalism had confined the gods within the realm of unreality. The Divine was seen in various ways in cosmic forces, but a God to whom one could pray did not exist. Paul illustrates the essential problem of the religion of that time quite accurately when he contrasts life “according to Christ” with life under the dominion of the “elemental spirits of the universe” (Col 2:8).

In this regard a text by Saint Gregory Nazianzen is enlightening. He says that at the very moment when the Magi, guided by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ. This scene, in fact, overturns the world-view of that time, which in a different way has become fashionable once again today. It is not the elemental spirits of the universe, the laws of matter, which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs the stars, that is, the universe; it is not the laws of matter and of evolution that have the final say, but reason, will, love—a Person.

And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly the inexorable power of material elements no longer has the last word; we are not slaves of the universe and of its laws, we are free. In ancient times, honest enquiring minds were aware of this. Heaven is not empty. Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love.

Spe Salvi 5

Reflection – This rather lengthy passage from Spe Salvi is beautiful, isn’t it? I couldn’t really cut it down or chop it up – it all flows so nicely together.

This has always been Ratzinger’s fundamental answer to scientific materialism and logical positivism, to all these deeply corrosive philosophical theories that drain the world of meaning, love, personhood, and leave us with brute mechanical forces and cold empty space.

In Christ, God has revealed that reality is much better than that. The mechanical forces and the vastness of the universe are real—they are there—but alongside and running through and filling all things is love, and Love is made known to us in Christ.

When we talk about ‘god particles’ (and I realize that most real physicists don’t use silly terms like that), we belie a desire to find something, some bit of matter, that will finally account for everything and hold everything together in itself and by its own properties.

I am not versed enough in science to know exactly what the Higgs-Boson particle does or why precisely it is so important, but I know that it cannot hold everything together in itself. What of love? What of joy? What of self-sacrifice and nobility in suffering? These things exist, and no material particle really accounts for them.

Reality is so much bigger and better than what materialist atheists allow us. And we all know it. Everyone who has fallen in love knows it; everyone who has brought a child into the world knows it; everyone who prays knows it. And this is where hope enters in for all of us. Filling all things, behind and before and within all things, in the life and beauty and abundance of all things there is a Spirit who continually beckons us, calls to us and leads us forward into the future of all things, a future that is vouchsafed for us by this same Spirit, who is Love, who is a Person, who is God.

The Business of the Body

The most basic Christian gesture in prayer is and always will be the sign of the Cross. It is a way of confessing Christ crucified with one’s very body… To seal oneself with the sign of the Cross is a visible and public Yes to him who suffered for us; to him who in the body has made God’s love visible, even to the utmost; to the God who reigns not by destruction but by the humility of suffering and love, which is stronger than all the power of the world and wiser than all the calculating intelligence of men.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 177

Reflection – The whole business of the body has been on my mind lately, one way or another. Recently various aches and pains (non-serious so far) are continually reminding me that 45 is not the same as 25 or even 35, and that 55, 65, and 75 promise to be even more so. Meanwhile, in the past few months, several members of MH and some of our very beloved friends have fallen seriously ill, bodily malfunctions of various kinds threatening them with possible death and certain grave suffering. At the same time, as a priest I continually work in spiritual direction with people struggling with their unruly passions and the bodily struggles and sins therein.

So yes, the body has been much with me lately. And this beautiful reflection from Ratzinger is very relevant to all of the above. We confess Christ crucified with our own bodies. By signing our flesh with the Cross, we not only claim it for Christ, but claim the salvation he wrought for us in His flesh, and how He wrought it.

Hatred or contempt for the flesh is a ‘hardy perennial’ in our humanity. We think of it in terms of Jansenism or Puritanism, the pinched repressed stereotype of Victorian prudery. But it is equally expressed in hedonistic debauchery and the blithe indifference of our age. ‘Who cares – we’re all just animals, after all!’ But we are not just animals. Our bodies have animalistic structures, yes, but our bodies are united with a spiritual soul, and body and soul together have a transcendent meaning and purpose.

But the body is so… gross, you know! (So might run the argument). We expel gases and fluids and solids that smell bad, we need to shovel dead organic matter into our maws several times a day, we sweat and stink and fall unconscious daily and our sexual urges are too much for us usually, and in the end of it all we die and decompose into nothing… come on! The body just is what it is, and what it is ain’t nothing special.

And our counter-argument? ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…’ Hand to forehead, heart, left and right shoulder (right and left if you are Byzantine!). We claim the embodiment of God in Christ, the embodiment of Love and mercy on the Cross, the working of salvation and restoration and re-creation and cosmic consummation as a bodily act of Jesus Christ.

And this act of Jesus—it wasn’t too pleasant, you know. Blood and sweat and stench and pain, and a mute limp corpse at the end of it. This is the answer to all the varieties of dualism and Gnostic rejection of the flesh. Jesus saved and re-created the whole cosmos, healed the soul of man and worked our spiritual rebirth and divinization by entering the depth of bodily frailty and weakness, by his suffering and death in the flesh.

The sign of the Cross – such a simple thing. We Catholics and Orthodox do it all the time, every day. But what it means is depth beyond depth. Our bodies are His body; our flesh is taken up in all its messy struggles, aches and pains, illnesses and ultimate death, into His Flesh.

And so we become, in all of that, a living offering with Him. We have little choice about our bodily sufferings and struggles. But, by signing our flesh with the Cross, we choose to be with Jesus in them, to place our flesh within his flesh, our pain within his pain, and so, our little love within the Divine Charity. And this is the path of discipleship, which leads to eternal joy and life in the transformed and glorious flesh of the resurrection of the body.

Why People Get Mad at the Church (One Reason...)

Because the Church is not as our dreams picture her to be, a desperate attempt is undertaken to bring her into conformity with our wishes: to make her a place for every freedom, a space where we can move freed of our limits, an experiment in utopia, which, after all, must exist somewhere.

Called to Communion, 136

Reflection – There is a certain species of anger against the Church, a certain type of bitterness and resentment of the Church, that is really a subtle sort of compliment to Her. I don’t get angry at, say, the Rotary Club for failing to usher in the peaceable kingdom on earth. I don’t harbor a bitter resentment towards the Chamber of Commerce for falling short of the beatitudes and the great commandment of love. I don’t fume and fret because the PTA or the Bowling League have left mankind chained in bonds of ignorance and sin yet.

Human organizations—human expectations! I might be upset if the Chamber of Commerce proved to be a den of thieves and extortionists or the PTA a conspiracy to corrupt our children or the Bowling League a front for a organized crime. But we would never expect such groups to be anything but what they are: a bunch of ordinary people pursuing some mostly harmless or even mildly beneficial end in the normal human muddled up way.

But the Church… that’s another story. It should be better than it is… and so we get angry. It should be a place of love and mercy… and when it is not, we rage. It should be a place of true and genuine freedom… and when it constricts, we rebel.

Now, I’m not talking about the anger that comes against the Church because of clerical sexual abuse scandals and cover-ups. That is a just anger against an intolerable injustice, one which I believe the Church has in recent years taken strong action to address and overcome.

I am talking about the anger, far more common, which comes at the revelation that the Church is, in fact, made up of a bunch of human beings who have the normal human flaws and blindnesses, follies and miseries that all humanity is subject to. When Fr. X is a flake and Fr. Y is a tyrant, and Fr. Z is a drunk and Fr. W doesn’t know how to talk to people… we get mad. When Bishop A is a poor administrator and Bishop B lacks personal warmth, Bishop C is living too lavishly and Bishop D is just a big mean bully… we get mad.

The Church is all human beings living human lives and subject to all the failures and falls that go with it (and, of course, somehow we take for granted and hardly notice Frs. A-V and Bishops E-Z who are fundamentally kind, generous men showing up and doing the best they can each day). Why get mad?

Because somehow we know that the Church is not supposed to be just one more human organization. We know, on some level, that the Church is not just human, but divine, and that the divine charity, the divine goodness, and the divine liberty is meant to flow and shine through all of Her members.

Ratzinger spotlights in this passage, however, the mistaken response many have today to their disappointment in the Church and its very real failures. Namely, to fix the Church by changing it to suit us. The Church has bruised me with its harshness—let me cover every ‘hard teaching’ with soft padding so it cannot reach me anymore. The Church has bound me and restricted me, suffocated my freedom with its overbearing ways—toss out all the rules and let me do what I please!

And when the Church says, as it so often has had to say in recent decades, ‘no, we really cannot teach other than what we teach, as we hold these teachings to be from God and not from man,’… well, that has increased the anger and rage, the contempt and hatred of many.

Meanwhile, the very faults and frailties of the Church’s ministers, the constant falling short of all of us to live the Gospel in fullness and proclaim it in all its perfect beauty and goodness actually calls us into a deeper freedom and deeper goodness and charity. Namely, to know that the Church is the instrument of salvation, but not the Savior. The Church is the sign of salvation, but not Salvation Itself. The Church is the seed of the kingdom, but the kingdom is coming, not here, growing, not yet mature.

And so the Church’s failures, which are real and painful, impel us not towards bitterness and anger or a reforming spirit based on our own ideas and preferences, but towards Christ. To cry out to Him, to deepen our communion with Him, to see Him coming towards us through the wreckage and mire, through the desolate city the Church often resembles, and to put all our confidence in Him, to find our true freedom, not in casting aside the laws and rules, but in the communion of love He makes possible for us, a communion of love that can even extend to Frs W-Z and Bishops A-E…

The Door is Open

The desperate situation of philosophy—that is to say, the desperate situation into which reason obsessed by positivism has maneuvered itself—has become the desperate situation of our faith. Faith cannot be set free unless reason itself opens up again. If the door to metaphysical knowledge remains barred, if we cannot pass beyond the limits to human perception set by Kant, then faith will necessarily atrophy, simply for lack of breathing space.

Truth and Tolerance, 135

Reflection – Hi, folks, I’m back! ‘Real-time Fr. Denis’ blogging here. Cana was great (as it always is) – a week of hot, sunny days and cool evenings and a genuinely nice bunch of families to share it with. Returning to Madonna House yesterday I found the place packed to the rafters with young’uns who have rolled in for our MH summer program. Nice!

Well, back to business. And it’s my favorite business today – philosophy! Ratzinger’s critique of positivism is a core element in his writings over the years. ‘Reason obsessed by positivism’ is a good turn of phrase. His point has been that the positivistic approach to human reason is arbitrary and unproven, and that our insistence on limiting reason to that approach is entirely unwarranted and deeply harmful to the human project.

Oh yeah—not everyone reading this is trained in philosophy… so what is positivism again? It’s the theory of knowledge that limits the known and the knowable to the immediately observable and the scientifically demonstrable. If you can’t measure it in a laboratory or touch it with your hands, it either simply doesn’t exist or at any rate is entirely beyond your knowledge and hence utterly irrelevant to your life.

Of course, positivism is inherently self-contradictory. The ideas expressed in the above paragraph are not objects of sense perception, nor can they be demonstrated in a laboratory. Therefore, by strict positivistic criteria, they do not exist, or are unknowable and hence irrelevant. Positivism is disproved and ruled out… by positivism. An intellectual theory that begins by cutting its own epistemological throat is perhaps open to criticism, eh?

And so Ratzinger has critiqued it, extensively and fairly unanswerably (in my opinion). Positivism simply has no persuasive force. Meanwhile, the effect it has is to render any kind of penetration into the deep mystery of life and humanity impossible. Forget about faith for the moment—any kind of inquiry into what it all means and how we are to live is ruled out a priori by scientific positivism.

I remember reading some blogger or other on the internet saying just that. “Well, we can’t really know anything about the meaning of life, so why bother with it, and just get on with having fun and doing what you think you’re supposed to do!” Positivism in action—and I think there’s an awful lot of people who have never stepped inside of a philosophy classroom who live out of that. Trickle-down philosophy—the bane of our times. If you don’t think for yourself and come up with your own philosophy, one will be given to you—and it will probably be some version of logical positivism.

Who says we cannot know anything about the meaning of life? Really, sez who? The whole human quest for wisdom and justice is based on their being something out there to find. And meanwhile, Mr. Positivist has in fact snuck in a conclusion about what it all means anyhow. “Let’s just have fun”—aka hedonism, aka ‘pleasure is the point of life.’ And ‘do what you think you’re supposed to do’—aka there is a moral order, and such a thing as ‘what we are supposed to do’. Where it comes from and why we are beholden to it is left unanswered…

Meanwhile, the door to metaphysical knowledge (that is, what things really are and what reality really is) is not really barred. It has been swinging open all these centuries, and thinkers unbound by Kant and Comte and Russell and Hume have been merrily going in and out of it all along. And the real possibility of metaphysical knowledge makes faith possible, credible, viable, intellectually respectable, vibrant and strong.

So to those of you who have faith and maybe are not so intellectually or philosophically inclined – take heart! Faith may be many things, but it is not ridiculous or nonsensical or anti-intellectual. And to those reading who may have rejected faith as this, defend your position! Ratzinger has raised a formidable critique of Comtian scientific positivism, and it needs to be answered if the anti-faith, anti-metaphysical position is to be maintained.

Tradition! Or, Why Tevye the Milkman was Right

I am away this week at Cana Colony, and am re-posting good old posts from when I first started this blog and didn't have many readers. Hope you enjoy them, and I'll be back for real on Saturday or Sunday.

[In Rome, St.

Paul] encountered the type of moral decadence that comes from the total loss of tradition: people were deprived of that interior evidential character that in other times had been offered to man form the outset of this life by usages and customs. Where nothing can be taken for granted, everything become possible, and nothing is impossible any longer. Now there is no value capable of sustaining man, and there are no inviolable norms. All that counts is man’s ego and the present moment.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 93

Reflection – This is from the beginning of an essay entitled “The Natural Knowledge of God” which is so utterly relevant to our times that I will probably be quoting most of it in short bits and pieces on this blog. (Really, though, if you’re going to buy one book of the pope’s, make it this one – it is short and superb!)

We touch in this passage upon another major theme in Ratzinger’s writings – the historical amnesia of Western Civilization, our being cut off from the vast wisdom of tradition accumulated and passed down through the centuries. It is this sundering of the individual from ‘usages and customs’ that draws us down into moral decadence and chaos.

Simply put, when nothing is passed on, everyone is left having to figure it all out themselves. Since this is rather difficult, to say the least, most of us end up parroting whatever the majority opinions or fashionable gurus of the day tell us, in easy to remember slogans. Hence we are trapped in the present moment and whatever 'wisdom' it has to offer us.

Of course human traditions are flawed—after all, slavery is a venerable human tradition, as is child sacrifice. But when tradition is discarded whole cloth, which is certainly the case in much of North America and Europe today, then the sole counterbalance to the force of the ego and the spirit of the age is lost. We are left trapped in our own desires and devices, our own projects, agendae, and plans, with no actual experience of a standard, a rule, a social norm to check or correct us.

Social convention, for all its flaws, has a capacity for curbing the unbridled egoism of the human person. That there are things that 'one simply doesn't do' is more important than we like to admit. Its loss (largely) in our day is a terrible one. The amnesia of our inherited moral wisdom is even worse; each person has to laboriously work their way through the whole mess.

I will never forget the young woman who triumphantly pointed out to me that the idea of a binding absolute moral law could not possibly be right since people have to steal food if they are starving to death and kill in self defense. It had simply never occurred to her that both starvation and violent attacks are not recently discovered phenomena, and, just perhaps, the very moral theologians and philosophers who argued for an absolute moral law had noticed those facts and given those questions some thought over the millennia.

Ratzinger has repeatedly called us to a radical anamnesis (remembrance) of the moral tradition of our civilization, so that we can rebuild a bulwark against the moral decadence of the unfettered ego and a defense against crushing conformism to current fashion. His life work is dedicated in many respects precisely to this.

So is this blog.

What is the Church For?

I am away this week at Cana Colony, and am re-posting good old posts from when I first started this blog and didn't have many readers. Hope you enjoy them, and I'll be back for real on Saturday or Sunday.

In the writings of the Fathers, the one and only Church precedes creation… here the Fathers are continuing a theme of rabbinic theology by which the Torah and Israel had been conceived of as being preexistent: creation was then conceived as a sphere for the exercise of God’s will; this will, however, was held to need a people who might live for God’s will and make it into the light of the world. Since the Fathers were fully persuaded that Israel and the Church were ultimately identical, they could not regard the Church as something that came into being at a late hour, by chance, but recognized in this gathering of the nations under the will of God the inner goal of creation.

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 134

Reflection – “I don’t mean to be offensive, but I’m not really married to the Church.” So said one of the lay students who shared several of my theology classes in the seminary. At the time, as is usual with me, I was too dumbfounded to do anything but stare blankly at her (if you ever find me staring blankly at you, it’s not really a good sign…).

Ten minutes after she left the room, I said out loud, “Well, Jesus is married to the Church.” And that seemed to me to be an effective, if not especially timely, rejoinder.

In this quote from Ratzinger, however, my rather summary defense of the Church is put into a broader and richer field of meaning. What is creation for? What is the world for? What is humanity for? There are all sorts of opinions, of course, including the current favorites, “Nothing!” or “Whatever you want them to be for!”

We say that creation is for the Church. This may seem ‘wrong’ somehow, or even offensive (what about all the people who aren’t Catholic or Christian – did they miss the boat?). But we see that God is working out a plan, a goal, a deep and beautiful unfolding of what he has made… and that this unfolding is the gathering of all men and women, all nations and people, into a single body, a single family, what in Madonna House we call a Sobornost.

And this gathering together is not only of all human beings. It is of all human beings united, in a way that we have a hard time finding adequate words for, with God. And that this gathering together takes up the whole of creation into itself – the material signs used in the sacraments, the artifacts of brick, wood, stone, metal, glass that hold the invisible mystery of this divine unfolding, the situation of this mystery, this Church, in time and space and history. That this unfolding of God’s intent is not an abstraction or an idea or merely some future hope, but is a existing reality, situated in the messy here-and-now situation of sinful, foolish humanity.

The Church is not an afterthought or an extra or (God forbid!) a problem to be dealt with or overcome. It is the very heart and center of God’s creative will.

I am married to the Church.

For Democracy to Survive

I am away this week at Cana Colony, and am re-posting good old posts from when I first started this blog and didn't have many readers. Hope you enjoy them, and I'll be back for real on Saturday or Sunday.

We are obliged to ask: must there not be a non-relativistic kernel in democracy too? For is not democracy ultimately constructed around human rights that are inviolable?.. We prefer today to speak of values rather than of truth, in order to avoid coming into conflict with the idea of tolerance and with democratic relativism. But such a terminological transposition will not allow us to evade the question I have just posed, since values derive their inviolability precisely from the fact that they are true and that they correspond to true requirements of human existence.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, p. 56.

Reflection – The problem of relativism looms large in Ratzinger’s writings. The section quoted above is from a lengthy discussion of the relationship of democracy, tolerance, and truth. In a secular democracy, can we make claims about the truth of good and evil, or absolute truth statements about reality? Does this not open us up to the danger of intolerance, the suppression of the rights of those who disagree with us? How can a secular and pluralistic society manage its affairs unless it excludes any truth claims from its legal and social structure? Many would answer these questions by insisting that a secular society must adhere to a position of strict relativism, confining all claims about truth to the private sphere.

These are indeed big questions at any time, but are especially pressing today, as courts and legislatures redefine the very meaning of marriage, human rights commissions define and re-define the limits of free speech, and the rights of human beings at the far ends of life (i.e. the unborn and the elderly) are alternately denied or debated. What are we free to say? To do? To think? What is the nature of freedom in the world, and what is its safeguard?

In this passage, Ratzinger points out that a democratic free society cannot safely commit itself to a strict moral relativism without endangering its own foundations.

The question is simple: do human beings have rights or don’t we? A strict relativist would have to say, “That depends.” But if we do not have rights which absolutely cannot be violated, then the very core of democracy is gutted.

Without a theory of inalienable rights, we are left with this: in some fashion, some entity in society, some arm of the state, determines what we do or do not have a right to do at any moment. If there are no inherent absolute rights that stand independent of social organization or government fiat, then we are essentially serfs of the state, exercising our freedoms only at the good pleasure and discretion of those controlling the levers of power.

This is a grim, even alarming prospect, yet we have to be clear. It is the strict logical implications of moral relativism at the level of mass society. A truly free society logically must rest on truth. If there is no truth, there is no freedom, since our freedoms can be denied at any moment by our betters. If there is no freedom, there is no democracy. Some kind of binding truth statements is necessary for a healthy democracy to survive.

Of course, this necessity of truth for freedom and democracy carries us into deep waters, difficult determinations. Yet without engaging these deep and difficult questions, we are in deeper waters yet. Indeed, we are profoundly vulnerable to tyrannies of the right or the left, to having any particular right we currently enjoy disposed of as soon as it becomes inconvenient to the achieving of this or that social good.

And this, in fact, is the situation of the modern world, insofar as it insists on a relativistic view of reality and morality.

The Future

I am away this week at Cana Colony, and am re-posting good old posts from when I first started this blog and didn't have many readers. Hope you enjoy them, and I'll be back for real on Saturday or Sunday.

[Faith] is not a system of semi-knowledge, but an existential decision – it is life in terms of the future that God grants us, even beyond the frontier of death. This is that attitude and orientation that gives life its weights and measures, its ordinances, and its very freedom. Certainly a life lived by faith resembles more an expedition up a mountain than a quiet evening spent reading in front of the fire; but anyone who embarks upon this expedition knows and feels more and more, that the adventure to which it invites us is well worthwhile.

Faith and the Future, 50

Reflection -  Ratzinger here summons us to the adventure of life, to a journey towards our true future.

The question of ‘the future’ is a key one today. So many ideologies that governed the course of world events in the 20th century were essentially eschatological, that is, future-oriented. Marxism anticipated a workers’ paradise, and was willing to smash everything and everyone to get there. Nazism heralded the glorious Third Reich when the Master Race could order all things in beauty and peace… once all the inferior races were cleared out of the way, especially the Jews.

Scientism promises an end to suffering… if we just let them experiment on and vivisect us in whatever way they please. Environmentalism, meanwhile, holds out a grim specter of eschatological doom, a sort of Judgment Green Day when all our carbon sins will come home to roost. We must repent before it is too late, in sackcloth, if not in nasty carbon-producing ashes. Again, if only we can abort and contracept enough people, environmental doom can be forestalled.

Human eschatology always seems to involve human sacrifice.

Ratzinger surveys all of these throughout his writings and holds out the Christian alternative. There is a glorious future held out for humanity; there are great deeds to be done, obstacles to be surmounted, works to be achieved. But this future is held in the heart and hands of God, not in human endeavor alone. The human efforts to secure the eshcaton end in horror, bloodshed, tyranny. Placing our hands in God’s hands, and allowing Him to guide us to the future of man allows us all the joy, excitement, expectation and greatness of spirit that we yearn for in these ideologies, while grounding all of this in truth, love, and a deep respect for the human person.

The weights and measure of life given by faith are just that: that each person is included or at least invited into this glorious future, that it is seen in the love and tenderness of God, in Christ, for every single human being, and that our own path to this glorious future is precisely this path of love, service, mercy, in imitation of Christ.

The Good Soil

I am away this week at Cana Colony, and am re-posting good old posts from when I first started this blog and didn't have many readers. Hope you enjoy them, and I'll be back for real on Saturday or Sunday. 

This passage is in relation to Mary’s role in the Incarnation. It is from a homily he preached on Isaiah 55: 10-11: “For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, and does not return, but waters the earth, and makes it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater, so shall my word go forth from my mouth: it shall not return to me empty, but accomplish what I desire…” And so he writes:

when the text says that the word, or the seed, bears fruit, it means that, unlike a ball that hits the ground and bounces back up, the seed actually sinks into the earth, assimilates the earth’s energies, and changes them into itself. It thus brings about something truly new, for now it carries the earth in itself, and turns it into fruit.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 14

Reflection - This is crucial in understanding, not just Mary’s role, but ours. We tend to think of our lives as somehow being just about us, don’t we? Even if we’re essentially trying to be good people? You know: I am me and you are you and she is she and God is God and… we’re all in little hermetically sealed compartments. We may bump up against each other, but ultimately we’re all locked into our own selves. This kind of atomic individualism is deeply ingrained in us.

And God is God, and the world is the world: so much of modernity is founded on a conviction that the two are not just distinct, but strictly separated one from the other.

But ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1: 14). God seems to have crossed the threshold of the world. And Mary is right there at that moment: it is Mary’s flesh that clothed him. And she was not just a passive vessel in this—she gave her consent. God entered her, and she gave herself to this event, so that God could become man in Jesus.

And this same Word comes into us, too. Mary was this good soil who totally gave herself to Jesus. But we’re that soil, too, not quite as good as her, but even so... The Father wants our consent, too. He wants to do something with our ‘flesh’ – the stuff of our humanity, the energies, as Ratzinger puts it, of our being. And He wants to bring forth something new in us, too, from our earth, our being. He wants to make it fruitful.

This ties right back to the previous post on creativity. The deep creativity of our lives, the fruitfulness we really are made for, is not a question of producing a book, a blog, a poem, a song, or a cake.

It is producing Christ in the world, in our flesh. My individual self is made to be soil, receiving the Word so as to (in a sense) become the Word, a living Gospel, so as to give the Word to others who can receive it and become it and give it in turn. Not exactly as Mary did; she is unique. But as I can, and as you can, in faith. Receive so as to become so as to give. This is holiness, and it is the deep creativity of our lives.

Gone to Cana

Well, I'm away for the week, heading out this evening to Cana Colony, our MH family camp/retreat. Prayers appreciated.
Rather than having the blog be silent for the week, I thought I would try something different - I have scheduled to appear each day this week old posts from a year ago, when I first started blogging and hardly anyone was reading the thing. Now that I've got a few more readers, anyhow, some of the good posts from that first month might be of interest to people.
I won't be able to cross-post these scheduled posts to Facebook or Twitter, though.
I will be back blogging in person Saturday or next Sunday.

Close the Door

The most opposite modern views of the world share the same starting point: the denial of the natural ethical law and the reduction of the world to ‘mere’ facts.

A Turning Point for Europe?,  34

Reflection – ‘We can change the world. Rearrange the world… Rules and regulations who needs them? Open up the door…’ The Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song Chicago remains the unofficial theme song of our times. We have been proudly ‘opening up doors’ for centuries now, changing and rearranging and jettisoning all rules with… well, I was going to say ‘with impunity’ but I don’t think it quite works that way.

Some of those doors have monsters behind them. Other doors were fire doors, holding back the annihilating forces of nature. Other doors were trap doors leading to oubliettes, and our flinging open of those means millions of forgotten ones have plunged down into the abyss of obliteration.

When we jettison the natural law—that is, when we start from the premise that there is no ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ built into the nature of things, the very structure of reality—then we are left in a world of facts and figures, forces of energy and brute matter. But this world of facts proves to be far more cruel and pitiless than any moral system ever developed.

We proudly uphold ‘reproductive freedom’, meaning the aggressive separation of sexual activity from pro-creation. Birth rates plunge throughout the developed world, virtually to extinction points in some countries. And so the demographic crisis heightens and tightens and worsens… and in a few years we will start euthanizing our elderly, the same elderly who in their youth proudly chose the path of contraception and abortion. The children they didn’t have are now unable to care for them and love them in their declining years. Rules and regulations, who needs them?

Oh yeah, we do… the same holds true for the looming global economic crisis. For years, decades now we (that is, our governments) have been living on credit and fancy bookkeeping and borrowing from our children and grandchildren to pay for a prosperous lifestyle. Well, our children and grandchildren have proven to be no-shows (see above paragraph for explanation). And the debt is coming due; the money is running out. What does this mean and what does will look like? I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does, either.

And the environment… ‘we can change the world…’ can we change how food grows from the earth? Can we change the nature of living creatures? Can we really sustain the current system of food production, the heavily urbanized civilization which requires a global network of food supply chains, fewer and fewer farmers feeding an ever-growing non-food growing population? When the money runs out (see above paragraph), how is all this food going to keep moving as it must?

Anyhow, sorry to be a downer on Canada Day. But we need to reclaim this ethical sense, this sense that in the very nature of things, given by God, is a structure, an order, a truth which yields a genuine good, a truth and goodness which respected and lived from yields a genuine beauty. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of pitiless ‘facts’, a tsunami of facts that is, in fact, rushing at our civilization fairly quickly now, and will swamp us in the coming decades.

God is merciful; nature is not. The moral law is a gift of mercy from God, to teach us how to live in this world so that ‘nature’ is our friend and companion, our intimate teacher of the ways of God and our nursemaid in the ways of the Spirit (I have much more to say on that subject, but for another time…).

Without that moral law, and the sense that it flows directly from the natural order, we are terribly vulnerable, terribly endangered, and I fear that all of us—my beloved nation of Canada very much at the top of the list—are going to feel the weight of mere facts very soon indeed, if we do not recover the true values coming from the heart of God.

Temple of Whom?

With [the Resurrection] the new Temple will begin: the living body of Jesus Christ, which will now stand in the sight of God and be the place of all worship. Into this body he incorporates men. It is the tabernacle that no human hands have made, the place of true worship of God, which casts out the shadow and replaces it with reality. Interpreted at its deepest level, the prophecy of the Resurrection [in John 2:19, the destruction and raising up of the Temple] is also a prophecy of the Eucharist. The body of Christ is sacrificed and precisely as sacrificed is living. This is the mystery made known to us in the Mass.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 43

Reflection – Ratzinger invites us here into a deep contemplation of Christ (a bit too deep, perhaps, for the beautiful holiday weekend we’re enjoying in Canada!). But, Canada Day or not, here we are.

The image of Christ as the ‘place’ where we worship God, the true Temple is one we can spend a long time praying over. Don’t forget, too, that Ratzinger says that into this ‘temple’ he incorporates men—us. We are all made by grace part of this living temple, part of this ‘place’ where God is worshipped in spirit and in truth. All of this is the language of scripture, hallowed by its canonical authority and 2000 years of reception by believers. But… what does it mean, really? What is this Temple? Whose is it? What is going on here?

The Mass is certainly at the core of it. But notice: Ratzinger does not say that this mystery is the mystery of the Mass. He says it is made known to us in the Mass. The Mass, the Eucharist, reveals, makes visible and sensible, this mystery of temple and worship and our incorporation into Christ.

What is this worship? It is Christ’s sacrifice of Himself to the Father on the Cross. It is Christ’s obedience to the Father out of love for Him and for us. It is this penetration into the world of flesh and bone of the very Spirit of God, pure spirit, pure gift. It is the penetration into the world of death and sorrow of the Pure Life and Pure Joy of heaven.

It is the startling and entirely unexpected—unsought, even!—descent of God into the world, God into Man. Heaven had captured earth and the communion of love of the Trinity has entered time and space and history, has a name and a face and a story.

And so, against all our sensibilities and proprieties, the worship of God is the participation in the life of God, is entering the dance of love and life of the Trinity.

Historically this penetration, this capturing, this fusion of earth and heaven occurred in the Incarnation and on Calvary. Existentially for us, we see it and hear it and taste it in the Mass.

But we live it, too, or at least we are supposed to. Our love and obedience, however clumsy or halting or partial or grudging or poor, is worship. Our small efforts to serve, to forgive, to share, to suffer and die for the other—all of this is living out the mystery revealed to us in the Mass.

All of this is our ‘temple service’, our levitical office. This calls us very deep, you know. It’s not just that we’re all trying to be nice people doing nice things so we can have nice lives. That’s all… well, very nice, but it doesn’t get us very far. It’s not much good to us when the roof falls in, everything goes to hell and ruination, and we stand, kneel or lie prostrate in the wreckage of our lives or the of the life of the world.

We better have something a little deeper going on than being ‘nice’. And this deeper path is the one Christ opens to us. Worship, the entry of God into humanity and the consequent entry of humanity into God’s life and love. And so our little lives, so poor, so naked, so humble, become pilgrimages into the vast expanses of the Heart of God, a pilgrimage without end.

And it is every Eucharist, every Mass, that gives us the Living Food for the journey so that our love may not grow cold and our life may not falter and die.

Freedom is Not Free

Freedom entails the ability of the conscience to perceive the fundamental value of humanity, a value that concerns every individual.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 48

Reflection – Well we have one of those nifty one-liners here, virtually tweet-like in its succinctness (132 characters, to be precise), which says more than many a vast volume of verbiage could voice. (Alliteration is fun!)

It is a huge theme of Ratzinger’s that freedom, so crucial, so necessary to the human project, does not stand alone as its own thing, independent and secure. Freedom exists in a matrix of values and truths without which it cannot survive.

Freedom simply as ‘I will do as I please,’ is doomed to failure. Either some other person will come along and in their freedom rob, rape, or kill me, doing as they please and leaving me a wreck or a corpse, or I myself will get subsumed into the collectivist thinking of the herd, where ‘what I please’ to do just happens to line up precisely with the messages and agendae of Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Freedom has to be held secure by something else. And many people get this. ‘Freedom is not free!’ is a battle cry in some quarters, although (sadly) what is often meant by that is that we have to invade other countries and torture the people living in them so that we can continue to be brainwashed by Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Ahem. Sorry. My inner hippy radical speaking there. S’true, though!

Ratzinger is (as usual!) right on the money when he says that freedom is held secure by the perception of the fundamental value of humanity, and its application to the individual. If I do not treat you as the inestimable being of value that you are, if you do not treat, or at least attempt to treat, each person you meet as if they are a V.I.P., literally, to look on everyone as a ‘thou’ and not as an ‘it’, then your freedom and mine are on very shaky grounds.

Why is this? Well, the Pope and I have written extensively about this over the past year. Clicking on the ‘freedom’ tag at the bottom of this post will give you a fair bit to chew on with the subject. It’s really a matter of knowing what freedom is for, which is really tied to the question of what human life is for. What is it all about, anyhow?

When we reduce the human person to something less than human, when we objectify, use, discard, destroy people according to some calculus of value or other, we lose what freedom is for. Freedom is for loving, for communion, for a joyous entry into the community of man, the human family, an entry and a communion that here and now is marked by struggle and anguish, but nonetheless is the essence of human life and flourishing.

To descend to a sort of law of the jungle, an approach to humanity marked by calculation and use, makes communion possible. If I use you, I cannot be in communion with you. If I cannot be in communion with you, I am no longer free. Life is reduced to a bare level of use and abuse, and ultimately I am enslaved by my desires, by the pressures of the marketplace, and by the pressures of the mass media and its group-think.

In other words, respect for life is the bare minimum requirement of a free society. So… is Canada a free society? Is America? Is Europe?

The struggle for the right to life is at the very core of restoring, rebuilding, and securing the freedom of our nations, and our claim to be humane and civil societies.

Happy Blogaversary!

Well, I done did it. I have now been blogging for precisely one year, having begun this blog on the Solemnity of Peter and Paul, June 29, 2011.
345 posts and over 30000 readers later, I am, God and my superiors having the final say on this and all matters, only just beginning.
Thank you to all you good people who have been reading me all these months, those of you I know and those I don't, those who leave comments and the vast majority who don't (who are all you people, anyhow???).
I will carry on my regular Benedict blogging tomorrow morning as usual, and look forward to continuing to live and reflect with our German Shepherd and with the Good Shepherd who loves us all through it all.
One year down, and keeping going with no visible end in sight.

The Power and Strength of Woman

In the women of Israel, the mothers and the saviors, in their fruitful infertility is expressed most purely and most profoundly what creation is and what election is.

Daughter Zion, 23-4

Reflection – Daughter Zion  is one of my favorite books by Ratzinger and was one of the principal sources for my thesis. Oddly, I hardly ever quote from it on this blog – not sure why that is.

I have recommended this book far and wide, and am happy to do so again here—in particular, Ratzinger develops here a biblical theology of ‘woman’ that has really been helpful to women struggling with what the Church teaches about women and its perceived anti-feminist stance.

This brief passage is from a long and detailed and very beautiful analysis of the feminine line in the Old Testament. As the masculine line passes from Adam to Noah to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua and down through the kings and prophets of Israel, so there is a feminine line, less prominent perhaps, but of deep significance scripturally and theologically.

These women, like the men, fall into basic categories. There are the barren women made fruitful by God’s grace and kindness—Sarah, Rachel, Hannah. There are the warrior women who, against any reasonable possibility of success, deliver Israel from its enemies (Deborah, Judith, and in a different manner, Esther). Both the barren woman who conceives and the ‘weak’ woman who triumphs in battle manifest the power of God to save and redeem his people, and the fundamental truth all of us, male and female, live in as His creatures.

Namely, creation and redemption (which in the Old Testament is one with the election of God’s people) are essentially received. God acts; we receive. God is the one who gives life, who makes us fruitful, who chooses us for Himself, and who brings us to victory in the battle of life. The feminine line in the Old Testament reveals the basic structure of created reality before God.

Ratzinger goes on to develop the final revelation of the feminine in the Old Testament in the personification of Sophia as created wisdom, working alongside the Uncreated Wisdom of God to create and delight in all that He has made. And of course the second half of the book applies this all magnificently to the Virgin Mary as the real historical figure who shows us the path of receptive creativity and joyful participation in love with the creative and saving work of God.

This is so crucial. We are conditioned in the modern world to associate strength, power, dignity, freedom, status with being the one in charge, being on top, being the boss. To be a fully human, fully adult, fully alive person entails an ever-expanding control of one’s world. This has many implications extending into areas of human sexuality, economic activity, intellectual inquiry—a whole anthropology of dominance and mastery that flows from a certain concept of freedom.

I maintain, Ratzinger maintains, and the Bible maintains that there is an entirely different model of freedom, dignity, power, and life that God reveals to us and beckons us to live by. Mary shows us this, and the women of the Bible show us this. Joyful receptivity, active participation, the surrender of love, the abandonment of self into the loving plans and providential dispensations of God, obedience coming out of the free disposition of one’s own person and being—this is what it means to be a human creature.

We are all ‘brides of Christ’, male or female. The soul is feminine in relation to God. This has nothing to do with ‘sex’ in the common understanding of the word; it is a matter of the fundamental terms of our relationship with reality, and with Reality. First comes receiving, then comes responding. God initiates; Christ leads. God is the author; we are under His authority. We are His. And the women of the Bible show us that this is the path to a fruitful, triumphant, and joyous life; Mary shows us that this is the path to glory, honor and power beyond our wildest imaginings.

Happy Serious Business

I would also like to stress that the sacred has an educational function and its disappearance inevitably impoverishes culture and especially the formation of the new generations. If, for example, in the name of a faith that is secularized and no longer in need of sacred signs, these Corpus Christi processions through the city were to be abolished, the spiritual profile of Rome would be “flattened out”, and our personal and community awareness would be weakened.

Or let us think of a mother or father who in the name of a desacralized faith, deprived their children of all religious rituals: in reality they would end by giving a free hand to the many substitutes that exist in the consumer society, to other rites and other signs that could more easily become idols.

God, our Father, did not do this with humanity: he sent his Son into the world not to abolish, but to give fulfillment also to the sacred. At the height of this mission, at the Last Supper, Jesus instituted the Sacrament of his Body and his Blood, the Memorial of his Paschal Sacrifice. By so doing he replaced the ancient sacrifices with himself, but he did so in a rite which he commanded the Apostles to perpetuate, as a supreme sign of the true Sacred One who is he himself. With this faith, dear brothers and sisters, let us celebrate the Eucharistic Mystery today and every day and adore it as the centre of our life and the heart of the world. Amen.

Homily, Corpus Christi, 2012

Reflection – A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he will believe in anything. So says, roughly, GK Chesterton, somewhere or other. There is a human capacity, really a human need, for belief that stubbornly persists despite the best efforts of rationalists to eradicate it. We need the sacred; that is, we need the presence of something bigger than ourselves which we cannot prove to be true but to which we pledge our loyalty. We need to be reverent; we need something or someone to respect.

Throwing out the God of heaven and earth, the God of Jesus Christ, as so many have done or (often, these days) have had done for and to them, any old god will do. Whether it is one of the host of new age or occult energies, or The Universe (TM), or human progress or science or environmental purity or Love (TM)—well, in the words of the Prophet Dylan, “Don’t you know you gotta serve somebody?”

And this is very much tied to the question of reverence, of respect. I think a good test to see what god a person worships is to see what they will not make fun of. ‘God is not mocked,’ – what does this person not mock, and why? We can all think of the stereotypical Sunday Christian who takes his religion very lightly indeed, but is deadly earnest about the maximization of his bank balance.

Personally, I don’t like jokes about Jesus. I don’t tell them, and I will listen politely if some well-meaning soul tells me one, but to me Jesus is not a subject for jokes. Jesus is joy, happiness, peace, beauty, delight, love, and laughter. But jokes? No—He’s too sacred for that.

And so these rituals, these sacred rituals, and the reverent respect with which we do them. This is how we teach children what God we worship. And how we teach ourselves, too. And, most importantly of all, how God has taught us who He is and how we are to approach Him.

This is rather important, actually. In our desacralized world, we are a bit unclear on something that had been obvious to our ancestors from day one. Namely, we cannot just approach God any old way we please. God is greater than we are, and awesome, and somewhat fearsome; we need to be shown how to enter His presence, and how to offer Him the worship and honor that are His due. This has been blindingly obvious to every generation of humanity since humanity was; we have forgotten it.

And Jesus is the one who teaches us how to approach God and enter His presence, and indeed personally bears us into the Presence of the Most High. And so as we go to Mass we go with happy hearts, uplifted hearts, joyous hearts… but never with sloppy, inattentive heedless hearts. We are entering God’s presence through, with, and in Jesus. It is serious business. Happy serious business. And it is reverent respect—genuflections, bows, good posture and moderation of voice and countenance—that helps our hearts to stay in that ‘happy serious place’ that opens us to the action of grace.

Drying Off

I would now like to move on briefly to the second aspect: the sacred nature of the Eucharist. Here too so we have heard in the recent past of a certain misunderstanding of the authentic message of Sacred Scripture. The Christian newness with regard to worship has been influenced by a certain secularist mentality of the 1960s and 70s. It is true, and this is still the case, that the centre of worship is now no longer in the ancient rites and sacrifices, but in Christ himself, in his person, in his life, in his Paschal Mystery. However it must not be concluded from this fundamental innovation that the sacred no longer exists, but rather that it has found fulfilment in Jesus Christ, divine Love incarnate.

The Letter to the Hebrews, which we heard this evening in the Second Reading, speaks to us precisely of the newness of the priesthood of Christ, “high priest of the good things that have come” (Heb 9:11), but does not say that the priesthood is finished. Christ “is the mediator of a new covenant” (Heb 9:15), established in his blood which purifies our “conscience from dead works” (Heb 9:14).

He did not abolish the sacred but brought it to fulfillment, inaugurating a new form of worship, which is indeed fully spiritual but which, however, as long as we are journeying in time, still makes use of signs and rites, which will exist no longer only at the end, in the heavenly Jerusalem, where there will no longer be any temple (cf. Rev 21:22). Thanks to Christ, the sacred is truer, more intense and, as happens with the Commandments, also more demanding! Ritual observance does not suffice but purification of the heart and the involvement of life is required.

Homily, Corpus Christi, 2012

Reflection – I grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, and so I can directly relate and reflect on this loss of the sense of the sacred in the Church in those years. Fortunately I grew up in a small town that could charitably be described as a backwater (Hello, Alexandria!), where we were spared all the latest innovations dreamed up in liturgy laboratories in the big cities. No clown Masses, basketball Masses, puppet Masses, or frozen yogurt Masses for us! (I made that last one up.)

Nonetheless, the tide of irreverence was rising throughout North America, and even if Glengarry County was on ‘high ground’ relatively speaking, we still got a bit damp from it. Personally, I'm still drying off. And it seems to me that this tide, far from receding with the years, has only continued to mount.

It seems to me that in broad popular culture ‘the sacred’ has become devoid of meaning. Or rather, something being identified as ‘sacred’ means that it is a target of special mockery and denigration. The idea that one should not make fun of someone else’s sacred realities has fallen by the wayside, to the great coarsening and weakening of social discourse.

Meanwhile even within the Church it seems that ‘the sacred’ remains elusive. How are we to act in church? How are we to dress, talk, carry ourselves? What is a genuflection and what do we genuflect towards? These have become unknowns for many Catholics in North America.

And underlying that can be a misguided sense that, ‘Well, God doesn’t care about any of that! He sees our hearts – He doesn’t care how we act or dress or talk!’ But as the Pope points out, the coming of Christ only heightens the sense of sacredness; it does not take it away.

In a sense, yes, God does not care how we dress or look. It is for our own sake that we take care. God loves us all, and does indeed see our hearts. But the way we dress and talk and behave in regard to our sacred realities shapes our heart’s attitude towards them. It is for our own sake, and for the sake of others, that we dress up for church, do not talk in church unless necessary, genuflect to the Blessed Sacrament and bow to the altar, and generally carry ourselves with attention and respect while in the sacred precincts.

The sense of the sacred – making the sign of the Cross with care, watching how we speak of Jesus and Mary and the saints, being properly respectful of the Pope, the bishops, the clergy—not because these men are necessarily holy themselves, but because their office is.

All of this is to keep ourselves in reality—who this God we worship is, who we are in his presence, and what He is doing for us. Reverence and respect keep us open to the mystery of faith and its awesome action in our lives today.

Talking About Beauty Here

Communion and contemplation cannot be separated, they go hand in hand. If I am truly to communicate with another person I must know him, I must be able to be in silence close to him, to listen to him and look at him lovingly. True love and true friendship are always nourished by the reciprocity of looks, of intense, eloquent silences full of respect and veneration, so that the encounter may be lived profoundly and personally rather than superficially. And, unfortunately, if this dimension is lacking, sacramental communion itself may become a superficial gesture on our part.

Instead, in true communion, prepared for by the conversation of prayer and of life, we can address words of confidence to the Lord, such as those which rang out just now in the Responsorial Psalm: “O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant, the son of your handmaid. / You have loosed my bonds./ I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving /and call on the name of the Lord” (Ps 116[115]:16-17).

Homily, Corpus Christi, 2012

Reflection – The last couple days I think I’ve said all I can say (for now!) about the subject of Eucharistic Adoration. So, while the Pope is continuing to talk about it here, I want to focus on another aspect of the subject, which he alludes to in this section of the homily.

It’s this whole business of contemplation. And I’m not thinking so much of contemplative prayer here, although that is paramount, but rather a certain fundamental attitude towards reality, towards life, towards people, that I think is sorely lacking today.

Our minds are made to dissect, analyze, evaluate, judge. I mean all of that in a good sense—the proper God-given function of our minds is to do these tasks. And they are necessary tasks; if we are to survive, navigate, and thrive in the world we had better be able to do all of the above.

Our hearts are made, not (as we think) to emote or feel or get all fluttery about everything, but to contemplate. That is, our hearts are made to behold, to receive, to be in the presence of ‘the other’, be it a sky, a river, a tree, a flower, a bird, or a person. The receptive stance, the passive stance of simply seeing what is and allowing what is to shape what we are.

I believe that a deep source of our spiritual malaise today is that our minds are cut off from our hearts, or our hearts starved of their proper contemplative function. When that happens, a tree becomes either so many feet of board wood or cords of fire wood or a nuisance or something ‘pretty’. In other words, the tree is not given any room in my awareness outside of its utility to me or lack thereof.

That’s bad enough when it’s a tree which is a creature of God. When we approach persons this way, it is disastrous. I like you; I don’t like him; she can help my career; he’s useless to me; she makes me feel good; he makes me feel bad. And that’s that for all of them. Tragedy! The truth of your being, his being, and her being actually has little if anything to do with whether or not you all (or as they say in the South, all y’all) are useful or useless, pleasurable or displeasing to me.

And when my mind is cut off from my heart, and so all I have is analysis, dissection, and judgment, then all I have is that approach to you. Narcissism follows on this, and a terrible fracturing of communion, a terrible isolation in which each is only connected to each by bonds of utility and mutual benefit.

I’m really talking about beauty here. Contemplation is simply to see that you are you; that you are not made for me, that you have an integrity, a reality, a substantial being that is wholly distinct and not necessarily related to me. And in that contemplation, to see that you are beautiful. Your being, your reality, your substantial whole, your integrity of self, has a beauty, a truth, and a goodness that is wholly itself, with or without me, and my contemplative approach to you is that which alone gives me access to this truth and goodness and beauty.

The same is true of the flowers, the trees, the river, the sky, and the stars. But it is acutely true and vitally important of each human being. And of course this contemplative attitude, this passive receptivity and appreciation, is that which alone opens us up to God and to prayer. Contemplation, the uniting of our heads with our hearts, the privileging of receptivity over judgment, beholding over dissecting, wholeness over analysis—this is the urgent spiritual need of our times, I believe.

My Job is Too Easy

Actually it is wrong to set celebration and adoration against each other, as if they were competing. Exactly the opposite is true: worship of the Blessed Sacrament is, as it were, the spiritual “context” in which the community can celebrate the Eucharist well and in truth. Only if it is preceded, accompanied and followed by this inner attitude of faith and adoration can the liturgical action express its full meaning and value.

The encounter with Jesus in Holy Mass is truly and fully brought about when the community can recognize that in the Sacrament he dwells in his house, waits for us, invites us to his table, then, after the assembly is dismissed, stays with us, with his discreet and silent presence, and accompanies us with his intercession, continuing to gather our spiritual sacrifices and offer them to the Father.

In this regard I am pleased to highlight the experience we shall be having together this evening too. At the moment of Adoration, we are all equal, kneeling before the Sacrament of Love. The common priesthood and the ministerial priesthood are brought together in Eucharistic worship… To be all together in prolonged silence before the Lord present in his Sacrament is one of the most genuine experiences of our being Church, which is accompanied complementarily by the celebration of the Eucharist, by listening to the word of God, by singing and by approaching the table of the Bread of Life together.

Homily, Corpus Christi, 2012

Reflection – You know, sometimes it’s just too easy, this blog project of mine. At the risk of sounding like some sort of starry-eyed besotted papaltastic fan-boy, Pope Benedict is just so… awesome (dude!). So easy to just receive his words, ponder them, and find something to say about them. And so it is in this passage from the homily.

It’s this whole business of being in the presence of the Lord, you see. When we oppose the celebration of the Mass to the Adoration of the Sacrament, what this signals is a sort of losing the presence of the Lord. When we do this opposition thing, it seems to me that the stress falls on the action of the assembly, perhaps on the action of the Lord, but the Lord acting through the action of the community.

While of course this is true—how could it be otherwise in a sacramental system?—the deeper and truer reality is that it is the Lord who is acting, not us. The Byzantine liturgy begins with the deacon intoning “It is time for the Lord to act,” quoting Ps 119. It is time for the Lord to act… it is God who is present, acting, doing, loving, saving. The community is there and we have our necessary part. The priest is there and I have my necessary part. But it is Jesus who makes the Eucharist the Eucharist. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

Not me, not you, not the choir or the readers or the cute little altar servers. Jesus.

And so we adore Him. Once His place and His action are seen as the supreme and essential truth of the liturgy, it is the most natural thing in the world for the celebration of the liturgy to spill over into silent adoration in his presence.

And this is the Church, you see. All of us together just before the Lord, just in His presence, letting Him speak to us, letting Him love us, letting Him communicate Himself to us in whatever way He chooses. And out of this, out of both our active celebration and reception of Him and our silent listening contemplation of Him, we can love, serve, preach the Gospel, overcome ourselves, do what needs doing.

What a faith we have. And what a beautiful Pope we have who is able to express this faith so wonderfully, with simplicity, faith, and elegance. So let us bow down and worship the Lord today in the Eucharistic celebration of Sunday, and let us look for the chance to worship Him in silent Adoration when we can, as we can.