From Sea to Shining Sea

Give the king your justice, O God,

and your righteousness to a king’s son.

May he judge your people with righteousness,

and your poor with justice.

May the mountains yield prosperity for the people,

and the hills, in righteousness.

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,

give deliverance to the needy,

and crush the oppressor.

May he live while the sun endures,

and as long as the moon, throughout all generations.

May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass,

like showers that water the earth.

In his days may righteousness flourish

and peace abound, until the moon is no more.

May he have dominion from sea to sea,

and from the River to the ends of the earth…

For he delivers the needy when they call,

the poor and those who have no helper.

He has pity on the weak and the needy,

and saves the lives of the needy.

From oppression and violence he redeems their life;

and precious is their blood in his sight…

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,

who alone does wondrous things.

Blessed be his glorious name forever;

may his glory fill the whole earth.

Amen and Amen.

Psalm 72

Reflection – Well, this is not going to be an easy blog post to write. This psalm has a profound significance, both in its own right—it is one of the great messianic psalms heralding the king who will establish righteousness on the earth—and for me as a Canadian.

The official motto of Canada is ‘from sea to sea’, and Canada is formally known as the ‘Dominion’ of Canada, precisely quoting from this very psalm: ‘May he have dominion from sea to sea.’ Canada, my beloved home country, is in its historical formation a Christian nation—this is not a matter of opinion, nor is it a political statement about any issue before us today. It is a matter of plain fact. 

And Psalm 72 is right at the heart of this Christian historical sensibility of Canada—pity on the weak and the needy, redemption from oppression and violence, care for the poor and those who have no helper.

I am ashamed of my country this week. The government of Canada, admittedly pressed to do so by the Supreme Court of Canada, is forcing through an aggressive law not simply allowing physician assisted death (assisted suicide, truly, or euthanasia), but forcing health care providers to provide it, even if in conscience they cannot.

The poor and the needy, the vulnerable, the suffering—all of these will be given not compassion and care and protection, but death. We can dress it all up in fine words about mercy and relief of suffering, but it is all a load of nonsense in the end—we are going to be killing people when they are at their most needy and vulnerable. As we have done to the unwanted unborn for decades now, so we will do to the unwanted elderly and disabled.

Oh, Canada, my home and native land… may God have mercy on us.

The process by which the bill was passed was ugly in itself. Our Prime Minister actually became physically violent at one point on the floor of the House of Commons and assaulted an opposition member. I wish I was exaggerating about that, but that is what happened, by any normal legal or moral standard or meaning of words. And… there was nothing, in terms of consequences or even widespread concern. Apparently, that is what democracy looks like, in Canada, in 2016.

I fear we are devolving into a thugocracy, led by the man with the great hair, the one-armed pushups, and the winning smile.

So my heart is a bit sore as I write this blog post about Psalm 72, our ‘national psalm’, if you will. The one thing I do know is that, in this year 2016 when so many nations are faced with leaders or prospective leaders (hello, my American readers and friends!) who appall us or frighten us, we are called to know that there is one Messiah alone who delivers justice and mercy to the poor and the weak, who establishes the world in right judgment and good order. And we know His Name, the name above all other names.

As all the other kings of the earth fail us, as they are failing us, pretty much without exception across the face of the globe, let’s put all our faith and hope in He who endures like the sun, falls from heaven like the rain. May His name be blessed forever and ever. Amen. Amen.

Nothing Else Matters In the End

This weekly commentary on the Mass is winding down to the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, and so we now come to the following prayer:

To us, also, your servants, who, though sinners, hope in your abundant mercies, graciously grant some share and fellowship with your holy Apostles and Martyrs: with John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, (Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia) and all your Saints: admit us, we beseech you, into their company, not weighing our merits, but granting us your pardon, through Christ our Lord.

Last week I wrote about the previous part of the Eucharistic Prayer, where we pray for all the faithful departed, and I wrote about the reality of Purgatory and the duty of love to pray for the dead who languish there. This week I want to write about the reality of heaven, and the importance of heaven in our daily life here on earth.

This is something we never talk about these days, and that is a big problem. For the last 50 years, motivated by a certain sense of prioritizing of social justice and mission in the world, the Church at large has chosen to neglect to the point of vanishing the theme of eternal life and heaven, to the point where (I know this to be the case) more than a few good church-going Catholics no longer believe in it or consider it a necessary part of the faith.

This is absurd, of course. Our life on this earth is a hundred years, maximum, and for most people considerably less. The fact is, there is a life after death, and it is eternal. We are creatures made to survive death; the human soul is immaterial by nature, and hence immortal. These are facts, not nice if rather odd ideas.

We can spend the endless duration of life that follows our mortal death in the presence of God, and hence in a state of light, joy, peace, and beauty. Or we can spend the endless duration of life after death in the absence of God, and hence devoid of light, joy, peace, and beauty. The one state we call heaven, the other hell.

Once we accept the above paragraph as true, one conclusion inescapably emerges: the only thing that really matters in this life is to live our life in such a way that we go to heaven when we die. It is a matter, if you will, of sheer economics—one hundred years maximum of this mode of living vs. an eternity of utter bliss or utter misery.

The idea that this focus on heaven and living life in such a way as to get to heaven when we die would make us indifferent to the things of earth and to pursuing justice and charity on earth is such a stupid idea that it could only possibly have arisen in the 1960s, the decade when so many stupid ideas were conceived.

At any rate, it’s dumb and so let’s be done with it. Life is hard, but it’s harder when you’re stupid. The simple fact is, we live our life in such a way as to be suited for heaven if and only if we live our lives poured out in love of God and love of neighbor. The God we believe in is a God who passionately loves every human being He created. Our loving Him back necessarily means loving everyone and working for the good of all according to the wisdom and strength we are given by God. It is ludicrous—patently, obviously ludicrous—to say that a concern for heaven makes us indifferent to the sufferings and injustice of life on earth.

It is not the remembrance of God and what He desires of us that makes us selfish and malicious and unjust; it is forgetting Him that does that. And this is more and more the case these days; either we forget God in despair that there is such a person, and so the only good in life is to grab as much of this world as we can, or we forget God in presumption, blithely assuming that we all just automatically go to heaven when we die, so it doesn’t much matter what we do to each other on earth.

The Mass here really does establish us on the right path. ‘We your servants, though sinners, hope in your abundant mercies’ – this is truth. And we ask Him for a share and a fellowship with the saints in heaven, for it is ultimately His gift to us that we can even hope to get there at all.

But let’s be clear about it—nothing else matters in the end. There is no earthly good, no earthly pleasure, no other happiness we can attain in this life that can outweigh the question of where we are going to spend eternity. And every decision we make this day and every day should ultimately be decided on the basis of one thing and one thing alone: is this going to move me closer to God and to the heaven where He dwells, or is it going to move me further from Him? In other words, am I choosing love and goodness here, or something else? Because in the end, that is what it is all about.

Let's Talk About Judgment

Well, I’m not following any particular plan with this Wednesday series on the ‘Gnarly Questions’, the genuinely difficult matters of Catholic theology or faith practice that puzzle or confound many. Like so much else of this blog, it’s mainly a matter of what I’m thinking about when I wake up in the morning, or something I read this week or whatever.

That being said, let’s talk this time about a word that is one of the most red flag words around, a word guaranteed to get people’s hackles up and knives out, one way or the other. Let’s talk about judgment.

‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.’ (Matt 7: 1, Lk 6:37). These are the Lord’s own words, and we ignore them at our peril. To be a Christian is to be non-judgmental—let’s get that straight. ‘For with the judgment you make, you will be judged’ (Matt 7:2) – the consequences are grave if we do not come to grips with this call and live it out faithfully.

What does it mean, anyhow? The problem is that many people today abuse that one saying of the Lord by taking it out of its proper context, which is the whole of Scripture. And from that, they interpret ‘do not judge’ as meaning that we cannot advance any sort of moral norm, make any kind of claim as to the good and evil of specific human acts. The whole thing collapses into a sort of fuzzy relativism in which nobody can ever say to anyone else ‘You ought not do that.’

Well, that is silly. The moral law has been given to us as a gift to make our lives beautiful, not as a curse to burden and afflict us. Certain actions are morally wrong simply because, and only because, they harm us, harm particularly the one who does them. A specific action is morally good because it helps the one doing it become more the person he or she is created to become.

It is incoherent to say that, say, ‘murdering another human being is wrong’, and then, beholding Stanley bathed in the blood of Jim, not be able to say ‘Stanley has done a wrong thing.’ That is not being non-judgmental; that is being an idiot. Nor is it being non-judgmental to refuse on principle to go to Stanley and say ‘Yo, Stan, you have done a wrong thing there, killing Jim!’ That is not being non-judgmental; that is being a coward.

So what is non-judgment? It is the blank refusal to say that another person is in a state of sin. People do wrong things all the time, objectively manifestly wrong things. But whether they have actually sinned or not depends on a host of factors that are utterly unknown to us.

For an action to be a mortal sin, it has to be grave matter (something serious, Ten Commandment stuff). The person also has to have full knowledge that what they are doing is wrong. They have to be doing it freely and without compulsion, with deliberate intent (cf Catechism 1857). These latter two conditions are known only to God, since they pertain to the interiority of the person.

It is not a judgmental thing to say to a person, “You know, I really don’t think you should be doing that. Did you know that was against the moral law? It is, you know!” That is a work of mercy, actually, provided it is done with prudence and charity. It is a judgmental thing to say to someone, “You are a sinner – you’re going to go to Hell if you don’t cut that out right now.”

Mind you, most of us, in our judgmentalism, don’t actually say those things out loud. The late Fred Phelps and his so-called ‘church’ (of ‘God Hates Fags’ notoriety) really are extreme outliers. But for many Christians it is more a matter of the up-turned nose, the pursed lips, the raised eyebrow, the dirty look, the cold demeanour, the sneer. And these things, because they cannot be directly countered or corrected, because they are matters of non-verbal and unspoken judgments, can be much more damaging in the end.

We have to pray for, and choose, really choose, to have a compassionate heart and a friendly disposition towards all men and women—the ones who always get it right and do everything they’re supposed to do (whoever those happy few may be), and the ones who struggle and fall down and are lost in any number of immoral paths and bad choices.

We don’t know how God sees them, although we do know He loves them enough to die for them. Perhaps we could love them enough to stifle our criticisms and carping and unkindness?

There is much more to say about this—so often we jump to conclusions about situations, make assumptions about what a person is doing and what is in their hearts, and our assumptions are quite often not charitable and are astonishingly often wildly inaccurate.

Judgment belongs to God. We are indeed to know what is right and what is wrong—why on earth would God want us to be ignorant of such vital matters? But to assess whether another person is in the grace of God or is cut off from Him—this is simply not our business and we indulge in such matters to our own immortal peril, as the Lord Himself took pains to tell us.

Do not judge, lest you be judged.

This Week in Madonna House - May 8-15

This week in Madonna House was made up of a backdrop of ordinary life with some un-ordinary events looming in the foreground.

The directors’ meetings are ongoing (they wrap up later this week), and so we all continue to enjoy having the directors of our various mission houses around. While this is not a format in which I can discuss the meetings themselves (I am an attendee at them), they are proving to be a rich time of sharing our life and the work of the Holy Spirit among us in the year 2016. God is good.

Last Thursday quite a few of us (I didn’t get a count, but it must have been over twenty) went to the March for Life in Ottawa to bear witness to the evil of abortion. As those who have been on this March, or the much larger one in the States, know very well, it was a long and very full day, but very blessed. Several of us went to the Rose Dinner in the evening where we had the opportunity to listen to Obianuju Ekeocha, about whom you can read at the link. She was fantastic, and gave a strong encouragement to Canada to reclaim its moral voice in the world by defending the human rights of its weakest and most vulnerable members.

Besides that, the other outstanding event was the feast of Pentecost, which we celebrated with the Divine Liturgy of the Christian East, followed by a festive brunch. We received our ‘Pentecost gifts’ at that meal—this is a very old custom at MH where each person receives a gift and a fruit of the Holy Spirit on a nicely decorated piece of paper. I received wisdom and peace this year, for example.

In the afternoon we had a picnic which we try to do each year when the directors are all here, usually around our May 17 foundation day.

It was a bit amusing this year—several people had prayed for a day without black flies, the early spring scourge of all outdoor activities. Well, their prayers were answered all right—we had snow instead! But if you think that prevented us from having a great picnic, then I guess you just don’t know MH that well.

Sports were played. People sat around the camp fire. For the less hardy, there were card games and other recreational activities in the house. Some MH people looooooove to dance (I, uh…, am not among them) and so there was a bit of dancing going on somewhere or other (yeah, I am definitely not a dancer).

The picnic (which included a hamburger and hot dog supper, and home made ice cream for dessert) went on well into the evening with music and fun—it was basically just a great day to be together.

All of this went on against a backdrop of ordinary life—the gardens are busy, snow or no snow. The men are hard at work on the various building projects that dominate their lives right now. The women keep everyone fed and watered and clean and tidy. And we all lift up our hearts in prayer and intercession for all of you and for our troubled world in all the works of our hands.