Dawn is Coming, No Matter What

Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,

for in you my soul takes refuge;

in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,

 until the destroying storms pass by.

I cry to God Most High, to God who fulfils his purpose for me.

He will send from heaven and save me,

he will put to shame those who trample on me.

God will send forth his steadfast love and his faithfulness.

I lie down among lions that greedily devour human prey;

their teeth are spears and arrows, their tongues sharp swords.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens. Let your glory be over all the earth.

They set a net for my steps; my soul was bowed down.

They dug a pit in my path, but they have fallen into it themselves.

My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast.

I will sing and make melody.

Awake, my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre!

I will awake the dawn.

I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples;

I will sing praises to you among the nations.

For your steadfast love is as high as the heavens;

your faithfulness extends to the clouds.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens.

Let your glory be over all the earth.

Psalm 57

Reflection – We have been trodding slowly through the ‘gloomy 50s’ in the book of psalms—an unbroken succession of psalms lamenting evil in the world and the sufferings of the psalmist in the face of that evil. I am somewhat amused that, as hard as I have found it to write about these psalms week after week, they have proved to be very popular posts, three of them currently being among the ‘top ten’ posts of the last month. I guess ‘gloom sells’ is the take away lesson here.

Well, the gloom is starting to lift and the light is dawning – the psalmist here is still afflicted, still besieged by enemies. But… ‘awake my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn.’ Something is changing; deliverance is coming.

The destroying storms come, and the destroying storms pass by. There are all sorts of dangers about—lions, spears, arrows, sharp swords, pits—but somehow the psalmist is unharmed. Terrible things happening around him, but not in him, where the song of praise to God never ceases.

Well, this takes us somewhere. Because of course we all know that in the so-called ‘real world’ (whatever that means, exactly) sometimes bad guys do find the mark, right? I mean… well, I guess I don’t need to drive the point home too hard after the week the world has had. The spears, arrows, and sharp swords (guns and bombs) don’t always go amiss. What about that? What about then? Where is God? What are we to do? How does this psalm apply to that reality?

It seems to me that we can go very shallow here (‘oh, it’s all good you know – la la la!’) or we can go very deep. Let’s leave aside the shallowness, which is self-refuting. The depth of it is that if we are in God—really, truly in Him—then our bodies can be pierced with bullets and blown apart by explosives, and in truth this does not harm us. It hurts us—may indeed kill us—but fundamentally it does us no harm.

If we are in God—truly, deeply, really in Him—then the death of our bodies do us no harm. The pain of injury, the pain of loss and grief, deep injustice, terrible confrontation with evil, miserable times of sorrow and tribulation—all of these are real, and are just awful to endure.

But… they hurt us, but do not harm us. If we are in God. If God is our life. If we have by His grace placed ourselves so utterly into His care and His mercy (‘Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me’) that our true life, our true self, our whole being is there.

This is not some shallow silly consolation—well, it’s all gonna work out in the end, ya know! This is the deep consolation of faith, the deep truth of God and Jesus and eternal life and heaven. The consolation of the Spirit. This psalm is not just whistling a happy tune in the dark of night; it is a solemn testimony that the dawn is coming, no matter what. Dawn is coming; God is coming. God is here. In the blackest of black nights, God is with us. And so we praise Him, glorify Him, call out to Him for mercy, and keep going no matter what.

And if the so-called worst happens—if that bullet finds us, that bomb blows us up, we will simply close our eyes in this world and open them in the next, and proceed to the next verse of the next psalm—praising and glorifying God forever in the world that has no end and is free of sorrow and pain. Nothing can harm us, if this is our life.

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.

Works of Mercy: Feeding the Hungry

Last Wednesday I began a new series on the blog, in preparation for the Year of Mercy. My concern is that too much of the initial conversation around this Jubilee Year has revolved around matters that are both controversial and over which you and I have little if any say in. You know what I mean—all that Synod on the Family stuff in Rome.

I made a decision on the blog to give all of that a pass. And I am standing by that decision. But meanwhile there is this Year of Mercy in the Church, and what are we going to do about it? My suggestion is that the real course of action open to all of us can be found in the Church’s list of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and that if we are to really make God’s mercy visible in the world, the means to do so lie there and not in endless wrangling over who gets to receive communion.

So I am going to go through these works each Wednesday and just talk about them a bit. Today, we have the first corporal work of mercy: to feed the hungry.

This is well placed as the first work of mercy. Food is the primary need of the body, and to feed someone is the most direct and simple way of expressing love for that person. There is something almost primeval about it – putting a plate of food in front of a person is really a sacramental act—love made visible, love made concrete, love giving life and strength to the body and delight to the senses. Is it any wonder that the great Sacrament of Love took the form of food and drink?

So there is much to not just ponder here, but practice. And this is something anyone can do, whatever your circumstances are. Look around you. Is anyone hungry? Feed them. Not exactly rocket science, is it?

You can’t cook? Donate to the local food bank or soup kitchen. You are poor yourself? Donate what you can to the local food bank, etc. If you are truly so poor that you cannot give even a can of kidney beans to them… well, then you are the one who needs some kind merciful soul to feed you, I guess. May God bless you and put you in their company.

It seems to me that this feeding the hungry business really is where it all has to start—all the spiritual works of mercy somehow rest on this foundation. If people are hungry, it is hard for them to be instructed in their ignorance, admonished in their sin, counseled in their doubts, or comforted in their affliction. And indeed we know that people who are deeply afflicted are so often profoundly comforted by the knock at the door and the neighbor bringing them a casserole or whatever.

I will always remember fondly that the day my mother died and we were all pretty wiped out with grief and stress, there came that knock at the door around supper time… and two very good friends of mine bearing a couple of large pizzas. Comfort for the afflicted indeed.

And so there is that aspect of it, too. We have the genuine poor of the streets served by food bank and soup kitchen, the people who we don’t know personally, perhaps, but who we know need to be fed. But what about that struggling student who is living on ramen noodles and Red Bull? What about that family who just had another baby and are probably scrambling to put something resembling a balanced meal on the table? What about… well, just that lonely person who we run across in church or at work or here or there? The casserole at the door or the occasional dinner invitation are things simple enough, perhaps, but what a huge difference they make! How much more human and warm and kind the world is when everyone is thinking each day, “Who can I feed today?”

And of course there is the larger problem of world hunger, and our need to find, say, one good charity that we trust to send relief to people who are actually malnourished in other parts of the world. Of course that is necessary, and thank God we live in a world where we can both know of the need of our brothers and sisters in far lands and do something about it.

But mercy has this quality of direct, personal engagement, and there is no act that is more personal and immediate than setting a meal in front of a person. Love made visible, love giving life to the body and warming the heart. Really, feeding the hungry is both a corporal and a spiritual work of mercy—so much happens around a table when food is shared. Community happens. Friendship happens. Many things happen which need to happen a lot more in our cold world.

Let’s you and I warm it, and the first way to do so is to have a good look around, see who’s hungry, have a good look at ourselves and our larders, and… well, feed them!

This Week in Madonna House - November 8-14

This week in Madonna House we were, like the rest of the world, very much taken up with the terrible events in Paris on Friday. We used to have a house in Paris, and one of our women staff is actually from Paris, so there were personal connections with this tragic event. We are all united in prayer for the world, and especially for the world leaders who have the genuinely difficult job of wise response to these events.

In MH we express our prayer primarily by our fidelity to the duty of the moment, those tasks the Lord puts in front of us at any time. On that front, it was a fairly ordinary kind of week around here. Guests continue to arrive and the house continues to be a lively place in the evenings.

We always have a contingent of guests from South Korea, and at the moment there are seven of them, which is quite a crowd, really. Four of them are seminarians here for an experience of apostolic community life, and they went one evening to visit the first year applicants of the Companions of the Cross, a community of priests from Ottawa who have a formation house just up the road from us.

Christmas is coming, hard as that is to believe given our warm weather. And Christmas means baking. With a family to feed as big as ours, the kitchen has to prepare quite a bit ahead of time and freeze it. The Christmas puddings were baked this week, then, the first of many large Christmas food projects ahead of us.

One evening anyone who wanted gathered in the kitchen for a sugaring off. This is the process of making granulated sugar from maple syrup. It is a fascinating process. The syrup is first heated to a certain temperature, then is moved onto cooling racks where it sits undisturbed for twenty minutes. At this stage of the cooling, seed crystals have formed in the syrup, and the sugar maker begins to stir it, slowly.

This makes crystallization happen – crystals make crystals – and so the plot, and the syrup, thickens. At a certain point, when the syrup can no longer be stirred easily, when it looks like a large quantity of wet (and very hot) sand, it is distributed around to whoever has come to help, who begin to pound and sift it, to break up the clumps and allow the water to evaporate off. We’re making a lot of sugar, so this takes as many hands to help as are available. The finished product is a fine granulated sugar which we will then use for the Christmas baking to come.

So, come to MH and learn how to make sugar. And yes, you can try this at home! Christmas preparations also happened in St. Raphael’s, our handicraft center, which continues to offer classes on creative card making each Sunday. Last week was lino cut cards; this week it is birchbark cards. Our MH gift shop is actually two shops—the main one which tends to offer the more high end collectibles, art, and crafts and the ‘small shop’ which offers more discounted items. This time of year the small shop becomes a ‘Christmas shop’, supply all your holiday season needs—decorations, crèche sets, and so forth.

Classes for our guests and applicants (those preparing to join MH) continue, myself teaching the guests the Fundamentals of the Spiritual Life, a wide variety of people teaching the applicants various aspects of our MH life and spirit. Right now they are learning about liturgy from various angles, and Scripture—what Catherine always called the two pillars upon which the apostolate rests.

We have begun a new book for our post-lunch spiritual reading, The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, on the history of the Divine Mercy devotion. I recommend it highly, especially with the Year of Mercy just around the corner.

As always, I sense that there is a great deal going on here that I fail to capture each week – this is a very impressionistic column on this blog, not a comprehensive historical record. Really, everyone is so hard working and busy here, there is much going on that I just don’t observe.

But in the midst of it… Paris, Beirut, Syria… we are very aware of the world at this time and are offering all of it for all those suffering everywhere. Let us unite in praying for peace and healing for all peoples and nations and creeds.