The Feet and The Washer

I can’t seem to summon up the will to write my usual ‘this week in Madonna House’ blog post, popular as those always are, for the simple reason that I cannot think of anything noteworthy that happened this week here. Sometimes life is just pretty ordinary.

Meanwhile, I wanted to throw in my two cents’ worth about the Pope’s change in a small liturgical rubric, the Holy Thursday mandatum rite of foot washing. The Pope, as his absolute prerogative, has in recent years altered that rite in his own practice of it to include washing the feet of women; now he has formally altered the rubric for the universal Church so that ‘the red’ (the instructions) simply read that the feet of any of the ‘people of God’ can be washed.

Now first, we have to say that Pope’s have supreme and immediate authority to do precisely this kind of thing. Anything in the liturgy that does not touch directly upon the matter and form of the sacrament (e.g. bread and wine for Eucharist, water for baptism, a man for priesthood, a man and woman for marriage, oil for confirmation, and all the associated words that confect those sacraments) is subject to change by the proper authority, and that proper authority is the Bishop of Rome.

So if anyone is thinking ‘the Pope can’t do this!’ they are precisely wrong. This is exactly what the Pope can do, and he has.

And a good thing, too. I have long felt that the rite should change in precisely this way. This particular rite, like all the rites of the liturgy, is symbolic, right? Nobody is actually showing up in church on Holy Thursday because their feet are dirty and need to be washed. People generally attend to that kind of thing in their own homes.

Symbols are not the sort of things that only bear one meaning, or for that matter that bear a meaning apart from and unrelated to their cultural context. And as cultures change and shift, this kind of sub-rite of the liturgy (optional, in fact), is precisely the kind of thing that needs to be evaluated from time to time—is its symbolic meaning still holding? Does it communicate what it is meant to? Is what it is communicating what we really want/need to communicate at this time in the Church?

So the washing of the feet has borne two meanings, related but distinct. One is that of Christ establishing the ordained ministry in the Church, and in that establishing making it clear that it is a call to humble service. The emphasis is on the priesthood as service, and in that emphasis clearly only men should have their feet washed.

But it also is a symbolic reminder of the general call to service in the Church, Christ showing by example that not only priests but all of God’s people are called to wash the feet of their brothers and sisters in humble service. And in that reading, clearly the priest should wash the feet of men and women both.

Two different messages being communicated, right? Both are true, both are good, in fact they are in no way contradictory to each other. It is simply a matter of deciding which one is the more appropriate message to communicate to the Church in our times, and also if there is a risk of a message being communicated that we do not intend and do not believe. Such as, ‘women have no place in the Church’.

At any rate, the Pope has made the decision, and (not that my opinion matters) I happen to agree with it.

That being said, we now have to be vigilant about other messages creeping into the rite that are not particularly helpful or relevant to the liturgy, and that in fact are distractions. For example, “You go, girl! Female empowerment ftw!” Or “Pope Francis is the awesomest Pope evah! Take that, you stupid conservative traddies!” You know, things like that. If those become the focus of this rite, then this optional rite should simply be omitted.

Holy Thursday is one of the principal holy days of the year. Our focus should be first the Lord Jesus and his establishing of the Eucharist, second the Lord Jesus and his establishing of the priesthood as servants of the Eucharist, third the Lord Jesus and his great commandment of love and fourth, the Lord Jesus and his being delivered over into his passion and death.

You may notice a common theme running through where our focus should be in this liturgy. It starts with ‘J’ and rhymes with ‘sneezes’, eh? In fact, that’s more or less a sound principle not only for liturgy but for pretty much anything in life.

And so while I really have thought for some years that this change should be made in the rite, I would now say that it would be good if we could put this controversy behind us and simply make the focus of all our attention be not on the feet being washed, and especially not on the dirt that needs to be washed off (which, frankly, is where our focus is going so often), but on the Washer. Keep our eyes on Him, and the rest of this stuff tends to fall into place by itself.

These Weeks in Madonna House - March 27-April 8 II

So much has happened in the past couple of weeks in MH that I couldn't cover it all yesterday. Mamie Legris' death and burial merited a post all to itself. But meanwhile there was Holy Week, Easter, and a whole host of related seasonal events.

On the work front, the farm is dominated by the bleatings and cavortings of baby lambs, the cutest little creatures God ever made. We are having an unusually good year with the lambs, with many triplets and even one set of quadruplets being born and enjoying a high survival rate. This is a reflection on the care and skill of our farmers who truly pour their lives into the work of feeding this family.

Speaking of pouring, the maple syrup season is underway, albeit slowly and hesitantly. It has been unseasonably cold so far, and the warm days needed for sap flow have for the most part failed to materialize. So we'll see - the likely thing is that it will be a short season as temperatures are going to sharply increase over the next week, which will make the trees bud out, at which point the sap no longer produces a palatable syrup.

The gardens are moving forward, however, with greenhouse lettuce being planted along with other greenhouse plants. The winter bush work of harvesting trees for firewood and lumber is over--now comes the long work of moving, splitting, stacking, filling wood sheds, and so forth that takes up a lot of our men's time.

But all of that is mere backdrop to the real 'work' of these days which was the celebration of the holiest season of the year. Adding to the usual beauty of the Triduum this year was our having a catechumen among our guests, a young woman who was baptized and confirmed at our Easter Vigil. Her journey into faith, combined with Mamie Legris' journey into eternity, made our Easter here almost too rich to bear.

Those familiar with our MH customs know what we do here. On Holy Thursday we arrange our dining room tables into a 'banquet hall' format, with table cloths and festive centers, for the 'Supper of the Lamb'. This is not a seder meal, but does draw on elements of that Jewish ritual. At the beginning of the meal a whole roast lamb, mounted on a cross-shaped frame, is solemnly processed through the dining room to the strains of Psalm 136. There are readings and prayers, highlighting the theme of Christ the Lamb who was slain for us. Then we feast, richly and beautifully, on lamb, bread, wine--a deeply symbolic and most joyous agape meal. At the conclusion we read a long excerpt from the farewell discourse of Christ in John's Gospel. And of course we celebrate the evening liturgy that is familiar to every Catholic, complete with foot washing and solemn Eucharistic procession.

Good Friday we breakfast on hot cross buns, symbolic of the sweetness of the Lord's cross, and sup on a fast meal of plain boiled potatoes. We refrain from ringing bells (a loud 'clacker' is used in their place), lighting candles, and so forth. In addition to the 3:00 service of the Lord' Passion we celebrate the Byzantine service of the Burial of Christ, in which the lamentation over Christ's death repeatedly is broken by joy in his impending resurrection, and in which the epitaphion, or burial shroud, is carried in solemn procession through the chapel. At the end of this service all present go 'into the tomb' with Christ to await the resurrection, processing under the shroud and blowing out their lit tapers, as they are now with and in Christ and do not need their light any longer.

Holy Saturday is a day of furious activity in preparation for the feast (actually all the days are that, as the preparations for these meals and liturgies and the decorating of the house are monumental tasks). At Lauds we sing a beautiful Byzantine hymn - 'The Lord awoke, as one asleep, and arose, saving us,' that has such beauty and power in it that some of us consider it a high point of the liturgical year.

But of course the real high point is the Vigil itself. We seem to have opted in MH to do all seven Old Testament readings (as the priest celebrating the Vigil said in explanation, "What else do we have to do?"). The liturgy of baptism and confirmation was stunningly beautiful in its essential simplicity. I am the spiritual director of the woman who was baptized, so had the immense privilege of administering those sacraments to her - a moment of awe and sacred delight, about which I can say very little, really.

After the Vigil, we celebrated with a festive late night supper. Our Russian Easter foods of paska and koolitch (a sweet cheese confection and a special Easter bread) were consumed in large quantities (note my use of the passive voice in this sentence!). And so it went - a joyous happy celebration of Christ's victory and gift of new life.

The normal Easter days off were shifted on account of Mamie's funeral, and are occurring today and tomorrow. And... that's the news for now from here! I am travelling today and tomorrow to the great Canadian prairies, as I mentioned yesterday, but do plan to keep blogging as much as possible (it is a busy week coming up, mind you, so I make no promises). And to all of you a happy Easter Octave and a blessed season of light and mercy.

Why Did Jesus Die?

Do you sense something so far beyond mystery that you almost feel as if you were teetering at the edge of the universe? Last night in Gethsemane God the Son took upon himself my sins and yours—the sins of all the world. He took them on himself and lifted them up, or rather, he was lifted up for them on a cross. He died to atone for them.

Before our eyes this simple wooden cross holds the absolute forgiveness of God for us. Lord, have mercy! Lord, have mercy! A thousand languages repeat it, and he has pity on us because he has been lifted up and from him came pity, compassion, tenderness, understanding. Can we comprehend what has happened? God, the Almighty, the All–Powerful, the One who has no limit to his power, limited it. It is incomprehensible…

Today is the day of an examination of conscience, and yet somewhere deep within us joy rises like the sun. However it is still dark and the darkness is I, looking at myself. The darkness is also sorrow that he had to die for me. The joy is that he did! Now I am whole and healed and all is well! My separation from God, the original one, is wiped off.

Now I walk in the mercy of God; we live in his mercy. Now the moment of guilt is gone. Man must not feel any guilt anymore, only a terrible sadness when he once again breaks his alliance with God, the alliance of love. Whenever you feel that you have broken it, pray, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner!” and it is forgiven!”

Catherine Doherty

Reflection – Happy Palm Sunday to you all, and a blessed Holy Week. This excerpt from a talk by Catherine Doherty on Good Friday 1973 seemed a fitting way to begin our week of the Lord’s Passion and love this year. The talk itself is part of my book Going Home.

I have been trying to do a bit of catechesis on Sundays here and there. This Sunday, let’s talk about the catechetical matter that is perhaps the one above all others, namely the death of Jesus Christ and its saving power in our lives.

For those who have simple faith, this matter poses no problem, and perhaps that is the best way to be. We know Jesus died; we know He died because He loves us; we know His loving death has saved us, won us forgiveness of our sins, opened heaven’s doors, reconciled us to the Father. For many people, that is all we need to know—we don’t get troubled by questions of how and why and what is the meaning of all this.

There are those who are so troubled, though, and it is good to have some kind of answer worked out for them. We cannot precisely ‘explain’ our faith—it is a divine revelation and ultimately transcends the powers of human comprehension—but we can talk about it, clarify it, make it a bit more understandable even if we cannot (and should not) eliminate the mysterious aspect of it.

And so many theologians over the millennia have given some account or other of ‘how’ Jesus’ death saved us. The Church has never adopted any one of those explanations as its own dogma. The dogma of the Church is precisely what I laid out two paragraphs ago, that this death happened and that this death has had these effects for all who are saved, and that the salvific fruits of this death are offered to all men and women.

In the Western Church, the most influential theory has been that of St. Anselm of Canterbury, the ‘substitutionary’ theory of salvation. Humanity, in committing sin against God, ran up a debt that was infinite, since our offense was against an infinite majesty. Being finite we could not pay that debt; but since it was a human debt, a human being had to pay it; but only an infinite being could make the infinite satisfaction of the debt; so only a God-man could pay that debt, and the wages of sin are in fact death, and so Jesus paid the debt for all of us.

With all due respect to St. Anselm and the many holy men and women who have accepted and taught this theory, I have never cared for it. It is too much rooted in categories of law for me—yes, this is an aspect of life and of our relationship with God (Scripture would collapse into incoherence if all notions of law were eliminated from it)—but law is not the heart and the whole of our life with God. And since this matter of Jesus’ death is at the heart of our faith and our life with God, it seems to me that casting it in wholly legal terms impoverishes our faith.

This is the theory I prefer (I offer this bearing in mind that this too is merely a theory, and that our Catholic faith is the simple faith that Jesus saved us by dying for us, period): Sin is fundamentally death, the undoing of creation. Creation in its deep heart is being flowing from Being, being ordered and shaped and given life from Being. This is the deep meaning of obedience, that our whole existence is from Another, the Uncreated One.

Sin rejects being, life, creation, and so sin is death. Jesus, being God the Creator, enters the reality of sin without sinning (which is metaphysically impossible for God) by entering the reality of death in his sacred humanity. His motivation is love—love of His Father, love and mercy to us poor sinners.

And so, in the very place of sin, the place where sin does what it does—kills us—the Creator God establishes a new creation. That which had been the great monument of destruction and uncreation—the tomb—becomes the place of personal encounter with Life. That which had been the fruit of our tragic and terrible disobedience and selfishness becomes transformed by obedience and selfless love.

It is not on the level of law and debts, but on the level of personal encounter, personal love, personal communion—a communion of love that is forged at the very place where all relationships are destroyed and sundered. And so—sin is forgiven, heaven opened, we are reconciled and saved.

Ultimately all we need to know is that God loves us so much that He died for us, and simple faith is satisfied by that answer. But it is good to meditate on just what Love does, and just how much Love has shown itself to be stronger than death, isn’t it? Happy Passion Sunday, and may we all enter into the victory of Christ and know his joy this Easter.

I've Got a Blank Space, Baby!

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Little, be always little. For those of you who are wondering where on earth Fr. Denis is, I am writing this in Victoria now, where I’m spending the last few days of my little apostolic trip out West. Back to Ontario and ‘normal’ life Thursday.

I have been going through the Little Mandate bit by bit for the past while now, and we have finally gotten past the first paragraph. Catherine always did say that the first paragraph was the essence of the matter; the rest is commentary on it – how to live it out.

Key to that living it out is the spiritual attitude of the second paragraph, specifically the attitude of ‘littleness’ we are looking at today. There is no question that this is a very hard thing to embrace, hard to really stay in this spot of spiritual littleness, spiritual childhood.

We want to be ‘big’. Pride in Latin and Greek and Hebrew means being above oneself, taking to oneself a bigger status, a higher place than one rightly occupies. And pride really is the deep wound of our humanity, expressed in so many ways. Pursuit of riches and power, dominant behaviours of various sorts, or the more hidden interior expressions of it—quiet assumptions of superiority, self-righteousness, incessant judgment of others.

All of it is the direct rejection of humility, which is the deep meaning of this second paragraph of the Mandate. It is the unanimous testimony of all the spiritual geniuses of Christianity that humility is the virtue at the very heart of the spiritual life, as understood in our Christian faith. To accept to be what one is—a creature, that is, one made by and absolutely dependent for being on Another, and so properly bound to obedience to that Other—is the utter need for any kind of progress in spiritual growth, any kind of real interior life in God.

The reason for this is so simple it hardly need explaining, does it? You don’t make children grow up to be adults by feeding them rocks and dirt. You don’t make a seed grow to be a tree by giving it roast beef and mashed potatoes. You don’t make a thing grow to the mature state it is meant to attain by ignoring the kind of thing it is. Living in the truth, on this most basic physiological level, is what makes life and growth possible.

And humility is thus the soil, the mother’s milk, of our healthy flourishing humanity because it is the truth. We are creatures. We are wholly dependent on God for existence and for ongoing life. We are meant to live in such a way as to be constantly receiving everything from Him who is Everything, meant to be an empty space filled by Fullness, a cup perpetually filled with strong wine, a womb perpetually made fruitful by the One who is the source of all fruitfulness.

If I can be a bit silly and paraphrase Taylor Swift here, we are meant to sing continually, “I’ve got a blank space, baby (Jesus), and you can write your name.” Littleness—accepting that this is so, and deliberately refusing to fill that blank space with all sorts of illiterate scrawls, empty boasts, lunatic ravings (those are our judgments of other people!), and the like—is our constant choice to be that empty canvas for God to paint on, that unsown field for God to plant in, that cup waiting to be filled with the precious Wine of God (which we know is not wine at all, but his very life's blood).

We are on the edge of Holy Week, and the immense mysteries of God are upon us, the vast frontiers of divine life and love revealed to us only in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ. In the face of that immensity, we are best served by being a little blank, a little empty, a little… well, little. And in that littleness, receptive. And in that receptivity, come to be able to share in His Cross and join Him in loving the world into life and beauty again. It’s the only way to do it, and it requires from us deep humility and surrender to His will in our lives.

Let Your Heart Take Courage

In you, O Lord, do I take refuge; let me never be put to shame;

in your righteousness deliver me!

Incline your ear to me; rescue me speedily!..

Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God…

Because of all my adversaries I have become a reproach, especially to my neighbors,

and an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.

I have been forgotten like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel.

For I hear the whispering of many—terror on every side! —

as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.

But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, “You are my God.”

My times are in your hand;

rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors!

Make your face shine on your servant; save me in your steadfast love!

O Lord, let me not be put to shame, for I call upon you;

let the wicked be put to shame; let them go silently to Sheol…

Love the Lord, all you his saints!

The Lord preserves the faithful but abundantly repays the one who acts in pride.

Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord.

Psalm 31

Reflection – The Monday Psalter has delivered up for us Psalm 31, just in time for Passiontide.  It is a happy coincidence that we have this psalm, which is the source of one of the Lord’s seven last words on the Cross, to meditate on as we begin this last cycle of Lent, the two weeks when the Church’s focus shifts from our own lowly state and need for mercy to the beautiful joyous solemn reality that mercy has indeed been given us in the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ.

‘Into your hands I commit my spirit’ – along with ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’, these two words of the Lord should be understood as implying the whole psalm, prayed by Him as he hung upon the Cross. A man crucified can only speak with great difficulty; that the Lord spoke this one sentence of Psalm 31 means that the whole of it was resonating in his mind and heart as he died for us.

And this is of great significance. Psalm 31 is a psalm of total entrustment and peaceful abandonment to God in the face of great suffering and affliction. The psalmist is undergoing what so many of the psalmists seem to have undergone—persecution, calumny, humiliation, and who knows what else—but in the midst of it, his prayer is serene, childlike, faithful.

On the lips of Jesus this prayer becomes a deep revelation of the Trinity—the Son resting in the bosom of the Father from all eternity, the communion of love which is the very transcendent structure of Being, the wholly divine revelation that God Himself is communion, is mutual gift and reception and gift, that the very absolute center of reality is not defined by categories of power or violence or cold mechanistic determinism, but by the warmth of love and gift.

And this wholly divine, absolutely transcendent reality is translated into the human sphere in the Incarnation, and is shown on the Cross to be utterly triumphant over the worst excesses of suffering and evil, the worst wounds of non-love that man can deal out to man. And because Jesus on the Cross commits his spirit not only to His Father in heaven but to us (cf John 19:30), we can share in that absolute victory of childlike trust and expectant hope over suffering and evil in our lives.

It is Passiontide, time to contemplate these realities which are so simple and yet carry us right into the heart of the Triune Mystery of God, and make that mystery the mystery of our own lives. Christ died for us, and then rose from the dead. And so in our own ‘dying’, be it in body or in spirit, we can rest in confidence that He is in us, alive and active, and that in Him all things are made new, and we are brought through sorrow and death into life without end.

‘Love the Lord, you his saints, be strong and let your hearts take courage, all you who wait for the Lord.’ Into your hands, O Lord, we commit our spirits.