Bread and Wine

My Thursday commentary on the Mass has taken us past the Liturgy of the Word and so now into the Liturgy of the Offertory, the Preparation of the Gifts. At this point, while of course words are still used in the Mass, the use of the symbol begins to emerge here in its prominence.

So I want to spend some time these next few weeks discussing the central symbols of the Mass that dominate the action of the Eucharist. Specifically, there is 'bread and wine', there is the altar, and there is the priest. These are the basic symbolic elements of the celebration of the Mass into which we all enter in worship.

Why is it bread and wine that is used for the matter of the sacrament? Of all the foods that could be chosen, why did Our Lord choose these two? Why does the Church insist on wheat bread and grape wine, even when this may be inconvenient (say, in mission areas where these need to be shipped in at some expense)? Or even when it may make it difficult for an individual Catholic to receive the Eucharist (say, someone with celiac disease or an alcoholic)?

Fundamentally of course it is a matter of obedience. The Lord used bread and wine, told us to do what he was doing the way he was doing it, and so we have no authority to change it. That's really it--the sacraments were not our brilliant idea, not ours in their institution and so not ours to muck around with and change according to whatever brilliant idea is floating around in the Church or in the world (this applies to all the sacraments, marriage and priesthood being the two that people seem to want to muck around with the most these days).

But anyhow, back to bread and wine. Granting that we use them for the simple reason that Jesus done told us to do so, is there anything more to be said? Quite a bit more, actually. Bread is the great scriptural symbol of the basic reality of human life. The word itself in Hebrew is used interchangeably with 'food'. Bread is sustenance, bread is survival. The core reality of ordinary life lived day to day.

Bread also has a shadow side, too. Life is labor, life is hard. 'You will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow.' There is the bread of affliction the people ate in Egypt--bread has this aspect of hard labor, of a world that is marked by economic hardship, injustice, exploitation. Bread is life... but life is hard.

Wine is something quite different, symbolically. We cannot live without bread, symbolically speaking. We can live without wine. Wine is the great symbol in the Bible of life lived beyond the level of mere survival, mere sustenance. Wine is the symbol of human flourishing, joy, celebration. Life as not just a chore to be endured but as something happy, something rich and full.

But wine too has its shadow side. Drunkenness, folly, the wreckage of life that comes when it is consumed rashly or without due measure. Wine 'gladdens the heart', to use the fine biblical phrase, but it can also sadden the heart, drunk in the wrong amount at the wrong time.

All of this meaning is taken into the action of the Mass. Bread and wine are taken to the altar and given to the priest. Everything that human life is - the basic reality, the hard laborious injustice, the glad celebration and joy, and the tragic wreckage of our brokenness - all of this is carried up the aisle of the church to be given to the priest and placed on the altar.

I will say more about those symbols next week, but for now the main point is that Christ's choosing of bread and wine means he has chosen us, that he has chosen to bring all of human life in its beauty and goodness and its tragic suffering into his own offering. There is nothing - not one particle of our human life, that is outside of the Eucharist, that cannot be brought into the mystery of Christ and of God. These simple Eucharistic elements of bread and wine contain within them the whole panoply of the human condition, the human experience. And all of it is to be brought to the altar of God, all of it is to be brought into the mystery of Christ and His love.

As to what happens to those elements, what happens to our human lives, what happens to us when this is done... well, that's for the posts ahead. Stay tuned.

The Enemies At The Sickbed

 Blessed is the one who considers the poor!

 In the day of trouble the Lord delivers him;

 the Lord protects him and keeps him alive;

he is called blessed in the land;

you do not give him up to the will of his enemies.

 The Lord sustains him on his sickbed;

in his illness you restore him to full health.

 As for me, I said, “O Lord, be gracious to me;

 heal me, for I have sinned against you!”

 My enemies say of me in malice,

“When will he die, and his name perish?”

 And when one comes to see me, he utters empty words,

while his heart gathers iniquity;

when he goes out, he tells it abroad.

 All who hate me whisper together about me;

they imagine the worst for me.

 They say, “A deadly thing is poured out on him;

he will not rise again from where he lies.”

 Even my close friend in whom I trusted,

who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me.

 But you, O Lord, be gracious to me,

and raise me up, that I may repay them!

 By this I know that you delight in me:

my enemy will not shout in triumph over me.

 But you have upheld me because of my integrity,

and set me in your presence forever.

 Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,

from everlasting to everlasting!

Amen and Amen

Psalm 41

Reflection – This psalm is entitled, often, in psalters and breviaries ‘a psalm in time of sickness.’ That may well be; as usual, there is more going on here than just someone with a tummy ache or a bad back. Most of us do not, at least in any visible way, have our ‘enemies’ gather around our sickbed to taunt us and lift their heels against us.

With all respect, I do sometimes wonder at the world the psalmists lived in – they certainly seem to be surrounded by a whole lot of not nice people. On the relatively rare occasions when I am sick, I get surrounded not by people shouting in triumph over me, but by people bringing me chicken soup and the like.

That being said… on the other hand this is exactly what happens to us when we are weak and vulnerable, failing and frail in life. It Is maybe not human enemies who surround us with taunts and gibes, but serious illness is a time of spiritual peril and temptation. Chronic pain and long protracted weakness leave a person prey to all sorts of vicious spiritual attacks: “Just give up… what good is your life… you are accursed… lie down and die…” And so on and so forth. At times it may be our own diseased thought processes; at times it may genuinely be attacks from the one true Enemy of humanity.

One of the great effects of the Sacrament of the Sick is that it unites the suffering one to Christ in his or her illness, and so does exactly what this psalm says, pours out the graciousness of God to the person so that this Enemy may not shout in triumph over them.

At the same time, this psalm speaks to just how evil the whole euthanasia movement is. Call it assisted suicide or whatever—it is euthanasia. Sickness is a time of temptation and spiritual struggle. 

The dying process is fraught with terrible battles against despair, against all sorts of tragic lamentations and desperate combat against not just physical death but the deeper spiritual death—the death of faith, the death of hope, the death of love.

To have the doctor who is supposed to be caring for you standing over you with a needle saying constantly in the midst of these battles “We can end this all now, you know!” is pure evil, even if the intentions are in fact kindly. To have the government—which let us not forget means you and I—standing at the bedside of the person saying “Hey, why don’t you just kill yourself?” is simply wicked.

So perhaps this psalm is not so remote and odd after all. We are surrounded by spiritual enemies in our sicknesses, and now more and more are surrounded by human enemies in (alas!) the members of the very profession who are supposed to be helping us and the society who is supposed to cherish us support us.

So in the light of that, let us pray for all the sick and turn to God in our own ailments, that he deliver us all from evil and raise us up in the sight of our foes. Amen.

It's Easier to Just Give In

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity,

and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;

my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity;

I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”

and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

Therefore let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you when you may be found;

surely in the rush of great waters, they shall not reach him.

You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble;

you surround me with shouts of deliverance.

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go;

I will counsel you with my eye upon you.

Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding,

which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you.

Many are the sorrows of the wicked,

but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.

Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

Psalm 32

Reflection – Happy Monday of Holy Week. This is a week rich in themes—so much to ponder, so little time, really. Fortunately we have precisely one Holy Week a year, so if we don’t quite take it all in this year we can try again next year (not to mention that we’re allowed to think about these things in between—encouraged, actually!).

The Monday Psalter has brought us to Psalm 32 which focuses on one of the key themes of this season, namely forgiveness of sin.  In Madonna House we are having our communal penance service this evening; many parishes have had similar services at some point in the Lenten season.

In our community this is always a night of great peace and joy—to communally, individually acknowledge the simple, sad truth that we are sinners, that we have sinned, that we have done what we know to be wrong and have turned our faces from God in doing so—to be able to say this outright, publicly, with great humility, even as we reserve the specific details for the sanctity of the confessional, is great freedom and happiness.

To have to either hide one’s sins away like a terrible secret, a shameful thing one must conceal from God and neighbour, or to be so horrified or incensed at the very notion of sin and being a sinner that we have to deny sin exists, rationalize every choice we have made, wish away every moral law we have broken—all of this is frankly exhausting. Our bones waste away from the effort, our strength is dried up. It is so much easier, really, to just give in, admit one is a sinner, go to confession and forget about the whole thing.

Some of my anti-Catholic readers (why do they read this blog, anyway?) approach the subject of sin and the sacrament of confession as another example of clerical privilege and abuse. They don’t seem to realize that priests go to confession, too, as do bishops and the Pope for that matter. Our MH communal penance service is for all of us, as we all together acknowledge and confess our sins to the Lord, even as the priests are indeed the ministers of God’s mercy in the sacrament itself.

In Holy Week all of this is especially poignant and meaningful. Jesus Christ died for sinners, died to win us the sure forgiveness of our sins by the shedding of his blood. We cannot really appreciate what He did for us unless we fully acknowledge the desperate plight of our sinful humanity. If sin is not real, and is not a very serious problem indeed for us, then Christ’s death is rather pointless, isn’t it?

The truth is, our unforgiven sins will pull us down to Hell and eternal death if we do not bring them ‘under the Blood’, in that fine old fashioned phrase. And this should be no cause for undue distress for us, because as it happens Jesus did die for us, and so mercy and forgiveness have been made available to the whole human race in His death and risen life. We don’t have to be sorrowful, and we don’t have to be stubborn like a mule in finding our own path through the world, and we don’t have to waste away. Life is given us, freely, in Jesus Christ.

Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

So What is Marriage Anyway?

In the light of these facts [about the nature of marriage and love] the characteristic features and exigencies of married love are clearly indicated, and it is of the highest importance to evaluate them exactly.

This love is above all fully human, a compound of sense and spirit. It is not, then, merely a question of natural instinct or emotional drive. It is also, and above all, an act of the free will, whose trust is such that it is meant not only to survive the joys and sorrows of daily life, but also to grow, so that husband and wife become in a way one heart and one soul, and together attain their human fulfillment.

It is a love which is total—that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner's own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.

Married love is also faithful and exclusive of all other, and this until death. This is how husband and wife understood it on the day on which, fully aware of what they were doing, they freely vowed themselves to one another in marriage. Though this fidelity of husband and wife sometimes presents difficulties, no one has the right to assert that it is impossible; it is, on the contrary, always honorable and meritorious. The example of countless married couples proves not only that fidelity is in accord with the nature of marriage, but also that it is the source of profound and enduring happiness.

Finally, this love is fecund. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being. "Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents' welfare."

Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, 7-8

Reflection – Well, back to ‘weekends with Humanae Vitae’. The next three days we’ll read together through the next bit of the encyclical.

Here we see such a clear and beautiful presentation of what marriage is, the necessary pre-condition to discussing what can or cannot happen within a marriage. If you don’t know what a thing is, you cannot know what it can or cannot do—agere sequitur esse is the philosophical principle here—doing follows from being, what a thing is determines what its right operation is.

The previous paragraph had rooted this esse of marriage in its reflection of the love of the Father for his creation and for the human person, and the love of Christ for the Church. Marriage in the natural order is an echo of God’s ‘it is very good’ to creation; marriage in the supernatural order manifests and in fact expresses the union of God and humanity that is the mystery of Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride the Church. And in this expression man and woman receive grace to live out the communion of love to which they are called.

It is because marriage is these things, because a validly contracted marriage of two baptized people is this, whether they are saintly paragons or utter messes or like 99% of us, a jumbled mix of both, that the ‘laws’ of marriage are what they are.

Marriage cannot be broken, because God’s covenant of love cannot be broken, God cannot stop loving his creation, Christ cannot ‘divorce’ the Church. Divorce is impossible, and no human laws can change that—this is the plain and unequivocal teaching of Christ himself in the Gospels. To ask the Catholic Church to change its laws to allow divorce and remarriage is to ask the Catholic Church to renounce Jesus Christ.

Marriage is exclusive and total, because that is who God is, who Jesus is. Infidelity in a marriage is a direct denial of the very nature of marriage.

And marriage is fruitful, ordered towards fruitfulness, because God’s love is creative, Christ’s love for us is fruitful within us. God’s love gives life; the expression of human love which most intimately corresponds to God’s love, which is nuptial sexual expression, must conform to the pattern of love to which it is made. And it must conform to it according to a fully human way of being and acting—in other words, in freedom, rational choice, and the deeply human decision to move in trust and in communion with one another and with God.

All of this is not just a bunch of arbitrary rules, but flows directly from the reality of what marriage is, revealed by God, revealed by Jesus Christ, and communicated to us through the Tradition of the Church. Agere sequitur esse – what a married couple does flows from who they are. Or as Pope St. John Paul II put it—families, be what you are!

Lazarus, Come Out!

Today we forget everything far too quickly, even the Magisterium of the Church! Part of this is unavoidable, but we cannot forget the great content, the great intuitions and gifts that have been left to the People of God. And Divine Mercy is one of these. It is a gift which he gave to us, but which comes from above. It is up to us, as ministers of the Church, to keep this message alive, above all through preaching and in our actions, in signs and in pastoral choices, such as the decision to restore priority to the Sacrament of Reconciliation and to the works of mercy. Reconciliation, making peace through the Sacrament, also with words, and with works of mercy…

Let us ask ourselves what mercy means for a priest, allow me to say for us priests. For us, for all of us! Priests are moved to compassion before the sheep, like Jesus, when he saw the people harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus has the “bowels” of God, Isaiah speaks about it very much: he is full of tenderness for the people, especially for those who are excluded, that is, for sinners, for the sick who no one takes care of.... Thus, in the image of the Good Shepherd, the priest is a man of mercy and compassion, close to his people and a servant to all.

This is a pastoral criterion I would like to emphasize strongly: closeness. Closeness and service, but closeness, nearness!... Whoever is wounded in life, in whatever way, can find in him attention and a sympathetic ear.... The priest reveals a heart especially in administering the Sacrament of Reconciliation; he reveals it by his whole attitude, by the manner in which he welcomes, listens, counsels and absolves.... 

But this comes from how he experiences the Sacrament firsthand, from how he allows himself to be embraced by God the Father in Confession and remains in this embrace.... If one experiences this in one’s own regard, in his own heart, he can also give it to others in his ministry. And I leave you with the question: How do I confess? Do I allow myself to be embraced?

Pope Francis, Address to the priests of the Diocese of Rome, March 6, 2014

Reflection – As I have mentioned, I’m in Orangeville Ontario this week giving a parish mission (thank you, all who are praying for it – it’s going well). My presence here happens to coincide with the archdiocese of Toronto’s ’24 Hours of Reconciliation’ – the day when every parish will be open all day with priests available to hear confessions. So I will actually be spending about four hours today hearing confessions in the church here, along with the parish penance service tomorrow night to close off the mission.

None of which I had in mind when I picked out this talk from Pope Francis for today’s blogging, but all of which goes nicely together. The sacrament of confession is such a beautiful thing, really. People have such odd ideas about it sometimes—I'm thinking not of the truly weird and wacky ideas of anti-Catholic bigots so much, but the normal perceptions of non-Catholics or lapsed Catholics.

I suppose in the latter case people have had bad experiences and this colors their perception. I must say that I’ve been going to confession regularly for 40 years of my life with no lapses, and I have never once been yelled at, sneered at, bullied, shamed, hectored, humiliated—not even remotely. In fact, the only criticism I would make of some of the priests who have heard my confession over the years is that they have been if anything a bit laxist (the pope will explain this shortly).

But for the most part, the priests I have encountered in the confessional have been kind men simply offering me the tangible experience of God’s mercy in this unique sacramental setting. Sometimes they have had a word of wise counsel, more often they have simply given me the sacrament (which is the point of the exercise, after all).

It’s such a beautiful thing. You walk in, kneel down or sit, speak in simple unadorned language the moral failures, the sins, of the past week or month, express contrition, receive some mild penance or other, and then…

And then Jesus, not the man, not the priest, washes you clean. Not because you deserve it, not because you earned it, not because of anything… he just does it. It is a miracle on a par with the raising of Lazarus from the dead. You walk into the confessional burdened in conscience to some greater or lesser degree. You walk out (Lazarus - come out!) as innocent as a newly baptized baby, unbound, alive.

What a gift this is from God in the life of the Church, what a treasure! How is it possible that Catholics have turned away from it, make silly jokes about it, or get angry about it as if it’s some horrible imposition? God, in Jesus, in the life of the Church, in the person of the ordained minister, works here the greatest miracle, the greatest work of power next to his creation of the universe and his raising of Jesus from the dead – he restores life, health, and the grace of divine communion to a human soul who has refused these goods. How on earth can anyone have a problem with this?

So… when’s the last time you went to confession? Uhhh... isn’t it time you went again?