Blog on Hiatus

Sorry for the two posts in a row here - my next installment on Psalm 23 is immediately below. However, I am off with the staff of our house in Robin Hood's Bay, England, to give them a retreat in nearby Fighly, so will be off the blog from Friday-Sunday. Back Monday, God willing, to finish up the psalm, and then we'll see what's next.

Any Takers?

You have prepared a banquet for me

In the sight of my foes

My head you have anointed with oil

My cup in overflowing

Psalm 23

Reflection -  You know, I should have mentioned yesterday that the psalm shifts in the previous verse in a very significant way. The first half of the psalm has been all third-person statements - 'the Lord... He gives... He leads...' But with the whole prospect of the valley of the shadow of death and evil and not being afraid, something interesting happens.

Suddenly, we're not talking about God - we are talking to Him. It is not enough, it is never enough, simply to talk about God, to have all the right ideas about Him, to have perfect theology and perfect verbal expression of that theology. We have to know God; just knowing about Him will not do.

Meditation, in other words, must lead to prayer. Prayer--talking to God, expressing to Him our love, our gratitude, our total need and total confidence in that need--is the end of meditation--discursive thought about God and his ways with us. Meditation leads to prayer, and prayer leads to contemplation, where we behold God with the eyes of faith and rejoice in His beauty in peace and in love.

You have prepared a banquet for me in the sight of my foes - So God takes care of us, right? God is laying out a banquet for us continually. The Eucharist, for sure - this is the utter center and most lavish earthly experience of that banquet. God Himself feeding us with Himself - what banquet could be greater, this side of heaven?

But of course there is more - after all, we don't consign all non-Catholics and non-Orthodox to the starvation bunkers of the world. God feeds his people - the invisible feeding of grace. The lavishness of creation itself - the bounty and beauty of the earth. The mysterious and most hidden and delightful action of love in the world, flowing in and out of human hearts and minds. So much food, so much God is giving us. Our meal ticket, so to speak, is total surrender to Him, total abandonment to His will. He can and does feed us as He can when this is absent, but when we utterly give ourselves to Him, it is like planting ourselves right at the head of the buffet line and getting all the choice cuts and best savory dishes.

What about these enemies? Well, the devil and the disbelieving world, of course. But I have to admit - my own worst enemy is my own disbelieving heart. And it seems like God delights in setting a banquet before me in the sight of that foe above all. God delights, in his great fatherly love, in putting me to shame in my disbelief and rebellion. And may He continue to do so until faith is put to flight in the vision of His face.

My head you have anointed with oil, my cup is overflowing - again we see the two levels of the psalm here. On the basic level, it is just another way of saying how God lavishes a banquet on us - the anointing of the head, the cup brimming with wine, all that good stuff.

But... we know that anointing with oil is something quite more than just a symbol of rich abundance. Messiah or Christ means 'anointed one'. Kings and priests and prophets were anointed in the old covenant; the whole people of God are anointed in the new one. Anointing is with the Spirit, not with rich oil. The Spirit is upon us, and the cup overflowing is filled with the love of Christ poured into our hearts by that same Spirit.

And so the banquet God gives us is not just or mainly 'all kinds of nice goodies'. We may actually live in great poverty and affliction - many people of deep faith do, as we all know. It is the gift of the Spirit that is God's banquet set before us each day. And this gift of the Spirit means the capacity to live and love as God lives and loves. To be liberated from the boundaries of our finite humanity to enter a truly divine sphere of life and action. To be divinized as a free gift of grace from our Father in heaven who in the Spirit makes us sharers in his Son's life and being.

That's the gift God offers us. Any takers?

Walking the Right Path

He guides me along the right path;

He is true to His name.

If I should walk in the valley of darkness,

 no evil would I fear.

You are there with your crook and your staff;

With these you give me comfort.

Psalm 23

Reflection - I'm taking a few days to look at Psalm 23, this most beloved and familiar of the psalms. My contention is two-fold: that it contains a whole summary of our Christian faith, particularly because Jesus took it into his own self-revelation by calling himself the Good Shepherd; that it can be read on a simple level of childlike trust and faith, but also at a very deep mystical level.

I think this two-fold level is nowhere more visible than in this stanza of the psalm. There is an obvious reading of these words that is quite true and very lovely... and then look again, look deeper, and it pulls you into this other level of reality, this profound reflection on the ways of God with us.

He guides me along the right path - Well, God teaches us the moral law. This would have been, and doubtless still is, the clear reading of this passage for a Jew. God's law is the path of life, the path of righteousness. And we have to remember that in Jewish thought this is not especially tinged with sanctimonious self-righteousness. The path of the law, the way of righteousness, truly is a way of life and of joy. To live morally is to live a good happy life, and God makes this possible by teaching us this way.

But of course it goes deeper. We never leave morality behind, never become 'free' wrongly of the demands of just behavior, but we do transcend it. And God leads us on this right path, too. This path into communion with Him in Christ by the Spirit. The path that leads us, not simply to a good human life, but into the very heart of the Trinity. The path walked by the saints, by Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, by Francis and Dominic and Kolbe... moral life, yes, but that path terminates in mystical union.

He is true to his name. God is faithful. God is God, and that means goodness, justice, truth, love. Such is our core basic faith--and don't we have to struggle with it sometimes! But there it is. But then, this name... for Christians it is not simply YHWH, but 'Father.' 'Jesus.' A personal love, a personal salvation. There is a depth here again that the psalm leads us into. What is God's name, and what is his 'trueness' to it? 

If I should walk in the valley of darkness, no evil would I fear - oh, we do love this verse, don't we? We all have our time to go down into the valley, to enter into darkness. Times of tribulation and affliction, times of deep uncertainty and confusion, times of immense sorrow and grief. Darkness--and it awaits us all. Praying this verse has been for countless millions of Christians a grace and a strength to confront the pain and sorrow of life - no evil would I fear.

But... again, there is more. The valley of darkness in Hebrew is 'the valley of the Shadow of Death' - the good old King James version was literal in its rendering. And this is, in a certain sense, our human condition. We live in the shadow of death continually. I could die today; you could, too. We don't really know, do we? And so the psalm beckons us to a way of life that is truly fearless, to live in an awareness of death that is not morbid but intensely real, to live knowing the fraility and transience of our life here and march forward through this valley with unshaking faith and fearless love.

You are there with your crook and your staff; with these you give me comfort. Again, I guess it is natural for me to hear 'the Church' here. Bishops use crooks as symbol of their shepherding role, and it truly is the Church itself which shepherds us and ushers us through this valley safely. Do you know what a crook is for, and why it is shaped that way? It is to snag the sheep when they run away - the curvy bit is designed to catch the sheep's hind leg and drag it back to the shepherd. We go running off in all sorts of directions; it is our choice to stay in the Church, in communion with the apostles and their successors that catches us up and stops us from getting too far away from the Shepherd.

But of course we are living in a most painful age of ecclesial failure and scandal, and so this reading of the psalm is somewhat anguished for us. It certainly is for me. But, beholding the 'sins' of bishops and of priests and the shame of our failures, we are called to a deeper mercy yet, a deeper forgiveness, a deeper faith. And this is truly God's 'crooking' us, his pulling us to Himself in a strong, even violent way. Comfort today comes from God, but this comfort does come as we struggle and strive to live our Catholic lives in fidelity and loyalty to His Church. And that's quite enough to ponder for one day - it's time for me to go get ready for Mass.

Places Fresh And Green

The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want. Fresh and green are the pastures where he gives me repose. Near restful waters he leads me, to revive my drooping spirit.

Psalm 23

You know, I'm finding my way on this new style of blogging, and certainly not quite sure of myself in it. One thing I may try to do from time to time is reflect on Scripture. I did that little series on the Lord's Prayer a few weeks ago, and people seemed to enjoy it. Certainly, if we are talking about the 'Ten Thousand Places' where we find the face of God, the Word of God provides more like ten million such.

And so I would like to take this most familiar of psalms and spend a few days with it. It is the one psalm that, if a person knows any Scripture at all, they probably know it, or at least the first lines of it. I believe this psalm is a sort of summary of the whole of the Bible. Certainly Jesus takes it up into his own mystery and the very depths of the Christian revelation by calling Himself the Good Shepherd and linking his shepherding work to his dying for his sheep.

It seems to me timely that, as we have lost (sort of) our German Shepherd, and wait with bated breath for the cardinals to select a new shepherd to serve in that capacity, meanwhile confronted again with the painful spectacle of Church leaders falling prey to sin and failure, that a good long contemplation of Christ the Good Shepherd is timely.

The Lord is my shepherd - there is nothing I shall want. Now, that's a statement of faith for you. Do you want anything? Anything at all? Got all you need? Faith answers that question one way; our frail and faithless humanity answers something else entirely.We seem to ourselves to need all kinds of things: if not food and drink, then friendship and love. If not shelter and clothing, then financial security and a decent job prospect.

Need, need, need... well, we have to choose ultimately, what we really believe about all this. If the Lord is our shepherd, then we shall not want. Indeed, we do not want - in Hebrew, the verb tenses are indeterminate, to say the least. God is giving me what I need right now. God is giving you what you need right now, even if what you need may apparently look like a whole lot of things that are unpleasant and mysterious. Who needs cancer, or unemployment, or a bad relationship, or mental illness? Maybe you do... for reasons far from clear to you or to me.

Fresh and green are the pastures where he gives me repose. This is a question of our prayer, I believe. Sometimes God gives us very tangible pastures, overtly beautiful resting places. But more often than not he opens those pasture gates for us in the interior recesses of our being, the pastures of the heart which, if we truly surrender to his leading, become the gateways to the pastures of His Heart. And sometimes it is in trackless wilderness or choking desert or frozen wastelands where those hidden pastures can bloom most verdantly. It is a question of trust, of surrender, and of ceaseless prayer.

Near restful waters he leads me, to revive my drooping spirit. The sacraments have been described using that language many times over the centuries. This whole business of life coming into us from without us - the whole reality of grace, of gift, of refreshing streams penetrating our souls from without, from the great Without which is the true Within - the heart of the Trinity.

I love Psalm 23 because it uses language and image that a child can understand and commit to memory, yet ushers us into mystical heights and depths that are boundless. We will pray this Psalm in heaven, I am sure, and understand it all the better there. Meanwhile, on earth, let's see where the next days take us with it.

What Power Do We Have?

In the meantime, in the quest for a complete theological vision of ecclesiology, a certain amount of criticism arose after the 1940’s, in the 1950’s, concerning the concept of the Body of Christ: the word "mystical" was thought to be too spiritual, too exclusive; the concept "People of God" then began to come into play… In the text of the New Testament, the phrase Laos tou Theou… means… the ancient People of God, the Jews, who among the world’s peoples, goim, are "the" People of God.

The others, we pagans, are not per se God’s People: we become sons of Abraham and thus the People of God by entering into communion with Christ, the one seed of Abraham. By entering into communion with him, by being one with him, we too become God’s People… Only through Christology do we become the People of God, and thus the two concepts are combined. The Council chose to elaborate a Trinitarian ecclesiology: People of God the Father, Body of Christ, Temple of the Holy Spirit.

Yet only after the Council did an element come to light – which can also be found, albeit in a hidden way, in the Council itself – namely this: the link between People of God and Body of Christ is precisely communion with Christ in Eucharistic fellowship. This is where we become the Body of Christ: the relationship between People of God and Body of Christ creates a new reality – communion. After the Council it became clear, I would say, that the Council really discovered and pointed to this concept: communion as the central concept. I would say that, philologically, it is not yet fully developed in the Council, yet it is as a result of the Council that the concept of communion came more and more to be the expression of the Church’s essence, communion in its different dimensions: communion with the Trinitarian God – who is himself communion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit – sacramental communion, and concrete communion in the episcopate and in the life of the Church.

Address to the Roman Clergy, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Reading this as a member of Madonna House, I cannot help but hear Catherine Doherty’s voice in the background. She had her own rather strong views on the whole subject of ecclesiology. The Mystical Body of Christ was, for her, the image that spoke most deeply to her, and she never really warmed up to ‘People of God’ as an image.

Her mystical body ecclesiology was anything but ‘spiritual’ (in the wrong sense of the word) or ‘exclusive’ – for her, it meant that she, you, I were deeply connected to the whole of humanity, that in Christ our actions and choices, our prayers and sacrifices, our daily fidelity to the duty of the moment were made efficacious across the face of the earth and could be applied to the needs of the poor, the suffering, the struggling sinners—the whole need of the world for succour and support.

A commentor asked me yesterday what ‘power’ women have in the Church today. I said there, but will say here on the front page of the blog, that the only power any of us have, really, is this power of being a cell in the Mystical Body. Of throwing our tiny humanity, with all its stumbles and staggering, onto Christ and His Power to save, heal, raise up. Power to issue an encyclical, to preach a homily, to enact this program or promulgate that doctrine—well, it’s not that all that is nothing, of course, but the real power is the power of Christ moving through our human weakness.

And the sacraments are the great sign and the great effectiveness of this power. I am glad that Benedict fills out the ‘people of God’ image by linking it to communion in the Eucharist. Catherine didn’t like the image because she saw it being used in a too humanistic and sociological way. So often the phrase became a slogan advocating for more democracy in the Church or ‘empowerment’ of the laity, understood as their being in some kind of zero sum competition with the clergy.

Rather, we are the People of God insofar as we gather around the Lord at His table, and unite ourselves to His sacrifice of praise to His Father. This, and this alone, makes us ‘God’s people’.

And so we are in this ‘time of the Church’ for the next few weeks, called to pray together and truly take hold, I would suggest, of our deep Catholic identity in all the media firestorms, scandals and rumors of scandals, and all that stuff. To know that we are in Christ and Christ is in us, and all we are asked to do is to unite ourselves with Him in the Spirit and surrender our will to His, as Mary did, knowing full well that only thus is Christ brought to the world, and that only Christ brought to the world can heal the world and raise it up to new life.

The Most Beautiful Thing in the World

To how many does Christianity really seem ‘something big, something growing, to which we can give ourselves up completely with joy and enthusiasm’? Do… unbelievers… observe on our brows the radiance of that gladness which, twenty centuries ago, captivated the fine flower of the pagan world..? In a word, while we are fully alive to the blasphemy in Nietzsche’s terrible phrase [that God is dead] in its whole context are we not also forced to see in ourselves something of what drove him to that blasphemy?

Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism

Reflection -  This is a quote from my thesis research, not by Joseph Ratzinger. The book cited is one of the truly great books of the twentieth century, and great in not being toooo long and technical, either.

I always cherish, if that's the right word, the saying attributed to Nietzsche that he would be persuaded of the truth of Christianity a bit more readily if only Christians looked more redeemed. There is truth to that. Do we look happy that Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead and has brought us the sure and certain promise of eternal life and bliss is we should only believe in Him and follow Him in the obedience of faith?

Does our faith, in fact, make us happy? This sentence I just wrote above - what effect does it have on you? Just empty words on a computer screen? Or the very center and substance of life, a transforming fact that all your days center around and that is the constant refrain of your mind and heart.

God loves us. Love has been poured out in Jesus Christ. This love is saving, transforming. It pulls us out of the death trap of the world, of our broken and battered humanity, and lifts us up to the very heart of God, to the very heart of life and love and splendor of glory.

Do we believe this? Then... why is there so little joy in our lives, in our countenances, in our voices, in our homes? I'm not trying to lay a guilt trip on anyone - God knows I only have to look in the mirror if I want to see a lousy Christian! But we have to be clear that the world, so badly in need of conversion, is mostly not going to be converted by logical arguments, certainly not by angry harangues, and not even by really good social justice programs or other forms of political advocacy, good and proper as those might be.

The world is converted by beauty, and beauty starts, not with painting a magnificent icon, composing a gorgeous chorale, or carving a sculpture from ivory or marble. Most of that kind of beauty is beyond most of us most of the time.

The most beautiful thing in the world is a human face, radiant with joy. It is the joy shining from a face of one who actually believes that Jesus is who Jesus says He is, and really did what we say He did, and really is present in, with, around us continually. This is the most beautiful thing in the world, and it is a beauty within all our grasp. It is this beauty, and the love, the friendship, the genuine charity that accompanies such a beauty, that will re-Christianize our world.

God is not dead... but we can act at times as if He is. We can keep God pretty firmly hid away in our heads, our hearts, the 'place of the skull' where the dead Christ lay.

Well, He cannot be confined there. He bursts forth from there, every time. Even in Lent, Christ is risen from the dead (a***lu**). And it seems to me that a great prayer of Lent, and of life, is that we truly do believe in all this stuff we say we believe, and that we have the grace and courage to show it forth in how we live, how we carry ourselves, what we show forth to the world.

Really, do we have any idea of our own greatness? Of the thunderous, splendiferous, magnificent reality of what it is to be a baptized Christian. Do we not know that we are God's temple? It is so very amazing to be what we in fact are, and the world really does need to know about it. Let's think about how our face can be one of those ten thousand faces that show the Father's love to the world.

It's All So Very Messy

I would say that theological discussion in the 1930’s and 1940’s, even in the 1920’s, was entirely conducted under the heading Mystici Corporis. It was a discovery that brought so much joy at that time, and within this context emerged the formula: We are the Church, the Church is not a structure; we Christians, all together, we are all the living body of the Church. And naturally, this obtains in the sense that we, the true "we" of believers, together with the "I" of Christ, are the Church; every single one of us, not a particular "we", a single group that calls itself Church.

No: this "we are Church" requires me to take my place within the great "we" of believers of all times and places. Therefore, the primary idea was to complete ecclesiology in a theological way, but also in a structural way, that is to say: besides the succession of Peter, and his unique function, to define more clearly also the function of the bishops, the corpus of bishops.

And in order to do this, the word "collegiality" was adopted, a word that has been much discussed, sometimes acrimoniously, I would say, and also in somewhat exaggerated terms. But this word – maybe another could have been found, but this one worked – expressed the fact that the bishops collectively are the continuation of the Twelve, of the corpus of Apostles. We said: only one bishop, the Bishop of Rome, is the successor of a particular Apostle, namely Peter. All the others become successors of the Apostles by entering into the corpus that continues the corpus of the Apostles. Hence it is the corpus of bishops, the college, that is the continuation of the corpus of the Twelve, and thus it has its intrinsic necessity, its function, its rights and duties.

To many this seemed like a power struggle, and maybe some were thinking of their power, but substantially it was not about power, but about the complementarity of the different elements and about the completeness of the corpus of the Church with the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, as structural elements; and each of them is a structural element of the Church within this great corpus.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Well, I warned you that, new blog or no new blog, Pope Benedict would not be too far away from my reflections. Especially in this time when we are so very focussed on the Church, on the bishops, on the Cardinals in a particular way, it is good to hear his thoughts on the movement towards collegiality at Vatican II.

Whenever we start thinking about the structural elements of the Church, which if we are using the imagery of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ could be likened to the skeletal system, the bones that keep the body configured in a way that makes life and movement possible, we have problems. Because of course, those ‘bones’ are not just bones, they are men. And as men they are prone to the same sins and failures we all fall into. As men they can be wrong about things, or wicked, or foolish, or weak. As men they can hurt and be hurt.

Oh, it’s all so very messy! Why did God do it this way? Why did He make His Church so dependent on these people, who (it is so easy to say) are so messed up, so wrong, so infuriatingly human, so much of the time?

Well, why did God make the Church reliant on you and me, either? And… it is, you know. The bishops and Cardinals may be the ‘bones’ of the Church, so to speak, but you and I are the muscles, the cells, the organs, all of it together. And they can be either wise and holy or foolish and sinful, but if you and I are not alive in Christ, passionate with love of God and neighbour, what difference does it make, anyhow?

We’re all in this together, in other words. Yes, the bishops have power of a sort and can do great harm or great good in their ministry. But so can you. So can I. And we do. Ecclesial communion is not served by finger pointing, by sneering, by snark and invective against the leaders God has currently given us, or by engaging in whatever sort of power struggle we think will move our agenda forward. We need to pray for them. We need to pray for one another. We need to preach the Gospel with our lives and love one another with sincerity of heart and firmness of purpose.

This is what makes the Mystical Body healthy, vigorous, alive. And this is the call of Christ to us always, but especially in this time of transition in the Church.

Lovely in Limbs and Eyes

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; _myself_ it speaks and spells,
Crying _What I do is me: for that I came_.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

G.M Hopkins

 

Reflection - So, a new day, a new month, a new era in the Church, and (least importantly of all) a new blog to go with it. I wanted to start with returning to this poem by Hopkins which I quoted last week to you, explaining the title of the new blog.

 

Hopkins' poetry is both very beautiful, and very convoluted to read at times. This is one of his easier ones, actually. The whole sense here is that each created thing perpetually speaks its own name, tells its own truth, 'deals out that being indoors each one dwells.' The whole beautiful theology of the true is in this. We are not isolated fragments floating in a meaningless cosmic soup, bumping up against each other randomly.

 

Rather, every particle of being is communicating itself to every other, and we rational creatures have the awesome capacity to receive this communication. We have room in our minds, and so in our hearts, for all of creation. We can know, and knowing, love everything that is.

 

Hopkins says more, though. And that is this whole sense that all creation, but most especially the human creation, and most especially of that, the good, just man or woman of creation is not only speaking his or her own name, but Christ's. It is this whole sacramental sense of life I hope to bring forth on this blog at least some of the time. Whatever in reality is good, is true, is beautiful, is at least a reflection of Christ, and quite often is a true sharing in Christ's life and love.

 

Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limb and eyes. And in the perception of this -- and don't forget, we have to look for it, or we miss it! -- we come to the Father through the features of men's faces. And so in my new design for the blog, which I will doubtless be tweaking and adjusting in days to follow, I have faces, faces, faces running down the side. These particular faces are ones who have touched my life and shown me the Father, at least a little bit. No doubt I will be adding more as time goes on.

 

It is this whole beautiful reality that God comes to us in other people. Other people are not 'God', exactly - God is God alone - but there is a sacramentality that is very real and very important. Each of us is meant to be a sacrament of sorts - we do not only speak our own name, but His. Our lives are not only about our own truth, but His. Our faces are not our own, but are mirrors of His. And this is what I will try to look for and reflect on in the blog ahead.

 

Otherwise... meet the new blog, same as the old blog. I still have lots of material from Joseph Ratzinger and have no intention of keeping it to myself. No doubt the new pope's face will adorn the blog shortly, and I will delve into his writings and public addresses. And... well, we will see. And I hope you will all continue to join me as I throw my little bit into the social media maelstrom, doing my best to show God's face in this strange digital world.

 

 

 

 

Popes Come, Popes Go

And now the second topic: the Church. We know that the First Vatican Council was interrupted because of the Franco-Prussian War, and so it remained somewhat one-sided, incomplete, because the doctrine on the primacy – defined, thanks be to God, in that historical moment for the Church, and very necessary for the period that followed – was just a single element in a broader ecclesiology, already envisaged and prepared. So we were left with a fragment. And one might say: as long as it remains a fragment, we tend towards a one-sided vision where the Church would be just the primacy.

So all along, the intention was to complete the ecclesiology of Vatican I, at a date to be determined, for the sake of a complete ecclesiology. Here too the time seemed ripe because, after the First World War, the sense of the Church was reborn in a new way. As Romano Guardini said: "The Church is starting to reawaken in people’s souls", and a Protestant bishop spoke of the "era of the Church". Above all, there was a rediscovery of the concept that Vatican I had also envisaged, namely that of the Mystical Body of Christ. People were beginning to realize that the Church is not simply an organization, something structured, juridical, institutional – it is that too – but rather an organism, a living reality that penetrates my soul, in such a way that I myself, with my own believing soul, am a building block of the Church as such. In this sense, Pius XII wrote the Encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi as a step towards completing the ecclesiology of Vatican I.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Well, so the day has come at last. At 8 p.m. (Roman time) today, Pope Benedict will step down from the chair of Peter and retire to a life of prayer and seclusion. I find myself unable to offer some sweeping analysis of Benedict’s papacy and its long-range impact, or some grand conclusion about the meaning of his resignation and its implications for the Church.

Partly, I’m still jet-lagged, and very much taken up with my short-term assignment to Robin Hood’s Bay, UK. Mostly, though, I don’t put all that much stock in grand sweeping analyses, especially those made in the moment of the event. Time and history will give us a better sense of ‘what it all means’ than this present moment affords.

Meanwhile, by sheer coincidence I have come to the point of the address to the Roman clergy about the ecclesiology of Vatican II, and particularly about the incomplete ecclesiology of Vatican I. And this is more than slightly relevant to today’s event.

Vatican I (if you are hazy on the details) defined the dogma of papal infallibility—the pope as the final arbiter of the deposit of faith. His ministry can never be exercised in isolation from the rest of the magisterium or in conflict with the whole of the tradition of the Church, but nonetheless, there is a last word, a final authority, and it resides in the occupant of the chair of Peter.

Vatican I said so, and it is binding on Catholics to believe so. But if we leave it at that, as Vatican I was forced to by historical events, then we are indeed left with an unbalanced and undue emphasis on the office of the papacy to the exclusion of the bishops and indeed this whole deeper sense to the Mystical Body of Christ.

Yes, the Pope has a unique and vital role, and may Benedict’s successor do as good as job with it as he did and John Paul II before him. But… your bishop is also a successor to the apostles, and has a role. And… you have a role, too, you know. As do I.

It is this deep sense of the Church as bigger than one man and even bigger than one office, crucial as it may be, that we need to grasp and truly take to heart. Some of the anxiety around Benedict’s resignation betrays, I would suggest, a lingering lack of balance in the Catholic community. A certain focus on the papal office that is just slightly out of proportion.

Everyone who reads this blog knows that my love of Benedict is second to none, and my respect for Church authority and fidelity to the Church is (I hope by now) beyond question. So understand me well when I say that popes come and popes go, you know! It is Jesus who is the life of the Church, and the Holy Spirit whose abiding presence makes this life real, present, vital, effective. And God the Father who is the source and end of our life in the Church.

So, thank you Benedict. We love you, and we wish you well, and will continue to pray for you daily. Now go have a good rest and pray for us as you promised you would. And the Church goes marching on with unfaltering step and unwavering gaze at the Lord who is our life and our salvation.

What Part Do You Understand?

Then there were the principles [of liturgical reform]: intelligibility, instead of being locked up in an unknown language that is no longer spoken, and also active participation. Unfortunately, these principles have also been misunderstood. Intelligibility does not mean banality, because the great texts of the liturgy – even when, thanks be to God, they are spoken in our mother tongue – are not easily intelligible, they demand ongoing formation on the part of the Christian if he is to grow and enter ever more deeply into the mystery and so arrive at understanding. And also the word of God – when I think of the daily sequence of Old Testament readings, and of the Pauline Epistles, the Gospels: who could say that he understands immediately, simply because the language is his own? Only ongoing formation of hearts and minds can truly create intelligibility and participation that is something more than external activity, but rather the entry of the person, of my being, into the communion of the Church and thus into communion with Christ.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Ah, this is so crucial, right here. In the Eastern liturgy, the bulk of the action takes place behind the icon screen. At the most sacred moments, the curtains are drawn, and the priest’s voice is low, barely audible. The reason I have been told for this is that the reality of the liturgy is so beyond our human comprehension, that to see and hear it clearly with our senses is actually not to see or hear it at all.

We have to get this, we moderns who are so clear that everything is so clear all the time. Intellgibility does not mean having everything laid out for us to easily hear and see. Not when it’s the liturgy; not when it’s the mystery of God. 

Liturgy is the great mystery of God – the love of God poured out in Jesus, consummated on the cross, made present to us in the Church by the action of the spirit through the ordained ministers of the rite. It’s not so much ‘what part of this do you not understand?’, as it is ‘what part of this do you understand?’

Get it? So the language of liturgy should be a bit elevated, should be a bit ‘up there’. If it’s all ‘Jesus you are so nice help us to be nice too’ we are actually falsifying the mystery we are supposed to be presenting. And so I personally am thrilled to bits at the new English translation with its sometimes tangled syntax and fun vocabulary words, its sense of hieratic language.

If we easily see it, we are not seeing it. If we immediately comprehend it, we have understood nothing. To be a bit baffled, a bit puzzled, a bit confused – to be uncertain of what’s really being said, what’s really going on – that puts on a more sure footing, a more correct track.

And that’s the intelligibility of liturgy. As it happens, that’s also active participation – to be swept into a mystery beyond our ken, and to give ourselves to it in wonder and in awe. This may look like silent prayer, attentive listening or yes, singing and responding with full voice to what is being said.

Liturgy: not our work, but God’s, not our truth, but God’s, not on our level, but God’s, and how we structure it should reflect this basic understanding.

First Things First: The First Day

I would say that there were several [principles guiding the renewal of the liturgy]: above all, the Paschal Mystery as the centre of what it is to be Christian – and therefore of the Christian life, the Christian year, the Christian seasons, expressed in Eastertide and on Sunday which is always the day of the Resurrection. Again and again we begin our time with the Resurrection, our encounter with the Risen one, and from that encounter with the Risen one we go out into the world. In this sense, it is a pity that these days Sunday has been transformed into the weekend, although it is actually the first day, it is the beginning; we must remind ourselves of this: it is the beginning, the beginning of Creation and the beginning of re-Creation in the Church, it is an encounter with the Creator and with the Risen Christ. This dual content of Sunday is important: it is the first day, that is, the feast of Creation, we are standing on the foundation of Creation, we believe in God the Creator; and it is an encounter with the Risen One who renews Creation; his true purpose is to create a world that is a response to the love of God.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – You know, my intent had been to just do bits and pieces of this talk of the Pope’s, and then move on to my new blog format and content. But the more I dig into it, the less I am able to condense or excerpt it. It is so very fine.

For example this little bit on the Paschal Mystery and Sunday. Sunday is not simply a day to rest, recharge or (as is more likely these days) run around like a lunatic getting everything done that can’t be done during the week.

Sunday is Resurrection Day. In Russian, that is the actual name of the day—Voskrisenie, I believe. Every Sunday we should know, in some fashion, that the whole universe is beginning again from and with the Risen Christ. Every Sunday we should taste this newness, this freshness, this joyful springing hope. In MH we do this in the time-honored ways human beings have always expressed joy and hope: by dressing up a bit, having foods that we don’t normally have during the week, making the liturgy a bit fancier, trotting out the more lovely or elaborate hymns. The library puts up a display highlighting some theme or other of the Sunday readings. Unnecessary work is avoided. Little things, but they create a special Sunday atmosphere, a signal to our senses and from our senses to our whole self that this day is different, this day is new, this day something happened, and is continuing to happen.

Well, that’s MH. Your life is different from ours, but the call is there nonetheless. The Paschal Mystery is at the heart, not just of the Church’s liturgy, but of all our lives. As we pray, so we believe, and as we believe, so we live. Lex credendi, lex orendi.

And the whole thing the Pope says of Sunday – the day of creation, and that creation is bound up in the whole love of the Son and the Father, which becomes our love and our life through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So our whole way of loving the world and carrying God’s love into the world is deeply bound up with the liturgy and its centrality in our lives.

I was just out walking in Robin Hood’s Bay, which is laced with footpaths that extend for miles in all directions. It is truly one of God’s most beautiful creations, this little corner of England… and I must say that man’s creation here isn’t too shabby either. The village is lovely and blends perfectly with the rugged stone terrain. It is this joy and love for creation that such a place elicits in us almost automatically that is elevated and completed by our faith and the Paschal Mystery. God looked on all he had made and said it was very good—so good that He leapt down from heaven to die for its salvation, and rose again raising all creation up with Him into its fulfilment. And this is what every Sunday is about, and what we should strive in our human little ways to reflect.

First Things First

The first, initial, simple – or apparently simple – intention [of the Council fathers] was the reform of the liturgy… Let us begin [there]. After the First World War, Central and Western Europe had seen the growth of the liturgical movement, a rediscovery of the richness and depth of the liturgy, which until then had remained, as it were, locked within the priest’s Roman Missal, while the people prayed with their own prayer books, prepared in accordance with the heart of the people, seeking to translate the lofty content, the elevated language of classical liturgy into more emotional words, closer to the hearts of the people. 

But it was as if there were two parallel liturgies: the priest with the altar-servers, who celebrated Mass according to the Missal, and the laity, who prayed during Mass using their own prayer books, at the same time, while knowing substantially what was happening on the altar. But now there was a rediscovery of the beauty, the profundity, the historical, human, and spiritual riches of the Missal and it became clear that it should not be merely a representative of the people, a young altar-server, saying "Et cum spiritu tuo", and so on, but that there should truly be a dialogue between priest and people: truly the liturgy of the altar and the liturgy of the people should form one single liturgy, an active participation, such that the riches reach the people. And in this way, the liturgy was rediscovered and renewed.

I find now, looking back, that it was a very good idea to begin with the liturgy, because in this way the primacy of God could appear, the primacy of adoration. "Operi Dei nihil praeponatur": this phrase from the Rule of Saint Benedict (cf. 43:3) thus emerges as the supreme rule of the Council. Some have made the criticism that the Council spoke of many things, but not of God. It did speak of God! And this was the first thing that it did, that substantial speaking of God and opening up all the people, the whole of God’s holy people, to the adoration of God, in the common celebration of the liturgy of the Body and Blood of Christ. In this sense, over and above the practical factors that advised against beginning straight away with controversial topics, it was, let us say, truly an act of Providence that at the beginning of the Council was the liturgy, God, adoration.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – First, on a personal note, I survived my trip OK, in spite of very nearly missing the train from Manchester to York due to a criminally slow baggage carousel. I am writing this from the MH Robin Hood’s Bay priest quarters, across from the lovely simply chapel. The village and area await my exploring feet tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it is so wonderful that Pope Benedict should give us his perspective on the Council in these last days of his papacy. The centrality of liturgy is key in this part of his reflection – that before we can know how to carry the joy and beauty of the Gospel to the modern world, we must have this joy and beauty within our hearts and spirits. And we can only have this joy and beauty if our own life is worship is ordered rightly. 

‘Save the liturgy, save the world’ is a slogan in some circles today, and there is great truth in that.

If first things are not placed first, if the core relationship, not simply of my own personal life but of the Church’s common life, is not well ordered in truth, beauty, and goodness, then what do we have to offer anyone? How can we preach a Gospel we are not living? And the right worship of God—orthodoxy in its original sense—is at the very heart of living the Gospel.

Catherine Doherty knew this very well. From the beginning of her social justice apostolate in Toronto, she immersed herself and her followers in the very liturgical renewal movement the Pope mentions here. She knew that we cannot work for justice, love the poor, advocate for life, serve one another in generosity and persevere in righteouness if we are not drawing life from God and bringing him our all in all, which happens nowhere more perfectly and truly than in the Mass and in the other liturgical acts of the Church.

 
So right liturgy is key to the renewal of the Church in the modern world, and I believe Pope Benedict has done more than anyone to work tirelessly for this right renewed liturgy. And… that’s enough for jet-lagged me right now, so I will try to check in tomorrow with our next thrilling instalment of ‘The Council and Me’, by Pope Benedict XVI.

Off to England

Well, I'm sitting in Toronto's Pearson Airport, waiting for my flight to Manchester. I'm off to our house in Robin Hood's Bay, North Yorkshire, UK for three weeks there, giving retreats and talks and whatnot (whatnot being whatever the director of the house tells me to do!).
I will try my level best to keep up with the blog, especially since we're in these historic times of papal succession. But, of course, being in a different place on a different schedule will no doubt make blogging a bit more sporadic the next few weeks. And while I am committed to the blog re-naming and re-design... well, we'll just have to see when that gets done.
Meanwhile, prayers please, as I jet and then train off to encounter the Yorkshire moors, pudding, and (possibly) terriers.

The Herald of the Future

We went to the Council not just with joy but with enthusiasm. There was an incredible sense of expectation. We were hoping that all would be renewed, that there would truly be a new Pentecost, a new era of the Church, because the Church was still fairly robust at that time – Sunday Mass attendance was still good, vocations to the priesthood and to religious life were already slightly reduced, but still sufficient.

However, there was a feeling that the Church was not moving forward, that it was declining, that it seemed more a thing of the past and not the herald of the future. And at that moment, we were hoping that this relation would be renewed, that it would change; that the Church might once again be a force for tomorrow and a force for today.

And we knew that the relationship between the Church and the modern period, right from the outset, had been slightly fraught, beginning with the Church’s error in the case of Galileo Galilei; we were looking to correct this mistaken start and to rediscover the union between the Church and the best forces of the world, so as to open up humanity’s future, to open up true progress. Thus we were full of hope, full of enthusiasm, and also eager to play our own part in this process.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – I want to spend these last days of Pope Benedict’s pontificate giving excerpts from his address to the Roman clergy. This is truly one of the most interesting talks I have ever read of the Holy Father’s, which is saying a lot, and as you can see I have put in a link to the whole text on the Vatican website. It’s too long for me to blog the whole of it, but I encourage everyone to read the whole thing. The Pope in this talk seems much more relaxed, informal, even chatty, as if the impending relief of the burdens of office has already put him more at ease.

And so, like many elderly men, his thoughts go back to younger days. In his case, the reminiscences are of great value to us, since his younger days occurred at the heart of the seminal event of modern Catholicism, the Second Vatican Council. And with his sharp intellect in no way diminished, he has something to say about that seminal event.

It is all about the mission of the Church in the modern world. When the apostles—those twelve Jewish men, a motley assemblage of fishermen, tax collectors and who knows what—went out from Jerusalem into the Gentile world, they were charged with the difficult task of proclaiming Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, the Messiah of Israel, to people who knew neither the law or the prophets nor longed for this Messiah.

By the true sensus fidei already acting in their midst and by the very words of Jesus recorded in Matt 28: 19-20 they knew they must do this… but how? In the first century and following the apostles and their successors boldly claimed the language, the culture, the images, the symbols of the pagan world to express faithfully the truth of the Christian Gospel, and did this while retaining the full moral content it demanded, and the whole Jewish religious sense of the one God and the covenant model. It was arguably the greatest feat of authentic inculturation of the faith in our history, and it occurred while people were being beheaded, crucified, thrown to lions, immolated.

All of which is a slight digression to allow me to say: buck up, folks! If they could do it, we can do it! Nobody’s throwing us to lions yet, much, at least not in North America and Europe. Oh, we get scoffed at and the sins of fellow Christians thrown in our faces, ad]nd it all can be very nasty and vulgar at times, but I don’t somehow see Ignatius of Antioch (‘let the teeth of the beasts grind me to become the pure wheat of Christ!’) feeling toooo sorry for us just yet.

The Vatican Council was all about seeing how best to bring the Catholic faith and the Catholic mission to the modern world which is in such disarray. What is the ‘language, culture, images, symbols’ of this modern pagan world? How can we faithfully express the message of salvation, the full weight and beauty of its teachings, and the true moral implications that flow from them, in a way that modern people can hear?

 

It has to be done in the communion of the Church, in fidelity to the God-given structures of authority in the Church, and in continuity with our past and its wealth of wisdom. That’s all part of the fullness of our faith. But it has to be done effectively, apostolically, evangelically, and that’s the burden we all carry in the year 2013.

Things I Am Not Blogging About

OK - so the Internet is all abuzz with salacious gossip about Vatican scandals. Several people have asked me what I think.
I don't think anything, because I don't know anything. The entire article, as I understand, is rumours, gossip and unsubstantiated tittle tattle.
I don't blog about that stuff.
We all have one duty right now, as far as the Vatican, the papacy, and the conclave are concerned. And that is to pray, to fast, and to keep our eyes on Jesus. It is his Church, and his power alone that holds the Church in being and in life.
Gossip, rumours, and salacious scandal do not help us, I think to do anything of our duty of the moment in this matter. So I will not blog or comment further on it. God bless us all, and keep His Church in peace and integrity

Foxhole of the World

As the Fathers of the Church teach us, the temptations are part of Jesus’ descent into our human condition, into the abyss of sin and its consequences; a descent that Jesus made to the end, even to death on the Cross and to the hell of extreme remoteness from God. In this way he is the hand that God stretches out to man, to the lost sheep, to bring him back to safety. As St Augustine teaches, Jesus took the temptations from us to give us his victory (cf. Enarr. in Psalmos, 60, 3: pl 36, 724).

Therefore let us not be afraid either of facing the battle against the spirit of evil: the important thing is to fight it with him, with Christ, the Conqueror. And to be with him let us turn to his Mother, Mary; let us call on her with filial trust in the hour of trial and she will make us feel the powerful presence of her divine Son, so that we can reject temptations with Christ’s word and thus put God back at the centre of our life.

Angelus, February 14, 2013

Reflection – ‘The important thing is to fight it with him.’ That’s a great little sentence to meditate on today. One of the truly lamentable tendencies that came out of the 1960s and following in the English-speaking Catholic world was a cleansing of our spiritual vocabulary of militaristic language.

God was no longer the ‘God of hosts’, but the ‘God of power and might.’ Prayers that in the Latin clearly referred to battles, campaigns, strife and war were generally softened in the translation to the language of ‘struggle.’ I don’t know about you, but I struggled to get out of bed this morning, and it wasn’t quite the invasion of Normandy.

There was a certain anti-militarism that prevailed in much of the first English translation of the Latin liturgy. And it is a shame. Oh, we all want peace; nobody wants war. Military men and women themselves don’t want war, given that the burdens and dangers of it fall on them nearly exclusively.

But… we got war, folks. This is the existential condition of the human person in this world of flesh and blood. It is not a war against other human beings—the ‘others’, whoever they may be this week. It is a war against the devil and his legions, and it is ongoing constantly.

Temptation, illusion, confusion, captivation—these are the weapons of our enemy. And there are lots of defeats in this war – there is sin, there is failure. We have to be realistic about all these matters. The fact that we don’t happen to like war and conflict doesn’t stop the enemy from dropping bombs on us. We’ve got to get our armour on, even if we would prefer to slip into something more comfortable.

And so the Pope’s words here are very salutary and bracing. Do not be afraid of the battle with evil, but fight it with Christ who has conquered. We run to Jesus in all this, like the weak little children we are, because the enemies we face are truly stronger than us. And to help us run to Jesus, to show us how it’s done and get us there securely, we call on the help of Mary our Mother.

And while all this is very serious and real and sobering, ultimately God allows it all for our good. We have to put God at the centre of our lives, or we die. God is God for us, or we are lost in the hell of idolatry and selfishness. That the world is not a primrose path to skip along carefree, but rather a battle zone where we are in clear mortal peril pushes us out of complacency and towards God and towards truth.

 

There are no atheists is foxholes, the old saying goes. That may or may not be true, but truly the world is a foxhole, and the shelling can be intense at times. Let us not be in denial, or paralyzed by fear, or confused about who our enemies really are and what weapons we have been given to fight them. The weapons are faith, hope, and above all love. Prayer and fasting and mercy, all the while clinging to Jesus and Mary and  entrusting our whole life to them. This is how the victory is won.

Ten Thousand Places

OK - so I've given some careful thought and prayer to the new name for the blog, and its new direction.

First, since our beloved Pope Benedict has a full week left with us as our German Shepherd in his office, I will keep the original name and exclusive focus on his writings until February 28. I might mention at this point that I am actually on the road again from this Sunday onwards, heading to Madonna House in England for three weeks of ministry there. Blogging will be ongoing, but may be a bit more sporadic than my usual daily post.

On March 1, though, I will retitle the blog Ten Thousand Places. What on earth do I mean by this title? Well, my two favorite authors (besides Joseph Ratzinger and Catherine de Hueck Doherty) are C.S. Lewis and Gerard Manley Hopkins. My favorite novel of all time is Lewis' Til We Have Faces, to the point where I struggled and strained to find some play on the word 'faces' for the blog that wouldn't sound horribly cheesy, like 'Face to Face' or 'Facing Facts' or 'Face Values'. You all know that I have a terrible loathing of puns and would never stoop so low as to make one. I would lose face by doing so.

So I went searching for Hopkins quotes instead. Having considered and rejected such possibilities as 'Deep Down Things' (which sets the bar a bit too high for me, I think), 'All Things Counter, Original, Spare, Strange' (that one almost got me, I have to admit!) and 'Dayspring to the Dimness' (I would be the dimness, Christ the dayspring in that one), I then found this most lovely and beloved poem:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; _myself_ it speaks and spells,
Crying _What I do is me: for that I came_.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
 

Bingo, says I. My intent is to expand the blog from Ratzinger outward to other authors, other beautiful Christians reflecting Christ in manifold ways, with my own running commentary babbling alongside them. And here we have - Christ is ten thousand places, lovely in... men's FACES.

And so this will be the new blog, beginning on March 1 - Ten Thousand Places, with the tag line of  'To the Father through the features of men's faces.' So now you know.

Whatever, Lord

With the traditional Rite of Ashes last Wednesday we entered Lent, a season of conversion and penance in preparation for Easter. The Church who is mother and teacher calls all her members to renew themselves in spirit and to turn once again with determination to God, renouncing pride and selfishness, to live in love. This Year of Faith Lent is a favourable time for rediscovering faith in God as the basic criterion for our life and for the life of the Church. This always means a struggle, a spiritual combat, because the spirit of evil is naturally opposed to our sanctification and seeks to make us stray from God’s path. For this reason the Gospel of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness is proclaimed every year on the First Sunday of Lent.

Indeed, after receiving the investiture as Messiah—Anointed—with the Holy Spirit at the baptism in the Jordan Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit himself to be tempted by the devil. At the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus had to unmask himself and reject the false images of the Messiah which the tempter was suggesting to him. Yet these temptations are also false images of man that threaten to ensnare our conscience, in the guise of suitable, effective and even good proposals.

The Evangelists Matthew and Luke present three temptations of Jesus that differ slightly, but only in their order. Their essential core is always the exploitation of God for our own interests, giving preference to success or to material possessions. The tempter is cunning. He does not directly impel us towards evil but rather towards a false good, making us believe that the true realities are power and everything that satisfies our primary needs. In this way God becomes secondary, he is reduced to a means; in short, he becomes unreal, he no longer counts, he disappears. Ultimately, in temptation faith is at stake because God is at stake. At the crucial moments in life but also, as can be seen at every moment, we stand at a crossroads: do we want to follow our own ego or God? Our individual interests or the true Good, to follow what is really good?

Angelus Address, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Happy Chair of St Peter! This feast day rolls around every year, and every year we are asked both to pray for the Holy Father and to give thanks for the Petrine ministry in the Church and the service of unity that it fulfills. Somehow, I am willing to bet that Catholics in general are a bit more aware of both the feast day and the papacy this particular February 22. It’s the Lent of the papacy, in a certain sense, as all eyes turn towards the Vatican to witness Benedict step down next Thursday and the cardinals gather shortly thereafter to elect a new pope.

So I’ve still been pondering this whole matter of Benedict’s resignation. I think one remarkable aspect of it is precisely what he reflects on here so beautifully. That is, the renunciation of power. ‘The true realities are power and what satisfies our needs’ – this is the way of the world. Get power and keep power. Hang on to whatever power you have until it is wrested from your hands. This happens in big ways and in small, all over the place, all the time. The power struggle, and who comes out on top. And so we have this man, certainly old and tired and perhaps sick, and carrying God-alone knows what heavy burdens of office, but nonetheless still capable of hanging on to the office, hanging on to the power.

And he is saying, ‘You know what? It’s not about power. It’s not about me. It’s about God – He is the true and only head of the Church.’ As John Paul II taught us powerfully about carrying the cross of suffering until the end, Benedict is teaching us about deep humility and self-effacement. Two different men with two different lessons to teach us.

Ultimately it is the same lesson, though. Turn to God! God is the center. God is the source. God is the Father, the one Father, the only Father. God is the One who sustains us in times of trial and empowers us to walk in fidelity to the bitter end of life. God is the One who strips us, ‘belittles’ us in the positive sense of that word, makes us very small and childlike and simple in all things.

It is God’s Church, not Benedict’s or John Paul’s or the Cardinals or yours or mine. It is God’s world, not Obama’s or Harper’s or any of the other great movers and shakers of our time. My life and your life belong to God, not ourselves. Benedict’s resignation, if we really take it to the depths of spiritual meaning, is a call to all of us to really dispossess ourselves, really detach ourselves, really dis-empower ourselves freely out of love, so that this Lent God can be a bit more all-in-all in our lives.

What that means for you and for me will vary widely depending on our circumstances. But the call is there for all of us. ‘Whatever, Lord’ – do what you will with and in me. Take everything from me or ask me to carry it all until I break—so long as you are with me ‘til the end. This is the great Lenten call our Holy Father has issued to us in this Year of Faith.

My Blog Will Go On

Christianity must always remember that it is the religion of the Logos. Christianity is faith in the Creator Spiritus, from whom comes everything that is real. Precisely this ought to give Christianity its philosophical power today, since the problem is whether the world comes from an irrational source, so that reason would be nothing but a ‘by-product’ (perhaps even a harmful by product) of the development of the world, or whether the world comes from reason, so that its criterion and its goal is reason. The Christian faith opts for this second thesis and has good arguments to back it up, even from a purely philosophical point of view, despite the fact that so many people today consider the first thesis the only ‘rational’ and modern view.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 49

Reflection – ‘So, what are you going to do about the blog?’ The question has been posed to me once or twice (or a couple dozen times, but who’s counting?) the past week or so. My answer has always been, “I’m praying about it!”

You see, I didn’t start the blog precisely because Joseph Ratzinger was the bishop of Rome. I started the blog because he writes passages like the above one: luminous, penetrating, intellectually acute and yet accessible to the general reading public. I started the blog because I believe this ‘German Shepherd’ (and he will still be a shepherd—a bishop—on March 1, don’t forget) has offered the modern world insight, guidance, thoughtful reflection and a gentle presentation of the Gospel in a somewhat intellectual key, but no less the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The modern world has largely responded by sneering at him, calling him silly names, and ignoring his writings, as we have all had lamentable opportunities to see in the past week of media ‘coverage’ of the story.

So I do want, and fully intend, to continue presenting excerpts of Ratzinger’s writings ongoingly on this blog. There may be less interest in him as he retreats into the silence and seclusion of a monastery, but I believe he is a key figure in the Church’s re-presentation of the faith to the modern world, and his life work deserves and in fact needs to be made better known. I may broaden the blog out to include other writers (Catherine Doherty first among them, of course), and my own independent writing and reflection. Given that we are no longer (sob!) living with him, I will probably be looking for a new name for the blog (any suggestions gratefully accepted), but nonetheless, the blog will go on as it has.

A great central matter of Ratzinger’s contribution to modern theology is, in fact, found in the above passage. The reasonableness of the doctrine of creation, the fact that only a creation of the universe from a rational being undergirds and assures us of the ultimate reasonable quality of being, the fact that modern atheistic materialism reduces the universe to absurdity—all of this is key in Ratzinger’s entire thought.

The Regensburg address several years ago, which everyone remembers as if it were an assault on Islam, was in fact an assault on post-modernism. God as Logos, God as a Being super-eminently reasonable, logical in the best sense of the word, means that our human reason, our capacity to move towards apprehension of the truth, this fantastic human power which delivers, in a sense, the whole material universe into our hands through technological mastery—this human power in fact takes us beyond the material universe and into the very heart of God.

Reason does not merely give us scientific prowess, but opens us up for communion in love with God and one another. This is so alien to our whole understanding of reason in a positivistic technocratic world, yet it flows naturally and automatically from the Christian doctrine of creation. And this doctrine, then, and this understanding of reason, yields a whole theology and spirituality of communion, a vision of reality in which our humanity in its deepest and highest nature comes from God and is ordered towards God, and in which our whole apprehension and relationship with the created order is meant to be shaped and ordered by this God-ward orientation.

 

This is the theological vision of Joseph Ratzinger, and I fully intend to continue presenting it to the world on this blog. Now, what am I supposed to name it…?

The Great Lenten Dilemma

In this time of Lent, in the Year of the faith, we renew our commitment to the process of conversion, to overcoming the tendency to close in on ourselves and instead, to making room for God, looking at our daily reality with His eyes. The alternative between being wrapped up in our egoism and being open to the love of God and others, we could say corresponds to the alternatives to the temptations of Jesus: the alternative, that is, between human power and love of the Cross, between a redemption seen only in material well-being and redemption as the work of God, to whom we give primacy in our lives. Conversion means not closing in on ourselves in the pursuit of success, prestige, position, but making sure that each and every day, in the small things, truth, faith in God and love become most important.

General Audience, February 13, 2013

Reflection – Once again Pope Benedict in a few words lays out a whole program of life, a whole concise and very deep understanding of what we are to do and what it is all about. He truly does have an extraordinary gift for that kind of thing. (Can you tell that I’m really really going to miss him?)

This is the whole business of Lent, though, and we really need to get clear about it. To reduce Lent to ‘giving up chocolates (except on Sunday! And feast days! And… when I’m really desperate!!) is to reduce Lent to something of little if any spiritual value.

It’s not about giving up. We do give up stuff in Lent, but the giving up is only so as to open up, to make room, to get ourselves moving God-ward and out of ourselves.

We make ourselves a bit uncomfortable, a bit hungry, a bit unsatisfied with the fare of life. This is not so we can enjoy some ridiculous triumph of the will (‘40 days without potato chips! I am like unto a god!’), but so that we go looking Elsewhere for life.

Conversion – that is the whole point of Lent. Conversion away from self-centredness, materialism, concern with success or prestige or wealth. Conversion away from gluttony, avarice, sloth, pride, envy, anger, lust—the seven deadlies that all conspire to close us in on ourselves and offer us myriad paths to life which in truth lead nowhere but the graveyard.

In Lent in Madonna House, we pray each day at the end of Lauds the ancient Lenten prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian. At the end of each petition, we prostrate before the Lord, expressing our deep humility and contrition and desire to change. This is the prayer:

O Lord, Master of my life, grant that I may not be infected with the spirit of slothfulness and faintheartedness, with the spirit of ambition and vain talking.

Grant instead to me your servant a spirit of purity and humility, a spirit of patience and love.

O Lord and King, bestow upon me the grace of being aware of my sins, and of not judging my brother. For you are blessed forever and ever. Amen.

There is a reason why this prayer is so prominent in the Christian East. It expresses perfectly what Pope Benedict captures of the true Lenten spirit. And it really does all come down to Jesus in the desert, the voice of the tempter and the response of Love Incarnate, and our entry into that mystery. Do we place God first, or ourselves first? Do we turn to God in humble supplication for everything, or charge along living from our own power and lights? Do we simply make Christ the center of our lives, or our own desires and agendae the center of our lives?

 

These are the Lenten questions, the great Lenten dilemma, the Lenten choice. Really, the choice of all our days, no matter what the season, but in Lent we are called to confront it all a bit more intensely. Why? So we can welcome the gift of God at Easter more deeply, rejoice with our brothers and sisters being baptized all around the world with greater exutation, and ourselves receive this eternally new life of God more fully, so that we can bear it into the world which needs it so terribly.