Church Marquee

This is at least the third week of my vacation at home when on my daily, early morning walk I have passed by the church marquee in front of a local unaffiliated church carrying the same enigmatic (to say it politely) message: "Broken by Religion - Healed by God". I feel offended by the message but really can't say why.

I do not have the slightest idea even after all of these mornings of being confronted with the "message" as to what it could possibly mean. I'm wondering if the pastor or preacher has been away on vacation and if the janitor or church secretary didn't take matters into his or her own hands and decide to make a statement, perhaps in the old European tradition of sacristans or church sextons who firmly resented their being underpaid and unappreciated by the local clergyman, with whom they were more often than not at odds for many reasons (Bernanos, in Diary of a Country Priest, alludes to this "tradition"). As I say, I haven't the foggiest as to what the thing is supposed to mean and no courage to go knocking on the door to find out what somebody means by that.

Truth to be told, I'm glad that Catholic churches rarely have marquees to display more than the schedule of Masses and Confession times. It's a genre totally foreign to our notion of Sunday as the Day of the Lord. It would be unthinkable, if you had more than one Catholic church on Main Street to have the dear priests competing for Sunday attendance by putting out the title for their Sunday homilies street-side on the marquee, let's say on Friday afternoon. While Father should do his best to teach and edify in the homily and that at least since the Council of Trent and its Catechism, which had detailed outlines for which passages went with the readings for each Sunday of the year, Sunday is nevertheless not Sunday School for us but our day to put ourselves clearly in relationship with the Sacrifice of the Cross and our Blessed Lord Who reigns from that Tree, as we renew with Him in unbloody fashion what He did for us once and for all on Calvary.

An awful lot of our non-Catholic friends not only read their bibles, but they study in groups and alone. In days gone by, we Catholics too studied as children preparing for first Confession, first Holy Communion and Confirmation. Today, we try even to make young couples reflect on the important step they are taking when they ask the Church for Christian Matrimony. All in all, however, the over-sixty crowd were better prepared for Sunday than the under-fifty crowd are today. When you knew your basic catechism, when you prayed daily at home (meals and bedtime, and for certain families even the rosary), then you knew what Sunday was for. You knew you owed everything but especially Sunday morning and Sunday Mass to the Lord. It was serious time and even reason to dress up.

I'm so glad EWTN's rich programming comes into most people's homes these days. There's a lot of great Catholic radio out there too. It sounds like the internet offerings, especially video, get good exposure as well... "Broken by Religion - Healed by God"? What in the world is that supposed to mean? Let us just blame it on an unhappy janitor and get on with the program!

Choosing Life in Christ

22^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year A

Jeremiah 20:7-9

Romans 12:1-2

Matthew 16: 21-27

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me… What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”

What was Peter thinking when he rebuked the Lord and said: “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you”? What was Peter thinking? What are we thinking, when we choose other than the way of the Cross of Christ for our life’s path? Do we think we can refuse the Lord’s will and somehow get by, even though in doing so we have refused the Lord Who loves us and knows us better than we know ourselves?

Jesus is telling His disciples and us in today’s Gospel not about everyday preferences or options but about the Last Judgment; today’s message is the fundamental one about who we are or what we are about. And sadly, I must say, there are times when I get the impression that those who are supposed to be knowledgeable in the Faith even while not denying this truth still tend to dismiss our accountability before the Throne of God and to hold the whole matter of the Last Judgment to be something subtle, complex or in one fashion or another hard to sort out, almost, if not altogether, irrelevant. Many of our Catholic people feel as though they are not really accountable before God for how they live their daily lives. And yet today’s Gospel makes the whole matter of Judgment Day and the consequences of our choices appear rather straightforward… “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me… What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”

The Last Judgment: We must decide; we must take a stand for or against the teaching of the Church as it comes to us from the Apostles and then order our whole life accordingly. The Creed we recite every Sunday at Mass says He (Jesus) will come again to judge the living and the dead and that His Kingdom will have no end. Human life is not just a passing thing; we are destined by God for everlasting life. Make no mistake about it; we cannot escape the ultimate consequences of our choices in this world in terms of the next. God made me to know, love and serve Him in this life, so as to be happy with Him in heaven. My life does not end with my physical death; I cannot consider my life as crowned only by the tombstone or monument my survivors might place on my grave. My life goes on and my reward is in Heaven. When I’m gone, it serves me little if later generations have read my book or my poem, marveled at the bridge I built or been edified by my paintings. I will not be judged on my smarts, my college entrance exam scores or the number of patents I may have pending.

We must choose the Lord as our God, just as God’s People in the Old Testament have always been called to choose; we cannot turn our backs on Christ’s Cross or refuse our share in that Cross. The Chosen People had to leave all else for the service, the worship of the living God. This was the only adequate response to God’s generous love and favor toward them. Jeremiah bemoans this very fact in the first reading for today’s Mass: all the pain which serving the Lord as his prophet has brought to him, but he finds it irresistible to serve the Lord and to fulfill the prophetic mission entrusted to him by God. “I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.” Jeremiah knows that he belongs to the one, true God and can do no less than serve Him, no matter what it costs him.

We, the people of the New Covenant in Christ’s Blood, cannot make our own way through life without God in the person of Jesus Christ; our short-term and often selfish calculations or uninformed judgments just don’t carry weight; they don’t count. What counts are God’s will and our correspondence to that will. When Peter hedges or tries to contradict the Father’s Will, Jesus, Who knows God’s will as only the Son can, Jesus says to Peter, don’t tempt me: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”  We cannot simply go with the crowd and seek our own convenience or comfort. None of us can honestly create our own little story, our own little truth amongst others, as if our wishing made it so.

Number 163 of the Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church (called YOUCAT) answers the question: What is the Last Judgment? And comments: “When Christ comes again in glory, his full splendor will shine upon us. The truth will come plainly to light: our thought, our deeds, our relationship to God and to other men – nothing will remain hidden… Here it is decided whether we will rise to eternal life or be separated from God forever.”

I find an explanation that helps me understand what was so seriously wrong with Peter’s negative reaction to Jesus’ prophecy of His Passion in a piece which our present Holy Father wrote back in 1992 about the Blessed Virgin Mary:

“Even for the believing man who is entirely open to God, the words of God are not comprehensible and evident right away. Those who demand that the Christian message be as immediately understandable as any banal statement hinder God. Where there is no humility to accept the mystery, no patience to receive interiorly what one has not yet understood, to carry it to term, and to let it open at its own pace, the seed of the word has fallen on rocky ground; it has found no soil.” (MARY, The Church at the Source, Ignatius Press, 2005, page 71)

My choices must be Christ’s. The prophet Jeremiah found it a rough path but an irresistible and right one. Don’t attempt to deceive yourself or your children about choices which fall short of the heights of Calvary. We can indeed be wrong as Peter was (Get behind me, Satan!) If we do not repent as Peter did, we will be called to account. 

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me… What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”

Jesus responded firmly, let’s say, sternly to Peter because of Jesus’ love for Peter and His will that Peter share fully in the great work to be accomplished for the salvation of the world. In the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass which we are called to share each and every Sunday we have that inestimable gift which belongs to those who enjoy the fullness of life and truth which is ours in the Catholic Church; in the other Sacraments and especially in the Sacrament of Reconciliation we have the means to return to the path which leads to life if sadly we have gone our own way. No matter how much it may hurt, we must, we can do no better than choose the Way of the Cross. Ultimately, it is the only choice which counts.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Wounded by Love?

MAGNIFICAT's "Meditation of the Day", for 26 August 2011, caught my attention firstly for its title: The Pining of the Wise Virgins. It comes from the Paulist Press edition of the complete works of Blessed Angela of Foligno and helps me with my difficulty in facing the "dark night" imagery of St. John of the Cross, which although it may not strike me as esoteric certainly hits me as less than universally applicable as a description of the obligatory hurdles the ordinary Christian must clear in his search for the living God. As far as I am concerned Bl. Angela is on to something.

Let me share this lovely piece, just in case you are not a MAGNIFICAT person:

"Love has various properties. Because of love, and in it, the soul first grows tender, then it pines and grows weak, and afterward finds strength. When the soul feels the heat of divine love, it cries out and moans... Assurance of God's presence engenders tenderness in the soul. In this state it is satisfied with consolations and other similar gifts. But in the absence of these, love grows and begins to seek the loved one. If it does not find him, the soul pines. It is then no longer satisfied with consolations, for it seeks only the beloved. The more the soul receives consolations and feels God, the more its  love grows, but the more, likewise, it pines in the absence of the beloved.

But once the soul is perfectly united to God, it is placed in the seat of truth, for truth is the seat of the soul. It then no longer cries out nor complains about God, nor grows tender or pines away. On the contrary, it acknowledges itself to be unworthy of every good and every gift of God, and only worthy of a hell more horrible than the one which exists. Wisdom and maturity are established in the soul. As a result the soul becomes ordered and so strengthened that it can face death. It possesses God to the fullness of its capacity. And God even expands the soul so that it may hold all that he wishes to place in it. The soul then sees the one who is, and it sees that all else is nothing except insofar as it takes its being from him." 

I particularly treasure the image of wisdom and maturity being established in the soul through genuine love. May the Bridegroom draw us to Himself!

properantes adventum diei dei

Getting the Word out on WYD 2011

Telling it like it is: Thank you Father Barron!

Clear and Distinct Ideas

"The interior life, which presupposes the state of grace, consists, as we have seen, in a generous tendency of the soul toward God, in which little by little each one's intimate conversation with himself is elevated, is transformed, and becomes an intimate conversation of the soul with God. It is, we said, eternal life begun in the obscurity of faith before reaching its full development in the clarity of that vision which cannot be lost.

Better to comprehend what this seed of eternal life, semen gloriae, is in us, we must ponder the fact that from sanctifying grace spring forth in our faculties the infused virtues, both theological and moral, and also the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost; virtues and gifts which are like the subordinated functions of one and the same organism, a spiritual organism, which ought to develop until our entrance into heaven."

The above quote from Fr. Garigou-Lagrange, OP, The Three Ages of the Interior Life (as reported on the web site of the same name), reminds me of my first nuncio in Vienna, Archbishop Michele Cecchini, and his highest compliment for another person: "He has clear and distinct ideas". How can anyone be less than satisfied with the great Dominican's ideas?

Having faced high school and college in the 1960-70's, I am all too familiar with the sort of know-it-all deconstruction which expressed dissatisfaction with the "old school" while offering only fuzzy/warm obscurity as a substitute. If I had a wish for length of days, sight and hearing, clearness of intellect and health, it would be such that I could learn all the lessons I was denied in my youth. May we never stop learning!

The Three Ages of the Interior Life

Happy reading!

"A man illumined by faith thus advances toward God by the two wings of hope and love. As soon as he sins mortally, however, he loses sanctifying grace and charity, since he turns away from God, whom he ceases to love more than himself. But divine mercy preserves infused faith and infused hope in him as long as he does not sin mortally against these virtues. He still preserves the light which indicates the road to be followed and he can still entrust himself to infinite mercy in order to ask of it the grace of conversion.
Of these three theological virtues, charity is the'highest, and together with sanctifying grace, it ought to endure forever. "Charity," says St. Paul, "never falleth away. . . . Now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity." (12) It will last forever, eternally, when faith will have disappeared to give place to vision, and when hope will be succeeded by the inamissible possession of God clearly known.
Such are the superior functions of the spiritual organism: the three theological virtues which grow together, and with them the infused moral virtues that accompany them." (from Chapter 3 of Part I)

Praying for the Peace of Jerusalem

What is the Love of God?

On today’s feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, I took the time to read his treatise entitled On Loving God in part as an act of reverence or homage toward this great doctor of the faith, but also a bit by way of wanting to reassure myself once again in the face of so many people who can’t do other than heap blame on his head from preaching a crusade…

Bernard is timeless and can teach us so much about loving God as we should:

“But it will be well to note what class of people takes comfort in the thought of God. Surely not that perverse and crooked generation to whom it was said, "Woe unto you that are rich; for ye have received your consolation" (Luke 6:24). Rather, those who can say with truth, "My soul refuseth comfort" (Psalm 77:2). For it is meet that those who are not satisfied by the present should be sustained by the thought of the future, and that the contemplation of eternal happiness should solace those who scorn to drink from the river of transitory joys. That is the generation of them that seek the Lord, even of them that seek, not their own, but the face of the God of Jacob. To them that long for the presence of the living God, the thought of Him is sweetest itself: but there is no satiety, rather an ever-increasing appetite, even as the Scripture bears witness, "they that eat me shall yet be hungry" (Ecclus.24:21); and if the one an-hungred spake, "When I awake up after Thy likeness, I shall be satisfied with it." Yea, blessed even now are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they, and they only, shall be filled.” (Kindle Highlight Loc. 168-77)

Watching World Youth Day 2011 from Madrid, Spain, I cannot help but pray, borrowing words from St. Bernard, that our youth all over the world and throughout the Church might be that “generation” which “…not satisfied by the present should be sustained by the thought of the future, and that the contemplation of eternal happiness should solace those who scorn to drink from the river of transitory joys.  May it be so, please God!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Conscience as Primordial Vicar of Christ

Fr. Barron describes conscience

Without exaggerating, I find this one of the truly all-time brilliant descriptions of conscience discerned or distinguished in the midst of other voices or a world's competing noise/attractions.

Whether we are talking about moral living or choosing to follow God's will for my life (vocation choice), my question is whether being touched by that tiny whispering sound, as Elijah was, is or has been rendered more difficult today. I know the answer: It cannot be any more difficult than it was back then remembering that Elijah was very much alone in a world gone thoroughly mad and pagan. His whole-hearted response to God's call was by God's command and in His Hands the beginning of a reconquest, a restoration.

There have been no few Elijah-like "giants" in the course of these two millennia of the Lord's time (A.D.). We need only mention St. Benedict. My question is how all of the rest of us can hope and pray for good boys and girls who are at least as in love with Our Lord and His Blessed Mother as the children of Fatima were. Children, as they were, really facing off and winning against the hardened unbelievers and conspirators against faith of Portugal at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Maybe it is as simple as the Holy Father's WYD 2011 message exhorting not to be ashamed of Jesus... for the sake of His uncompromising love and total sacrifice. Maybe it is as simple as acquainting children with Jesus from tiny and... letting the little whispering voice do the rest?