Intentions of the Holy Father for April

Ecology and Justice. That governments may foster the protection of creation and the just distribution of natural resources.
Hope for the Sick. That the Risen Lord may fill with hope the hearts of those who are being tested by pain and sickness.

Witnesses to Christ


Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec 28)

Lest we get to watery-eyed about the meaning of Christmas, we should recall the words of the Prince of Peace Himself, "I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism that I am to be baptized with, and how I am constrained until it is accomplished! Do you think I came to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division," (Lk 12:49-51). The message of Christmas is not peace on earth, not primarily at least; rather Jesus Christ himself is the message. Try telling people that in whatever words, and you will quickly learn what He meant speaking about causing division.

Two thousand years ago a cynical, petty tyrant named Herod ordered the slaughter of dozens, scores of innocent babes in Bethlehem and the surrounding district. He did so in the vain hope of stopping God's will, in hope of stopping the advent of the Messiah-king. To this date, including now as we sit here at our computers, hundreds and thousands of Christians are murdered each year in the vain hope of stopping the spread of the gospel, of stopping the spread of the Messiah's Kingdom. National governments collaborate to reduce the population of the developing world to "sustainable" levels. One feels that this language is a cover for a lie. Who ro what is being "sustained" by the programs of birth control, sterilization, and abortion in the developing world? Are they being built up? Or are we in the West being permitted to continue our lavish lifestyle by keeping them in firmly controllable numbers?

We in the formerly Christian West now indulge every appetite and repudiate whatever doctrines interfere with our desires. A gospel of wealth and prosperity, or a gospel of environmental stewarship, or a gospel of multiculturalism, or a gospel of nice all wrestle against and threaten now more than ever to subdue the simple Gospel of Jesus Christ. Moreover, we exploit and slaughter our own children in a horrifying orgy of debauchery and bloodletting, subjecting them to pornography, sexual abuse, neglect, and even outright death.

We must wonder in all the warring against children that the ages have seen, who is Satan attempting to strike? Perhaps he fears the second advent of the Messiah, and so is doing everything in his power to frustrate it.

If we reduce the meaning of Christmas to being kind, being calm, not worrying about what goes on around us, far from living in Faith, we will have abandoned it. The blood of the Darfur Christians, the blood of the Indian and Pakistani martyrs, the blood of Chinese Catholics, all these call out to us that the meaning of Christmas is Christ, and to stand for Christ necessarily entails receiving resistance. If nobody is concerned about what we are saying as a Church, we must not be saying anything very Christian, or even very interesting. Happily, this increasingly is not the case.

Close to the Heart of Christ


St. John the Beloved, Apostle, Evangelist, and Confessor (Dec 27)

Perhaps because of his youth at the time he encountered our Lord, St. John was preserved from the unchastity that creeps into adult life. For that or some other reason it was to St. John that Our Lord entrusted His Blessed Mother (Jn 19:26-27). Perhaps Our Lord trusted him the most because He knew that St. John, of all the apostles, knew His heart the best. After all, it was St. John who, with youthful ease and unabashedness, rested his head upon Our Lord's chest, where he could hear Our Lord's very heartbeat (Jn 13:22-24). This posture, resting on the Lord close to His Heart, listening quietly, is surely the exemplary posture of a Christian at prayer. It was he, who seeing in the tomb Our Lord's empty burial clothes, was the first to understand and believe (Jn 20:8-9).

St. John's writings focus heavily on the reality, meaning, and power of the Resurrection of Jesus in our lives. His writings also focus on our hope of Resurrection, and on the power of love. It is the sixth chapter of his Gospel that gives us our fullest scriptural understanding of the Eucharist - if there was any doubt about what Jesus meant later at the Last Supper, John's recollection of those Eucharistic discourses clarify the matter perfectly. For the convinced Christian, this and other passages serve as beautiful meditations for prayer. He traveled with Our Lord in his formative years, and kept the Blessed Virgin Mary as his own mother in his own home, perhaps for decades more. It was his blessing to be drawn in a very intimate way into the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Surely of all the apostles he knew best the gentle strength of love.

Exiled to the Island of Patmos in his later years, he was blessed by visions from the Holy Spirit showing him many confusing and difficult things. Perhaps only partly understanding them, he assembled them into the Book of Revelation, to finish the scriptural revelation of God to his People, to reveal God's People to themselves.

St. John, so close to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, so chaste and pure, pray for us.

Men on a Journey

An assistant pastor at my parish a few years ago began a group called the Men of Emmaus. It's really a ragtag bunch of Catholic ne'er-do-well hoodlums. At our 7:30 a.m. Saturday morning meetings, our staple has been to read together the Mass readings for the following Sunday. Sometimes we have special speakers in to speak with us. It amazes me how many of them seem willing to come back and speak to us again! The men are eager - sometimes very eager - to explore the meaning of the Gospel and to encourage each other to live out its implications more thoroughly.

These are the sorts of things you might hear in a typical meeting: "How should we vote? Should we bother? I've made mistakes in my past and now I am seeing more fully how they affect my family. How much to give to the poor? Do I do enough around the parish? Let's take up a collection to help pay bills for this man who's just lost his job. Will you be quiet!? How can I witness to Christ in my office without turning people away from Him? It is hard to be the only Christian in my home. Dude, you blew it the other day. Anyone want to go for a hike?"

Sometimes the "encouragement" can stop just short of a fistfight, but what really raises my eyebrow is how even in the near-fistfights there is no (or little) rancor and much love. After our discussions (and sometimes apologies!), we head upstairs for the 9:00 a.m. daily Mass.


What raises my spirits, and gets me out of bed at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings is the effect of our dopey little group. I've been going with varying frequency for a few years now, and it seems to me that something has been changing. In the men, and in the group, I see a gradual groping toward Christ. Men are investing themselves more deeply in their families, turning off the TV and picking up spiritual books, engaging in the Church's apostolate, frequenting the confessional, learning about our holy Faith - all the sorts of things that one would expect to accompany growth in holiness. These things strike me as sure signs that the Jesus virus is circulating among the group. May it stoke in us a fever of burning charity.

Now it looks like we are going to begin to read the Catechism as a group. That's great! The Sunday scripture readings, reflections, and talks are like puzzle pieces of our faith - the raw material and power of our Faith. Organized and systematized, put together into a coherent whole picture, they gain a strength and meaning otherwise inaccessible. That's what the Catechism is for, to help us to organize the Faith in our minds so that it can structure the way we think, act, and live.

Stephenmas


St. Stephen, First Martyr and Deacon (Dec 26)

It is telling that immediately after the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Dec 25), the Church chooses to remember and honor St. Stephen Protomartyr.

Why is that? Well, just as the First Martyr's day follows Our Lord's First Day, so we must be prepared to follow our Lord into martyrdom if we wish to honor His life and death.

A glance at the Rembrandt I've uploaded with this post, or at the biblical account of the martyrdom (Acts 6 & 7) reminds us of a young man named Saul. He held the cloaks of Stephen's murderers so that they would not get bloodied along with their hands. He approved the execution of the saint, and never really felt fully rehabilitated for his part in the crime. But he did convert when our Lord appeared to Him. The Bible doesn't say so, but it isn't farfetched to imagine that Stephen's peaceful, even eager, embrace of a holy death haunted Saul. Christ's blood, mediated through Stephen's bloody witness, brought about Saul's redemption, conversion into Paul, and sanctification into St. Paul.

As we witness and remember the birth of Our Lord in these eight days of His octave, let our witness transform us, and by His grace transform those who witness us.

St. Stephen, servant of the Gospel and first to lay down your life for it, pray that like thee, we might be blessed to lay down our lives daily in service to Christ. Amen.

Merry Christmas

Thank you, Jesus, for not leaving us alone down here. More personally, I am very grateful for a very, very nice day.

Fourth Sunday of Advent

The Fourth Sunday of Advent is come and gone. We've heard the prediction to the wicked king Ahaz of Judah, that a virgin should bear a child and name him Emmanuel; we've heard the account of the first fulfillment of that prediction in St. Matthew's gospel. The question is, "Has the Virgin given birth to the Christ Child in my heart yet?" He was born 2000 years ago, give or take - but has it made a real difference in the way I live my life? Has He been born into me yet? What concrete things have changed in my life as a result of loving Jesus? That's the test. Being nice doesn't cut it - who tries to be, or thinks of himself as, mean? Being a Christian means putting off the Old Man and putting on the New, putting on Christ.

Lord Jesus, in these last days before Christmas, and in these last days before your Second Coming, please come into my heart in a new way. Transform me Lord. Amen.

Mama Mary, you are the Great Mother of God and my mother as well. Please bear Him to me, and me to Him. By your gentle childbirth, please bear me gently, but more importantly, bear me swiftly. Amen.

Faith and Detachment

This from Melody Beattie's Codependent No More:

Detachment also involves accepting reality - the facts. It requires faith - in
ourselves, in God, in other people, and in the natural order and destiny of things in this world. We believe in the rightness and appropriateness of each moment. We release our burdens and cares, and give ourselves the freedom to enjoy life in spite of our unsolved problems. We trust that all is well in spite of the conflicts. We trust that Someone greater than ourselves knows, has ordained, and cares about what is happening. We understand this Someone can do much more to solve the problem than we can. So we try to stay out of His way and let Him do it. In time, we know that all is well because we see how the strangest (and sometimes most painful) things work out for the best and for the benefit of everyone.

It doesn't sound to me like detachment, as Beattie defines it, requires faith. It sounds like it is faith. Atheists have been winning the cultural argument in recent years because they have redefined faith. They say that to have faith is to believe that there is a God. Thus God's existence slides, in our minds, into the realm of the doubtful. It is not. It is absolutely certain. All it takes is a good hard look at the world to realize that there must be some sort of God. If there weren't a God, how the heck did everything else get here? "It just always was?" That's not a scientific theory - its a philosophical dogma. That's why more and more scientists (practicioners of the "hard sciences" first and foremost) are becoming more open daily to the existence of God.

Faith is not belief that God exists. Faith is belief that He loves us. That is hard. Especially in light of all the sin, apparent meaninglessness, and destruction in the world. These are the things that have hardened most atheists' hearts in the first place. We must be careful lest we let them harden our hearts without abandoning the knowledge of God as well. We can become practical atheists if we act as though God did not love us, God did not have a plan for us, God were not in charge. While all the while proclaiming God's existence, and even that "Jesus is Lord," we might still act as if not, act in the same way as the worldlings around us: hording wealth, resisting change and growth, fearing death. Such are the people, one fears, that will at the end of their days say, "Lord, Lord!" only to hear that sickening reply, "Truly, I say to you, I do not know you," (Mt 25:11-12).

Dear Jesus, help us to be like you. Help us to trust in our Father's plan for us. Transform our hearts to love you better. Lord, I believe - help my unbelief!

Daily Dose of the Mystery

I normally attend the 6:30 a.m. daily Mass at St. Martin of Tours, my home parish. If I oversleep that Mass by accident, I can always attend the 8 a.m. daily Mass at Mother Seton parish, around the corner from where I work. Today I slipped out of my office for a few minutes to attend that one because an early conference call precluded going to St. Martin. Of course, if I lived closer to Mother Seton, its 6:30 a.m. daily Mass would work too. In addition to passing St. Martin on the way to work, I pass St. Rose of Lima parish. Its 8:45 a.m. Mass is a bit later than I prefer, because I like to be out of the office by 4:30 or 5 p.m. at the latest.

Going to St. Martin has the added advantage that the priests there hear confessions after almost every weekday Mass. Only when funerals cut the schedule too close are confessions omitted. At Mother Seton confessions are heard not only at the customary Saturday afternoon times, but also Wednesday evenings. That can be handy if I am leaving work late, or after dinner, and I have a need or desire to go.

What's my point with all this babble about scheduling? Well, it's just that I am very grateful. I know in many places it is much harder to get to daily Mass, and even scheduling confession can be prohibitively difficult. I am very grateful to God and to the priests at St. Martin of Tours and Mother Seton parishes, and the other parishes in the area. These things, these sacraments, are absolutely indispensible for the steady progress in natural and supernatural virtues that is supposed to mark the Christian life. Our priests sit long hours in the box, awake earlier than otherwise necessary, and hop in the car at all hours of the night to make sure that their faithful have access to the sacraments. Their labor of love is a tremendous service to us all.

Please God, let us not forget to thank our priests for their work when they finish absolving us, when they communicate us, when they visit us. Reverend fathers, may God bless you for it.

Whither, Lord?

In my heart, I feel a desire to go off someplace: to a monastery or into the wilderness; I also feel a desire to plunge into the heart of the world, and to be with my family and closest friends. These desires come from sources as conflicted as the desires are conflicted: fear and guilt, longing and love, trust and joy. With these are jumbled together our encounters and day-to-day experiences as we seek to follow Our Blessed Lord. The work of discernment, I am coming to discern, is bringing these motivations, experiences, and desires to Jesus in prayer, and asking Him to help us identify them for what they are, and sort through them, and then to understand which are worthy of a Christian.


Heart of Charity


"Haven't you seen the sparkle in Jesus' eyes when the poor widow left her little tithe in the Temple? Give what you can give: the merit is not in the littleness or greatness, but in the will with which you give," The Way, #829.

Our Bright and Morning Star

Our Lady of Guadalupe (Dec 12)


When the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to St. Juan Diego, a humble, illiterate Indian peasant whose back was bent more steeply each day by the weight of Spanish oppression, the timing could hardly have been better.

In 1519, a band of Spanish newcomers organized the vassal nations of the mighty Aztec empire to overthrow it. For two years, Spanish incursions into Mexico had failed, but at last Cortez had found the secret: appeal to the natives' hatred of their own native overlords. The Aztec empire was rapidly undone, but what replaced it was not much better - not for the natives at least. They replaced one overlord for another, and the dark serpent gods of the Aztecs were replaced by the cruel whips of the Spaniards. Their impression of the Cross was that its long end cut like a sword. For twelve years they labored under this darkness, and their cruel oppression could only make a mockery of the love of Christ preached by the missionaries that accompanied the new conquerors.

In Europe at about the same time, the great darkness that had descended upon Christendom during the late Middle Ages burst into a storm called the Reformation. The Church began to hemorrhage there, as hundreds of thousands of people of all stations joined in the Protest of Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin.

In this dark gloom a star arose. She was a Morning Star, the first light before the Sunlight, in a darkness so deep that she could almost be mistaken for the Sun at a distance. She was Mary. The Queen of the Universe condescended to speak to a peasant farmer of a crushed race, just as her Son had condescended to speak with peasant fishers of a crush race, 1531 years earlier. She appeared to Juan Diego, calling him "Dieguito," like calling him Johnny. She sent him to go speak with a bishop, a veritable prince of the new conquerors. "But what if he does not believe me?" To which she replied with a gentle reproach that has echoed through the ages, "Am I not here, I who am your Mother?" Little Johnny, Juan Diego, went to see the bishop. Miracles attended their meeting and the bishop was convinced. The picture she imprinted upon Juan Diego's cloak moved the bishop to tears. He ordered a great shrine to be built at the spot where the Virgin had stood, making Spanish roses bloom in the cold December winter of the central Mexican plateau.

A greater miracle followed. The Indians converted. Though Spanish law insisted that baptized persons be released from servile bondage, that incentive had produced few converts in 12 years of domination. Now, at a word from their mother, the Indians converted by the tens of thousands, nay, by the millions. Baptistries - chapels dedicated exclusively to baptisms - were built around the country, and the Franciscan missionaries had to send home for more brethren, so great was the demand for baptisms and catechisms. They complained about sore shoulders from pouring so much water over so many heads. The Virgin had called herself the Lady of Guadalupe - a town near the bishop's home. Historians speculate that she may have called herself the similar-sounding Coatlaxupe ("Co-ah-tul-ah-shoo-pay") because she spoke in Nahuatl, Juan Diego's language. Whether she called herself that or not, it is a name she well deserves, for it means she crushes the serpent. And that is what she did. With one fell blow, she undid the cults of the Feathered Serpent whom the Indians had formerly worshipped, along with its human sacrifices and bloodlettings, and at the same time she undid the cruel Spanish bondage to which the Indians had become subject, surely itself a manifestation of the malice of the same serpent who had slithered in the garden of Eden so long ago. Following the Morning Star, the Dawn had indeed come, bringing the Sunlight of God's own Son to Mexico.

Today, in Mexico City, a teaming metropolis with tens of millions of people from every country conducting every manner of business, the old pyramids of the Aztecs stand empty and desolate, while the gardens at the Lady's Shrine are swollen with greenery and life. The Basilica of Guadalupe stands as a visible lighthouse for Christian sailors at sea in the dark and raging waters of our times. The serpent seems to have arisen again, this time under the seductive guises of the gods Autonomy and Choice. Still he demands human sacrifice and turns women's wombs and doctor's operating tables into his altars. As tens of millions of children are murdered within their sanctuaries each year around the world, Our Lady, who appeared to Juan Diego pregnant with Our Lord and full of life, is again invoked to crush the serpent's head and to put an end to his reign of death. The Virgin of Guadalupe, already crowned Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas, has been designated by Holy John Paul the Great as the Great Protectress and Patroness of the Unborn. It is to her that we cry out: "Mother, save our children! Bring us back to Your Son!"

Mexicans frequently quote the prophet Isaiah beneath their images of the Virgin of Guadalupe: "God has not dealt thus with every nation." Indeed. He loves all people, and has given us His Son. And to those of us who fear Him and love His Son, He has also given His mother.

Remember, oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence I fly unto thee, oh Virgin of Virgins, my mother. To thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. Oh mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy, hear and answer me. Amen.



Our Lady of Guadalupe, Queen of Mexico, Empress of the Americas, Great Protectress and Patroness of the Unborn, Queen of All Hearts, Mother of the Church, Mama, pray for us!

Down on a Mat

Our parish youth minister invited me to help out with the Christian Awakening (C.A.) Retreat #28. About 50 teenagers attended the retreat in one capacity or another, with 10 adults chaperoning it.

Some of the teenagers are very impressive as Christians. I have seen them give up their day off to help old ladies move before the Sherriff's deputy arrives to evict her. I've seen them keep vigil with Our Lord into the wee hours of the night. I've seen them pick up their grades, take responsibility for their actions, and set good examples for their peers. I've seen them have a lot of good, clean fun. Other kids going come from very unstable families with absentee fathers, lack of supervision, even drugs or violence in their homes. The amazing thing is the amount of overlap there is in the two groups: kids who come from hell on earth who have begun to fix their eyes on heaven, and so are finding even life here-and-now transformed a bit.

Likewise, some of the kids coming on the retreat did so entirely voluntarily, this being perhaps their second or third annual retreat. Others were pressured by friends or parents using more or less coercive measures.

The Gospel reading for today's Mass (Mon after II Sun of Advent; Is 35:1-10; Ps 85; Lk 5:17-26) coincides beautifully with my experience over the past weekend. The Gospel story is the one in which a paralyzed man is lowered by his friends on a mat through the roof of the house where Jesus is teaching. There were too many people for the man's friends to bring him that way, and so they had to get creative. On our retreat, we found ourselves with too many difficulties to manage on our own. We had to let the Holy Spirit orchestrate what we hoped would be, in the lives of many of these kids, a new creation. The paralyzed man may have had some sort of faith, or maybe not, but that was entirely irrelevant because he couldn't do anything one way or the other about it. But his friends had faith, and they carried him through when he couldn't do for himself. So with our kids: perhaps they believe in God, or a god of some sort - but most of the retreatants had never encountered or gotten to know Him, and even if baptized their faith, the life of Christ dwelling in them, was a vestige of what God would have it be. So it was that the leadership team, adult chaperones, and the more spiritually advanced teenagers had to carry our younger friends to Our Lord. In the Gospel, Jesus sees the faith of the friends and is moved to give the paralyzed man what he needs. On our retreat, Jesus clearly heard our prayers and gave our young friends what they needed.

On the retreat, the talks focused on helping the young people to see themselves clearly and to risk themselves by giving confidence to brothers and sisters in Christ and to Our Blessed Lord Himself. The talks aimed at inspiring conversion and proposing to the young people a new, better way of living that will help them be happier in this life and certain of their destiny in the next. The talks were filled with the living testimony of people they know: parents, parish members, and peers. Small group discussions focused on helping them connect the message they had heard with the daily course of their own lives.


We hope that in the coming weeks and month our young peoples' life of prayer will flourish, their damaged relationships will continue to mend, their wounded souls will continue to heal, and their joyful innocence will continue to be restored. Please pray for them.

Bless Me Father, For I Have Sinned...

People want to confess their darkest secretest - the secrets about who they are and about what dark things we've done. We are made to share ourselves, and we want to share precisely those parts of us that we most fear are unlovable.


How else do you explain the huge amount of counseling and psychotheraphy going on in the world today? I am not here questioning its value. I am only pointing it out and asking what it means.

How else do you explain websites like PostsSecrets or MySecret? PostSecret is a collection of postcards sent in to the owner, a Germantown, MD resident who collects and publishes the anonymous postcard-sized confessions - in books, and on websites! MySecret is a site started by an Evangelical minister because he realized so many people have so much yuck inside that they just need to get out.

We Catholics have known this need for a very long time. That's why we have the confessional. Confessions can be made anonymously to the priest for the truly ashamed, and face-to-face for someone looking for a gentle gaze. What's more, there's no fear that the secret will be leaked. And the best part is that the power granted by Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, to his apostles so that they could forgive sins, has been handed down generation after generation, right into the hands of the dopey, overweight chatterbox of a priest sitting on the other side of the screen. He can really DO something about your deepest, darkest secrets. He can, by the power of Christ, forgive them and set you on a new track in life.

If you're Catholic and you haven't been to confession in a while, go. If you live in the D.C. area, here's a schedule for downtown confessionals. For those of out in Montgomery County at my parish, St. Martin of Tours, the priests hear confessions after every weekday Mass (M-F, 6:30 a.m. and 9 a.m.), after the Saturday Mass (9 a.m.) and Saturday afternoon (4 pm-ish) before the Sunday vigil Masses begin. I know that in addition to the traditional Saturday afternoon confession time, the priests at Mother Seton parish in Germantown hear confessions on Wednesday evenings starting at 6 p.m. Go. Get it off your chest. You'll feel better. And you will KNOW that God forgives and loves you. No need to post anything on the blogosphere, either.

Pronunciation and Contentlessness

Americanized pronunciation of English words doesn't bother me. People pronounce things however they pronounce them - if the words’ meaning is taken, then the words have done their work.

Increasingly in American culture we do not use words to mean what they mean. It starts with the innocuous example of the word
cool meaning anything but "below room temperature." C. S. Lewis warned against another trend: exaggerating everything in our speech with the words we use. Everything is awesome. When we come across something that truly inspires a soul-lifting wonder and awe, we haven't any meaningful words left, because awesome has already been used to describe in a generic way the rather tasty jam we had on our morning's toast. The trend is pervasive.

More alarming than the trend of using words for anything but what they really mean, is the
growing trend to say anything but what we really mean. That is, the dramatic increase in lying and dishonesty especially notable in politicians, corporate America, and in our schoolchildren. Theirs, I imagine, are only highly visible examples of a vice that is overtaking us all. More and more, we do not say what we mean and mean what we say. Instead, we say what we think will get us out of trouble, or get us what we want.

It is what they say that concerns me more. I do believe that the evacuation of content from our political discourse is an ill omen. This evacuation of content is closely connected with the hollowing of our national moral life as well. This evacuation of content is diplayed in almost daily on our national news. Reasoned debates about ideas and policies by men and women of character is replaced by shouting matches and soundbites between people who, rather than simply admit they haven't got much character, argue that personal character is somehow unrelated to one's work in society. This evacuation is more sinisterly played out in the widespread acceptance of the use of torture or
enhanced interrogation techniques against enemy prisoners-of-war.

These trends interweave and unite in an especially powerful way around sexual topics. Abortions are not said to kill babies, but only to terminate pregnancies. The term making love is slapped on every one-night stand, secret tryst, and vulgar act of fornication imaginable.Contraceptives are not called what they are: devices-to-enable-me-to-do-what-I-want-without-consequences. They are simply protection. Homosexual liaisons are not called that anymore, let alone the more precise terms unnatural and sodomy. They are called alternate lifestyles, and even that term seems somehow to marginalize sodomy too much - the idea that sodomy is alternate to something more common, more normal, more wholesome is to be entirely excluded from the language of our Brave New 1984 World.


Both the hollowing of our language and of our national ethic are both tidily summarized by the use of a single word to describe nearly anything and everything, except the thing to which it is most rightly attached: f---.

An Act of Contrition

Oh, God, I am so sorry for all my sins. In choosing to do wrong and in failing to do good, I have offended You, whom I should have loved above all things. I firmly intend with your help to confess my sins, do penance for them, avoid occasions of sin, and sin no more forever. Oh Mary, please help me to love Jesus better. Amen.


Why can I never get it right, this thing called life? Jesus, help me not to rely on me, but only on you. Only on you.

First Snow


The first significant snow of the season is hitting the Washington, D.C. Metro Area as I type. I have a friend in the boonies who is certainly wetting her pants with excitement over the whole thing. As for me, well, I've filed a complaint with management that the thermostat has been set too low. The Complaints Department up in heaven is notoriously unresponsive concerning weather issues. It looks like those of us who'd rather be in the Caribbean will just have to take this one on the chin.

Images of the Invisible God

St. John Damascene, priest and doctor (Dec 4)

St. John Damascene (b. 676) is considered the last of the Church Fathers, a priest, monk, scholar, and he heavily influenced the last (Seventh) Ecumenical Council recognized by all Christians, the Second Council of Nicaea (787). That council was convened to settle a great controversy and threat that had arisen in the East.

The controversy was regarding the use of sacred images (icons, but also statues and other depictions) in worship. The Jews had generally resisted such things holding that one could not depict the Invisible and Living God - no image could capture his essence, and any attempt at an image of God was merely an idol. Christians had generally always tolerated images as a matter of course.

Now Arabic raiders and hordes fueled pressed in against Christendom. They were fueled by passionate conviction in their new religion - Islam. It had only two essential tenants - that God is One, and the Mohammed is His prophet. Yet, part and parcel with those convictions was a third - depicting God was to be forbidden. Everywhere the Muslim Arabs struck, they conquered: Christian Palestine, Christian Egypt, Christian North Africa, Christian Spain, Christian Syria, Christian Persia all fell to the Arabs by the mid-700s. Many Christians became suspicious that they had been mistaken to allow the use of icons. They became fearful that God was punishing Christianity for heresy, heresies that may have even spread by the use of icons. They pointed out that Islam - so crystal clear and simple - forbad icons. The Jews forbad icons. Why should Christianity permit them?

It was in this turmoil that John grew up, as his native Syria was being overrun and taken over by the Arabic hordes. The Muslim Arabs had a modicum of respect for Christianity and Judaism, and what wasn't destroyed in initial conquests and sackings was generally left alone - including the interiors of churches and homes. So it was the Christians continued to have their icons. But in fear was rife in Constantinople, the capital of the Christian East, where the remainder of the Eastern Roman Empire still held on by a fingernail. Several times the Muslim Arabs struck and were repelled, but a seige mentality of fear settled upon that great city.

It was then, in 726, that Emperor Leo the Isaurian of Constantinople began his war against icons. He began passing laws to forbid their use in worship, and even to have them removed from public places. The Christian Patriarch of the city objected, and the emperor responded by ordering an ancient image of the Mother of God, hanging in the cathedral, to be taken down and smashed in the town square. He and his followers became know as the Icon-Smashers (iconoclasts).

At the time, John Damascene was the chief councillor of Damascus and served on the court of the Muslim Caliph who ruled that city and much of the Islamic world of the day. John was a Christian laymen serving the Muslim ruler of his city because he had a very important skill necessary for civil administration and lacking among the Arabs of the day - John could read. Not only that, but John had received the very best classical education available in his time - he read and wrote Greek, Latin, Syrian, studied philosophy, the natural sciences, theology, history, and music. He was a diligent worker, and served the Caliph well, helping to protect Christians from unnecessary difficulties.

While serving on the court of an icon-hating Muslim, John began to write letters to the icon-smashing Emperor, and to the Christian Patriarch helpless to resist the smashing. John, though far away, was anything but helpless. His letters were a brilliant defense of icons. He argued that in the Person of Jesus Christ, God has fully revealed Himself, and thus removed the danger of idolatry formerly attached to images. He quoted scripture, "He is the image of the invisible God," (Col 1:15). "Since God had begun to use images, mightn't we?" John asked. Before our senses could not take in God. Now, because of the Incarnation of the Word of God, the Enfleshment of God, our lowly flesh could take in God - we can eat His Body and drink His Blood. When he walked among us, we could shake His Hand and see His Face. To extend those experiences to later generations by means of images is surely not contradicting God's generous gift of Himself to us. John Damascene argued that denying the use of images was to deny the Incarnation of the Son of God.

The Emperor was embittered by John's scholarly resistance. He ordered that within the Empire, John be refered to only as The Bastard. But he went further. The Emperor had forged in handwriting very much like John's a letter offering to betray the city of Damascus to the Emperor. He then sent the letter to the Caliph. The Caliph had John's hand lopped off for writing the note, and dismissed John from his court. This sentence was lightened, compared to how most "traitors" were treated, because of the Caliph's great love and esteem of John for his virtue. When John's hand was miraculously restored, the Caliph offered John his old job back.

Understandably, John was hesistant, and decided to seek ordination rather that returning to the court of the Caliph. The Bishop of Damascus ordained him a priest. He continued his defense of icons, and wrote several beautiful sermons about the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He made an encyclopedic compilation of all the philosophy of his day called The Fount of Wisdom. The Arabic philosophers who would later influence St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics relied heavily on this book. His writings, and perhaps he personally, greatly influenced the Second Council of Ephesus, at which his doctrine of icons won out. He died sometime before or during the council (787), living to be perhaps as old as 111 (!), but exactly when is unclear.
Notably, as the Protestant Reformation (starting 1517) took its Calvinist turn (in the 1540s), Protestants began removing and destroying sacred images from their homes and from places of worship. While there isn't any argument made at the time connecting this new iconoclastic movement to Islam, one has to wonder. That was the same time period in which Muslim finally smashed through Constantinople and began overrunning Eastern Europe. By the time of Calvin, the Muslims were well on their way toward Vienna and Germany. Perhaps Protestants feared, like the Iconoclast Heretics of the ancient past, that the Muslim's success was due to their rejection of icons.
In our own day, we are grateful to see a renewed interest in traditional parts of Christian worship. The use of incense, consecration bells, icons, rosaries, statuary, and more in our liturgy and churches had shown a tremendous decline since the mid-1900s. Many of those responsible for removing and even smashing beautiful marble altars, replacing them wooden tables, throwing beautiful Stations of the Cross into dumpsters, and replacing them with abstractions entirely unrecognizable as artistry, have done so in the name of "updating" or "modernizing." That is, they were eager to aid and abet the great enemy of our time - the opinion of the "rest of the world," also known as secularism. For a generation or two, Catholics starting trying to fit in with their Protestant and secular neighbors who seemed so successful and powerful, just as Christians in St. John Damascene's day were so worried about their Muslim neighbor's plans. In the last decade or two, thanks be to God, we have seen a dramatic reversal in this trend. Can we doubt for a second that St. John Damascene has been pleading our case in the Heavenly Courts?
St. John Damascene, pray for us.

The Face of Christ

More from Fr. Jean LaFrance's Give Me a Living Word:

"27. The face of Christ must become alive for you: it must have eyes that see, lips that speak and a heart that loves. This is a gift of God and there is no trick to it. Nevertheless all spiritual masters testify to it: you must seek to have the face of Christ become alive for you and that can only be the work of the Holy Spirit.

28. At one time, you felt this breath go by in your life and your eye meet that of Jesus, otherwise you would not be here. From that day on, Jesus Christ ceased to be an abstract entity for you and you had but one wish: to find him again in contemplative prayer.

29. But after that, the sea ebbs away and you are cut short! As the Fathers say, grace abandons us. Your situation is then very painful, for you are yearning for Christ like Adam when he was chased from the Garden of Eden. At certain moments, contemplative prayer may even have lost all its meaning for you or at least most of it. How can you prevent this encounter from falling into oblivion, not in the manner of Proust's "madeleines", but in the biblical sense: "Remember all that happened to you when the face of Christ took flesh in your sight." St. John Chrysostom says that at the moment of baptism, we are enlightened by the grace of the Holy Spirit, but that grace very quickly disappears into the depths of our being and we hasten to forget it. A catechumen recently made the same remark to me," Give Me a Living Word, 9.27-29.

How to be a Beacon

A great article for Americans about a few things we need to change if we really want to be genuine beacons of liberty to the world.

http://www.peggynoonan.com/article.php?article=394

Come and See


Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle (Nov 30)

In St. John's Gospel, Andrew and another disciple of John the Baptist heard the Baptist point out Jesus as "the Lamb of God." With that, they started following after Jesus. When he notices them, Jesus asks him what he wants. Andrew enigmatically asks, "Teacher, where are you staying?" The followed John because he prophesied about Jesus, and now having seen the prophesied one they begin to follow him. It is as if Andrew and the other disciple of the Baptist want to follow Jesus to the source. It is possible that the disciples were wondering if Jesus had a place to stay - but that seems unlikely. More likely, they themselves were looking for a spiritual place to stay, for something upon which they could hang their hats, for a central organizing theme for their lives. Jesus does not give some sort of pat answer, "Oh, I'm staying on Maple Street," or "Me and my gang are at the Holiday Inn." Rather, he invites them to a new experience: "Come and see."

Christianity, ultimately, is not meant to and cannot be a pat answer to life's questions. A young man in my parish died last Saturday night while asleep in his bed. He was a good kid. Toxicology revealed nothing foreign in his system. He had just run the Marine Corps Marathon. There was no indicator that the 15-year old boy had an undetected heart defect. He simply died unexpectedly. And in response to his family's anguish, Christianity should not attempt to say, "Now there, there. It's alright. See, Carl's in heaven now. It's OK." Such an "answer" (though perhaps factually accurate) is a dull platitude that rightly angers people. If God is in his heaven and the world is good and easy to understand, then why did Carl die.

Christianity's answer is different. Christ didn't die so that we won't have to. Christ died with us. Christ said, "Come and see," (Jn 1:39). If we have the faith to go with Him into whatever darken paths He leads, we will see and encounter the goodness of God, a goodness that transcends silly pat answers given by people who feel awkward amidst suffering.

Having encountered this Man who could be the center of their lives, the disciples of the Baptist begin to feel a difference immediately. We too, as we follow Christ, begin to experience a difference in our life. Things change. Firstly, we change - our sins alarm us more, then peace wells up as we see the sins begin to fall away, brushed off us by the hand of a gentle and loving Older Brother. Slowly, he prepares us to meet His Father, and to make His Father our own. As this encounter with Christ progresses, we become like Andrew who, "found his brother Simon and said to him, 'We have found the Messiah,'... He brought him to Jesus," (Jn 1:41-42). The Christ-likening change in us draws others to us, and thence to Christ himself. In word and deed our witness becomes credible, and like St. Andrew, we can bring our brothers and sisters to know the same loving God.

Christian Work

Recently Fr. Julian Carrón, current leader of Communion and Liberation, was interviewed at an international assembly for leaders of the movement. The assembly was entitled, “Friends, That is, Witnesses” and was held at La Thuille, Italy. I have cruelly stripped them from their context because a lot of the dialogue is jargon-laden.


"[Jesus] did not try to respond only to the [people’s] hunger, but He tried to
respond to another [deeper] hunger, because “man does not live by bread
alone.” So, after responding to the initial need of material hunger, He
spoke of the Eucharist. He knew what the true human need was…

In
doing a work, an “I” must not reduce the need or the answer to the need… If I
realize what my own need is, I will not be so naïve as to think that by
responding only partially to the need of the other, I am
responding
to him


We have to be very careful; because now we can be very
good at creating projects, we have learned the job well... It can happen, for
example, that we manage to get the resources for carrying out projects, but then
we don’t have the personnel. So, when the project is in place, we ourselves are
not there, the [worker] that has that view of the need that we spoke of is not
there. So we are left with an NGO like the others. Is this what we want? It is
of no interest to me. If we want to keep [our distinctive] difference, we have
to obey the Mystery, and if we can do only five projects because we only have
five subjects that can do a work as we mean it, then we have to obey this. If
the Mystery wants to give us a hundred thousand subjects so as to do a hundred
thousand projects, we will do a hundred thousand, but as long as we have only
five, we will do five; otherwise, we are presumptuous, expecting to answer a
need just because we do bigger and bigger projects…

Jesus did not
heal all the sick of His time. Those whom He healed, He healed as an example, so
that through that people could learn that there was Someone interested in their
life, who answered the whole of their need. If the Mystery wants us to respond
to more needs, He will give us more people. But first we have to generate a
[worker] capable of doing a work…

For us, works are an example. I
got this perception visiting our communities, seeing our works. I would have
liked you to see what I saw at Rose’s Meeting Point, in Uganda. There I saw the
kind of work I would like, that gives me enthusiasm. As you can imagine, Rose
cannot respond to the problem of AIDS in Uganda (it is everywhere, so it is
impossible to respond completely), but she can bring the hope of meaning to all
the women she relates to and takes care of… For something like this to happen,
any NGO is not enough; it needs a [worker] who–responding to the human need
generated by AIDS–can communicate the existence of an answer to the need as a
whole and reawaken hope. This is [an apostolic] work. So we must not succumb to
the temptation of wanting to respond to everything."

Last night, our large School of Community in the DC area hosted a member of the movement who is in the area speaking on behalf of her work. Her name is Rose Businge, the Rose mentioned by Fr. Carrón. She and her coworkers provide the material sustenance, living quarters, education, and self-respect for tens of thousands of AIDS patients and their orphans. Here are some quotes from Ms. Businge:

"Man, who apparently seems to be nothing in the face of sickness and death,
instead is great, because of his relationship with Infinity."


"You become the lord of the reality - not because you possess it, but when
you discover to Whom it truly belongs. We become the protagonist in our
situation when we discover to Whom we belong."


"What defines a man? What defines a man is not his problems, but Who is
discovered in him."


"Man is a cry for happiness."


"Anger [at injustice] is overcome by belonging. As we become more aware
of belonging to Christ, we begin to look at wrongdoers in a new way."


"If you change, the world will change with you. As you grow closer to
Christ, you will bring the world with you."

Your Path - pt 2

Your Path







"There are many people - holy people - who do not understand your path. Do not get bent on making them understand: you will waste time and make room for indiscretions," (The Way #650).

Separation of Morals from Politics

Jacques Berlinerblau is a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, holding the chair in Jewish Civilization there. He is also a regular columnist on the Post's collection of blogs. He has a recent posting advocating the separation not only of religion from politics, but also of morals from politics.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/georgetown/2007/11/it_is_my_opinionand_ill.html

To which I responded:

"I am always amazed by a couple common contentions in modern American culture.

1) What a person believes has no bearing on what he does.
2) What a
person does when he thinks nobody is looking has no relevance to what he does
when he is being watched.

Of course, spelled out, both statements are
patently false. We never act EXCEPT based upon what we believe to be true, and
very clearly the same person acts privately and in public, and if his conduct
when unsupervised is reprehensible, we have no reason to trust him except that
he is being supervised, which means we cannot trust him unsupervised.

We
need to be very clear on the full range of beliefs of candidates, from practical
(it is important to balance my checkbook) to esoteric (the nature of God). We
have nothing else with which to estimate how he will act in circumstances we
cannot foresee. If I believe that the bridge ahead is out, I stop the car. If I
believe the bridge to be intact, I continue driving. If I believe another person
to be making threats he can carry out, I prepare to defend myself. If I believe
the person "threatening" me is a six year old having a tantrum, I chuckle and go
on my way. If I believe humans have an innate dignity (from whatever source)
that transcends any other consideration, I treat people with the utmost respect.
If I think people are *just* very complex arrangements of matter, then I've no
reason to treat them differently than other complex arrangements of matter (like
sheep, trees, computers, etc).

We need to know that the candidate we are
electing is not just skilled, but good, and not only good when we are watching,
but good through-and-through, because there will be many times when the
president must act while very few are watching. If we are not convinced of the
president's personal goodness, how can we trust him to act well? Witness the
situation with our current administration.

Lastly, supposedly "private"
affairs are often more public than we suppose, if for no other reason than that
private actions are acts, and as such reveal to us the inner life of the actor -
in fact, nothing BUT his actions tell us about who he is. If M. Mitterand saw
fit to break his vows to his wife on a regular basis, why should the people of
France presume that he would keep his vows to them? I will not vote for a man
known to be an adulterer for exactly that reason: if he will not keep his
promise to his wife, then he is not a promise-keeping sort of person, except
perhaps when it suits him. In which case, I do not want to hear him babble in
front of the Supreme Court all sorts of silly promises he might not keep when
the time comes, depending on how it suits him.

Without any intention of
advocating some of the models rejected by Prof. Berlinerblau, I only observe
that while the French Model might work for them (although, Prof. Berlinerblau
neglects to mention the foment in France that partly involves the French Model),
I see no reason for us to adopt it."


As usual, my (I think) very logical and thoughtful post went completely ignored by the subsequent 50+ respondants, who prefered only to scream and wail about Conservative Christians or how gays and divorce are wrecking the nation. In my mind, the first thing wrecking our nation, built on a shared discourse about important questions, is an inability to conduct a respectful public discourse.

Miguel Pro and Christ the King

This past Sunday was designated as Solemnity of Christ the King. Originally promulgated in the 1925 document Quas Primas by Pope Pius XI to occur on the last Sunday of October, the feast is now celebrated each year on the last Sunday of the liturgical year - the Sunday before the beginning of Advent.

Culturally, the feast is meant to fly in the face of all that we hold dear in democratic countries: self-determination, representation, policy by consensus. Pope Pius XI read the signs of the times and could smell the growing determination by world leaders not to be bound by traditional morality. While Communists overthrew Russia and the revolutionary government in Mexico became violently anti-Christian, even Christian Europe witnessed new trends and social programs opposed to good morals. It was clearer and clearer to the Holy Father that an assault against Jesus Christ himself was underway. Placing the feast at the end of the year is perfect. The readings taken from the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours (especially those from the books of the Maccabees) for the end year all draw our attention to the Lordship of God. The readings do so in a stark way: example after example is given of worldly rulers claiming absolute dominion - even insisting that people violate the laws of God to prove their loyalty. In these cases, the readings dramatically highlight the necessity of martyrdom by those who love God.

One modern example given to the Church on November 23 is that of Blessed Miguel Pro, S.J. The young Jesuit found his studies for the priesthood interrupted by the Mexican Revolution. His seminary was moved to Texas, and after a time there, he finished his studies in Belgium. By then, the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico was in full swing. Where the laws were enforced, priests were forbidden to wear special attire, renounce allegiance to the Church, cease performing sacraments, required to marry, and executed for refusal to any of those things. Priests were literally being shot in the street wherever they were found. Bl. Miguel volunteered to return to this environment because he suffered to see his countrymen go without the sacraments, with nobody to preach the Gospel to them, with nobody to remind them that God heard their cries and would not leave them alone forever.

After sneaking back into Mexico, Bl. Miguel evaded the authorities for a few years. Frequently he would slip right under their noses using the same sort of clever disguises that he and his siblings had used in their amateur theatre performaces as children. He even made so bold as to evangelize soldiers and police officers in places where "wanted posters" displayed his picture! By the time the young priest was apprehended in Mexico City, he was personally arranging the food and rent money for hundreds of families dispossessed for adhering to Holy Church, as well as offering Mass illegally numerous times weekly to crowds of people numbering into the hundreds. At last he was betrayed, like Christ, by one of those who benefited from his labors. Arrested with two of his younger brothers on the pretext of an assassination attempt, he refused the opportunity to disavow his priesthood, and was ordered to be shot by a firing squad in front of ambassadors and the press corps of the world's socialist and communist countries and organizations. So it was that, refusing a blindfold, Bl. Miguel stood before his murderers, facing them calmly, and forgave them aloud. Then, as the command to raise rifles was given, he threw wide his arms and shouted out "Viva Cristo Rey!"

Long Live Christ the King!

This pose is the one captured by photographers. Some of them, though socialists, were awed by his bravery, and within days holy cards had been made from the photographs and were circulating illegally. He was forbidden a public funeral, but the government was unable to act against the tens of thousands who showed up to escort the body to its burial site.

The question we have to ask ourselves, whatever our state in life, is whether Christ is king over us.

Do I avoid sin for fear of offending Him? Or do I make excuses?

Do I engage in thankless service in order to please Him? Do I only do the good things I like?

Do I rearrange my affairs to accord more completely with His desires?

Do I fear the opinion of other people, even strangers, more than I fear provoking God?

Am I willing to part with anything - ANYTHING - material possessions, habits, relationships - the moment it begans to interfere with my relationship with Jesus Christ?

In calling myself a Christian, "One of Christ's" I am implicitly answering the above questions. Do I answer them the same way in acting like Christ?


If Jesus Christ is not the Lord of my Life, the King of my Heart, then He is just a nice prop in my life that I take out sometimes, maybe once a week or so, to make me feel better about myself. We have cause to concern about this situation because Our Lord, the King of the Universe, himself said, Not every one who says to me, `Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, `Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, `I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers,' (Mt 7:21-23).

Again, it is fitting that the feast of Christ the King comes at the end of the year, because when all is said and done, Jesus Christ is Lord. On the Last Day, He will have the last word.


Stressing Over Stress

"Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith; but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ," C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, ch. 8.


The Charity of Pennies

"You are too naive. How few are those that practice charity! To have charity is not to give old clothes or pennies... You tell me your situation and your disappointment. Only this occurs to me: let's you and I go and give, and give ourselves without any reserve, and we will avoid that those with whom we deal should have your same sad experience," The Way #469.

Persevere in Prayer

"To persevere. A child that calls at a door calls once... twice... many times - loud and at length - and without shame! And someone who goes to open the door in a huff is disarmed before the simplicity of the inconvenient little creature. So it is for you with God," The Way #893

Waiting in Prayer

"20. We are told that St. Ignatius could find God in contemplative prayer as he wished, when he wised, and wherever he wished. You undoubtedly are far from enjoying such facility, but do not go and say that this grace is not for you: it will surely be given to you if you persever in prayer. It is also said that after he had seen the Blessed Virgin, Ignatius ceased to be tormented in his flesh. Know that this grace can also be given to you as experience has proved to me.

21. Until such time, prepare your heart to receive this gift and wait for it patiently in a prolonged yearning like the elderly Simeon who, prompted by the SPirit, came back every day to the Temple of Jerusalem to wait for the Savior. Like him, you will someday receive the Child in your arms and you will be rewarded for this long wait.

22. And to pass away this time of waiting, do what you can. Say the Jesus Prayer or the rosary, read the Word of God. In last resort, do nothing but wait knowing that, at any moment, prayer may well up in your heart."


Give Me a Living Word: Maxims on Prayer (1.20-1.22), Jean LaFrance

The Cloak Cutter


St. Martin of Tours, Bishop (11 November)
Called the Holy Man of Tours (317-397), Martin wasn't actually from Tours. He was from Hungary. It was there that he encountered Christians, and through them Christ, and by that encounter became a Christian himself. His parents weren't thrilled, but weren't especially upset either. As long as Martin followed the "right" course in life, he could be whatever religion he wished, for all his father cared. The son of a Roman legion officer, Martin was by law automatically conscripted into the Roman Army and travelled with it throughout Germany and France. That was, as far as Martin's father was concerned, exactly the right path - with Caesar's legions to wherever they led.

Not so with Martin. He wanted nothing more than to follow Christ wherever he lead. As a point of family honor and obedience, he would not abandon his post as a soldier though he had a strong dislike for soldiering. He was big and strong, and a good soldier, and though he made no secret of disliking his trade, he won the respect of his brothers-in-arms. He won their respect so much so that they tolerated his eccentricities: how he cared for and served his slave, how he constantly gave to the poor, refrained from indulging in rape and looting, how he even cut his own warm officer's cloak in half to clothe a freezing old beggar. After a number of years, when his service was complete, he settled down in France for what he hoped would be a life of quiet contemplation.

No such luck for Martin, though. His wisdom and gentleness won him a reputation in the countryside around Tours, France, and people began to seek him out, and eventually to take up residences near his once-quiet hermitage. His reputation spread even to the Bishop of Tours, who asked him to accept ordination as a priest. Martin obeyed only when the bishop insisted. When the bishop died, by popular acclaim the Christian faithful of Tours chose him to be the next bishop. The clergy of the area were amazed, but felt they had no choice other than to accept their demand.

As Bishop of Tours, Martin expanded the sort of work he has undertaken as a priest. He mobilized the faithful to care for the poor in very effective ways. The countryside around Tours was still very poorly evangelized and catechized, and when Martin could find no priests in Tours willing to go out to the styx to teach the people, he shamed into it them by going himself. He was rumored to sleep little and eat less, so determined was he to reach every soul and to share so completely with the poor. Rumors spread that not only was there a holy bishop in Tours, but a miracleworker as well. Dozens of people reported healings at his touch or by his prayer, and even the resurrection of some deceased people was reported.

St. Martin of Tours was completely devoted to doing God's will and nothing else. When he was elderly yet busy as ever, our Lord appeared to him and told him to prepare himself to pass into the next life. Martin immediately stopped all his activities and told Jesus that he was ready to go that instant.

I Must Stay At Your House

The readings at Mass for last Sunday (XXXI Sunday in Ordinary Time; Wis 11:22-12:2; Ps 145; 2 Thes 1:11-2:2; Lk 19:1-10) were very happy ones to read. The visiting priest did a very good job providing them with a spiritual interpretation. I will recount (and slightly embellish upon) it here.


By the time Jesus arrived at Jericho, he had massive crowds following Him because of the miracles they'd heard of. They wanted Him to do something for them: heal a sick child, settle cases of law, give them bread that he could make reportedly from thin air. They all wanted something from Him.

Zacchaeus was a tax collector. Now, nobody really likes the IRS. But lest anyone confuse a Roman publican with an American federal employee, let's take a minute to explore what Roman publicans, i.e., tax collectors, did and were. First of all, they weren't Roman. They were locals. So Zacchaeus was a Jew. Second of all, they paid for the right to collect a given kind of tax, or taxes in general, in a given region. The Romans ran their tax organization like a franchise. There was a custom by which the publican was permitted to take a little extra from his taxees for his "service" and it was quite common for the publicans to refuse receipts to those who wouldn't pay even more. That's how the publicans made back the money they paid the Romans for the right to collect taxes from their countrymen: by extorting those same countrymen. To ensure the process went smoothly, the Romans would provide rough soldiers as escorts and enforcers.

A few decades after Jesus, a Jewish historian named Josephus reports that the Romans were crucifying so many people for rebellion, rioting, and resisting their authority that the Romans actually ran out of wood for the crucifixes. Even if he exaggerates, that is a LOT of crucifixions! Even by the time of Jesus and Zacchaeus, the Roman rule in Palestine was becoming increasingly brutal: destroying an entire village, or massacring all of its children, was a common enough affair. Maybe some of the people crowding in to see Jesus wanted him to heal injuries caused by Roman soldiers. It is in this context that Jesus called out to Zacchaeus, a Roman collaborator and traitor who had probably extorted many people in the same crowd, thereby making himself rich at their expense.

There was a difference between Zacchaeus and the crowd, though. They mostly wanted Jesus to do something for them. Zacchaeus merely wanted to see the one who everyone said was strict and held a high standard, yet was kind and gentle even to prostitutes and tax collectors. Without knowing it, or maybe even without knowing why, he wanted to see the Face of God. We all do. It's what we were made for. Only Zacchaeus wasn't going to let natural or social difficulties stand in his way. He was literally willing to go out on a limb to see the Living God.

Jesus had mercy on Him and invited himself over to Zacchaeus' house - a house probably long filled only with other tax collectors and their rented prostitutes, since no respectable or good citizen would be caught dead there. The joy on his face probably said much the same thing as the Roman Centurion who said, "Lord I am not worthy that Thou should enter under my roof," (Mt 8:8). His response was as gracious as our Lord's mercy: he would give half of his posessions to the poor, and four times repayment to whomever he had extorted, when the Law only required double repayment. Jesus' choice of words is striking as well: "I must stay in your house today," (Lk 19:5). Must is a big word. There is very little that God must do. But to visit salvation upon Zaccheus, Jesus had to visit him in his home.

Lots of other people only want God to do stuff for them. That's not what chiefly interests Him, though. WE are what He is chiefly interested in. And He wants us to be chiefly interested in Him. He wants to make His dwelling with us. And He will, if only we are willing to stop treating Him as if He were our step-and-fetch boy and go out on a limb to see Him for who He really is. Then He will offer to come into our heart and home, and if we receive Him, we will welcome salvation and grace beyond imagining.

The reading from the Book of Wisdom draws attention to God's methodology of salvation. Gently, gradually, He draws us each back to Himself at the right pace. We might say, "Oh, why does so-and-so have it so easy?" or "Poor so-and-so, life is really rough for him." In reality we'd best just recognize that God is working patiently and inexorably for the salvation of each person, using whatever life circumstances suit each of us best, to draw us to Himself, to get us to welcome Him into our hearts without compromising our freedom to slam the door in His face. As with Zaccheus, if Jesus is to bring us salvation, He must visit us in our home, dwell with us there, and by coming into our home, come into our heart, and bring grace with Him.

Pray for the Dead and the Dead Will Pray for You

Feast of All Souls (Nov 2)


On the Feast of All Souls we commemorate and pray with special fervor for the souls of the all the Faithful Departed in Christ. We still hope for those whose whose life and death were not clearly marked by the sanctity of Christ because of the fact that they lived and died in Him. This union with Him continues to progress even after life on earth does not, precisely because their soul is immortal and because in Christ there is no death, no end - but only eternal life. The spiritual (and to us, unknown) process by which their sanctification and purification continues is commonly referred to as Purgatory.

Purgatory is necessary not because they must earn forgiveness for their sins. That can't be done. It is necessary because sinning isn't just breaking rules. Sinning harms things, which is why it is "against the rules". First and foremost, sin damages us, our ability to relate and love others, to share communion with them, to enter the Communion of Saints with God and all the Elect in Heaven. This damage must be undone.

Sin blinds us to its own nature, to our nature, and to our enmeshedness with it. Sin hardens the heart of the sinner against truth, beauty, and goodness - to reality itself, to transcendence, and to God. Sin makes us more prone to further sin. All these effects are added to the visible, material damage done by the sinful deed itself (the stolen money, the broken heart, etc.). People enmeshed in sin wouldn't enjoy heaven even if they somehow got there, any more than a rough street gangster would enjoy the opera or a museum of fine art. Preparation is needed.

For those of us unlikely to die completely transformed in Christ, completely united to Him, completely reconfigured to Him, the thought that the process can continue as long as necessary is a comforting one. There is comfort in the thought that, as our prayers on earth can assist in the conversion of our brothers and sisters on earth, so can our prayers can assist in this final purification of our brothers and sisters gone ahead of us. If we would like our brethren to assist our preparation to enter Eternal Paradise, we might begin by assisting in theirs.

Communion of Saints

Feast of All Saints (1 Nov)

The term Communion of Saints can give misleading impressions, or even leave the reader drawing a blank. It's really not meant to be that complicated or obscure though. Today is the Feast of All Saints, those recognized and canonized (the ones with "St." in front of their name), and those unknown and unhailed (maybe like your grandma). Today seems like an according good day to reflect on what it is that we Christians are all called to be.

Communion is an intimate sharing, to the point of oneness (unio, in Latin). What is shared? Lots of things: your stuff, your time, your hopes and fears, maybe your time and place, even yourself, your heart, your life. What kind of sharing is it? It isn't contractual sharing, where one party gives such-and-such in return for a return from the other. That's business, not communion. In communion, each party gives of himself without waiting to see whether the other makes an adequate return. In communion, each party has to make a sort of leap of faith - giving even his own self, without knowing if the other will even care. The communion happens when the return is made, and both parties are sharing - but if each party waits for the other, it never happens, and if either party only makes the gift looking for something in return, then it's only business. There might be bumps in the road. Bumps occur when one party forgets to keep giving, or starts looking for something more in return. The miracle is that as long as the one who begins to falter turns back to the right way of sharing, the communion can actually become stronger because of such trials. More sharing of more important things with less demanded in return means more communion.

Communion is the sort of life that God has. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each sharing their whole self with the others, without waiting or wanting anything in return. This sort of love is what fills in the communion shared by the saints, but it doesn't come from them. In fact, when the saints start loving each other, they are usually very bad at it. Mother Teresa wasn't born with that name, nor with that degree of holiness, of godliness. She was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in a backwoods area of Albania, and was probably pretty much like all the other girls in her town.

God makes each of us an offer, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me... Enter into the joy of your master," (Mt 19:21, and 25:21). Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu took God up on the offer. She got rid of whatever was going to hinder her acquisition of that communion. She gave and gave of herself to all around her. She grew in sanctity until she shined like a star.

Sanctity isn't anything ethereal or fluffy, and it's not anything in a pious picture. There aren't halos around the heads of saints as they walk among us. More often than not, there's dirt or pooh on their hands. At least, that's what was usually on Mother Teresa's. That's because sanctity is holiness, intimacy with the heart and mind and ways of God, sharing in His Life of Self-sacrificing Love.

God offers us each a share in His communion of sanctity. He does not want it to be just Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; rather, He wants it to be Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Joe; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and you! As we take God up on His offer, leaving behind our sins and anything else that encumbers us, we are drawn closer and closer into communion with God. As we enter into that communion, we share in the same communion as the others drawn by the same God. We enter into the Communion of Saints. That Communion is made of a love so strong that, in Christ, it conquered death, fulfilling the prophecy found in the Song of Songs. "Love is strong as death," (Song 8:6) and in us, as we allow God's love to grow, our hope of conquering death also grows. It allows us to trust Him more, and to leave behind everything else of lesser value, which is everything else. This love is so powerful, this Communion so deep, that we have reason to hope, joining into it, we too will conquer death on the Last Day. Even in the meantime, we are bound by it to the Saints in heaven, and share in their communion.

But we don't start out that way. We start out as a ragtag group of disciples each looking to Jesus and Holy Church for different reasons: some for bread, others for work. Some hope for help cleaning up an addiction. Some come because their parents make them. Some are looking to get help for their kids, new friends, or a fresh start in life. For whatever reason we come, Jesus trains and disciplines us to start looking, not for what we can get, but for what we can give. He teaches us to have constant recourse to Him for all that we need - wisdom, strength, support, love. He helps to keep us focused on Him and on His Will and on His Kingdom. That's how we start: each of us a little Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. The question is where we will end. Will you be the next saint in Holy Church, even if you never get your "St."?

Onward, Christian Blogosoldiers!

In this news article, Camillo Cardinal Ruini has urged Italian men and women religious to charge onto the blogosphere, lest that new territory (and with it, the minds of many youth) be surrendered to anti-Christian forces.

http://www.zenit.org/rssenglish-20858



The Martyrdom of Ordinary Life

"Their example gives witness to the fact that baptism commits Christians to participate boldly in the spread of the Kingdom of God, cooperating if necessary with the sacrifice of one's own life," he said. "Certainly not everyone is called to a bloody martyrdom. There is also an unbloody 'martyrdom,' which is no less significant, such as that of Celina Chludzinska Borzecka, wife, mother, widow and religious, beatified yesterday in Rome: It is the silent and heroic testimony of many Christians who live the Gospel without compromises, fulfilling their duty and dedicating themselves generously in service to the poor.

"This martyrdom of ordinary life is a particularly important witness in the secularized societies of our time. It is the peaceful battle of love that all Christians, like Paul, have to fight tirelessly; the race to spread the Gospel that commits us until death. May Mary, Queen of Martyrs and Star of Evangelization, help us and assist us in our daily witness,"

Pope Benedict XVI on the Beatification of 498 martyrs of Spain during the 1930s.

Source of Christian Joy

"Christ in history is like the sun in a day that is just beginning, like the dawn. And a man who had never seen the sun, who had always lived in the night, would be full of wonder at seeing the dawn emerging. Things would start to take on their form, albeit in a blurred and still unclear way. And such a man, even if he cannot imagine the sun in its midday splendor, nonetheless begins to intuit that something new is happening, that the dawn is a beginning: the beginning of day.


The earth, existence, and history, for Christians, are like the beginning, the dawn of that full day to which God has destined us.

In the Christian experience of night, in which men are submerged and where they know things only by groping, something begins that makes everything start to have a meaning. And the clearest proof of this is that it happens even with the most ordinary things, everyday things. Thus our routine, too, takes on a dimension of greatness and gladness," Msgr. Luigi Giussani, Seeking the Human Face. See http://www.clonline.us/readings/formation-personality.cfm.

Looking Toward Heaven

All that is meant by "modern" these days is intended to keep us from thinking about God and Heaven. Science, as a quest to no longer need God rather than to learn about His creation, is intended to distract us from God. Obscenity, modern "art", the busyness of modern daily life, the loudness of televisions and radios, and the flashiness of billboards, the excitingness of video games, are all meant to fix our attention on themselves... never to point us to something more beautiful, more good, more true and real than themselves.

God has given us EVERYTHING to help draw us to Him. We should cultivate in our hearts an "eye" for seeing things as reminders of Him, as foretastes of Heaven. We must constantly battle to push out of our mind those things that infiltrate, distracting us from the realest reality: God and His good plan for us. A deep life of prayer is the only thing that can help us focus on the heavenly bliss that God has in store for us at the end of our journey through this life.

Learn to look at the things of this life and see what they might tell us of heaven. In heaven, we will not be mere spirits, or ghosts; nor will we be angels. God made us with bodies, and in Heaven we will be reunited with our transformed, resurrected body. In Heaven, there will be nothing to prevent us from playing frisbee with our pals, sitting under a shady tree with Jesus, eating yummy strawberries and cream, and bathing in the sunlight on a warm autumn afternoon.

Here, in this video, I've compiled some things that have given me glimpses of Heaven.

Gluttony and Impurity

"Gluttony is the vanguard of impurity," The Way, #126.

Fundamentally, gluttony is about satisfying all our desires, particularly for food, drink, comforts, and the finer things of life. Indulging our cravings for these things without restraint makes us weak, soft, and self-centered. Our hearts become mixed and cluttered with all sorts of desires that will sidetrack us from following God. Gradually, our minds and hearts confuse even people with property, with what is ours to please us. We begin to use others, even in the most perverse ways. What is lust but the extension of the gluttony principle to include persons, treating persons as mere things to satisfy our desires?

Purity and Apostolate

"Without holy purity it is not possible to persevere in the apostolate," The Way, #129.

Purity ensures a love that is unmixed with selfish desires, unchained by our own limitations. This kind of love comes from God alone, through the sacraments, nurtured in prayer.

A Word from St. Josemaria Escriva

I am going to start posting aphorisms periodically, from St. Josemaria Escriva's The Way. I am not involved with Opus Dei myself, but highly recommend it for almost any other working stiff layman out there. The translations are all my own, from the original Spanish text of Camino, so forgive me if it doesn't match your translation at home.

"The more they exalt me, my Jesus, all the more humble me in my heart, making me know what I have been, and what I will be, if you leave me," (The Way, #591).



Following the Heart of Love

St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, Virgin (16 Oct)

St. Ignatius of Antioch, Martyr and Bishop (17 Oct)

At first glance, these two saints have little in common. She was a Frenchwoman and a nun in who died peacefully in a cloister during the 17th century. He was a Syrian bishop fed to wild beasts in Rome at the beginning of the 2nd. An inspection is revealing.

Margaret Mary lived in a convent ravaged by Jansenism in a country sinking under the weight of the same spiritual illness. Jansenism is a complex heresy that boils down to keeping a very strict rule (the stricter, the better, they thought), with failure to do so adequately spelling out eternal damnation. This thinking led to a very harsh and judgmental attitude toward anyone who falls short. That cold and harsh attitude leads inevitably toward the withering of love. With this heresy, all that remains of authentic Christianity is a set of rules and prideful people giving hateful looks to everyone else. It was in this spiritual climate that Our Lord revealed Himself to St. Margaret Mary and showed to her His living, loving Sacred Heart. His heart is a heart full of love, and all who behold it must make the barest and starkest of choices: to accept or to reject that love. St. Margaret Mary chose love. That love transformed her. Since her devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus began to spread among her sisters, throughout France, and around the world, He has transformed hearts wherever He has been loved.

Ignatius, elected bishop of Antioch toward the end of the first Christian century, must have been aware of the danger he was in. He was the ringleader of a largish gathering of a suspicious cult. Yet, he had beheld the love of Christ and been transformed by that love as well. In fact, he was so transformed that nothing else mattered. He fell so in love with Jesus, whom his eyes never beheld in this life, that he also began to love the things that Jesus loved. He loved little children, he loved wayward sinners, he loved hard-headed Christians, he even loved his enemies. Most dramatically, he loved suffering for the sake of saving souls. So it was that as he was being dragged in chains to Rome to be murdered at the Emperor's command, he begged his well-connected brothers-in-Christ living in Rome not to use their connections or their money to get him released. He had one desire left: to see Jesus. When the Rom
an world began to get a clearer and clearer view of this sort of love, the "games" at which Christians were murdered stopped seeming so fun. The Roman world, full of violence, cold business relationships, and loveless lives, desperately craved the one thing they could not buy for themselves: love. When the Romans saw that Christians had it, very large numbers began to become Christians in a very short time.

If any of the symptoms of the lovelessness disease sound familiar, if any of it seems applicable to our life or world today, we must consider that perhaps the disease is the same. That's good news, because it means the treatment is the same. Let us turn to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and ask Him to teach us to love.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, make our heart like unto Thine.

St. Margaret Mary, pray for us.
St. Ignatius of Antioch, pray for us.