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Blog Sabbath, Deo gratias!

Dear Nealobstat Readers:

Periodically I have to take a break from my blog writing to attend to the myriad details that assail me. And periodically I have to give your Inbox a rest!

It’s time, and this time it may be a while.

I hope to resume sometime in the summer.

Let us pray for one another.

I am genuinely amazed, deeply grateful and exceedingly humbled to know that anyone reads what I write and benefits from it in their faith life. Deo gratias!

I have loved writing this Blog and engaging in exchanges with so many extraordinary people of faith. Nealobstat has become for me over the last couple of years a sort of Jeremiah 20:9 experience, so I will have to see what happens over the next weeks as I transition to other forms of writing on into the summer (I am hoping a book and an article).

I will leave you (1) with my personal favorite blog post out of the 601 (click here) and (2) with a quote that sums up in brief the very soul of everything I am trying to say in all I write about Christ and his life-giving Cross. And maybe you’ll say: you could have saved yourself a lot of time by leaving it at this!

For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

Every Easter I like to re-post this jubilant middle eastern outpouring of flash-mob Paschal joy (in Arabic/Greek).

This is the text they sing:

Arabic: Al-Masih qam minbain’il-amwat, wa wati al mowt bil mowt, wa wahab’l hayah lil ladhina fi’l qubur

Greek: Christos anesti ek nekron,
thanato thanaton patisas,
ke tis en tis mnimasin,
zoin charisamenos!

Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death,
And upon those in the tombs
Bestowing life!

Sabbath Hell

Today marks the 600th post on this Blog since I began writing ~2010, and I can think of no better feast for it than this day of darkness, silence, and hope…

…descendit ad inferos…

It is Christ’s final act of obedience towards his Father that he descends into hell, … the place where God is absent … It is filled with the reality of all the world’s godlessness with the sum of the world’s sin; therefore, with precisely all that from which the Crucified has freed the world. In hell he encounters his own work of salvation not in Easter triumph, but in the uttermost night of obedience, truly the “obedience of a corpse.” While bereft of any spiritual light emanating from the Father, in sheer obedience, he must seek the Father where he cannot find him under any circumstance. Hell seen in this way, is, in its final possibility, a Trinitarian event.

– Hans Urs von Balthsar

Good Friday

Today is the day when speech turns to silence for solace, to awe for attitude, to bewilderment for perspective, to mourning for sentiment and to lament for prayer. On this day, as the Victimae Paschali Laudes says it, “Death and Life fought bitterly.”

It’s a day when the sun darkens, the earth quakes and the angels, beholding the slaying of God by humanity, “tremble as they gaze.” Today sin finally carried out the exigencies of its malevolent logic: God must die if man is to finally and fully contravene His will.

Atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, though with a meaning other than that given by the gift of faith, gave fearless voice to the stark and ghastly truth of this day’s mystery:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?

But as the Triduum is a whole 3-in-1, nihilism and despair do not prevail. Why? The God we have slain is an immortal abyss of mercy, and our unspeakable crime avails God of the opportunity to unleash not the raging fury of avenging justice but the quiet zephyr of reconciling love. O felix culpa!

Stupefying.

Christ-Wood

This weekend my family and I have the privilege of keeping in our care a relic of the True Cross that a friend graciously shared with us. As I knelt on the floor in front of it last night, I just couldn’t wrap my head around its reality and significance. As I sit quietly present, I can hear in my head my wife singing this haunting text:

Ecce lignum crucis, in quo salus mundi pependit.
Venite adoremus.
Behold the wood of the cross on which hung the Savior of the world.
Come let us adore.

I feel I cannot sufficiently dispose my heart with worthy wonder and awe. The tiny splinters of that hallowed Christ-soaked wood, alone in all of inanimate creation in commanding of the very worship due to God, captivate my entire imagination. Those splinters are the foundation of the New Creation. Stat crux, the unshakable Cross.

Today

I can think of no finer meditation today than an Orthodox antiphon for Holy Thursday night, Today is Suspended. Here I include both the text and a haunting chanting of that text:

Today is suspended upon the Tree, He who suspended the land upon waters.
Today is suspended upon the Tree, He who suspended the land upon waters.
Today is suspended upon the Tree, He who suspended the land upon waters.

A crown of thorns crowns Him, who is the King of the angels.
He is wrapped in the purple robe of mockery, who wraps the heavens with clouds.
He receives smitings, who freed Adam in the Jordan.
He is tranfixed with nails, Who is the Son of the Virgin.

We worship Thy passion, O Christ.
We worship Thy passion, O Christ.
We worship Thy passion, O Christ.
Show us also Thy glorious resurrection!

Triduum: Days of Compassion

Some scattered Triduum thoughts…

As we enter these Three Days of awe and wonder, I have been taken up, as all of Christians should, with reflecting on the wonder of the Paschal Mystery — that mysterious Passover of Christ from death to life.

Holy Week always thrusts me (us!) into a disorienting confrontation with the Cross as the event that dirties God, sinking him into the messy muck of human existence and infusing into that muck a surprising beauty.

Dark Light

Christ, once transfigured in glorious splendor on Tabor is disfigured on Golgotha. What seems at first glance to be an irredeemable admixture of pure divine Light with diabolical darkness, an unfortunate interruption of God’s progressive triumph over a fallen world that must be quickly transcended and forgotten, becomes the very epicenter of our memory of God’s most wonderful work. Every liturgical nanosecond of these Three Days is an unveiling of measureless mercy, a revealing of God’s prodigal desire to come down and take up the history of our human misery into his own existence, bleeding with our wounds and suffering from our blows.

And though it is “right and just” to assert that God-in-Christ descended thus in order to redeem and liberate us from the oppression of sin and the terrors of death, it is equally necessary to pause in silent gratitude — just be still — before we leap in joy toward the glorious, chain-breaking Resurrection. Pause and peer into God’s longing desire to wholly identify with our sorrows, to bear in our flesh the overwhelming weight of our ancient oppression. Emmanuel is truly Compassion-with-us.

A Feast in the Presence of Thine Enemies

That reflection turns my heart at once toward the holy Eucharist, that supreme Gift that was instituted by Christ as his compassionate consent to being slain by his own creation.

Christ is God “given up” and “poured out.”

In the holy Eucharist, Christ shares with us whole Passover mystery, the entire substance of divine condescending compassion.

Still Wine

The other day, as I was about to drink from the Chalice at Mass, I paused for a moment and, as I looked at the consecrated Wine, it struck me forcefully that this very still and serene Drink contained within the raging storm of the divine-human drama; the drama of Love embracing the enemy, of Mercy embracing misery, of Wealth bearing poverty, of Communion suffering abandonment, of Purity risking filth, of Joy knowing sorrow, of Life obeying death.

And then I thought, after I had consumed: all who dare to draw near and drink this Blood must be prepared to be metabolized, to be broken in the heart of a divine storm that rages unceasingly in the deepest core of our holy-holy-holy God. And we daring souls who, in saying “Amen” before we consume, trustingly consent to be thus metabolized and re-created are ever-more made capable of unleashing God’s peaceful Christ-storm into our war-weary world.

Basta!

I have let my words run wild. Let me return to sobriety and allow Bl. Teresa of Calcutta, doer of God’s compassion, to say it with greater simplicity:

And I believe that great love must begin in our own home first in our own heart in our own home; my next door neighbor; in the street I live; and in the town I live; and in the world because only then he will be able to spread the meaning of Eucharist. [The] meaning of Eucharist is “understanding love.” Christ understood that we have a terrible hunger for God. He understood that we have been created to love and so he made himself a bread of life . . .[we] must eat and drink [in the Eucharist] the goodness of the love of Christ of his understanding love; he also wants to give us a means, a chance to put our love for him in a living action; he makes himself the hungry not only for bread, but for love; he makes himself the naked one not only for a piece of cloth, but for that understanding love that dignity, human dignity; he makes himself the homeless one not only for a piece of a small room, but for that deep sincere love of one another and this is Eucharist, this is Jesus the living bread that he has come to break with you and with me.

Is this *ideal spiel* real?

This is the week that those who have long journeyed in RCIA finally reach the great Sacraments of Initiation  Font, the Fire and the Feast. My years working with the RCIA in Tallahassee and Iowa were some of the most rewarding as those candidates and catechumens offer to the rest of us more or less sleepy Catholics a wake-up call, challenging us to value what we have received.

A woman I walked with through the RCIA process in the late 1990s once said to me the Thursday after she entered into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil:

You know what the greatest gift you…we…Catholics can provide to help inspire us to evangelize? Having communities of faith that really look like the beautiful vision of faith we learned about in this last year. I mean, it’s so beautiful! The idea is that when ‘outsiders’ like me first show up knocking on the parish door, calling the parish office or coming to Mass with someone who’s Catholic who invited us to come, it’ll feel appealing and inviting. What grabbed me here at this parish was when I came to Mass with my Catholic neighbor — who was really devoted — was that the people at Mass all looked really convinced, engaged. They sang, responded, and after Mass someone my friend introduced me to even told me he’d pray for me; and told me how awesome it was to be Catholic.

In the future, when I start to take the risk to witness to my new-found faith and I try to invite someone to ‘come and see’ my faith-in-action at the parish, I really want to be proud of what they will find when they come to visit my faith community. I want them to meet people who are proud to be Catholic, happy to be Catholic and love to live Catholic. Who love Jesus and Mary and the saints and the Mass and all that. Who want to make a difference in the world. I want them to meet Jesus here like I did.

Just two Saturdays ago I heard a lecture by a Maryknoll priest at the seminary who gave a striking description of ‘the model parish’ that he heard when he lived in El Salvador: “For those who wish to love God and neighbor, you have a home here.”

Ambassadors of Christ

Evangelizing parishes like my RCIA acquaintance described can be very creative in their approach. I know a priest who preached this message in his homily to his parishioners on Palm Sunday:

Next week we have a rare opportunity: our Church will be filled with seekers who are looking for Jesus. When the Christmas-and-Easter-Only Catholics, or non-Catholics show up at our Church on Easter let’s make them feel like they are welcome here; let’s show them that God is here; let’s invite them to encounter Christ. Show them your faith in your heartfelt prayer, in your reverence, in your joy and your welcoming smile. Strike up a conversation in the parking lot or parish hall with someone you don’t recognize; make them feel welcome; share with them your faith as a Catholic in the Risen Christ; and if they’re alienated or unaffiliated, invite them in to come and see. To come to our RCIA Inquiry classes. See in your pew a pamphlet with all we offer in our parish, what they can connect with — faith formation, service, spiritual enrichment, sacramental confession. Give them something concrete and specific. Make sure they take the book with them [Matthew Kelly's Rediscover Catholicism]

And when I share with those present, just before holy Communion, that only Catholics in a state of grace should receive the Eucharist, let’s help them discover why that should make them not feel shunned or excluded, but rather awaken them to the hunger they have for Jesus, for the Bread of Life; for reconciliation. Why are you sad you cannot receive?  Because you are hungry for full communion in faith with us? We’re sad too; we grieve.

Pray for this to happen next week, brothers and sisters; and before, during and after Mass, witness to that by the way you act and talk!

Martyrs

That’s a brilliant strategy. It not only challenges Catholics to own their irreplaceable role as living witnesses of the faith, but it encourages them to deepen their appreciation of the the divine Gifts they have been given by God. We believe in a faith professed and handed on by martyrs, and we need daily pray to have the same courageous passion they did if we are to prove worthy stewards of so great a treasure.  I’ll end with a well known story to highlight this point.

In Abitene, a small village in present-day Tunisia, 49 Christians were taken by surprise one Sunday in the year 304 A.D. while they were celebrating the Eucharist, gathered in the house of Octavius Felix, thereby defying the imperial prohibitions. They were arrested and taken to Carthage to be interrogated by the Proconsul Anulinus.

Significant among other things is the answer a certain Emeritus gave to the Proconsul who asked him why on earth they had disobeyed the Emperor’s severe orders. He replied:

“Sine dominico non possumus”: that is, we cannot live without joining together on Sunday to celebrate the Eucharist. We would lack the strength to face our daily problems and not to succumb.

Kneeling into Faith

As we pass over the Feast of the Annunciation today in silence (it’s transferred to after the Easter Octave), I have been thinking about the beauty of that feast — the feast of God’s enfleshment in the womb of Mary. In Jesus, God has forever and ever made our body essential to His existence — God will always have a human body, a human soul, a human will, a human intellect, a human heart, a human smile. In Jesus, God will forever and always love in a human mode, always express His omniscience in and through a finite mind, always reveal Himself in those gaping and never-sealed wounds that were our sinister handiwork; but His merciful artistry.

Astonishing,

And all this very theological thinking made me think of the beauty and power of the body in our life of faith, which made me think of Malcolm X.

How so?

Every Knee Will Bend

When I was an undergraduate, I had to read the Autobiography of Malcolm X. I found it very powerful.

One of the most memorable scenes in the book was the moment of his final decision to convert to Islam, which for him meant the agonizing choice to disavow his violent criminal past. What struck me most in this scene was the role that his body played in his conversion, and it really made me appreciate anew the power of bodily ritual in Catholic worship to give expression to and shape our faith.

Here’s an excerpt from the scene:

The hardest test I ever faced in my life was praying. . . bending my knees to pray – that act – well, that took me a week. You know what my life had been. Picking a lock to rob someone’s house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before. I had to force myself to bend my knees. And waves of shame and embarrassment would force me back up. For evil to bend its knees, admitting its guilt, to implore the forgiveness of God, is the hardest thing in the world. It’s easy for me to see and to say that now. But then, when I was the personification of evil, I was going through it.

Powerful.

It makes me think of a quote from St. Ephraim the Syrian,

If your body is not praying when you’re praying, you’re not really praying.

I think here especially of teaching children to pray. We must be careful to employ in faith formation the full range of Catholic calisthenics to help form both mind and heart. Moving the soul aright means moving the body aright, which means we should never consign faith formation to chairs and desks. We should, as in the case of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd’s pedagogy (see here), employ a kneeling, standing, hands folded, heads bowed, genuflecting, signing, processing, prostrating face-down to the earth faith formation. To paraphrase St. James, “Faith without motion is dead.” And we must douse the body, via the five senses, in a rich sacramental saturation, using holy water, incense, candles, icons, statues, sacred music, relics, seasonal food,  kissable Gospels or the spectrum of liturgical colors that make faith beautiful.

Such an embodied pedagogy of prayer and faith disposes the soul for encountering God in the supreme manner he himself has designed, the Seven Sacraments. In this messy economy, God saturates us in the divine life by plunging our bodies into breathed-on water, smearing us with dripping fragrant oil, bidding us ingest Flesh and Blood, mystically laying his hands on us, countering our whispered evils with echoing mercy, and manifesting his everlasting covenant of love by the two becoming one flesh.

So when we pray let’s imitate God and engage our material world, our bodies, in ways that suit the divine ordering of things. Being spiritual as Christians means relating our bodies, and all of the material goods around us, to God in the way God intended.

Dragging My Body to God

I met a young man last year who told me that his conversion to Catholicism from Protestantism came about as a result of the “soul following the body.” Here’s my recollection of our conversation:

When I was still Methodist, I was dating a Catholic girl who loved to go to the Chapel and sit for an hour in front of a fancily enshrined piece of bread to pray. That’s how I described it when I was still protestant. She invited me to join her to pray, and so because I loved her I went with her, even though I didn’t *get it*. Week after week I would sit there with her, and though it was always a peaceful hour it didn’t really mean anything much to me. But then…

One week she was out of town and she asked me to cover her hour, so I did. I sat down alone in the chapel and started to feel a little nervous without her, almost even felt afraid of being alone with the bread. After about 30 minutes, I began to feel this somewhat disconcerting and real sense that Jesus’ love was flowing from the bread, and suddenly, without knowing why, I found myself on my knees and crying. It was just this profound sense of being loved. I knew that this bread wasn’t just bread; it was living; it was, as I later would come to find out, really Christ. But I can tell you, I knew it was true before anyone explained it to me. What we call transubstantiation is completely perfect for explaining my experience, because what lit up that room was Jesus radiating from a particular place in the chapel where he was present in a way he wasn’t anywhere else. Not generic Jesus everywhere, but Jesus there, present, pouring out his love all over me.

It’s like she dragged by body to God, and later my soul caught up.

.

The Vocation to Furious Love

“Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious.” – GK Chesterton

I remember back in the 1980s when I was struggling to discern my vocational path. It was only months after coming to faith and I was consumed with a desire to serve God, but had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was immensely fortunate to have been offered an opportunity to present my conundrums to a wise and exceedingly kind Trappist monk. I can only imagine how this 20 year old college student, brimming with idealistic zeal, must have appeared to him! I remember distinctly saying to him at the end of my personal history, “Okay, so my real question is, should I become a priest, a deacon, a monk or should I marry?”

K.I.S.S.

I wanted a simple, direct and unambiguous answer from this holy guru that would not implicate me in any sort of misty ambiguity, nuanced thinking or protracted discerning struggle. I guess I was really hoping for him to have a mystical locution.

And I’ll never ever forget his bizarre and deadly serious answer to my very clear question: “Yes.”

After a long, monastic-style pause that my kids would call “awkward,” he said this (cobbled together from my journal notes):

Tom, you should be any one of those if you find in it the best way for you to love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself. That’s the whole point of you’re decision. You’re discernment of God’s calling isn’t like an Easter egg hunt, where you’re searching for some secretly hidden answer located outside you, but rather it’s the discovery of what God has already planted within you; into your unique history of pain and joy, into your personality and all your gifts that He has given you as a capacity to love as He created Tom to love as no one else could. And don’t look for the ‘easy way’ since that love God demands will be sacrifice, will always be more about others than about you, since vocation isn’t first of all about your personal fulfillment but about serving God and serving neighbor.

First, you have to live your faith out now and get some history to your faith — it’s so new for you! And as you continue on, look around you at the needs out there that present themselves, look within your soul and come to know what gifts you have to offer; listen to your heart’s movements as you pray and share these all with a trusted guide; and, once you do come clear as to where you are being led, as best you can, freely say yes. Then you will start pushing the plow without looking back. But remember, you have a long way to go; you must work hard on getting your life in order now, a life put together in the light of faith; and you need to practice this in the real world for a few years before you can think of discerning a life’s vocation. Build the foundations first before you try to build the castle.

Of course, at the time I found this all very opaque and unhelpful toward fulfilling my aspiration to be like St. Matthew: “Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.” I thought, “I have all this fire in me, I am good to go and you don’t think I’m ready to choose now?” 26 years after this conversation, I am absolutely certain I was not; and life after that day proved beyond a shadow of doubt that his words absolutely true.

In fact, as I prayerfully reflected on this story, I found myself recalling all of the mini bonfires I used to build in our yard when I was young. I always enjoyed burning the small twigs and the straw for quick effect, a big fire, fast and furious, but soon to expire. I knew that the the fire would really only last if I inserted into the roaring blaze some larger logs that would take some time to catch. But if I was patient, attentive and careful, eventually those thick logs would themselves be consumed by the fire and even come to glow red-hot in their deepest core.

During those years of discernment and personal growth, I hated, using Chesterton’s phrase, living between furious opposites; especially between “already, not-yet.” I preferred, and still prefer more often than not, to have all of life’s inner and outer tensions eased, and my life’s path made clear, tension-less and simple. But God always leads otherwise, the God whose covenant sign is to be found in those “arms outstretched between heaven and earth,” as our Eucharistic Prayer so beautifully says it.

At the time I wanted from this holy monk a divine “medium” to manifest my destiny and command obedience, not a counsel to practice and perfect the art of sacrificial love through careful, patient, arduous and freely chosen discernment of God’s gentle lead per crucem ad lucem, “through the cross to the light.”

Love: the Way of all Vocations

After we had this discussion, he asked me to read a selection from St. Therese’s Story of a Soul. Though I found it very moving, I still didn’t totally grasp the implications for me. Now, its light is blinding. To this very day I annually thank this monk with a Christmas card for his wisdom and love.

I’ll share a portion of that selection from Therese here, even at the risk of testing your time-constraints for reading my rambles.

To be your Spouse, O Jesus, to be a Carmelite, by my union with you to be the mother of souls, should content me… yet it does not… Without doubt, these three priviliges are indeed my vocation: Carmelite, spouse, and mother. And yet I feel in myself other vocations—I feel myself called to be a soldier, priest, apostle, doctor of the church, martyr. Finally, I feel the need, the desire to perform all the most heroic deeds for you, Jesus… I feel in my soul the courage of a crusader, of a soldier for the Church, and I wish to die on the field of battle in defense of the Church…

I feel in me the vocation of a priest! With what love, O Jesus, would I bear you in my hands, when at the sound of my words you came down from heaven! With what love would I give you to souls! But alas, just as much as I desire to be a priest, I admire and envy the humility of St. Francis of Assisi, and feel the call to imitate him in refusing the sublime dignity of the Priesthood.

Dreaming of the tortures in which Christians are to share at the time of the Antichrist, I feel my heart thrill, and I would like these tortures to be kept for me… Jesus, Jesus, if I wanted to write all my desires, I would have to take your Book of Life, where the deeds of your saints are recorded: all these deeds I would like to accomplish for you.

At prayer these desires made me suffer a true martydom. I opened the Epistles of St. Paul to seek some relief. The 12th and 13th chapters of the First Epistle to the Corinthians fell before my eyes. I read, in the first, that not all can be apostles, prophets, and doctors, etc., that the Church is composed of different members, and that the eye cannot also be at the same time the hand.

The answer was clear, but it did not satisfy my desires, it did not give me peace…. Without being discouraged I continued my reading, and this phrase comforted me: “Earnestly desire the more perfect gifts. And I show you a still more excellent way” (1 Cor 12:31). And the Apostle explains how all gifts, even the most perfect, are nothing without Love… that charity is the excellent waythat leads surely to God. At last I had found rest…. Considering the mystical Body of the Church, I had not recognized myself in any of the members described by St. Paul, or rather, I wanted to recognize myself in all… Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that if the Church has a body composed of different members, the noblest and most necessary of all the members would not be lacking to her. I understood that the Church has a heart, and that this heart burns with Love. I understood that Love alone makes its members act, that if this Love were to be extinguished, the Apostles would no longer preach the Gospel, the Martyrs would refuse to shed their blood… I understood that Love embraces all vocations, that Love is all things, that it embraces all times and all places… in a word, that it is eternal!

Then in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: “O Jesus, my Love, at last I have found my vocation, my vocation is Love!… Yes, I have found my place in the Church, and it is you, O my God, who have given me this place… in the heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be Love!…. Thus I shall be all things: thus my dream shall be realized!!!”

I am a child… It is not riches or glory (not even the glory of Heaven) that this child asks for… No, she asks for Love. She knows but one desire: to love you, Jesus. Glorious deeds are forbidden her; she cannot preach the Gospel or shed her blood… But what does that matter, her brothers work in her place, and she, a little child, stays close to the throne of the King and Queen, and loves for her brothers who are in the combat… But how shall she show her love, since love proves itself by deeds? Well! the little child will strew flowers, she will embalm the royal throne with their fragrance, she will sing with a silver voice the canticle of Love.

Yes, my Beloved, I wish to spend my life thus… I have no other means of proving my love except by strewing flowers, that is to say, letting no little sacrifice pass, no look, no word–profiting by the littlest actions, and doing them out of love. I wish to suffer out of love and to rejoice out of love; thus I shall strew flowers before your throne. I shall not find one without scattering its petals before you… and in strewing my flowers I will sing (can one weep in doing so joyous an action?) I will sing, even if my roses must be gathered from among thorns; and the longer and sharper the thorns, the sweeter shall be my song.