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!
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
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
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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!
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.
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.
.
{I apologize up front here for the excessive length of my post today, but I feel those who can take time will be enriched by these texts}
I would like to begin by noting here something important that happened yesterday in Rome. Pope Francis referred for the first time to the “voice of Benedict XVI,” and especially to Benedict’s core message regarding the Western “crisis of truth.” Francis took his stand with firmly with Benedict, while at the same time further enriching his own insistent “Franciscan” call to our Church for a new “poverty of spirit” by offering a concomitant critique of Gospel-poverty’s antithesis, “spiritual poverty”:
But there is another form of poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously. It is what my much-loved predecessor, the dear and venerated Benedict XVI, called the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ which makes everyone his own criterion and endangers the coexistence of peoples.
And that brings me to a second reason for my name. Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace. But there is no true peace without truth!
There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.
One of the titles of the Bishop of Rome is Pontiff, that is, a builder of bridges with God and between people.
My wish is that the dialogue between us should help to build bridges connecting all people, in such a way that everyone can see in the other not an enemy, not a rival, but a brother or sister to be welcomed and embraced!
My own origins impel me to work for the building of bridges.
As you know, my family is of Italian origin; and so this dialogue between places and cultures a great distance apart matters greatly to me, this dialogue between one end of the world and the other, which today are growing ever closer, more interdependent, more in need of opportunities to meet and to create real spaces of authentic fraternity.
In this work, the role of religion is fundamental. It is not possible to build bridges between people while forgetting God. But the converse is also true: it is not possible to establish true links with God, while ignoring other people.
Hence it is important to intensify dialogue among the various religions, and I am thinking particularly of dialogue with Islam.
At the Mass marking the beginning of my ministry, I greatly appreciated the presence of so many civil and religious leaders from the Islamic world.
And it is also important to intensify outreach to non-believers, so that the differences which divide and hurt us may never prevail, but rather the desire to build true links of friendship between all peoples, despite their diversity.
Fighting poverty, both material and spiritual, building peace and constructing bridges: these, as it were, are the reference points for a journey that I want to invite each of the countries here represented to take up.
But it is a difficult journey, if we do not learn to grow in love for this world of ours.
Here too, it helps me to think of the name of Francis, who teaches us profound respect for the whole of creation and the protection of our environment, which all too often, instead of using for the good, we exploit greedily, to one another’s detriment.
Part II: Preaching to Prisoners
In honor of Pope Francis’ stunning decision to celebrate the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday in a juvenile prison, Casal del Marmo, I thought it would be appropriate to re-print Pope Emeritus Benedict’s homily at the same prison in Lent of 2007.
To me, the power of celebrating the liturgical memorial of the institution of the Sacramental Sacrifice of Passover Freedom in a prison is extraordinary. Francis is certainly thus far a pope of wows.
++++++++++++
Chapel of the Merciful Father
Fourth Sunday of Lent, 18 March 2007
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Dear Boys and Girls,I have willingly come to pay you a Visit, and the most important moment of our meeting is Holy Mass, where the gift of God’s love is renewed: a love that comforts us and gives us peace, especially in life’s difficult moments.
In this prayerful atmosphere I would like to address my greeting to each one of you: to the Hon. Mr Clemente Mastella, Minister of Justice, to whom I express a special “thank you”; to Mrs Melìta Cavallo, Department Head of Justice for Minors, to the other Authorities who have spoken, to those in charge, to the operators, teachers and personnel of this juvenile penitentiary, to the volunteers, to your relatives and to everyone present.
I greet the Cardinal Vicar and Auxiliary Bishop Benedetto Tùzia.
I greet in particular, Mons. Giorgio Caniato, General Inspector of the Prisons Chaplaincy, and your Chaplain, whom I thank for expressing your sentiments at the beginning of Holy Mass.
In the Eucharistic celebration it is Christ himself who becomes present among us; indeed, even more: he comes to enlighten us with his teaching — in the Liturgy of the Word — and to nourish us with his Body and his Blood — in the Eucharistic Liturgy and in Communion.
Thus, he comes to teach us to love, to make us capable of loving and thereby capable of living.
But perhaps you will say, how difficult it is to love seriously and to live well! What is the secret of love, the secret of life? Let us return to the Gospel [of the Prodigal Son].
In this Gospel three persons appear: the father and two sons. But these people represent two rather different life projects. Both sons lived peacefully, they were fairly well-off farmers so they had enough to live on, selling their produce profitably, and life seemed good.
Yet little by little the younger son came to find this life boring and unsatisfying: “All of life can’t be like this”, he thought: rising every day, say at six o’clock, then according to Israel’s traditions, there must have been a prayer, a reading from the Holy Bible, then they went to work and at the end of the day another prayer.
Thus, day after day he thought: “But no, life is something more. I must find another life where I am truly free, where I can do what I like; a life free from this discipline, from these norms of God’s commandments, from my father’s orders; I would like to be on my own and have life with all its beauties totally for myself. Now, instead, it is nothing but work…”.
And so he decided to claim the whole of his share of his inheritance and leave. His father was very respectful and generous and respected the son’s freedom: it was he who had to find his own life project.
And he departed, as the Gospel says, to a far-away country. It was probably geographically distant because he wanted a change, but also inwardly distant because he wanted a completely different life.
So his idea was: freedom, doing what I want to do, not recognizing these laws of a God who is remote, not being in the prison of this domestic discipline, but rather doing what is beautiful, what I like, possessing life with all its beauty and fullness.
And at first — we might imagine, perhaps for a few months — everything went smoothly: he found it beautiful to have attained life at last, he felt happy.
Then, however, little by little, he felt bored here, too; here too everything was always the same.
And in the end, he was left with an emptiness that was even more disturbing: the feeling that this was still not life became ever more acute; indeed, going ahead with all these things, life drifted further and further away.
Everything became empty: the slavery of doing the same things then also re-emerged. And in the end, his money ran out and the young man found that his standard of living was lower than that of swine.
It was then that he began to reflect and wondered if that really was the path to life: a freedom interpreted as doing what I want, living, having life only for me; or if instead it might be more of a life to live for others, to contribute to building the world, to the growth of the human community….
So it was that he set out on a new journey, an inner journey.
The boy pondered and considered all these new aspects of the problem and began to see that he had been far freer at home, since he had also been a landowner contributing to building his home and society in communion with the Creator, knowing the purpose of his life and guessing the project that God had in store for him.
During this interior journey, during this development of a new life project and at the same time living the exterior journey, the younger son was motivated to return, to start his life anew because he now understood that he had taken the wrong track. I must start out afresh with a different concept, he said to himself; I must begin again.
And he arrived at the home of the father who had left him his freedom to give him the chance to understand inwardly what life is and what life is not. The father embraced him with all his love, he offered him a feast and life could start again beginning from this celebration.
The son realized that it is precisely work, humility and daily discipline that create the true feast and true freedom.
So he returned home, inwardly matured and purified: he had understood what living is.
Of course, in the future his life would not be easy either, temptations would return, but he was henceforth fully aware that life without God does not work; it lacks the essential, it lacks light, it lacks reason, it lacks the great sense of being human. He understood that we can only know God on the basis of his Word.
We Christians can add that we know who God is from Jesus, in whom the face of God has been truly shown to us. The young man understood that God’s Commandments are not obstacles to freedom and to a beautiful life, but signposts on the road on which to travel to find life.
He realized too that work and the discipline of being committed, not to oneself but to others, extends life.
And precisely this effort of dedicating oneself through work gives depth to life, because one experiences the pleasure of having at last made a contribution to the growth of this world that becomes freer and more beautiful.
I do not wish at this point to speak of the other son who stayed at home, but in his reaction of envy we see that inwardly he too was dreaming that perhaps it would be far better to take all the freedoms for himself.
He too in his heart was “returning home” and understanding once again what life is, understanding that it is truly possible to live only with God, with his Word, in the communion of one’s own family, of work; in the communion of the great Family of God.
I do not wish to enter into these details now: let each one of us apply this Gospel to himself in his own way. Our situations are different and each one has his own world. Nonetheless, the fact remains that we are all moved and that we can all enter with our inner journey into the depths of the Gospel.
Only a few more remarks: the Gospel helps us understand who God truly is. He is the Merciful Father who in Jesus loves us beyond all measure.
The errors we commit, even if they are serious, do not corrode the fidelity of his love. In the Sacrament of Confession we can always start out afresh in life. He welcomes us, he restores to us our dignity as his children.
Let us therefore rediscover this sacrament of forgiveness that makes joy well up in a heart reborn to true life.
Furthermore, this parable helps us to understand who the human being is: he is not a “monad”, an isolated being who lives only for himself and must have life for himself alone.
On the contrary, we live with others, we were created together with others and only in being with others, in giving ourselves to others, do we find life.
The human being is a creature in whom God has impressed his own image, a creature who is attracted to the horizon of his Grace, but he is also a frail creature exposed to evil but also capable of good. And lastly, the human being is a free person.
We must understand what freedom is and what is only the appearance of freedom.
Freedom, we can say, is a springboard from which to dive into the infinite sea of divine goodness, but it can also become a tilted plane on which to slide towards the abyss of sin and evil and thus also to lose freedom and our dignity.
Dear friends, we are in the Season of Lent, the 40 days before Easter. In this Season of Lent, the Church helps us to make this interior journey and invites us to conversion, which always, even before being an important effort to change our behaviour, is an opportunity to decide to get up and set out again, to abandon sin and to choose to return to God.
Let us — this is the imperative of Lent — make this journey of inner liberation together.
Every time, such as today, that we participate in the Eucharist, the source and school of love, we become capable of living this love, of proclaiming it and witnessing to it with our life.
Nevertheless, we need to decide to walk towards Jesus as the Prodigal Son did, returning inwardly and outwardly to his father.
At the same time, we must abandon the selfish attitude of the older son who was sure of himself, quick to condemn others and closed in his heart to understanding, acceptance and forgiveness of his brother, and who forgot that he too was in need of forgiveness.
May the Virgin Mary and St Joseph, my Patron Saint whose Feast it will be tomorrow, obtain this gift for us; I now invoke him in a special way for each one of you and for your loved ones.
{service announcement: if you want to pray for the Cardinals in the Conclave, this is a fabulous way: www.adoptacardinal.org}
I had a friend write me recently in great anguish about some wild liturgical abuses going on at his parish, his pastor’s proclivity to make the Eucharist into an ego fest, and what he saw as a total lack of reverence before, during and after Mass.
I want to write more about that at another time, but it reminded me of a conversation I had with a Coptic (Egyptian) Christian who was a grad student at Florida State University. We talked at length about the possibility of reunion between his Church and the Roman Catholic Church, and discussed the various doctrinal differences and how they might be overcome. But he said something at the end that I found most fascinating, and relevant to my friend’s email. He essentially argued that the primary obstacle for many Copts to reunion from the Coptic side is the threat of the “banalization” of the Liturgy. Simply put, he believed Western Christians have largely lost a sense of the holy, of the transcendent mystery of the God, and have lost the “Godward” orientation of Liturgy.
Let me share his core argument (in my words, of course, summarizing what I recall to be his major points):
What we Copts find most frightening about reunion is not the resolution of our theological differences, but the liturgical culture Catholics tend to bring with them from the West. For us, the divine Liturgy is an act of God-facing awe and holy fear filled with love and reverence for God’s deep and unutterable mystery. Worship is sobered by holy fear, yet joyful with love. And for us the priest who celebrates is not a personality or creative dramatist but an icon and symbol of Christ who willingly loses himself in the cloud of ritual movements and fixed liturgical language. The Liturgy is not a show or celebration of ourselves but an appearing of the presence of the coming Kingdom; the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Our church is full of the blessed Seraphim and Cherubim and all the powers of heaven who come to lift us up with Christ into the heavens where the Father lives in inaccessible Light. And as we dare to draw near to his Holy Gifts [the Eucharist], we dare do so only because we have been invited by God, though we do so in holy fear knowing we must still dress aright with good works, heart-rending repentance for purified hearts, even as we confess the Gifts are the Flesh and Blood of God. Communion is fraught with danger even as it is with joy and life, as we commune with the all-pure, all-holy, all-true, all-all God. My fear if we have reunion? It’s that the seeming loss of liturgical awe and reverence in your church, the loss of a sense of what is really and truly happening in divine Liturgy, will dilute the Coptic faith that has been penned in martyr’s blood, and will lure Copts into the seduction of a westernized God — a God whom we are desirous to tame and domesticate and house in a safe and gated community where He obeys our soft and individualistic mores and values; and resists troubling our idolatrous consciences with those fiery darts of the Gospel of the Kingdom that sting us to the heart.
If you experience Coptic liturgical worship, every one of his words about their liturgical culture will ring true. Just peek at this:
Contrasts
My Coptic conversationalist, during our lively exchange, quoted from an Orthodox liturgical text, and said, “If we can feel safe that our Catholic sister Churches will bring this attitude toward worship to us, we are ready to declare reunion.” Here’s the text:
Let all mortal flesh be silent, and stand with fear and trembling, and meditate on nothing earthly within itself;
For the King of kings and Lord of lords, Christ our God, comes forward to be sacrificed, and to be given for food to the faithful; and the bands of angels go before Him with every power and dominion, the many-eyed cherubim, and the six-winged seraphim, covering their faces, and crying aloud the hymn, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.
And I will leave you today with Cynthia Clawson’s haunting rendering of this text:
I happened on this quote the other day from St. Don Bosco:
An effective but often neglected means of gaining Paradise is almsgiving. By almsgiving I mean any work of mercy exercised toward one’s neighbor for the love of God.
It reminded me of a comment a colleague of mine here at the Seminary made to me last Fall, that I quoted before on this blog:
If one were to do a cursory read of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke), one would get the impression that we are saved by giving alms.
The vocation of human beings, in the Hebrew biblical worldview, is to return the created world back to God as a sacrificial offering of thanksgiving, and the prime conduit of that “return” is the hand of the beggar. We are, in effect, priests of mercy who ensure creation conspires to the good of all.
{If you are skeptical on this account of Jewish thinking on the topic, read Gary Anderson’s article in First Things (click here) that rocked my world first time I read it.}
In this sense, Jesus’ final judgment parable in Matthew 25:31-46 is simply the Messiah’s “Amen” at the end of the Hebrew Bible.
So this Lent, return your corner of the universe to God through the hands of those around you in need of mercy. When you die, they will await you with hands full…
A priest from Peru I once had the good fortune of meeting described his religious community’s periodic fasts to me this way:
Though we possess the means to continually feast, we choose to regularly fast so that those who continually fast without choice might be permitted to regularly feast.
While it is true that fasting has built into it the purposes of cultivating self-mastery over disordered appetites, facilitating the spirit of prayer or creating in the heart an attitude of sacrifice toward God, in Judaism and Christianity it was most intimately tied to the anti-individualist understanding of possession and ownership, i.e. the goods I possess are meant to benefit others, and because essential to my fulfillment is my neighbor’s fulfillment I will regularly deny my possessiveness to the point of discomfort in order to benefit in some way my neighbor whose need lays just claim on me.
This is clearly what Isaiah was getting at in 58:5-8:
Is this the manner of fasting I wish, of keeping a day of penance: That a man bow his head like a reed, and lie in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD? This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke; Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own. Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed
This all also reminds me of a quote from the Lenten breviary that I love:
Prayer, mercy and fasting: These three are one, and they give life to each other. Fasting is the soul of prayer; mercy is the lifeblood of fasting. Let no one try to separate them; they cannot be separated. If you have only one of them or not all together, you have nothing. So if you pray, fast; if fast, show mercy; if you want your petition to be heard, hear the petition of others. When you fast, see the fasting of others. If you hope for mercy, show mercy. If you look for kindness, show kindness. If you want to receive, give.
– St Peter Chrysologus (c 380-450)
So this Lent when you lessen your feast to make room at your table, bring with you to the next Mass you celebrate the joy of having imitated the Master who invites you to a Feast spread before you at the cost of His own once-chosen fast.
A number of years ago, I was visiting a Greek Orthodox Church where I was asked to share my thoughts on the beauty of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Twist my arm! It’s like forcing me to drink coffee at Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans or coercing me to admire my wife’s smiling face. Beauty naturally births praise. And my point to them was precisely that: the Eastern Churches possess a holy knack for rendering God’s beauty accessible to the five senses in a way that, in my experience and personal judgment, surpasses that of the West. It’s why the legend of the conversion of Prince Vladimir of Kiev to the Byzantine version of Christianity contains this compelling description of the reaction of the pagan prince’s emissaries to what they saw at Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople:
We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere upon earth. We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there among men, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty.
It’s also no mistake that it was an Orthodox writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, that gave voice to this same aesthetic truth in his novel, The Idiot. The main character of the story, Prince Myshkin, responds to being presented with the portrait of a woman of ill repute, Nastassya Filippovna, by expressing his deep appreciation of her beauty. When asked to justify his troubling response to this “morally grotesque” woman, he says: ”In that face—there is much suffering…beauty like that is strength…such beauty will save the world.”
The main core of my lecture was this: it’s not the gloriously painted icons but the suffering and dying of Christ that is the unrivaled epicenter of all beauty in Christianity. And here I say the suffering and dying Christ, for even in the glorious splendor of the Resurrection it is Christ’s scar-marred Body that rises in immortal loveliness On the Cross of Jesus is the epitome of divine and human love bound in perfect synthesis, and it’s that love alone, lived out in a Church of sinners and saints, that makes or breaks the power of Christian witness. If we set aside the Slain Lamb that desires to bleed through the icons of flesh and blood – us! – and choose instead to transform the Church into self-congratulation society, or a museum of sacred artifacts that recall an age of beauty now lost and forgotten, the Church will grow old and weary and die a just death.
This beauty of God is a hard beauty, a burnished beauty, a sweat-drenched beauty, a fire-refined beauty that is no cheap trinket.
True Goodness is Beautiful
In particular, I said to these Orthodox, if we fail to endure as Christians the hardness of the commandments in an increasingly anarchic moral culture, or fail to suffer the costly demands of living and speaking the truth in our personal and public lives, or refuse to love unto excess after the pattern of the Cross, there will be no beauty to attract; no loveliness to reveal the Face of Christ. We will cease to be evangelizers and become mere chaplains of a quaint, if sometimes pretty, though largely irrelevant idea.
But we Christians, Oriental and Occidental, want people to fall in love with God’s love that has fallen down to us in Christ. That’s what counts, and that’s to be the white-hot core of all our skillful evangelizing strategies…
Nothing is more practical than finding God,
That is, than falling in a love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings,
What you will do with your evenings,
How you spend your weekends,
What you read,
Who you know,
What breaks your heart,
And what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
― Pedro Arrupe, S.J.
