Guard me, O Lord

A simple post for today’s feast of the Guardian Angels.

Angels are non-bodily persons, with intellect and will, created by God (according to Tradition) prior to the creation of the material cosmos. Each angel, because it was created ex nihilo, ‘out of nothing,’ is its own species, though the angels were created with certain unique missions that define them as groups (i.e. the 9 choirs). They are brilliant, powerful according to their ‘rank’ in the hierarchical choir and, except for the rebel angels who fell, ceaselessly behold God’s unveiled presence.

It is a core spiritual truth that to grow in the life of grace we must frequently engage the angels in prayer and supplication.

Our guardian angel’s entire mission is us, each of us individually from conception to death. So, constantly avail yourself of your angel’s friendship, and his ability ‘to light, to guard, to rule and guide.’ And if you are a parent, your child’s angel is your best au pair.

For more fun facts, see Kreeft’s book.

O Fortunate Ruin

The other day, I was speaking on the phone with someone who has long worked for a Catholic institution, and in the course of the conversation about some present, painful job-related difficulties, this person said, ‘Sometimes I wonder if Jesus has anything to do with the work we do.’

It set me wondering.

Solus Christus

Having worked within the Church Institutional for the last ~24 years, I have noted that Original Sin, ever alive and well in its unoriginal devotees, is, shall we say, quite evidently evident.

The bumps, bruises and ecclesial blows I have endured, and doled out, over those years have convinced me of one bedrock truth on which I have striven to build my life’s work: the Church is Christ’s Body, Christ’s Bride. And, at the center of this truth is a paradox: Christ established the Church on the foundation of his brutal execution, on humanity’s mortal rejection of God that, in the Resurrection, became God’s immortal acceptance of humanity. In other words, the fact that human infidelity was built into the Church’s founding event makes sin into a place of grace.

Cleave

When I first arrived at Mt. St. Mary’s Seminary in 1989, I met an elder priest at the Lourdes Grotto who said to me, ‘The secret to a lifetime as a priest is found in Jeremiah 17:5 and Psalm 146:3.’ After I read them later, I thought, ‘Cynic.‘

Now, I get it.

In the final analysis, I will be judged on how tightly I cleaved to Christ dead-risen. Only thus do human failures become so many singular graced opportunities to trust aright and sink my anchor in the Rock. O felix culpa!

I have found myself thrown against this inexorable law: if I heed Jeremiah 17:5/Psalm 146:3, then I taste Jeremiah 17:7 and Psalm 146:5.

Related Quotables

Italian theologian Carlo Carretto starkly expressed this vantage:

The Church has the power to make me holy but it is made up, from the first to the last, only of sinners. And what sinners! It has the omnipotent and invincible power to renew the Miracle of the Eucharist, but is made up of men who are stumbling in the dark, who fight every day against the temptation of losing their faith. It brings a message of pure transparency to God but it is incarnated in slime, such is the substance of the world. It speaks of the sweetness of its Master, of its non-violence, but there was a time in history when it sent out its armies to disembowel the infidels and torture the heretics. It proclaims the message of evangelical poverty, and yet it does nothing but look for money and alliances with the powerful.

Those who dream of something different from this are wasting their time and have to rethink it all. And this proves that they do not understand humanity. Because this is humanity, made visible by the Church, with all its flaws and its invincible courage, with the Faith that Christ has given it and with the love that Christ showers on it.

When I was young, I did not understand why Jesus chose Peter as his successor, the first Pope, even though he abandoned Him. Now I am no longer surprised and I understand that by founding his church on the tomb of a traitor, He was warning each of us to remain humble, by making us aware of our fragility

And again, Frank Sheed, brilliant American lay Catholic theologian/author of the mid 20th century, captured this same tension:

We are not baptized into the hierarchy; do not receive the Cardinals sacramentally; will not spend an eternity in the beatific vision of the pope. Christ is the point. I, myself, admire the present pope (John Paul II), but even if I criticized him as harshly as some do, even if his successor proved to be as bad as some of those who have gone before, even if I find the church, as I have to live with it, a pain in the neck, I should still say that nothing a pope (or a priest) could do or say would make me wish to leave the church, although I might well wish that they would leave.

Infernal Gospel

Please excuse the tortured meandering of my mind here as I mull over a truth of faith that is tough to speak about: hell.

Tough for me, at least.

Hell

Though I do not agree with all of the interpolations of ‘hell on earth’ found in this article, Rachel Hackenberg raises an important conversation that, especially since the Enlightenment, has fallen into perilous disfavor – the question of the existence and meaning of hell, that eternal alienation of human and angelic persons from God; persons who have set their wills definitively against the divine will.

The Catechism (1035) has this to say about hell:

The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, “eternal fire.” The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.

Hell is the state of absolute and final justice, where all of the evils, and evildoers, of history are brought under the solemn and ‘dread’ judgment of Christ. Hell highlights the immense gravity of human choice, the mortal weight of sin, as well as the urgency of the offer of divine mercy in the Crucified-Risen Jesus.  It also places into stark relief the character of God’s justice vis-a-vis sin, a justice so thunderously evident in the Hebrew Prophets, and the tragic consequences of refusing God’s mercy.

On Earth as it is in Hell

Rachel argues that hell, like heaven, begins already now — a ‘realized eschatology’ — in the earthly infernos unleashed by the whole array of human injustice and wrongdoing. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a Church historian, once made this point well: ’The problem is not only that our sense of sin has declined, but also that the world wars and totalitarianisms of the 20th century created a Hell on Earth as bad as anything we can imagine in the afterlife.’ When one forgets sin and deadens conscience, one is free to create a hell on earth with (seeming) impunity.

Or I think of Archbishop Chaput’s comments this past week that made headlines: ‘Jesus tells us very clearly that if we don’t help the poor, we’re going to go to hell.’ The implication is that, just as in the Rich Man and Lazarus parable, the unjust hoarders of wealth who create a living hell for the poor now will, in the next life, taste the ‘great reversal’ of the Kingdom that pronounces a definitive, unbridgeable judgment on the purveyors of the earthly hell, harrowing this hell in the Resurrection of the Just to everlasting life and of the Unjust to everlasting death.

Revealed, not Deduced

Here it’s important to remember that hell is not a rationally deduced, logical conclusion, but rather is a revealed truth of faith — i.e. we know it exists not because it simply ‘makes sense,’ but because God has made it known to us in Christ through the voice of the Church. It’s truly a mystery of faith which I myself assent to only with trembling, and a certain paralysis of mind.

In fact, hell is, in my mind, one of the ‘greatest mysteries’ of faith that resists full rational explanation. I cringe when I hear Christian apologists give neat and tidy explanations as to why hell ‘makes sense;’ or that only those who absolutely reject God in an act of total rejection risk hell (John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor #70 argued that mortal sin can result from gravely disordered individual acts and does not require such an absolute act of rejection of God). I also cringe when others’ simply dismiss hell as incompatible with divine mercy or human fragility. On a personal note: though I honestly can’t long contemplate hell directly without intellectually ‘shutting down,’ I also cannot embrace a divine justice beyond the grave that simply de facto resolves the tragic drama of the ‘butcher block of history’ by leading all eventually (coercively?) into a final happy place of eternal good-for-all. That said, I do believe with Hans Urs von Bathasar that it is compatible with faith to pray and dare hope that all (save the rebel angels) be saved, since the Church cannot dare I say ‘canonize’ any human as damned (see the famous debate on this in First Things).

Also, relevant here is the intriguing wording of #46 in Pope Benedict’s encyclical, Spe Salvi.

Heaven-Hell is the revealed resolution to the mystery of evil — but my own contemplation of that resolution remains forever, this side of Paradise, a dive into ineffable mystery as well as a free-falling plunge into saving hope.

Santa Lucia

The famously vivid vision of the Fatima visionaries, described here by Lúcia dos Santos, suffices to demonstrate the effect of direct contemplation of hell on the mind of any sane person:

[The Virgin Mary] opened her hands once more, as She had done the two previous months. The rays [of light] appeared to penetrate the earth, and we saw, as it were, a vast sea of fire. Plunged in this fire, we saw the demons and the souls [of the damned]. The latter were like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, having human forms. They were floating about in that conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames which issued from within themselves, together with great clouds of smoke. Now they fell back on every side like sparks in huge fires, without weight or equilibrium, amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fright (it must have been this sight which caused me to cry out, as people say they heard me). The demons were distinguished [from the souls of the damned] by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, black and transparent like burning coals. That vision only lasted for a moment, thanks to our good Heavenly Mother, Who at the first apparition had promised to take us to Heaven. Without that, I think that we would have died of terror and fear.

Proclaiming Eternal Consequence

The Church must proclaim this infernal truth of the Gospel just as she proclaims the Gospel of saving divine mercy, since the two are intimately linked in Jesus’ teaching. In his 1994 book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II wrote that too often ‘preachers, catechists, teachers . . . no longer have the courage to preach the threat of hell.’

We must have that courage, but courage suffused with reverence and prudence and judgment

The (il)logic of hell is the (il)logic of sin, just as the logic of heaven is the logic of love for God-neighbor. Hell is illogical because hell is loveless. Our existence was willed by God from all eternity, and our destiny is to be in God for all eternity. Our existence bears within it the greatest gravitas, the ‘weight of glory,’ and the Church must proclaim to all peoples the greatness of our calling, of our destiny, and make plain what’s at stake should we fail to embrace and live the truth of who we are and why we were created. Such a loss would be a supreme tragedy, when God’s Christ has re-written history to be a divine comedy…

Amor Meus Crucifixus Est

In honor of this Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the name of which invokes Christianity’s supreme paradox, I thought I would share another poem I wrote on what theology looks like when it takes into its core the ‘Pasch’ of Christ, his brutal-glorious Passover from death to life, earth to heaven.

<– This close-up of Jesus’ feet in Grünewald’s Crucifixion has remained, for whatever reason, the primary image in my own theological imagination of the essential character of God that has been revealed to us in Christ Crucified.

Martin Luther, in his rich, pre-excommunication 1917 Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, says something that has deeply shaped my own theology, and which this poem attempts to capture a glimpse of: ‘He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.’ In other words, whatever it is we say that we can know about God through natural reason (e.g. CCC 37) must be subjected to the visio crucis, the viewing-lens of the cross.

It also implies that the true theologian must be someone ‘well acquainted with suffering,’ which, in my experience, has been the mark of those whom I consider the greatest theologians I have known. One of my favorite of all theologians is St. Maximus the Confessor, who, after many years of brilliant writing, began his final phase of theologically eloquent silence after his writing hand was chopped off and tongue cut out by the Byzantine Emperor’s order.

Stammering Mystery

This poem, by means of a not-usual language, also attempts to tease out from personal experience of theologizing the paradoxical labor of trying to give language to an absolute Mystery that places in irreconcilable tension God’s unutterable transcendence and His unthinkable nearness. Stepping into such paradoxy is a dangerous venture that still must be tried by the fearful theologian precisely because God Himself first engaged in it.

So, here it is…

Paschal Theology

Edgeless Truth, turgid sea bereft of shore

Enfolded, crazed by a love-made-small

in image-pressed clay, mind with a fiery core

hemmed in, erupted by a limitless call.

Man, worm and spirit, soil and Godded flesh

Betwixt and between, created and un-,

Dreaming of Dawn in a straw-strewn crèche;

Clay-thought wedded to an incarnate Son.

Sharp-edged Truth, unthinkable Sword

Without beginning, now begotten Twice

Truth and love entwined, slave made Lord

Word in Chalice outpoured, adored Thrice.

Dare I now speak, think, discourse at length on Thee

Made bold by Thine own out-emptied Word,

In unsaid silence I risk your sullied Face to see

Whilst chewing on mere-straw, food for strength

To gaze on you of whom I had once only heard.

Lovely Orientation

When I read Chris Warner’s article on Eastern Christianity, I was captivated by this line…

The East complements the Western need to act upon the world with missionary zeal by being more singularly focused on the liturgical and interior spiritual life of Christianity than its Roman counterpart.

Immodest Thinking

The proclivity of the West to intellectually master, dissect, analyze and dominate everything often spills over into theology as a temptation to siphon God’s mystery of its secrets. Theology, which is the exploration of divine revelation, begins as an act of patient waiting, of receptivity wrapped in a reverent awe of the God who speaks to those who listen in silent love. This proper posture toward God’s mystery we call prayer, as desert Father Evagrius affirmed when he said, the one who prays is a theologian; the one who is a theologian, prays.

Within academic theological circles there is a tendency, in my experience, to view prayer a mere act of sentimental piety peripheral to the work of real, rigorous thinking. To see a scholar thumbing her rosary beads before offering an erudite lecture on ‘theology in a post-Christian world’ would appear odd in the academy, a curiosity.

But for a Catholic theologian it must not be thus. Theology is not a disinterested dissection of a corpse, but a dangerous consummation of love with the living and risen Christ. And prayer is not only an affective movement, or a mere litany of requisition, but an intellectual suffering of the mind-blowing mystery of God that yields knowledge.

Thinking in God

In this sense, theology is fundamentally liturgical, inasmuch as in liturgy we become lost in the sacramental thickets of God-made-flesh and find ourselves caught up in a dialogue that has forever pulsed in the fathomless heart of the Trinity. Theology is thinking in prayer.

Imagine what ‘thinking in prayer’ must be like, if we are talking about the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Imagine if this God were, as St. Catherine of Siena once boldly worded it, pazzo d’amore, ’mad with love.’ To speak worthily of such a God we must balance careful thinking with careless loving; detached reflection with total immersion. Here we can affirm that the sober symmetry of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa requires the complementary inebriated tussle of St. Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue.

Such a praying ‘liturgical theology’ functions in much the same way the late Benedictine theologian, Aidan Kavanaugh, describes liturgy:

The liturgy, like the feast, exists not to educate but to seduce people into participating in common activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught.

If poetry is, as Wordworth says, ‘emotion recollected in tranquility,’ then theology is God-drenched thought recollected in tranquility.

Deus

A professor from my graduate theology study years once shared a first-hand account of a lecture presented by the famous Dominican spiritual theologian Fr. Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange during the early 1960s in Rome. He said that the aged Lagrange walked up to the podium and began the opening prayer with the Latin word, Deus, ‘God.’

‘Deus…Deus…De-…’ Lagrange was unable to proceed any further, and had to leave the auditorium. ‘But,’ the professor said, ‘it was clear to all who knew him that this was no stroke, that Fr. Réginald was seized, as he often was in his latter years, by a love for the God whose Name he could not speak without being drawn out of himself.’

As a saintly DRE once said to me after a lecture I gave on theology, ‘Thinking about God at this point in my life leaves me with little to say, but much to love.’

Perfect.

Healed!

The other day I was playing contemporary Christian music on Pandora and a song by Laura Story came on that knocked my socks off.

It’s called Blessings, and offers a rich and lovely reflection on the mystery of prayer, suffering and healing.

Paschal Grace

What I love most about it is that it eschews a vision of prayer and healing that sidelines the mystery of God’s paschal Providence. In other words, the truth revealed in Jesus is that God’s grace does not save us by extracting us from suffering in this life but by transforming us in the midst of suffering that we might freely and joyfully embrace the crosses that befall us for the glory of God and for the life of the world. The rising of the Next World dawns from the smoldering ashes of the Present; the joyous glory of Heaven germinates in a tear-drenched Earth. This must not be confused with a joyless vision of this life, since the truly redeemed person, defined by the Beatitudes, finds a cause for joy, thanksgiving and praise everywhere; even in life’s darkest valleys.

All-too-often, Christians (i.e. me) think that a ‘successful’ answer to prayer is only one that frees me from all troubles, sorrows, pain. While not minimizing the true grace found in such deliverance when it does happen, a Christian theology rooted in the New Testament sees that the supreme goal of healing is heroic virtue and absolute trust in God.

Fr Tom Hopko once quoted St John Chrysostom as saying, ‘I seek healing only that I might again rise from the dust to shoulder my cross more bravely…Lazarus was raised from the dead only that he might later wear the crown of martyrdom.’

If our prayer rests on the premise that the Cross is a curse to be shunned and avoided at all costs, then we will miss our taste of the richest and costliest grace poured from the opened side of Christ: sacrificial love offered on the altar of surrendered trust.

Okay Laura, tell us the Story….

Crucified God

Small Faith

A time ago, I was invited to be part of a one-time small faith-sharing group. They group was made of remarkable people from a remarkable diversity of backgrounds, but all were forged in a sense of common trust by their common Catholic Christian faith.

One story that was shared in particular remains with me to this day, and from it I wish to draw one theological point to which all my thinking returns again and again, in saecula saeculorum.

Imagine 

The group was thinking that day about the practice of imaginative prayer, or the ‘application of the senses,’ as St Ignatius would call it. This form of prayer essentially invites you to enter a biblical text with your imagination and allow the Spirit to ‘fuse’ you with one of the characters in a particular scene (e.g. Mary at the foot of the Cross); or simply allow you to enter the biblical story in a way that yields fruitful spiritual or moral insight into your own life.

This young man of ~30 years old told a remarkable tale of his venture into the inscape of his soul where God led him to a place and time ‘where he would not rather go.’ He said his spiritual director asked him to pray the text of St. Matthew’s Passion (beginning in 26:36), and as he did so he wondered with some hesitancy which character he might be led to identify with.

As he prayerfully mused, closing his eyes to think into the sensual world of the story, he ‘of sudden’ found himself back in a very expected and frightening place – in 6th grade in the back lot of his middle school watching a real-life scene he had long worked hard to forget. He said he found himself watching his best friend get beat up bad, while he just stood outside the circle and watched. And after the beating was over, and the young thugs cleared away, he found himself in that moment of ‘turning’ when he was about relive the awful shame of walking away without offering any aid or comfort to his bloodied friend.

At that moment, he said, his friend transformed in appearance into the Christ-of-the-Passion, sullied and marred. Jesus said, looking straight into his eyes, “I forgive you for leaving me, for abandoning me. For it is I who suffer in the innocent victim, and I who pardon.”

The young man sobbed, wailed aloud as he finished sharing these words of Jesus to him.

After he regained his composure, he said, “Now, I’m free from the shame I have carried for all these years. I died the day I walked away from my friend, but Christ raised me from the dead when he exposed my shame and forgave me.”

Christ-Wood

In addition to his own rich explanation of the meaning and healing power of his prayerful encounter with Christ, I would like to add that his story is the key that unlocks the secret of all divine revelation: in the final analysis God-in-Christ responds to the problem of evil not by pronouncing just judgment, but by being unjustly judged; not by passing a righteous sentence of death, but by being unrighteously sentenced to death; not by declaring the guilty innocent, but by being Innocence declared guilty; not by doing violence to fallen man, but by being felled under the force of man’s violence; not by wielding divine omnipotence, but by embracing human impotence; not by destroying the life that had been lost, but by losing His own life to destruction; not by binding death’s prisoners, but by being bound by death that He might untie the knot of death’s terrible illogic.

When we turn to God in times of darkness, our “Why,” before it finds answer finds a strange harmony with the voice of the One from whom we demanded an answer.

Even in the Night

Ellie Wiesel, in his stunning book Night, tells a story from Dachau – a child is hung for suspected sabotage. As the hanging boy turns blue, a voice rails out from behind Wiesel, “Where is God now?” Wiesel said an inner voice in his heart softly answered, “Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on the gallows.”

Ecce lignum crucis in quo salus mundi pependit, ‘Behold the wood of the cross on which hung the Savior of the world’

Torrential Sleep

As we approach the eve of the great and awe-inspiring Solemnity of the Assumption of the Mother of God (called the Dormition in the East), body and soul, into Paradise I could not help but recall the festal homily given by the Eastern Orthodox bishop-theologian, St. Gregory Palamas; who was also the subject of my M.A. Thesis.

His homily is a classic example of the hyper-excess that characterizes the liturgical language of the East, an excess that is employed strategically to bring the mind into the heart and approximate the excessive character of Divine Mystery by means of a veritable lexical tsunami. The East proposes two paths into God’s un-circumscribed Nature: the super-luminous poetic torrent of liturgy or dark silence.

So, here’s Palamas’ torrent, if you dare submit your mind to its torrential flow….

Both love and duty today fashion my homily for your charity. It is not only that I wish, because of my love for you, and because I am obliged by the sacred canons, to bring to your God-loving ears a saving word and thus to nourish your souls, but if there be any among those things that bind by obligation and love and can be narrated with praise for the Church, it is the great deed of the Ever-Virgin Mother of God.  Read more…

Transfigure us, O Lord

Today is the glorious Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, commemorating in the midst of the (northern hemisphere) summer blaze, and just prior to the summer Easter, the moment on Mt. Tabor that Jesus’ body was manifested to his three inner-circle disciples as the epicenter of the bewildering and beautiful splendor of His luminous divinity.

This is a soteriological feast, or a feast about the mystery of our salvation. It is a moment in Jesus’ public ministry that anticipates the Paschal Mystery as He converses with Moses-Elijah, icons of the Jewish Scriptures, about his impending passover exodus in Jerusalem, even as his very flesh radiates, in pre-dawn hues, the magnificent light of the resurrection.

But this wonderful sign, this terrifying unveiling of the Mystery is for us.  Jesus’ disciples, who in this scene are simply dumbstruck by what they see and hear, will soon be allowed to ingest, on the night the Passover-exodus arrives, that glorious Flesh of the slain-risen Lamb. They will share the Light of His transfiguration provided they freely embrace His exodus through the Cross — per crucem ad lucem.

Note below the bodily disposition of the disciples in the unveiled presence of this Mystery. St. Teresa would later mirror their bewildered bodies.

Next time you are at Mass and dare-approach the Sacrament of that transfigured Flesh, think of your bodily gesture of reverence as a ritual expression of this bewildered love…

A God named Why

Last night someone connected me with this priest-theologian named Fr. Brian Purcell, and all I can say is, I’m a believer!

Among many other things, he has contributed to this excellent youtube series called Catholicbyte. Below is one example where he speaks about the problem of suffering in bold and compelling terms. Take a look-see: