Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mistress of Theologians

A number of years ago, I happened on Bl. Angela of Foligno’s (1248-1309) writings and was absolutely bowled over by them.

Her Italian-Franciscan untidy love for God mixes with her brilliant mind and stunning eloquence.  She is patroness (aka ‘mistress’, which is the feminine form of ‘master’) of theologians, reminding those of us who dare to claim the title Theologian that ‘theology’ is, first and foremost, meant to be a first-hand, insider’s knowledge of the living and fiery God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that ravages the willing theologian and makes him/her like God. Or drives the unwilling theologian into madness.

It’s why I never am tempted to think of my work as anything other than undeserved gift, an unsought calling and a sacred burden.

A great and representative Angela quote where she refers to her state of union with God:

God is the one who leads me and elevates me to that state. I do not go to it on my own, for by myself I would not know how to want, desire, or seek it. I am now continually in this state. Furthermore, God very often elevates me to this state with no need, even, for my consent; for when I hope or expect it least, when I am not thinking about anything, suddenly my soul is elevated by God and I hold dominion over and comprehend the whole world. It seems, then, as if I am no longer on earth but in heaven, in God.

Pope Benedict said a few words about her that are a good taste test:

Two Favs

In the July spirit of retro posts, I want to set side-by-side here my 2 favorite (aside from my wife) contemporary female sacred music voices. Both very different, but (and here’s my true litmus test) both loved by my daughters.

The first is the sprightly Jamie Grace, the second the anointed Colleen Nixon. Take a listening gander:

Twins!

Today is the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle. A few fragments about him…

Thanks for the Beatitude, Tom!

Though he is so often known as the doubter, he is certainly no different than his apostolic brothers who also doubted not only the Magdalene’s testimony, but also still doubted even in the midst of worship after 40 days of resurrection appearances! We are most grateful to Thomas for his bold request to see and touch the Lord’s risen body because from that desire came Jesus’ wonderful and final beatitude: “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” That’s us!

And from that empirical encounter, Thomas offered a most extraordinary confession of Christ’s identity: “My Lord and my God!” How revealing that it was the probing of the un-healed Wounds that convinced him of Jesus’ divine identity. A lifetime of meditation.

Look-alikes

Thomas was also called Didymus, the “Twin” — likely because Didymus, the Greek word for twin, simply translates the Aramaic meaning of Toma, which also means twin. But another tradition has it that Thomas was given the Greek nickname because he looked like Jesus; a tradition reflected in some of the iconographic tradition. I like that one.

Far-East

From history, Thomas is best known for his unbounded zeal for spreading the Gospel to the ‘ends of the earth’ as he managed his way to Rome’s far-east trading outposts in India where there were some sizable Jewish diaspora communities. By tradition, he had great success and established a number of churches.

One of my favorite stories about Thomas in India, from among the many historically dubious stories that arose in the first few centuries after his death, is his response to a king’s request that Thomas (known as a skilled craftsman) build him a palace. Thomas, wishing to teach this king, spent all of the money given him by the king on alms for the poor, to whom his preached the Gospel. In response to the king’s enraged response, Thomas said, “I have built for you an imperishable palace in the heavens.”

A true Forerunner of India’s Great Saint of Charity, no doubt.

Indian Church

The history of the Christian communities in India is both fascinating and tragic.

And the eucharistic liturgies of India, deeply influenced by those of the Church of Syria, are quite spectacular and some of these liturgical Rites celebrated in the Catholic Church of India traditionally trace themselves back to Thomas. Take a moment to watch:

Summer Christmas!

Today’s solemn feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist — a veritable summer Christmas! — carries with it that rare distinction of supplanting Sunday’s ordinary liturgy.

In Luke’s Gospel, John the Baptist, seal and last of the great Hebrew prophets, forerunner of Christ, has a conception-birth that is intimately linked to Christ’s conception-birth. {note that John’s Nativity is six months before Christmas as John is six months older than Jesus.} When Mary visited Elizabeth, who was in her sixth month of pregnancy, John joyously ‘leapt’ in utero in the presence of the newly conceived Messiah and was, by Tradition, sanctified in the womb by a proto-waterless baptism that he would ‘supply ceremonies’ for later at the end of his life in a font of martyr’s blood.

John’s conception, birth, public ministry and martyrdom all serve to prepare the way for Christ’s own, and the Gospels affirm the link between Malachi 4:5-6, which foresees the Prophet Elijah’s return prior to the Messiah, and John the Baptizer.  Hence of late in the daily Mass readings we have bathed in the Scriptures about Elijah!

Let the Fire Fall

So much to say about John’s witness among the saints. Everything about him stood as a sign, a pointing-away toward Christ, which is the very essence of Christian holiness. He remained in ‘critical distance’ from Jewish society as he preached on the boundary of the desert along a muddy river, and was wholly dedicated to calling all strata of that society to a life in radical conformity with the covenant Law of Israel’s God. God was about to break into Israel’s history in a final and dramatic way to rescue her from the tyranny of sin, and John’s role was to prepare the way for that invasion by calling Jews to renounce their infidelities in the same waters their ancestors once crossed to take possession of the Promised Land; and the same waters Elijah crossed before being taken to heaven in a fiery Chariot.

They were to await the coming of the Fire that once burned the Law into Sinai-stone, as that Fire now burned among them, setting fire to water in order to re-inscribe the Law in hearts written in God’s image and likeness.

The fiery waters of Baptism began in us the work of inscription — but the divine Scribe awaits our daily consent to make of us a living Gospel to manifest to all the Word-made-flesh.

Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia!

I’m back, for those who still have Obstat on their radar.  It is good to be writing again after the tumult of our move from the Heartland to the Bayou.

And today is the feast of, among others, the man for all seasons, St. Thomas More.  He is a true patron of the lay vocation who found his martyrdom not as a church-mouse but precisely by living holiness in his in-the-world career as Lord Chancellor of England.  Vastly more to say about him, but I will save that for other days.  In the mean time, if you have not seen the movie A Man for All Seasons, you must first go to confession for not having seen it and then promptly rent it and watch it when you have three hours to spare.

Eight Days a Week

Before I take leave of you for today, I have to say at least something about the Ignatian 8-day retreat I was, through the sacrificial love of my family, able to go on in early June at IPF in Omaha. Utterly astounding. I will write many blogs out of the graces of those days’ insights, but let me just share a core snapshot here.

Sounds of Silence

Imagine eight days of total silence, broken only by daily spiritual direction and liturgical responses at Mass, organized around four separate hour-long periods of prayer each day.  Absolutely no technology, newspapers, et al, and my only reading material was Sacred Scripture.

In such an environment one finds oneself utterly vulnerable to Christ, exposed to his gaze by the progressive collapse of all of the buzzing, blooming confusion of one’s accumulated props, distractions, buffers, interference — noise.  I can find no better way to describe it than this — as I walked along Ignatius’ thematic itinerary each day (essentially a journey through Christ’s life-death-resurrection) I found myself suffering the mysteries presented for reflection each day.  Here by ‘suffering’ I simply mean undergoing and enduring.

And the mysteries I endured were not just intellectually intriguing theological insights (which I relish!) but the reality, the pith and kernel, the red-hot coals and refining Fire inside the hearth that burns hidden in the Sacraments. e.g. to gain insight into Christ as Truth is cool, but to suffer Christ as Truth is to come to know – and bid adieu to – all your alloys in his truthy Fire.

And in that suffering of the mysteries of Christ I discovered with new vigor a truth I thought I knew so well — the truth that, as St Thérèse would nicely word it, tout est grâce, all is grace.  In other words, absolutely everything I am/do that is of eternal and redemptive value is in the first instance a work of God in-with-through me. The very existence of the cosmos is absolutely dependent on God’s creative and sustaining act at every moment, and to begin to pray as if that were a raw fact is, let’s just say, a radical revolution.

In a word, it means for me to pray like her…

Pax.

Ascension Homily

Feast of the Ascension of the Lord – May 20, 2012

St. Augustin Parish – Des Moines, Iowa

Deacon Mike Manno

Readings: Acts 1: 1-11;  Ephesians 1:17-23;  Mark 16: 15-20

Good morning:

Today, of course, is the feast of the Ascension of the Lord.  It used to be celebrated on a Thursday, forty days after Easter, but in most of the United States it is celebrated on the Sunday following. I guess this is the Church’s version of all those holidays that Congress has moved to either a Monday or a Friday so we can have three-day weekends.

Of course we’ll have a three-day weekend coming up for Memorial Day, and I’m looking forward to that … as an old formula car racer I really look forward to the Indianapolis 500!

The first reading today talks about Jesus being taken up into heaven.  The angels who appeared to the apostles told them that Jesus would return in “the same way you have seen him going into heaven.”

So we have from our readings today the promise that Jesus will return again.  What we don’t know is when.  And there is something else we don’t know … and it is asked by Jesus in Chapter 18 of Luke’s Gospel about his return: “When the Son of Man comes,” he asks, “will he find faith on earth?”

Think about that for a minute.  Jesus confides in his disciples his concerns about what he will find when he returns, as we know he will.

So let’s ask ourselves, if Jesus were to return today, what would he find?  Would he find faith?

Listen to what our Holy Father told members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith last January: “In vast areas of the earth the faith risks being extinguished, like a flame without fuel. We are facing a profound crisis of faith, a loss of a religious sense which represents one of the greatest challenges for the Church today.”

            Ever increasingly we look out at a world that has substituted its own god for the God of Salvation.  It’s a god of accommodation with the world, not the God that has created the world; a god of rationalization, not the God of absolute truth; a god that we find in ourselves, not the transcended God that demands obedience.

Yes, obedience.

We have a God that demands as much and he set out rules for life in the Scriptures and especially through Jesus in the New Testament.  Jesus, you see, wasn’t just a first century sandal-clad hippy whose ministry preached peace and love – oh he did preach peace and love, but he also preached a gospel of faithfulness to God’s commands – and in speaking of hell, which he did with greater frequency than heaven, he warned that those who disregarded his commands would end up there.

So following up on the Pope’s remarks, are we being faithful to the whole Gospel, or just those parts of it with which we agree? Or are we compromising with the culture around us, and accepting lifestyles that go beyond God’s commands.

I don’t think anything is more illustrative of this than the recent conversation about so-called gay marriage.  Clearly there is a biblical injunction against homosexual conduct and just as clearly large numbers of people who call themselves Christian simply approve of it and ignore the Scriptural injunction.

Of course, the Church doesn’t ignore it.  And it has preached and campaigned against that conduct.  And we have condemned it; not the people, but the act.

But isn’t it interesting that it is homosexual sex that gets all the attention from the orthodox.  Jesus and Scripture condemn all out of wedlock sex, but how many of us wink and nod approval to our friends and children who are living in sin after deciding to “shack-up.”  Is that not as worthy of condemnation as gay marriage?

And what about those who live in adultery after a divorce who have not had their prior marriages annulled?  Is that not part of the faith that Jesus left us?  Or what about the millions of Catholics who contracept? That prohibition goes back to the Apostles and what would be called our first catechism, the Didache; yet where is the response to that? Is it only homosexual sex that we condemn?

And it’s not just sexual morality that concerns us; how about those that use the economic system to drive down the poor to their own advantage; or those who use the legal system to gain an unfair – yet perhaps legal – advantage over a competitor?

And there are good, Catholic families that discourage vocations in favor of grandchildren; as well as Catholic institutions that abandon their Catholic identities for political advantage.

Is not our faith a full, balanced meal? Yet far too many of us choose to dine à la carte, accepting only those truths that correspond to a private world view.

We rely on the excuse of our conscience to enable our rationalizations, rather than using our faith to inform our conscience.

Have we accommodated our faith to the surrounding culture so much that we can’t see what is happening?  Have we become so non-judgmental that we refuse to see sin where it exists?

But I suppose in a culture that is quickly trying to remove God from our societal discourse this should come as no surprise. We live in a society that is today governed by moral relativism rather than principles of truth; by tolerance of all forms of conduct rather than the commands of our God.

We may, in short, have reached the point Richard Niebhur suggested where we have created our own deity; a god without wrath who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministry of a messiah without a cross.

When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith?

Or will he find millions of lost souls whose accommodation with the world has left them empty and without hope.  Will he find a world full of fatherless children because we have disregarded the value of marriage and family?

And how many of our children will he not find because we have ended their lives in what should be the safest place for them, their mother’s womb? Will he find that we have lost the moral ability to draw a line between right and wrong, between faith and fantasy, or between heaven and hell?

Will he find us striving for the City of God or the City of Gomorrah?

When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith?

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A Canonical lawsuit?

Unfortunately, I found that Georgetown today lacks the integrity to consistently live the Catholic identity it claims.  While faith and spirituality are embraced at Georgetown, they are respected only so long as they are either confined within the walls of Dahlgren Chapel, or diluted to appease the dictatorship of relativism which is sweeping our civilization. Read more…

Magnify, do or die

In this month awash in Our Lady, I’d like to share a few words on her ‘song,’ the Magnificat.

Mary’s soul ‘magnifies’ (megalunei) the Lord. But how do you magnify the Infinite?

Here’s my take.

The invisible God longs to be made visibly manifested to us flesh-and-soul creatures who are stamped with his image. In biblical language, God wishes to show his glory in, to and through us. But he can only do that in those who freely consent to manifest the image-and-likeness he made us to be — to reflect his attributes (e.g. justice, mercy, kindness, patience, joy, love) in our very flesh and bones.

Mary accomplished this as no other. She not only manifested God, reflected his attributes, and shone with his glory, but she (gasp!) gave him our flesh and blood and bones so that he could be magnified for us to see, hear, touch, smell and taste. In Catholic lingo, she sacramentalized him, echoing his Opening Word, ‘let there be light,’ with her fiat, ‘let it be done.’

O Mary, intercede for us that we may magnify the magnificent glory of our majestic God.

{a personal note — my favorite contemporary setting of Mary’s Magnificat, worth the 99 cents}