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Archives for 2019

The Mother of God and the Incarnation

December 31, 2019

It is common to use evergreen boughs to decorate for the Christmas season. Like the image of the Burning Bush, the evergreen points us toward a mysterious source of life, a current just beneath the surface of our world, bursting through like a hidden spring at certain moments. Amid the entropy of our deciduous (Latin decidere, to fall into ruin, to die) world, signs point us toward this inexhaustible font. The contrast between the autumnal coloring of leaves and the steady greenery of needles, like the contrast between the sidereal firmament and plummeting meteors, speaks to us of a contrast between a permanent world, as yet only hinted-at, and the restless burgeoning and decay of the palpable.

The signs of permanence and stability, the evergreens, the stars, the Burning Bush, appear very much within our world of flux. This is itself significant, for it suggests that our salvation is not so much a separation from the material as it is a rejuvenation of the very cosmos itself. So says Saint Paul:

“Creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.”
—Romans 8: 20-21

It is because of this link between our salvation and the liberation of creation that the prophecies of the Old Testament have retained their value. Even after the Fall, creation has borne traces of its lost transparency as well as its destined rebirth. This is to say that creation itself has continued to point toward God its boundless Source. “Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things have been made [Romans 1: 20].”

Danger enters from the darkening of our intelligence that followed on the loss of trust in God. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil lost its sign value as a marker of God’s love and guardianship of Adam and Eve and became (falsely, by the trickery of the serpent) a counter-sign of a supposed arbitrary tyranny. Once faith has been broken by this kind of mistrust, creation ceases to speak lucidly. We ourselves are tempted to be entrapped by the disintegrative forces unleashed by sin, to try and hold on to creatures whose decay is meant to warn us to return to the source of life.

According the Wisdom of Solomon, our predicament can be thus summarized:

“From the greatness and beauty of created thing comes a corresponding perception of their Creator….as [the pagans] live among his works…they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful….But [they are] miserable, with their hopes set on dead things.”
—Wisdom 13: 6-7; 10

Even the chosen people of Israel needed constant reminding of the invisible and immaterial God Who communicates through the visible and material. It is significant (another “sign-being-made”) that in Hebrew, the same word, dabar, means “word” and “thing”—a commingling of the spiritual and the perceptible. The prophets communicated not only by speaking, but by proto-sacramental actions and objects. All of these point to the mystery that we celebrate this night, the sudden illumination, not of a lowly shrub on the side of Mount Horeb, but of the human race and all creation by the Motherhood of the Virgin Mary.

We can describe in minute detail how conception takes place, in terms of the mingling of genetic material and the implantation of an embryo in the tissue of its mother’s womb. But can we perceive how a human life, consciousness, the whole mystery of personhood is set in motion by these intricate biological events? Once more we are brought to the boundary between contingent materiality, and the mysterious Source of life itself. This Source has been at work since the beginning of time. Moses and the prophets, culminating in John the Baptist, pointed to its manifestations, celebrated in tonight’s antiphons. We the baptized have the joy of partaking in it:

“For in the mystery of the Word made flesh/a new light of your glory has shone upon the eyes of our mind,/so that, as we recognize in [Christ] God made visible,/we may be caught up through him in love of things invisible.”
—Preface I of the Nativity

May your New Year be filled with the illumination of the Son of God and His immaculate Mother! May we learn anew how to live sacramentally, pointing others to God’s manifestations in our world today.

Merry Christmastide!

The Incarnation, Joachim and Anne

July 17, 2019

How did Saint Anne, not mentioned in the Bible, become one of the most important saints of the Church’s second millennium? The answer has to do with the shifting role of the laity since the high Middle Ages and the central pivot point of the Incarnation in this shift. Let me begin with a personal anecdote.

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Is Patriotism a Christian Virtue?

July 3, 2019

The Fourth of July is, hands down, the loudest day in our Bridgeport neighborhood. It’s always amusing when we have a new person in the community this time of year, impishly warning them what is coming: an hours-long, non-stop barrage of explosions coming from every conceivable direction. Many of our neighbors leave for a few days, especially those with dogs. We, too, used to find a refuge away from the city. Hours of explosions throughout the night is not conducive to a contemplative atmosphere, to say the least. We’ve learned to make peace with the situation by watching edifying movies into the night and having a sleep-in on the 5th.

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His Most Sacred Heart

June 28, 2019

A few weeks ago, while shopping, I heard a song that took me back to the summer of 1985. I had fond and tranquil feelings associated with the song and that summer. This struck me as odd, seeing that in 1985 my parents were in the midst of a divorce. The song, “The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley (which I don’t particularly like), seemed to have taken me back to a much more specific memory. I spent a good deal of time that summer at a nearby park where the city of Green Bay organized a variety of activities. There were two girls, Dawn and Sally, who also spent time there, and we enjoyed flirting with each other in the then-innocent ways of fourteen-year-olds. One day, as I was aimlessly walking around a grassy part of the western end of the park nearest my home, I caught sight of them walking toward me. As if by some prearranged plan, they looked at each other and suddenly charged and tackled me to the ground, laughing. I was an extremely modest kid, disliking even to wear shorts in the summer except when playing basketball or running. I make this point because, in today’s hyper-sexualized world, it’s important to stress the overall chastity of this amusing expression of puppy-love, and the consequent effect, why it is what I remember about the summer of 1985. I wasn’t in the habit of thinking myself lovable at that time in my life, and I was genuinely surprised to have two attractive girls suddenly pay me such attention. Since that time, I’ve had experiences that evoked similar feelings, that of being lovable in spite of it all. Beginning in about my twenty-fourth year, I began to have this feeling more regularly, and almost always in connection with God rather than specific persons (though interaction with specific persons continued to occasion it).

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Solemn Vespers for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

May 25, 2019

[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end [Revelation 22: 13].”

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Solemn Vespers for the Easter Octave

April 27, 2019

[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]

The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was more than a new event within the old, tired world, laboring under sin and death.  In fact, it was the end of that world and the inauguration of a new creation.  All who are baptized into Christ belong to this new creation, and our lives “are hidden with Christ in God.”  As the first creation was made in six days, with God resting on the seventh, the new creation required a new day, the ‘eighth day’, a day outside of the closed cycle of the broken world.

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Form Focuses and Releases Energy

April 1, 2019

Today is Debbie Reynolds’s birthday. She is the most energetic woman I’ve ever seen on screen. What strikes me whenever I’ve watched her dance is this: her mastery of technique is what makes her energy so intense and infectious. Her poise and carriage are never tense nor slack; she is an icon of the (apparently) effortless channeling of the potential into the kinetic.

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Lenten Food for Thought

March 8, 2019

[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]

“The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent,” writes Saint Benedict, the Patriarch of Western monasticism and Patron of Europe.  What characterizes the life of a monk?  The vows that a Benedictine monk or nun makes today go all the way back to Benedict’s Rule, composed around the year 540 A.D.  Rather than the later ‘traditional’ vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Benedictines vow obedience, stability and “conversatio morum.”  The latter phrase is notoriously difficult to render into English.  The contemporary Benedictine who makes this vow is saying, “I promise to live like a monk!”  “Conversatio” is an entire ‘way of life’, and Saint Paul says that for all Christians, our true conversatio is in heaven [Philippians 3: 20].

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Can Faith Be Argued?

February 24, 2019

“We begin from faith, not reason. ‘Credo ut intelligam.’ But how does one argue faith?”

A friend recently asked me this question on a Facebook thread. The thread was about the degenerating relationship between the sexes, though the problem is clearly a more general one. That problem is one inherent in human nature and one that the institution of culture address: how do we resolve disagreements? I suspect that most of us, without reflecting on the problem, assume that we reason toward agreement. This would be terrific were it so; but this requires that we share premises and that we are skilled at drawing logical inferences from premises and applying them to particular cases. In other words, it requires that we be virtuous, using charity with our fellows and cultivating prudence.

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Grace in Retrospect

February 20, 2019

The Orthodox theologian John Behr has written that we live the faith going forward, but we understand it looking backward, as we see the mysterious working out of God’s grace in our lives and in the Church.

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