Monastery of the Holy Cross

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The Epiphany: God shines forth

In the Catholic Church, the season of Christmas extends through the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which we will celebrate this coming Sunday. The Baptism, in turn, is connected with the Epiphany, which most Catholics celebrated last Sunday.

We might mistakenly think that Epiphany just happens to be the time to commemorate the long trek of the Magi to Bethlehem: a touch of exoticism, perhaps even multiculturalism. Certainly we have multiple reminders in this week’s liturgy that the Epiphany marks the revelation of the mystery of the inclusion of the Gentiles.  But Church tradition sees in it something more profound, a truth indicated by the very name Epiphany, or “shining forth.”

Imagine that someone deposited a million dollars in your checking account. You would suddenly become a millionaire, but if this benefactor didn’t tell you he was doing this, you wouldn’t know. At some point or other, a lawyer or banker would share with you this good news. Suddenly, you would have the opportunity to live like a millionaire, which you couldn’t really do if you didn’t know you had the money.

At the Incarnation, the Divine Logos, by becoming man, by consenting to our mortal state, really and truly redeemed us. But we could not participate in this regeneration if Christ’s divine nature had not
been revealed to us. We could naturally believe that God is everywhere, we could trust God and hope in God, but in the Epiphany we have something greater than this: we see directly what God is doing, for He appears in our human form.

Much of what He does is what any person does: He’s born, learns to walk and talk under the guidance of His parents, learns a trade, makes friends, eats and sleeps, reads, works, recreates. But now we see God doing all these things, and in turn, all of these human activities become means of sanctification and union with God.

This shining forth extends into the liturgy. We can now observe all aspects of the liturgy and see God at work, using architecture, iconography, song, poetry, vesture, ritualized movements and gestures, bells, incense, wood, marble, silk, wax, oil, water, wine, and bread.

These have all been imbued with spiritual depth because of the Incarnation. But it is the mystery of the Epiphany that unlocks these depths, that invites us to use our senses to mount heavenward upon material scaffolding.

The third traditional mystery of the Epiphany is the changing of water in wine at Cana. Within the water all along was the potency to be wine, but until our Lord responded to Mary’s plea, we couldn’t see it. Now all of the formerly pallid and mundane circumstances of the world can suddenly leap to life, like an old black and white film colorized.

Anyone could have followed the star to Bethlehem. In other words, this appearance and shining forth was not yet like the Second Coming, like lightning flashing across the sky. It was possible to miss the signs.

The Magi, it is often said, were probably astronomers, those tasked with mapping the heavens and predicting the movements of the planets, sun, and moon, and of noting disturbances like comets. These signs were understood to be communications from the gods.

So the Magi were already watching, seeking a sign and communication. And when they received it, they responded by reverent worship and pilgrimage.

How much time do we spend watching for God and listening for His instructions? It is possible that my own distractions have caused me to miss the star, or perhaps my own attachments have kept me from setting off to see where it leads.

That you are reading this suggests you are trying to be attentive. May God send forth His light and truth into our hearts today, that our awareness of His love and salvation may change our lives.

Homily for the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome

Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, it seems like a good moment to reflect on the subject of ecclesiology. Ecclesiology means the study of the ecclesia, the Church.

What is the Church? What does it mean to be a member of the Church? These questions are not as easy to answer as we might think at first blush.

For example, when we ask what the Church is, the answers that we get from theologians vary, depending on the perspective from which we view the Church. It is the mystical Body of Christ. It is the sacrament of salvation for the world. It is the People of God, or the Perfect Society, through which we, the members, receive grace and are sanctified and perfected in union with our shepherds, the bishops, under the special care of the Holy Father, Christ’s vicar on earth. And of course, any one of these “models” is itself a mystery, and therefore open to ongoing reflection.

I would like to offer the idea of the Church as a kind of fractal, just to make things at first even more mysterious and perhaps overly complicated.

What is a fractal? In certain popular usages of the term, it refers to a shape that is made up of several connected versions of the same shape on a smaller level. Imagine, for example, a snowflake, with it six points. Now imagine taking six of the same snowflakes and connecting them around a center so that it makes a new hexagonal snowflake. And imagine that this new snowflake has the same shape as each of the six smaller snowflakes. That’s what I mean by fractal in the case. As we zoom our or zoom in, we see the same shape emerge each time. That shape is repeated at different levels.

So, there is one Church, as we say in the Creed. That is because Christ Himself is the One mediator between God and Man, and the Church is His Body and His Bride. There can only be one Bride for Christ and that is the Church.

Now, a brief side note on the Lateran Basilica. Just over two thousand years ago, in the City of Rome, there was a family that had recently become a part of the wealthy class in pagan Rome, and their name was the Lateran family. They built a palace on the site of what is today the Lateran Basilica. This palace was confiscated by the Emperor Nero and became part of the government’s property. Three hundred years later, when the Emperor Constantine became Christian, he donated that former palace to the pope at the time, Pope Miltiades, and it became the seat of the bishop of Rome. The building was destroyed several times, and the current building was built over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fourteenth centuries, the building was destroyed by two fires while the pope had moved his administration to the city of Avignon in France. When Saint Catherine of Siena persuaded Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome, he found the Lateran Basilica completely in ruins. So he moved his administration to Saint Peter’s Basilica on the Vatican hill, and this is where the pope continues to exercise his governance of the Church. However, the Lateran remains the cathedral church of Rome, and therefore is the Mother Church of the entire Roman Catholic world. Hence our celebration today. It is a sign of the unity of the Church under one pope, and a sign of the Incarnation, inasmuch as there can be only one Mother cathedral, and for God’s purposes, He chose Rome to be the home of this church.

Now, let’s return to the idea of a fractal. So, you remember that I said that when either zoom in or zoom out, we see the same shape emerge. This is what we find in the ecclesiology, when we look at the Church. When we zoom all the way out, we see the universal Church, with billions of members all around the world and in heaven and in purgatory. A glorious sight to be sure.

But when we zoom in, we don’t find an isolated “piece” of the larger Church. We find a diocese. And at the head of the diocese is the Bishop. And by dint of his ordination as bishop, he is just as much a successor of the Apostles as is the bishop of Rome. One of the principles vigorously enunciated at the Second Vatican Council is that each bishop receives his power and authority directly from Christ, not from the pope. The pope receives particular powers reserved to him, but the normal powers of a bishop, to teach and preach, to celebrate the sacraments, and to govern the Church, comes directly from Christ. This means that each diocese is, in some way, the fullness of the Church in a local, miniature setting. The whole, single, Church is present, and this is especially visible when the bishop celebrates the sacraments. For Christ is acting in the fullness of His power through the bishop.

Now, if we zoom in yet another level, we get to the parish. Again, the parish is not simply a piece of the diocese. There is, again, a sense that the fullness of the Church is present locally, through Christ’s ministry, now through the instrument of the priest. Now, we should say that the parish is a more inadequate symbol or instantiation of the universal Church. For example, a priest cannot celebrate the sacraments without the permission and mandate of his bishop, and certain sacraments are reserved to the bishop, such as ordination or the consecration of an altar. Certain decisions belong to the bishop. But even if the picture is slightly dimmed, this does not mean that the fullness of the Church is not actually present when the priest acts in the person of Christ, whether teaching governing or sanctifying.

This fractal nature of the Church is denoted by the fact that we celebrate three church dedications each year. Today we celebrate the Church’s unity at the highest level. On October 11 each year, we celebrate the dedication of the diocesan cathedral, in our case the archdiocesan cathedral of Holy Name downtown. And last but definitely not least, we celebrate the dedication of each parish or religious church. In our case, this is on October 24. And this celebration at the most local level is the highest-ranking, liturgically speaking, of the three.

This means that while today’s celebration is a feast in this church, in Rome it is a solemnity, the highest-ranking category of a liturgical celebration. This once more connects us to the Incarnation. It is God who has chosen to consecrate this place to Himself, and it is likewise God Who chose to consecrate the Lateran basilica. He does this to deepen His relationship with the actual people who come here. But we are never, for that reason, isolated from the other churches. We recall on this day each year that our small community is not just a piece of the universal Church, but in some way makes present the entirety of the Church, which is best understood from the perspective of the ministry of unity given to Saint Peter and his successors.

So, we can give thanks to God this day for calling us to be members of His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, and for reminding us that what we see here, however humble it may appear, is in fact an opening to the grand and glorious city of the redeemed, an opening to the kingdom where we hope to enjoy God’s glory forever. Amen.

Homily for the Solemnity of the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Church

[The dedication of our church took place on June 19, 1910.  The monastery now transfers the Solemnity of the Anniversary of the Dedication to October 24.]

The Church’s liturgical directives instruct us to celebrate each year the anniversary of the dedication of the church building. This year we celebrate 115 years since this building became what Saint Benedict calls an oratory: a place consecrated to prayer. Saint Benedict goes on to say that the oratory should be what it is called: we come here to pray.

Eleven years ago, Cardinal George consecrated our new altar, and so we had a smaller-scale experience of what a church dedication looks like. The first thing to notice about it is that it can only be done by a bishop, in other words, by someone who is a part of the line of apostolic succession. A bishop is the spiritual descendant of those men upon whom Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit, commissioning them to teach, govern, and sanctify. The bishops share this commission with their helpers, the priests and deacons, but the most important actions are reserved for the bishops, who bear the fullness of Christ’s sacramental priesthood.

When any item is blessed, it is set apart in some way as dedicated to God, and therefore it bears something of God’s holy presence. Holy water, for example, can drive out the simpler demons. When we were baptized, we were set aside for God, and God took up residence in our souls. When this happens, it is as if a light goes on inside us, and we become spiritually alive. Certain latent powers, rooted in the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, are activated and begin to grow. This illumination that takes place is signified by the candle, lit from the Easter candle, Christ Himself, and given to the newly baptized.

When a priest is ordained, this process takes on a specific contour: not only is God present in the soul of a priest, but Christ now promises to act through the priest in specific ways. Again, a certain latent potency in a man is activated, and God’s sanctifying power now manifests itself in the priest changing the elements of the Eucharistic sacrifice into Christ’s Body and Blood, to note the most radical example.

And so it was with this church, when the bishop anointed its walls and the stone of the altar. In the case of our new altar, the relics of Saint Benedict and Saint Vincent of Saragossa were buried inside it, incense was placed on the altar, and finally a candle. And at this point this building came alive spiritually, as it were, and became God’s dwelling place. Every time we light the candles at the altar, we recall this in a profound way—this is one reason why the Eucharist is never celebrated without the candles being lit.

When the lights come on in the Church, or when the sun streams in through the stained glass windows, we see signs that this is a holy place. The images, the altar and the canopy above it, called a reredos, the twelve columns signifying the twelve apostles: these are those latent objects that become illuminated, alive with God’s presence because they are in a holy space. And all this ornamentation is meant to show us who we are as a Church. For we are being built into God’s dwelling, we are the stones being sanctified.

There is so much to dwell on in this theology, but time being limited, let me offer two brief final observations.

First of all, you are aware that this building has undergone a lot of repair in the last few years. In this world that has become infected with sin, objects are subject to decay and decomposition if they are not regularly repaired and renewed. Sometimes this work requires vigorous scraping, even removal of decayed brick and wood, before new brick, wood, and paint can restore the original beauty. This is a sign for our souls: sin has caused all of us to lose the original glory that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the garden. But God’s rescue mission is restoring this glory and spiritual beauty. Sometimes this requires scraping and extraction from us of improper attachments and so on, and this can be painful. In our suffering, it’s important to set our eyes on the goal, which is the beauty and glory that we will enjoy for all eternity with God and the saints. A beautiful church assists us by giving us a glimpse of what this will be like.

Which brings me to my second point. For this encouragement to take root in us, it is helpful to expose ourselves to it. The brothers will tell you that I frequently remind them not to close their eyes at the liturgy. I don’t bring this up to shame anyone, but to point out that in our modern context, our tendency is to seek God within ourselves, and more or less exclusively within ourselves. I have already said that He dwells within us because of baptism, so this is not entirely wrong. But interiorly, we are not yet fully purified, or at least I’m not, and I’m guessing that most of us aren’t. All the visual, aural, and olfactory cues in the church, dedicated to God’s glory, remind us that the goal of salvation is much greater than ourselves. Not only that, but the church is a symbol for a well-ordered soul, and therefore helps us to know how to identify God’s presence within us. What should we look like interiorly? Are we ornamented with images of salvation history and the examples of the saints? Is the incense of constant prayer filling us? Are we offering regular sacrifice to God upon the altar of our hearts? How might we grow as Catholics by today’s celebration? How might the illumination of our souls bring God to the world today?

Natural contemplation, the meaning of creatures, and the end of the virtues

When I initially read Cassian’s first Conference, I found the discussion there of the goal (scopos) and end (telos) of the monk to be interesting but not particular engaging on a personal level. Over the years, as I re-read it, it occurred to me that the problem was the entire worldview that formed me. This worldview sees no goals to anything in the cosmos, depicting it as the open-ended development of initial conditions and inputs of force and motion. That matter and energy happened to produce human beings, gemstones, scorpions and tornadoes is a quirky and ultimately inexplicable part of this random development.

It was through reading Dante, Charles Williams, Chesterton and MacIntyre that I gradually came to understand the perfections of creatures, first on an intellectual level of assent, and eventually at the level of the heart, of appreciation and gratitude. This helped to open up for me what Evagrius calls natural contemplation: the graced ability to see creatures from the spiritual perspective, the perspective of God and the angels, the perspective of eternity.

Natural contemplation means accepting that creatures have meaning. They have ways of flourishing and ways of failing to flourish. We participate in God’s life-giving grace when we work towards this flourishing—or even simply allow it to happen, take note of it, and give God glory.

An example that I have frequently used to illustrate this is that knives are meant for cutting things, and they work best when we understand the type of knife that we are holding. When we use a serrated knife with the right pressure, allowing the blade to gain purchase on the bread crust, we can gently guide it, according to its nature, through the bread. But when we use it like a guillotine, pressing straight down until the piece of food pops apart, the knife, as if objecting to being handled incorrectly, issues a loud report from the plate (which is perhaps also objecting to our misuse of its nature).

We go a step further when we use a knife as if it were a screwdriver or prybar. Sadly, this is a common mistake, to judge by the number of knives in our kitchen that are missing tips. But it is an outgrowth, even if a somewhat trivial one, of a worldview that gives objects no meaning, no goal, no nature. Since they have no inherent telos, we are free to make use of them as our wills desire. And so a knife becomes a screwdriver, and in secular culture men become women and women men.

If we lack the ability to be receptive to the goal or end of other creatures, is it really a surprise that we struggle to see our own lives as goal-driven? Human beings flourish in predictable ways. We will move toward this type of flourishing life not by examining our inner movements, but by attending to objective standards like the virtues.

All of the activities of the monastery gain their worth from what they contribute to a growth in virtue and an awareness of our final destination. At the judgement, God will not ask us if we got our work done on such and such a date, but if we labored to serve our neighbor in love, or if we sacrificed ourselves for the poor. We will not be asked if we were true to ourselves, because who we are in Christ is something beyond our ability to discern at the moment.

Fr. Timothy recently mentioned a reading from Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She says that, at the end times, God will reveal our proper name to us: we won’t understand fully who we are until then. But virtue will help offer us glimpses along the way. If we are growing in virtue, we are more likely to understand creatures from a proper theological perspective. If we are growing in virtue, we are more likely to be asked to step out of our present comfort zone and take up a task that will stretch us, perhaps quite a lot. But if we lack virtue, others will be reluctant to give us those opportunities to learn whether we have the skill to serve the community and the Church at a new level.

Liturgy and Rationalism

When I was younger, I wrote a lot of poetry. Often it took the form of song lyrics. But sometimes it was just poetry for its own sake, because I love poetry. One of the things about writing a lot when you’re young is that your work sticks around. You can read it when you get old and think, “This wasn’t very good.” Or more importantly, “This reveals more about me than I realized at the time. I didn’t recognize that feeling or insight for what it really was.” Occasionally, you discover, “Oh, there is actually an insight here that I didn’t even know I had at the time.” This comes about because, when we’re trying to make poetry work, we’re not using just our rational faculties. We’re using a certain kind of intuition, a felt, tactile sense of reality. We want to feel how the words fit together and create a rhythm together. When we’re writing poetry, we’re accessing our embodiedness in a way that we don’t when we’re writing an essay or an instructional manual.

I believe that an analogous process has taken place in the Liturgy. As Catholics, we profess that the Holy Spirit guides the Church in its development, and therefore that He also guides the development of the Liturgy. The Liturgy was assembled over many centuries by different people working in different places under different influences. These people made choices whose consequences none of them could have anticipated. The Holy Spirit may have inspired them to move in some way, knowing that a certain intuition would bear fruit 300 years later. Also, new people arose over time, bringing new insights. One example is William Durandus, a prominent medieval commentator on the Liturgy. Today, not everyone agrees that his works serve as a good critical resource for understanding the meaning of the Liturgy. But they do provide a snapshot in time: what people in the 14th century understood the Liturgy to be. This is different from what people in the 11th century thought or people in the 21st century think. To a certain extent, each period’s insights are valid, and we can learn from them all.

The problem with rationalism is that it takes an abstract schema—for instance, revealed truths, arranged in a certain order—and then imposes that on the Liturgy. It gives us the illusion of control over the Liturgy and tempts us to exercise it. But it misses the intuitive aspects that were put there either deliberately by human choice or unknowingly under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

This is a challenge for the Church in our time. The reforms that happened after Vatican II were infected with rationalism. But rationalism was never sufficient to the task of comprehending and communicating the mystery that the Liturgy celebrates. This is why it’s important that we access earlier versions of the Liturgy and use them to help us understand the current one.

The Ultimate (Sacred) Musician

In the Catholic tradition, one composer stands above all the others in eminence for capturing the essence of liturgical music. This year, we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Pierluigi di Palestrina (1525-1594), whose impact on both sacred and secular music in the West can hardly be calculated. On Saturday, October 18, at 5:15 p.m., here at the Monastery, we will be celebrating Solemn Vespers during which all of the choral compositions will be pieces by Palestrina. That we have such a selection of his music is itself an indication of his importance as a liturgical composer.

What is it about Palestrina’s art that stands above other Catholic composers? To answer this, it might help to take a step back and examine some theological questions.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

The Christian faith is based in God’s self-revelation. However, God’s “unveiling” is always paradoxical. That is because no matter what we can say about God, there always remains an infinite amount that we do not yet know. All theology, if it is to avoid becoming something idolatrous, must bear this paradox in mind. Theologians must speak cautiously about the true and infinitely free “God-Who-Is” and not be satisfied with a lesser but more manageable god conjured up and constrained by logic and syllogisms.

With this in mind, we can see how the Church’s liturgy is an important source for theological reflection. In the liturgy we hear Christ speak through the Scriptures and we experience His actions as members of His Body. The liturgy conveys something of the sovereign majesty of God as the One Who is always greater than what we can know. The Church has traditionally conveyed this excess of meaning through the liturgical arts.

For example, the liturgy takes place in buildings that convey mystical truths through architectural and ornamental symbols. Bishops, priests, and deacons wear elaborately decorated vestments that cloak their individuality and suggest other presences. Icons and statues convey their mysteries through the medium of visual art.

But the art that best symbolizes God’s mysterious presence is surely music. Music communicates the divine by being meaningful while nevertheless remaining opaque to verbal descriptions. Nothing I can tell you about a piece of music can take the place of you hearing it. And whatever meaning a piece of music has for me, any attempt to explain that meaning runs the risk of trivializing it.

Palestrina’s work has long been recognized as being particularly apt at finding this balance of intelligibility and mystery. His compositions have the power to move the emotions deeply without ever becoming sentimental, grotesque, or manipulative.

In the coming weeks, I plan to offer a series of blog posts discussing why I believe that the honors given to Palestrina are well-deserved. Hopefully readers will come to understand why he is considered one of the greatest composers of all time.

Since I have said that there is no verbal substitute for hearing an actual piece of music, we can hardly begin a commentary or exposition without some experience of what his music sounds like. Here is one of his most famous pieces, the Kyrie eleison of his Missa Papae Marcelli, the Mass for Pope Marcellus.

As we conclude this introductory post, keep these three things about Palestrina in mind…

The first is how his music flows without becoming nebulous. Palestrina was part of what was already a long tradition of liturgical composition. An earlier high point of this history sprang from the composers of the “low countries,” what we now call the Netherlands and Belgium. Composers like Adrian Willaert (ca. 1490-1562) aimed to offer us a taste of the vast angelic choirs through a technique called “seamless polyphony.” In my opinion, this is an extremely beautiful style. As implied by its name, the music flows seamlessly, without jarring transitions. The very lack of transitions can become its own problem, however. Liturgical music is based upon texts, which are broken into phrases and clauses, and Palestrina’s art honors this textual background especially well, balancing the need for transitions that are distinct yet never abrupt or jarring.

Second is the effortless beauty that suggests more than it says. As a general rule, Palestrina did not attempt to “interpret” the text by implying any kind of emotional affinity between the words and his musical setting. The approach that seeks to encode the music with an emotional  or figural illustration of the words is sometimes known as “word painting.” It would be embraced by the great composers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries like Handel and Bach. I will have a lot to say in later posts contrasting the genius of Bach and Palestrina. For now, let us just note that Palestrina, by avoiding any kind of interpretation, gives more of an impression that the music arises of its own accord, rather than being the product of a human mind. Word painting techniques can create a certain distractions by calling to mind the cleverness of the composer.

Third, whatever music you might need for any given liturgy, Palestrina has likely done a version of it. He lived right at the moment of the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church was in the midst of sustained reflection on the meaning of the liturgy, which had come under attack from certain Protestant Reformers. Palestrina translated the musical principles of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) into an extremely fertile set of practices which became standard for Western music in general for the next four centuries. Every composer from Buxtehude to Brahms relied on the craft of Palestrina when honing his own techniques. Even today, when a composer wants to suggest the sacred, he will often rely on methods perfected by Palestrina and the generation of composers to which he belonged.

The heart of this technique was the way that composers handled dissonance, which will be the subject of the next post.

* “Rightly, then, the liturgy is considered as an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ.”–Sacrosanctum concilium [the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II]

The Faces of the Transfiguration

In the beautiful mystery of the Transfiguration that we celebrate today, Saint Matthew tells us that Jesus’s face shone like the sun. It is a dazzling image. Do we have any analogous experiences of this?

I think that we do. Many years ago, I helped plan a surprise birthday party for a good friend. When he arrived at the restaurant where about thirty of us were hiding in a banquet room, he was expecting something like a quiet meal with his wife. When he entered the banquet room, he began to recognize all of us. As he looked around the room, his face very much “lit up!” It was a recognition of love, that all of these friends had made time to show him appreciation.

The second example I often reflect on is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Toward the end of her life, she was quite bent over, and her face was lined and tanned. Yet, whenever she saw someone, especially a young person, her face would simply beam.

What we see in the face of Christ is this light of intimate love. The Father says, “This is my Beloved Son!” The effect of this love is illumination: most especially of the face of Jesus, but also of all around it. I have already hinted that this potential is in every human face. Indeed, God wishes that all of us will one day shine with the same transfiguring light. Every person we meet today—whether it be a coworker, a beggar, an elevated train conductor, or a spouse—is loved by God in his or her innermost reality. That great light is waiting to shine forth when we have experienced the purifying fire of God’s love. May we live this reality today and every day!

Corpus Christi in Bridgeport

Last Sunday, we celebrated Corpus Christi with a Eucharistic procession. We processed around our neighborhood of Bridgeport, singing hymns. It’s always a bit amusing to see the reactions of unsuspecting denizens when they see us coming! We also had some students from the Chicago College of Performing Arts (at Roosevelt University) join us, singing Mozart’s Eucharistic motet Ave verum corpus (Hail, true Body!) and other music. It was an uplifting experience making a public confession of our faith in the loving Lord Jesus Christ, Who continues to nourish us spiritually and to guide us toward His kingdom.

I don’t believe that anyone in the neighborhood was doing Corpus Christi processions when we arrived. About twenty years ago, we approached Father Donald Craig, then the pastor of our nearest parish, Saint Mary of Perpetual Help, about collaborating on a procession. He was extremely enthusiastic, and for many years, we joined forces with the parishioners there. Now we each do our own separate processions (and cover more ground that way!). And it seems that these processions are really making a big comeback, here in Chicago and in other U.S. cities, which is very encouraging.

Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life

“I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” (John 6: 51)

Our Lord’s language in this excerpt from the “Bread of Life” discourse brims with connections to the mysterious Prologue of Saint John’s gospel. In particular, in John 1: 14, we read, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Saint John prefers this word, “flesh” to “body,” which is the preference of the synoptics. The one significant exception to this is quite telling: in Luke 24: 38-39, the risen Christ reassures His disciples, saying, “‘Why are you troubled, and why do questionings arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.’” God’s Son still manifests Himself in our human flesh.

Returning to the evangelist, Saint John, we see that his mystical gospels is, paradoxically, the earthiest, and this contrast was a challenge to His hearers in first-century Palestine, as it is for many today. In his first epistle, Saint John finds it necessary to stress the saving power of the Incarnation: “Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God [1 John 4: 2-3].”

Thus the flesh of Christ provides an occasion for a sorting out of spirits. This is exactly what we find when we look back at John Chapter 6. The crowd begins to grow restless. When Jesus says, “my flesh is good indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him [vv. 55-56],” the crowd (who had witnessed the multiplication of the loaves the day before!) objects. “This is a hard saying!” and “How can this man give us his flesh to eat [vv. 60 & 52]?” Saint John then remarks, “After this many of his disciples drew back, and no longer went about with him [v. 66].”

This sorting of the spirits perhaps offers partial explanation for the fact that early Christians exercised reticence about sharing the profound mysteries of the faith publicly, even with catechumens. This practice, known today as the disciplina arcani, or the ‘discipline of the secret’, began in the centuries of persecution, but persisted for about two hundred years after Constantine’s conversion began the process of making Europe Christian.

Once the Church became the dominant cultural engine in the West, disputes about the Incarnation reemerged. Whereas the Fathers of the Church, most notably Saint Irenaeus and Saint Athanasius, had successfully resisted the denial of the reality of Jesus’s body (known as the heresy of Docetism), the focus began to shift to the Holy Eucharist, the very flesh of Christ now truly present in the Blessed Sacrament. While the controversies surrounding the denial of the Real Presence did not carry many away from the faith, they were not put to rest until the reintroduction of Aristotle’s philosophy in the West. As a celebration of the triumph of the true doctrine of the Eucharist, the Church instituted today’s feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord. Pope Urban IV commissioned Saint Thomas Aquinas to compose the liturgy, and we are singing his antiphons and his hymn today. With the advent of Eucharistic Processions, the Real Presence of Christ became a public proclamation.

In the modern era, perhaps an underappreciated challenge to the Church’s teaching on the Incarnation is the place of the Church, which is Christ’s Body in the world today. As we adore Christ in the Holy Eucharist, let us ask the Holy Spirit to enliven our sense of the Mystical Body, formed and fed by Christ’s Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. And may our sharing of the One Bread make us a clear sign of the one destiny of the human race, an instrument of the mercy of God in the world today! May Christ, the Bread of Life, sustain us, strengthen us, and transform us into His presence for a waiting world.

Homily for Ascensiontide

We are in the midst of Ascensiontide, a brief liturgical season that falls between the feast of the Ascension and that of Pentecost. For forty days after the Resurrection, Jesus continued to appear to the disciples, and He taught them. It’s intriguing to speculate on what He taught during this mysterious period of time, but we can’t know the specifics with any certainty.

What we do know from Scripture is that after the Ascension, the Apostles did not immediately go out and start preaching. Jesus told them to wait in the city until they were clothed with power from on high, the Holy Spirit. He also told them that the Holy Spirit would remind them of everything He had told them. And indeed, we will see next week that the gift of the Holy Spirit transforms the Apostles into men on a mission to spread the gospel.

But back to today: where exactly are we in this story? I’d like to make two points about the liturgy today, relevant to the Ascension.

First what are we doing at the liturgy? Are we simply commemorating something that happened 2000 years ago, and meditating together on Jesus’s triumphant entry into heaven? There’s nothing wrong with doing this, and, in some sense, we do this every time we pray the Second Glorious Mystery of the rosary. But in the liturgy, something else is happening. We are touching eternity, and there is a sense that we are being invited to enter personally, truly into the dynamism of the mystery that we celebrate, that it is we who are ascending into heaven, the Body of Christ ascending with Jesus Christ the head of the Mystical Body.

On Ascension Thursday, in the opening prayer, called the Collect, we prayed this: “Where the Head has gone before in glory, the Body is called to follow in hope.” So we are following Christ toward heaven, and we do this by the theological virtue of hope. Maybe a good way to look at this is that objectively speaking, we are saved, we are ascending into heaven, it’s happening. But subjectively, we don’t fully feel or experience all the effects just yet.

What keeps us from experiencing the full effects? What is the purpose of waiting, of hope? Where are we going?

We are going toward God, Who is infinitely mysterious. We can never fully grasp Who God is or what it means to share life with Him. There is always some aspect of God towards which we are in the dark. This is why at the Monastery, we follow the ancient custom of the Church by not lighting the Easter Candle during Ascensiontide. We had seen Jesus resurrected in the flesh, but then he ascended, going before us toward the Father. We lost sight of Him, at least as we had known Him before. This absence is a reminder that, however well we know God at this point, there is still more to be revealed and discovered.

During Ascensiontide, we are in the position of waiting for Jesus to be revealed in a more profoundly spiritual manner. And this requires the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Now if you look in the leaflet that we put out for you that has the translations of the prayers, you will see how we are asking God today to help us experience Jesus’s abiding presence. We ask that we may, like Christ, pass over to the glory of heaven, and so on. Now, returning to this idea that our knowledge of Jesus and of God the Father will always be less than the reality, we can see a bit more what we are doing today and why we celebrate this each year.

We are always in the state of needing the Holy Spirit to enlighten our hearts, to give us a stronger faith. We are always, to some extent, in the dark about the reality of God. So we should pray every day to the Holy Spirit: come Holy Spirit, and fill the hearts of your faithful. Today’s liturgy puts us right in the middle of this dynamic of rising ever closer to the reality of heaven that we seek.

Alright, I promised two points about the liturgy. Here is number two. I asked earlier about what we are doing at the liturgy, and now we should ask what the liturgy is, exactly.

The Second Vatican Council taught that the liturgy is the action of Jesus Christ the high priest. So what we are doing every time we gather for the liturgy is making visible to ourselves and the world what Jesus in glory is doing for us and the world. We are not doing this ourselves, hoping to get God’s attention. God has fundamentally initiated this encounter, and we are merely responding, as best we can. And what Jesus Christ the high priest is doing is uniting us to God, giving us a glimpse into heaven itself, which He can do in his human nature, now that He has ascended.

This reveals that somehow human nature is not an abstract quality that we each participate in. Rather, in some mysterious way, our natures are made for union with each other at this spiritual level. This is why we can say that Christ, in His human nature, has raised all of us up to heaven. And while we are made for union, this unity is something that Christ invites us to achieve with His help by our willingness to make a sacrifice or gift of ourselves to God and to each other. This is why Jesus prays in today’s Gospel, “that they may all be one.”

And is this not the great gift that the Church can offer the world at the moment, a vision of human unity in God? Certainly Pope Leo believes this, which is why we chose as his motto, “In the One, we are one.”

We begin that work at the liturgy itself. This begins with our turning our hearts and minds toward Jesus seated at God’s right hand, as we sing each Sunday in the Gloria, and then asking Him to deepen our faith, to illuminate our minds at a more intensely by the gift of the Holy Spirit. He responds by sending the Holy Spirit to consecrate the bread and wine, to unite us by the sharing of the One Body. Then, like the Apostles, we are sent into the world to share what we have heard and seen.

Those waiting for us in the world are often experiencing profound uncertainty and unease. Let us be the presence of Christ for them.