Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Contemplative Prayer

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.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The Second and Third Precautions Against the World

(Here is the Introduction to this series and the First Precaution.)

The second precaution against the world regards the attraction that temporal goods have for us. A family has certain financial needs that a religious does not.  But for the lay person, as well as for the religious, it is a question of distinguishing needs from desires.

The last precaution against the world is to guard ourselves against thinking about events in the community. “Never be scandalized or astonished at anything you happen to see or learn of, endeavoring to preserve your soul in forgetfulness of all that.” “Even if you should live among [literal] devils you should not turn the head of your thoughts to their affairs, but…strive to keep your soul occupied purely and entirely in God.”

This aside about devils opens up an interesting clue to the meaning of this precaution. If you call to mind the famous drawing by Martin Schongauer of Saint Antony’s temptations, you will remember that the demons are poking at the saint, pulling his beard and so on. And he is completely tranquil and serene in the center of all this mischief. We are familiar with interpreting this in terms of thoughts. For example, when we pray, are we not immediately pushed and pulled in all directions by distractions? And does not the monastic tradition teach us that these distracting thoughts are, much more often than not, the product of demonic intrusion? The remedy is simply to return to the Psalms, or whatever meditation we have undertaken.

Now, Saint John Cassian says that the hermit fights the devil one on one. But the cenobite, the monk in community, fights the devil in his brothers. Does not this suggest that the distracting behavior of my brother is an occasion for the devil to turn my thoughts away from God? John of the Cross agrees: “There is never a lack of devils who seek to overthrow the saints; God permits this [state of affairs] in order to prove and try religious.”

John makes it clear that one of the most problematic temptations is to speak about what we’ve seen with another monk. He says that we should never do this. When we fail in this way, do we not often excuse ourselves ahead of time by claiming that we are acting out of love and concern? At a minimum, before we say anything, we might ask these questions. If the brother is truly in danger or is truly endangering others, who should know about it? Who would have the authority to address it? And then, how likely is it that the person in authority, abbot or novice master or whoever is the overseer in this case, doesn’t know what’s happening? How motivated am I, really, by love for the brother? Is it likely that I am in fact motivated by my own demand for others not to impinge on my peace of mind?

Now apply all that I’ve said to the hyper-reactive world of social media!

Once again, we see that the “worldliness” in this case is about a certain level of comfort, safety and self-insulation, a need to control my environment rather than adapt. We see also a way of identifying the three enemies of the soul with the three parts of the soul. The flesh clearly refers to temptations that arise from the concupiscible part of the soul. The devil, who we said earlier is connected to the intellect, refers to temptations that afflict the rational part of the soul. And the middle part of the soul, the irascible, is that part that deals with danger, discomfort and so on. Is it not often the case that when we feel the need to speak about something scandalous or merely annoying that we are moved by anger or sadness? God gave us anger to drive away true temptations, not to drive a wedge between ourselves and other. And sadness is a sign that something that we valued is being taken away. It is an invitation to let go of identifying myself with that imagined good, to open within myself a space for the True Good, Jesus Christ Himself. The world would encourage our false self to just such identifications, and the false self by its nature wishes to separate from others. Thus the devil puts us at odds, labeling others as either friends or enemies, depending on whether they can provide us with the goods to which we are accustomed or which we feel are our due. The true self, the life of Christ within, grows by constantly opening itself to a divine perspective, a boundless love that gives without counting the cost and has compassion on all.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The First Precaution Against the World

(Here is the Introduction to this series.)

I have already noted that the world, which shows itself an enemy through the middle part of the soul, especially afflicts the will.  This is our ability to choose goods based not on immediate desire, but on an apprehension of a future benefit or danger. The will is also the faculty that loves—love being a choice rather than a rational thought or a base desire.

And indeed, in his short work The Precautions, Saint John of the Cross immediately identifies love as the arena of the combat with the world. His first question to those who would do battle with the world is, “Whom shall we love?”

John recommends loving no one person more than another, and forgetfulness of all particular affections or hatreds. Do not think about others, neither good things nor bad.

This is sound monastic doctrine, though difficult in practice. Let’s begin with the very challenging teaching that we should not love one person more than another. This derives directly from the gospel. Jesus says that if we do not approach Him without hating father and mother, we cannot be His disciples. So John is channeling one of Jesus’s most difficult teachings.

Part of the difficulty is that there are relationships whose very nature incurs a certain debt, often mutual, but sometimes in one direction. For example, children are commanded to honor their fathers and mothers. This must be done whether one loves one’s parents or not. We show honor not because we love our parents more than others (though that may be the case), but because honor is the correct disposition toward a parent. This discipline of honor allows us to follow the teaching of Saint Peter, who says in his First Letter that we should honor all. By practicing honor toward certain persons, we can learn to transfer that honor to all persons.

This opens a way to understand what it might mean to love everyone with the same intensity. Loving a specific person is not necessarily the obstacle that it at first appears to be. The question is: will this love I feel and then exercise toward this person, who is God’s gift to me, will this love instruct me on how to treat everyone else? When I have discovered what it means to love one person, can I discipline myself to treat others as if I loved them? When I interact with someone whom I find disagreeable, I can ask, “How would I treat this person if I loved him or her the way I love my best friend?”

I believe that parenthood has a built in pedagogy here. Parents know that it is impossible to love every child the same way. But one must love each child in some sense equally. This requires a deep interest in knowing their nascent personhood, the specific needs of each child. In other words, parents must learn how to love the correct way for each child.

When we begin to open up this love toward others, I want to offer one of my own precautions. We are not talking about letting other persons determine us, and certainly not toxic persons. Love for someone making very poor choices can take the form of “tough love,” letting the person experience the pain that comes from poor choices. Even the incarceration of a criminal can be seen, if done properly, as an act of love, for it prevents the criminal from committing further acts that damage the soul. In any case, I am advocating for a clear-eyed love, not enmeshment with everyone else’s failings. This is why John also says that we must have equal forgetfulness of all persons. We must know where our feelings end and theirs begin, where we can reasonably be expected to help, and where our help means getting drawn into responsibility for unhealthy behavior.

It is interesting that we are commanded to honor our parents rather than to love them. On the other hand, we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus famously reinterprets the idea of a neighbor in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The neighbor is a person who incurs a certain type of debt, actually a kind of “reverse debt,” something owed to another who is the one in need, and who happens to be near me. In such a circumstance, I am invited to become the tangible mercy and compassion of God toward the poor, the sick, and the abandoned, simply because God put me there.

Let’s note in completing this meditation that every person we meet each day has experienced hurt, disappointment, injury—the list could go on and on. We can’t really know the extent to which that person needs compassion, a kind word, maybe just forbearance. And so he is my neighbor, the one to whom I owe love.

In what sense is the world the enemy in these expressions of honor and love? The world has fallen under the domination of the devil, the diabolos, the one who divides. Particular love and honor, as I have hinted, is given to us by God as a part of His pedagogy. It is when we want to hold onto that love and use it for our own purposes of comfort, pleasure, safety, or whatever, that it causes us to become possessive and to separate. We can attempt to build up a world centered on ourselves, based on our preferences. This is the hostile face of “the world”:  when we seek division based on our own judgments and not God’s.

The second part of John’s exhortation tells us not to think about others. Do we not again need to do this sometimes? Doesn’t a novice master or a teacher need to think about the character of the novice or student in order best to love him and serve his needs for conversion and growth? Do we not need to think about others any time we engage in a cooperative action?

Here is where John’s exhortation to think neither good nor bad comes in. He is exhorting us to evaluate the person not in a moral sense. Any such judgment will be ill-informed and biased. Rather, there are situations where love indeed requires us to make prudential judgments about the best way to interact with specific persons. Here’s the rub: it is extremely difficult to parse the difference between the moral judgment and the practical judgment.

I believe that the distinction arises from how the thought affects me. Does the thought of the other person’s character and assumed motivations move me to change my own approach and dispositions to adapt myself to that person? Or is my first thought to demand that the other person change?

Saint Benedict confirms this approach when he teaches that the abbot must adapt himself to each monk’s character and intelligence. An abbot is someone who really must think about others, as any father must think about his children. But the result of this thought, in the case of an abbot, is not first of all a demand that the monk change, but rather is a discovery of inadequacy in oneself. Or if we put this positively, it is an opportunity to grow in self-knowledge and wisdom.

Two Insights from St. Teresa

When I began the monastic novitiate twenty-five years ago, I was assigned to read two books by Saint Teresa of Avila, whose feast we are celebrating today. The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle have been companions of mine ever since. Saint Teresa writes in a relatively simple, even folksy style, but her knowledge of contemplative prayer is almost unparalleled. Her knowledge comes from a deep experience of God in prayer, borne out of suffering and a willingness to trust Him in all circumstances.

Two of her insights have been especially helpful for me. First of all, however lofty the concept of contemplative prayer may sound or even be, it is always rooted in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. We can never go wrong meditating on His life, death, and resurrection in the body. This is why He refers to Himself as “The Way.” No one comes to the Father except through Him, through His two natures, human and divine. The second insight that true contemplative prayer is a gift from God. We cannot generate it by working hard. We can dispose ourselves for contemplative prayer. But in the end, God will decide whether this gift will profit us or others. In fact, God may be very active in our souls, but hide this fact from us to keep us from taking it for granted or feeling superior to others.

 

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!

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.

Two Paradoxes for Holy Week (Part 1)

Owing to my interest in sacred music and liturgy in general, I’ve been asked to join a few groups on Facebook. Recently, in one of these, I was quite amused by a long debate that had broken out. On one side was a Catholic liturgist, a very learned man whose writings I greatly esteem. In the opposing corner was an Orthodox believer, about whom I know little. The dispute was about the relative amount of rejoicing and lamenting to be found in the Lenten liturgies of the East and West. The Orthodox writer insisted that Western liturgies focused more on sin and penance, whereas the Byzantine liturgies were brighter, focusing on the joy of God’s salvation, and so on.

There are indeed many joyful texts in the Byzantine liturgies for Lent. But there are also long passages in which the faithful accuse themselves of every imaginable sin, of being the worst of all sinners, hard of heart. There are claims for continually weeping over sin. In this, I tended to side with my acquaintance, the Latin liturgist, who made just this argument.

What amused me, though, was the very idea that penance and the joy of Lent could be separated at all. This apparent paradox is easily understood if we attend to the theology of the liturgy. “While we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son. [Romans 5: 10]” We do not weep for our sins hoping that God will save us if we attain the minimum required amount of contrition. Rather, we are already saved, despite the fact that we couldn’t possibly merit salvation. And it is this realization of God’s patience, His loving pursuit of us in our unloveliness, that gives rise to true penthos, or compunction. It is the response of the faithful on Pentecost. When they realized that they had conspired to put to death God’s Son, “they were cut to the heart [Acts 2: 37].” But did they therefore despair? No! They repented and were baptized, becoming followers of the Apostles.

It is well attested of many saints that, as they grew in holiness and nearness to God, they felt less worthy of friendship with God. The brighter the light in which we find ourselves, the more we see our imperfections. Yet it is God’s very nearness and purity, an experience, at root, of awe and bliss, that gives rise to this insight about ourselves. The closer we come to God in the liturgy and in prayer and in asceticism, the more we see how our sins keep us from fully experiencing the joy of life in Christ. And so we weep for our sins precisely because we are drawing near to God’s selfless, regenerating love. It is what theologian Khaled Anatolios calls “doxological contrition,” and which he holds to be the central meaning of salvation.

As I never tire of mentioning, Saint Benedict, who was extremely realistic about human failings and vices, mentions joy twice in his short chapter on the observance of Lent.

What is being described is the theological virtue of hope. Hope is the great forgotten theological virtue, and so perhaps it is no surprise that this Facebook disagreement went unresolved. For hope to be hope, we must hold in tension the fact that we remain sinners in need of salvation, and that somehow salvation has already been accomplished. In fact, until the eschaton, we are necessarily saved, not with final assurance, but “in hope [Romans 8:24]”: in such a way that we must continually work out our salvation in “fear and trembling [Philippians 2: 12].”

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Ascension

As members of the Mystical Body of Christ, we are already seated with Christ at the Father’s right in the heavenly places.  Our human nature has been glorified in Christ by its translation to heaven, and the life we live now is a life of pilgrimage to our true homeland, which is in the New Creation.  Our conversatio should be spiritual and heavenly, the glory of the flesh purified and illuminated by the grace of baptism.

The Divine Liturgy greatly aids us in coming to recognize this truth.  In the liturgy, we turn our minds, hearts and bodies toward Christ seated with the Father, and ask to be transformed from glory to glory in His likeness.  This is the meaning of facing East:  by turning in a common direction toward the reality that transcends any human project, we consent to God’s entrance into our lives.  We learn to desire not only spiritual goods, but the Divine Life itself.

The Mystery of the Ascension teaches us that our true life is hidden with Christ in God.  This a reality which requires effort to make manifest, most especially the effort of liturgical worship.

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