Monastery of the Holy Cross

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Remember Beauty: God Is Near

Beauty is an epiphany. Encountering someone or something beautiful opens a sudden abyss before me. The arrestingly beautiful object arrives as an answer to a question I had not thought to ask. And yet the answer is not the end, but the door into a cascade of mysteries. In other words, the right kind of aesthetic experience is theological.

Our first experiences of the beautiful are always embodied. They are encounters with real objects: sunsets, the Milky Way, Lake Michigan, forests, cardinals, orchids. Artists use their inspiration and ingenuity to craft beauty in artifacts: paintings, music, cathedrals, gardens, vestments. By a process of abstraction, we can think of ideas as beautiful. For example, I find a number of mathematical equations strikingly beautiful. But this “disembodied” version of beauty is always analogous to the embodied version of beauty.

So we are presented with an important paradox involving beauty. It is, on the one hand, theological and mysterious. At the same time, beauty is embodied and real. I opened by saying that beauty is an epiphany. An epiphany happens when a material object reveals a spiritual meaning. We see the object, and then we also see “beyond” it to significance. Beautiful objects are bridges between the material world and the infinite.

The Fibonacci sequence present in the interior of a sunflower.

For several reasons, I am planning a series of posts on beauty, particularly beautiful music. The goal is not to distract, but to model ways in which we can redirect our focus from the virtual to the real. This idea began with a request from a friend who was encouraging me to write more after my posts of April and May. Then, last week, a pastor from a non-denominational church addressed the brothers on various topics relating to his ministry in a neighborhood that faces challenges of poverty and violence. The two of us briefly discussed the role of anxiety in outbreaks of violence, and he urged me to write more on this topic. I will do that, and one way into this topic is through what the ancient monks called natural contemplation, and what I might call “beauty and the real.”

Beauty is often thought to be a luxury of a leisured wealthy class, irrelevant, say, to a community dealing with with poverty. To me, this sidelining of beauty is a major mistake. Beauty is a patrimony, even a right, of all human beings. More importantly, the loss of beauty produces anxiety and despair, the very ingredients that continue the cycle of violence and poverty.  

Now let me tie a few things together. The visiting pastor shared a number of very helpful insights. He noted that the uptick in violence in Chicago has been fueled, in no small part, by the increase in social media use during the coronavirus lockdown. A key source of harm of the lockdown has been the retreat by larger and larger groups from the real into the virtual.

The Garden of the Phoenix in Chicago’s Jackson Park, a gift of the people of Osaka, Japan.

Remembering beauty can help to bring us back to the real, to ground us. Moreover, beauty can reawaken in us a desire for a genuine life of the spirit. Beauty reminds us that we are made for a life that transcends insipid materiality. Beauty awakens hope, a very important theological virtue for us to cultivate at the moment.

In follow-up posts, I am going to be speaking more about “natural contemplation.” This practice, seemingly forgotten in recent centuries, consists in the habit of seeing things as God intended them to be seen. Since all things were created through God’s Word, all things reveal God, if we learn to view them properly. This would further imply that all things that exist are beautiful at some level, and that the experience of beauty can be a reliable indicator of God’s nearness and the soundness of our best intuitions. Once again, the created world needn’t be reduced to pedestrian materiality, but should instead, through faith and hope, be elevated and “sacramentalized.”

For today, I would invite each of my readers to take time to notice beautiful things around us. Take a few moments to contemplate the beautiful persons you’ve known and the beautiful experiences that you have had. Perhaps you could go further and think about the eternal beauty that the faithful believe awaits us in heaven, a beauty that breaks through even now when we gather to pray and celebrate God in the holy liturgy.

Jesus first manifested His glory by the gift of fine wine at Cana.

Reason and Faith

I was a big science fiction fan as a kid. I read everything I could find by Isaac Asimov, and I memorized episodes of Star Trek. In high school, I subscribed to Asimov magazine, and it was from reading the short stories and novellas therein that I came to the realization that the Golden Age of science fiction was long gone. So I was somewhat prepared to be cynical when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted my senior year.

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”–Isaac Asimov

On the whole, I enjoyed the show, but a comparison between the two Star Treks at the time confirmed for me that the adventure, mystery, and humanity of the original was losing out to militarism, expertise, and a kind of bureaucratic stuffiness in the new series. Later seasons managed to fix many of the glaring problems of the early seasons, but I had lost interest by then, and was devoting my creative energies to music and Shakespeare.

One episode summarized the problems for me. All I can remember about it was that some kind of tear had opened up in the space-time continuum (!), and if the Starship Enterprise couldn’t get there and knit it up somehow, that reality would cease to exist. No pressure! Beneath the surface of this implausible plot device, it would appear that human beings have become responsible for literally everything. 

And isn’t this how we all feel sometimes? We are urged to feel simultaneously responsible for:

Reducing global temperatures
Every questionable thing the President says or Tweets
Making sure people in Michigan don’t die of COVID-19
Figuring out how to get our two-year-olds into Stanford
Ending terrorism (or evil itself, if George W. Bush is to be heeded)
Getting the bishops to be more disciplined
Making sure no kids anywhere get bullied
Donating to groups fighting cancer, Alzheimers, et al
Ending poverty
Murder Hornets

Now I assume that, most of the time, our conscious minds understand that we can’t do everything. But the cumulative effect of the impulse to solve every problem is chronic anxiety. As I wrote in the previous post, this is, in fact, a recipe for irrationality. To assume responsibility for all of the world’s problems is fundamentally unreasonable, but we rarely permit ourselves to admit this squarely. The result is a worldview with a large, false supposition built in.

According to family systems therapy, stress is not produced by overwork. Rather, overwork is one symptom of stress that has its roots in being overly responsible. Our present stressed-out overfunctioning is further fueled by a simplistic notion that our American political system is a democracy. It’s not, in fact. We live in a representative democracy, more formally called a republic. The reason I point this out is that a flat ideology of “democracy,” suggests that we are all responsible for everything in our country, and that the only way to address this responsibility is through constant monitoring of the news and constant argument. And it’s exhausting!

What if we’re not responsible for all that other stuff? Who might be? What if we felt that, behind it all, the maintenance of the space-time continuum was God’s prerogative and not ours? I often find that God raises up ingenious and courageous helpers at fortuitous moments. These helpers see the same problems I see, but have the intelligence, experience, and resources that I lack. It’s always possible, too, that a problem can’t be solved immediately. I will return to that possibility below.

“We feel that we must disagree with those prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster.”–Pope Saint John XXIII

Pope Saint John XXIII offered this prayer each night before bed: “Well Lord, it’s your Church, you take care of it; I’m going to sleep.” Similarly, when Napoleon Bonaparte confronted Cardinal Consalvi and threatened to destroy the Catholic Church, the Cardinal’s response was, “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

These are quotes by men of deep faith, but they are also clear-eyed realists. There’s nothing childish about this faith. It’s an acknowledgement that there are powers at work in the world well beyond what we can touch. Our task is to figure out our assignment and then resolve to stay at our posts. The pagan heroes of old understood that fate was not something that they could determine. It was, however, theirs either to reject or to accept nobly and graciously. By accepting fate, heroes also accepted the relatively confined spheres of action in which it is enacted. Beowulf died slaying the dragon that was threatening his native Geatland (southern Sweden), but the dragon never was a serious threat to the lands of most other contemporary peoples. Peruvian dragons were, presumably, for Peruvian heroes to deal with. And in heaven, the great band of dragon-slayers will have its own special space at the bar where they will hang out and share stories from every corner of the globe.

Realism is central to thinking rationally about our options for acting. Hyper-responsibility inclines us either to grandiose, impossible projects, or to paralysis. Bipolar disorder happens when someone oscillates between these two unrealistic options. Some choose to escape this oscillation by a strategic retreat into chronic complaint. None of these approaches are reasonable, nor are they mature. Hidden fears are continuing to contaminate our thinking.

Faith is a gift from God. This gift frees us from fear, and it frees us to risk the good even when we might suffer for it. In our present climate, I suspect that many of us are tempted to choose lesser goods because, in a highly polarized environment, we fear failure, rejection, and ostracization. If we remember that our Leader leads by way of the Cross, we can let go of the notion that the suffering we experience is a sign of God’s rejection or our failure. Nor is it our responsibility even to change those who cause us suffering, any more than Christ felt it important to win over Pilate and the Sanhedrin.

Faith is often presented as the opposite of reason, but this is a mistake. The opposite of reason is reactive fear. Faith is the friend of reason. In fact, it is the precondition for the full flowering of reason.

Fear and Reason

Fear is a part of our bodily constitution. It comes with being a member of the animal family. In evolutionary terms, it has served us and our fellow animals well. Fear rapidly mobilizes our energies to face down danger or to flee from it. Both reactions give us a better chance of surviving immediate danger. This means that natural selection has favored the cultivation of the fear-response in us.

“Nothing resembles an angry cat…more than an angry cat.”–Anthony Storr, “Aggression” The breakdown of distinctions caused by fear, anger, and violence makes reasoning impossible.

For us rational animals, however, fear also presents specific dangers of its own. When I was in high school, my family had a beautiful but terrifying dog, a black Labrador/German Shepherd mix. She was a great guard-dog for a single-mother family, but her attack instincts were sometimes, let’s say, inappropriate. Once, when one of my mother’s piano students came for her lesson and rang the doorbell, our dog shattered the glass of the front door in warding off this thirteen-year-old girl student. Our dog frequently would get very upset about the presence of my male friends, though once she decided you were safe, she was as devoted afterward as she had been suspicious before. The difficulty for us is that there were few things that we could say to our dog to convince her that her responses were irrational. This is why Aristotle refers to humans as rational animals; among the members of the animal kingdom, we have learned how to temper the fear response by muting it, thinking through the situation, and then deciding whether fear is warranted. If it is, we have a larger repertoire of responses than fight or flight. We can make a plan that takes into account potential long-term effects of any hypothetical actions. Dogs, intelligent as they are, lack most of what makes this possible for humans.

In Catholic moral theology, we speak of the “age of reason.” Very young children do not yet have the full faculty of reason, and, as a result, tend to act on the promptings of feelings. One of the responsibilities of parents is to respond to the emotions of children in such a way as to facilitate the emergence of reason in the child. As parents know, the ongoing achievement of rationality is directly linked to an ability to manage one’s emotions, especially fear. Maturity is marked by rational reflection and reason-based decision making. Immaturity is marked by impulsivity and emotional reactivity. Another shorthand way to summarize this would be to say that the mature adult tends to respond to life, whereas the immature person tends to react.

When we permit ourselves to react, or even to overreact, we move in the direction of immaturity and even infantilization at times. Adult temper tantrums are no different than kid temper tantrums.

Mature persons are not therefore unfeeling, however. We will still have the immediate bodily responses to typical stimuli: fear, joy, anger, hunger, and sexual arousal. What will change about us is that we will know how to anticipate the trajectory of these feelings. We will know how to step back from immediate engagement, especially from those emotions that are most likely to lead to trouble if acted upon. The stimulus and its initial emotional response, in other words, will just become more information. That first impulse of fear, or perhaps more often, a sense of something being not quite right, is often a signal. Perhaps we need to pay attention to our surroundings a bit more perceptively in order to judge correctly what is going on. Some of us are better at making these detections in personal relationships, accurately reading body language, for example, to gauge what is being left unsaid. Others tend to excel in situational awareness, the ability to spot potential dangers before they arise, and to sense the presence of danger by knowing how to interpret inconsistencies in large-scale spatial arrangements. This is a good, mature use of initial emotional responses or “gut feelings.”

All of the above helps to explain some difficulties facing us as we try to make prudential responses to the pandemic. The worst-case scenarios present significant dangers to our whole way of life. As I wrote earlier, fear is not an unreasonable response to a number of possible futures. But if we allow fear to become chronic, if we continually marinate ourselves in the scariest projections, we run the risk of making our response less mature and less rational. In point of fact, we have, as we all know, lots of time to decide how to deal with the pandemic. We are not faced with a saber-toothed tiger ready to devour our children, a danger that requires a decisive, forceful response.

The quarantine that most of us are experiencing ratchets up chronic fear in another way. Every fellow human being is to be treated indefinitely as a potential vector and danger. That means that grocery shopping has suddenly been transformed into a dangerous activity. Every single action that requires us to come into proximity with someone else, we are told, is dangerous. This itself seems like a recipe for chronic fear and, therefore, unfortunately, immature responses to the actual threat.

George Orwell warned about the dangers of a breakdown in trust between fellow citizens, and the relation of this breakdown to the breakdown of reason.

This situation is clearly unsustainable and poses, in my view, much more dangerous long-term consequences. If we continue to treat all social interactions as fearful, we run the very real risk of infantilizing ourselves and making rational discourse impossible. When reason is not an available option, we are left only with power and force. Totalitarian governments know this, and so the cultivation of fear is an ineliminable feature of all dictatorships. Mind you, I am not saying that we are living in such an environment—yet. But at the very least, it seems important to me to treat the resumption of social interactions as a necessary goal, and to find ways to discuss with others in our extended families, neighborhoods, and workplaces, goals for making this happen as safely as possible. This will work most effectively if, in our personal lives, we are taking steps to cultivate our own rationality and maturity by reflecting regularly on what kind of information we really need (rather than letting hyperlinks lead us by the nose into what an anonymous person wants you to read, perhaps for motives of advertising revenue) to make informed decisions, and finding ways to identify the sources of fear and to assess them as we would any other threat.

Last of all, we should aim to hold before our minds eye the examples of heroes whose lives we wish to imitate. This is one reason that I urge our monks to read the lives of the saints frequently, and to make friends with them. The saint is a person of “heroic virtue,” and therefore, courage. In my next post, I would like to share with you my thoughts about why the saints are also models of rationality.  

Homily for Good Friday

Genesis tells us that man and woman are made in the image and likeness of God. Perhaps surprisingly, we read later in the same book that Adam and Eve wished to be “like” God in another way, gaining knowledge of good and evil. And this temptation to know what God knows led them to stretch out their hands to the forbidden fruit. The unhappy consequences of this action illustrate something that all of us know, that knowledge is often acquired by painful experience.

We are going through the very painful experience of relearning something that we easily forget, that there are real limitations to our knowledge. This is easy to forget because as our knowledge of the natural world has grown, we have been able to break through many barriers thought impassible.

Fifty years ago, many predicted that by 2020, we would not be able to feed everyone in the world. Yet, discoveries of high-yield technologies, better-quality fertilizers and other techniques allow us to feed almost eight billion people today more effectively than we fed three billion people in 1960.

With the click of a mouse, I can copy an electronic version of Saint Augustine’s City of God where it once took a scribe years to do the same work, at great cost to his eyesight.

But there are two dangers that accompany this increase in knowledge.

The first we all know. The human heart being what it is, any knowledge that can be used for good can almost certainly be used for destructive purposes. If we so wish, we can inflict more harm more efficiently than ever before.

The second danger is more elusive. With increased knowledge comes a sense of increased responsibility.

As we struggle to face the threat of COVID-19 together, it is tempting to point fingers. Someone should have known that this was coming, and they should have known how to stop it.

This isn’t the only example, just the one most ready to hand. We can point to other anxieties that come with increased knowledge. A hundred years ago, expecting mothers paid quite a bit less attention to diet, alcohol consumption, and other behaviors that potentially affect prenatal development. Today, mothers are sometimes reluctant to trust their own instincts and experiences when rearing a child, when there is so much literature on child development to be sifted through.

Even the doctors dealing with COVID-19 can face a similar problem. How responsible are you to stay on top of the fast-developing literature on treatment of COVID patients while dealing with the already-stressful situation of present patients? In the direction of this thinking, which is a kind of second-guessing, we start down that old path, desiring to possess the foreknowledge that only God enjoys, wanting to be like God in a way of our own desiring. However well-intentioned, however much we wish to protect ourselves, those whom we love, and our way of life, this attempt to control the world will eventually bring us to grief, a return to thorns and thistles.

Today upon the Cross, we see a different image. We see a man, but a man who is not merely the image and likeness of God, but is God. The contrast between Christ and Adam is one that continually exercised Saint Paul. In the chant that we sang just before the Passion (Christus factus est pro nobis obediens), we see Christ undoing the disobedience of Adam by his own obedience. Christ became obedient even to the point of death. This passage, from the second chapter of the letter to the Philippians points out that Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Instead he emptied himself and took the form of a servant.

This is what God looks like.

If we were to have the mind of Christ, if we were to consent to this self-emptying, we would become more godlike than we do with our efforts to control the world through our knowledge. In fact, we are all being invited to this today, to empty ourselves. Not only are we suffering the uncertainty of dealing with a novel disease, but we must confront this without being able to gather together as a Church, another hollowing out. If we can accept these invitations to self-emptying in faith, then we will be practicing the faith of Jesus Christ, the faith that brings true salvation—an eternal salvation.

This invitation is offered to us anew and in an especially poignant way this Pascal Triduum. It is extended to all the faithful, and to all humankind, in the example of Christ crucified. Let us then have the mind of Christ, to become truly like God, like the Son of God, in our willingness to entrust ourselves to the Father. And “let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help [Hebrews 5: 9].”

 

 

 

To Those Who Are Scared

At a press conference yesterday, the President was asked, “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” He didn’t really answer the question. Perhaps, in fairness, this sort of question is one that we should be asking our religious leaders. So I will take a shot at it and let the President focus on policy.

If you are scared, this means that you are human, and this is good. Possessing fear means valuing life and the good things of life like health, children, grandparents, friends, peace and community.

We sometimes mistakenly think that having courage means being fearless. But in fact, lacking fear makes one rash not courageous. Courage means fearing the right things the right amount. Since human beings lack immunity (at this moment) to the novel coronavirus, it threatens our lives. It really should make us cautious. Perhaps it should even enable us to make difficult decisions, painful in the short term, that will preserve life and the good things of life in the long run.

Of course, having too much fear is also a danger, hindering us from acting or moving us to make selfish decisions that cause more damage overall. Courage means taking the most rational action after judging how dangerous the situation really is.

At this moment, we are still learning what sort of danger COVID-19 poses to the things we love and cherish, and so we are called upon not only to be courageous, but patient. Patience is not something that comes easily to the American temperament, and here’s a chance to add a new virtue to our national character. While we wait, we are blessed to have many intelligent, motivated, energetic people working at understanding the nature of the disease and our best strategies to protect ourselves against it. We will not need to wait forever, just long enough to get clarity.

Making rational decisions and being patient requires that we master the thoughts that generate fear. It’s important to learn how to slow the panic response by sitting still and breathing deeply (this can be done in prayer). The next step is describing the situation and our options accurately and focusing on the overall goal. It is important to remember that COVID-19 is not fatal for most who contract the disease. Then, if our goal is keeping our families and neighbors safe, keeping the death count low and healthcare workers well-supported, and ultimately returning to good order and peace, we can focus on the actions that will get us there. Having the long-term goal in sight helps us to deal with potentially irrational fears that move us to counterproductive actions in the short term. For example, knowing that a vaccine will keep me healthy in the long run helps me to confront the pain of a shot in the short term.

Last of all, fearing rightly is a topic addressed by Jesus. Let me begin this final thought by pointing out that he spends much of his ministry reassuring others:

They were frightened, but he said to them, ‘It is I; do not be afraid.’ Then they were glad to take him into the boat. [John 6: 20-21]

After his resurrection, he continually urged his Apostles not to be afraid because death, that destroyer of all that we love, had been conquered. With that as background, we should note that Jesus also teaches us about fearing the right things in the right way.

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.

Lest this sound too ominous, we should note that he adds:

Even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. [Matthew 10: 28; 30-31]

The first part of that quote is a restatement, in perhaps hyperbolic terms, of the well-known proverb, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom [Proverbs 9: 10].” There are many ways to understand fear of the Lord, and in the Jewish and Christian traditions it is usually understand that this fear undergoes a maturation as we grow in faith. It typically begins as an acknowledgement that God is all-powerful and we are not, which should make us reticent about taking anything for granted in life (I plan to say more about this in a future post). Sobriety and humility are the entryway into understanding the world. But as we grow in virtue, this more servile fear grows to be a fear of losing God’s friendship through carelessness and superficiality.

Our present crisis calls upon all of us to act soberly and humbly, but also with profound desire to do what is truly best for our neighbor, what is truly just and upright. A proper fear of failure in these areas is a good motivation to take courage and make our own contribution to the long-term goal of restoring peace.

On Separation from Holy Communion

There has been a good deal of discussion about the decision of Cardinal Cupich and other bishops to suspend the public celebration of Mass. It’s important to note that a “clarification” to the Cardinal’s initial statement has dispensed Catholics of the Archdiocese from the obligation to attend Sunday Mass. There are two aspects of this that I would like to unpack a bit.

When we first heard of Cardinal Cupich’s statement, one of the brothers, who had studied Canon Law last year, said, “It’s like we’re under an interdict!” An interdict is a statement that makes illicit the celebration of any sacraments in a certain region. This was a widely used canonical sanction in the Middle Ages, but is not very frequently invoked in the modern world. However, we are not under an interdiction. Mass is still being celebrated, for example, at the monastery. We are just not doing it publicly. The Cardinal has encouraged all diocesan priests to continue private Masses throughout this time of “isolation.”

What is of real importance to understand here is that we are all members of the One Body of Christ by baptism, and that the reception of Holy Communion by priests at their private Masses nourishes all the members of the Body by virtue of our unity. I have encouraged all of our monks to be aware of this, that our reception of Holy Communion during this time be done devoutly and worthily for the sake of the whole Church and the world.

We also continue to pray the divine office as usual. Our voices go up to God on your behalf, on behalf of all government officials who are trying to make the best decisions for their peoples’ welfare, for heroic health-care workers, and, of course, for all who are sick with the coronavirus.

The second aspect of the suspension of public Mass is that this doesn’t dispense us from the mandate of the Third Commandment, to keep the Sabbath holy. Sunday should remain a day dedicated to the Lord. One fruitful way of marking Sunday would be a fervent “spiritual communion.” Below I’ve posted a video that offers some good ideas for spiritual communion, and here is the traditional prayer that accompanies spiritual communion:

My Jesus,
I believe that You are present in the Most Holy Sacrament.
I love You above all things,
and I desire to receive You into my soul.
Since I cannot at this moment receive You sacramentally,
come at least spiritually into my heart.
I embrace You as if You were already there and unite myself wholly to You.
Never permit me to be separated from You. Amen.

Your brother in Christ,
Prior Peter, OSB

 

The Presentation

About twenty years ago, when I was a junior monk, Abbot Lawrence O’Keefe, a noted scripture expert, preached our annual retreat. At one point, he made a curious remark. The fifth Joyful Mystery is the Presentation, but he said that it really ought to be classified as a Sorrowful Mystery. Understanding why requires a bit of excavating of this interesting episode from Luke’s gospel.

The tenth plague, the one that finally convinced Pharaoh to allow the Israelites to flee Egypt, was the killing of the first-born. All throughout Egpyt, all offspring that “opened the womb,” including those of livestock, fell prey to the Angel of Death. God made a distinction, however, between the Egyptians and the Israelites, and spared the first-born of the enslaved people. Before that fateful night, God gave an indication about one important consequence. Since God spared the first-born of the Israelites, these all belonged to Him. “Whatever is first to open the womb…is mine [Exodus 13: 2].” Later, at Mount Sinai, God’s claim becomes even stronger: “The first-born of your sons you shall give to me [Exodus 22: 29].” As the great Jewish scripture scholar Jon Levenson has pointed out, this is clearly a commandment to sacrifice the first-born son, after the pattern of Abraham’s testing in Genesis 22. Later still, God mitigates the harshness of this command, allowing first-born sons to be redeemed rather than sacrificed. “All the first-born of your sons you shall redeem [Exodus 34: 20].”

Saint Luke is actually combining several events in his recounting of the Presentation (this is the reason that feast was previously known as the Purification of the Virgin; mothers underwent a period of ritual impurity after childbirth). Let me return to focus on the “sorrowful” aspect of this mystery. Jesus Christ is not only the Virgin Mary’s first-born Son; He is God the Father’s first-born Son. From His conception, He belongs to God, and the redemption that Joseph and Mary offer merely delays the final gift that Jesus will make to Father by offering His life on the Cross. Today’s celebration foreshadows Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion and consecrates the child Jesus to the Father.

Let’s turn to another aspect of this mystery. When the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 587 B.C., the ark of the covenant, the sign of God’s presence, was removed from the temple. What happened to it remains an unsolved riddle–Indiana Jones notwithstanding. When the temple was rebuilt, the ark was no longer in the Holy of Holies (when the Roman general Pompey entered the Holy of Holies after taking Jerusalem in 63 B.C., he was puzzled to find it empty of any idols or statues). God was not entirely absent; nor had He fully returned after His dramatic departure narrated at the beginning of Ezekiel’s prophecy, dating from the Babylonian captivity. The prophet Malachi, writing perhaps in the fifth century B.C., indicated the God would suddenly appear in the temple. In the arrival of the Virgin Mary and the boy Jesus, the early Church saw the return of the true Ark of the Covenant (the Mother of God, whose womb was God’s resting place for nine months), and the sudden arrival of God in His temple. The long exile of the chosen people was finally ended, that moment that holy Simeon and Anna had awaited with such love for God.

The Wedding of the Lamb

In the first antiphon of First Vespers,* this arrival is seen as the consummation of the marriage covenant into which God had entered with Israel. Now, if we remember back to the Exodus, and God’s claim on all first-born sons, we see that this espousal is intimately connected with Christ’s self-offering on the Cross. He returns to claim His bride, at the cost of His own blood. There is indeed a certain sorrow to this, but it is that of those who sow in tears, only to reap in joy. In the Presentation is encapsulated the whole of the story of salvation. God the Father, in receiving back the Son of Mary, liberates not only Israel, but through her all humanity, and not from political slavery in Egypt, but from spiritual slavery to sin. It is significant that, at Mass tomorrow, we will bear candles in procession, just as we will at the Easter Vigil. It is one and the same Passover that we celebrate, from differing perspectives. As such, today’s feast marks the perfect nodal point between the Incarnation and Christmas, and the Paschal Triduum that looms in the future.

 

* This antiphon begins (in translation): “Adorn your bridal chamber, O Zion, and receive Christ the king…”

Lenten Food for Thought

[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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Grace in Retrospect

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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