Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Liturgy

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.

Homily for the Solemnity of the Nativity of John the Baptist

How did we first come to know Jesus?

Normally, our parents introduce us to Him by teaching us Who He is, stories about His life and death. We might have had teachers, priests, or a religious sister teach us Who Jesus is, by teaching us how to pray. Maybe we gained a deeper insight into Jesus from the example of a saint. These people, if they have been effective introducing us to Jesus, have all been bearing witness to Him, testifying about him.

And how exactly did they do this?

We might assume that a witness is someone who relates facts about a case, typically in court. If we witness a car accident or a theft, we may be called upon to give testimony. But once we start thinking about testimony, we see that there is a lot more going on. For example, we want to know how credible the witness is. There’s a legal principle in American law which states, “False in one thing, false in everything.” This means that if we catch a witness in a lie, we can legally disregard everything else that he or she says. So a good witness needs to have some integrity for us to believe his or her testimony.

But we also want to know how this person relates to the case at hand. Is the witness biased in some way? Is the witness likely to spin things in some way or other, maybe not being entirely dishonest, but perhaps also not invested in being objective?

This can work in the other direction, too. Returning to our parents or teachers, we are more likely to believe the person who has a certain type of relationship with Jesus and the Church than someone who recites the facts of Jesus’s birth and death as a series of facts from long ago. I recently read somewhere that testimony is not giving someone else the truth. It’s about giving someone else access to the truth, so that the other person can encounter the truth himself.

Alright, so all of this is a prelude to celebrating today’s great saint, John the Baptist. Jesus Himself says that no one greater was born of a woman than John the Baptist. Several times in the Scriptures we read that John bore witness to Jesus. So what can we learn from John’s example? Why is he so important?

Well, for starters, identifying Jesus was not as easy as we might suspect back in the time of His earthly life. While many people were happy that He brought healing and taught with authority, He was also very threatening to many powerful persons. Jesus often did things that were unsettling, like associating with lepers and prostitutes, tax collectors, and so on. So it’s understandable that many persons questioned whether Jesus could be the Messiah. In fact, at the time of the Crucifixion, the apostles themselves found it too dangerous to bear witness, and Peter lied about knowing Him.

But there was someone else that no one had any doubts about, and that was John. John’s integrity was unquestioned. His teaching was wholly consonant with that of the great prophets before him, especially Elijah and Jeremiah, and he backed up his teaching with a willingness to die rather than adulterate God’s law.

And what does this greatest of men do? He constantly points to Jesus, even from his mother’s womb. By his connection to the great prophets of old, he gives others access to the truth about Jesus, that He is the One who will fulfill all the great prophecies spoken in the Scriptures by the Holy Spirit.

John’s integrity and reputation were hard won. From his early adulthood, he separated himself from the crowd and lived in the desert, meditating on God’s law and the stories of the prophets. Through the assistance of the Holy Spirit, he came to know the mind of God Himself, and so was able to recognize Jesus when He appeared.

We, too, are called to be witnesses of Jesus Christ, and we can learn a lot from John.

How can we be more credible witnesses? Well, we must separate ourselves from the world and find time to devote to prayer and knowing God. We must be involved in God’s plan, in His story. But we also must be credible by our actions. They must reflect the reality of Jesus in our own lives. Like John, we have to learn not to point at ourselves, our own knowledge, our own experience, but to point away from ourselves toward the one Who is our Savior and Lord. See how in our deesis icon above the high altar John and Our Lady both face Jesus, pointing toward Him, offering their supplication and witness.

We who are striving to be His disciples must decrease so that he always increases in us and in others, for the Son of God is our true life and happiness.

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.

Conference: The Common Good

I will begin with three quotes.

In illo Uno unum (“in that One, one”, the motto of Pope Leo XIV)

Pope Leo XIV is widely understood to be a peacemaker and bridgebuilder, who aspires to build up the unity of the Church. He does this by pointing us to our final end and the true common good that we all seek to enjoy: Christ Himself. Because of the Incarnation, we experience this unity first of all in creatures. This is the common world that God gave us, and it is a check on singularity and idiosyncrasy.

A monk is one who is both separated from all and yet united with all. (Evagrius of Pontus)

Our withdrawal from the world does not mean that we monks do not continue to find Christ in our neighbor. It is a recognition that there are other forms of unity which are corrupted by sin. Today, the Church even speaks of “structures of sin”. These give us a false sense of unity. Our true unity in Christ is a transcendent goal that goes beyond what our senses can perceive. It requires a purification of sense and a purification of our relationships by a certain planned abstention from speech, fraternization, and the like.

The anchoritic life is somewhat rare, perhaps more so today than at other periods of the Church’s history. Saint Benedict offers us the pedagogy of the cenobium. I will focus on this reality in the second half of my conference.

Where brothers live in unity, they give glory to God, for there the Lord gives His blessing. (Magnificat antiphon, Memorial of Saint Pachomius)

Our prayer in the liturgy will be all the more efficacious and sanctifying to the extent that we come to Mass and the office reconciled to each other through our daily acts of self-denial and patient forgiveness of each of our brothers. We will experience God’s blessings to the extent that we seek this unity. It is not a result of our work, but a gift offered us to be sought out in its fullness. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” says Our Lord. Saint Benedict would have us seek and strive after this very Pax as our way of seeking God and seeking what is above.

To be in Christ is to be united to all the baptized, and, in some sense, to all creatures infused by the Logos. But I wish to focus on a few specific aspects of the cenobitic life and the common good to be found there as foundational to our sanctification.

The common good is the good that each of us enjoys precisely with the other members of the community. It is our common flourishing. It is a good, which means that we can enjoy it like any other good—to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how much we desire it and seek it.

I once visited Gloucester cathedral in Great Britain with a monk of our province who is also an artist. Fr. Stephen could enjoy the stone in a way that I could not. It wasn’t that I couldn’t enjoy the beauty and holiness of the cathedral, nor that I lacked any ability at all to learn to see the specific beauty and goodness of the stone. But truly coming to enjoy the stone as he did would have required me to want this and then to take steps to educate myself in its appreciation.

Furthermore, as an artist, Fr. Stephen was able to reproduce the goodness of stone in watercolor. Although I couldn’t do this either, I could enjoy his work at its completion, and even enjoy his enjoyment of painting.

So, too, with the common good of the monastic community. Some of us will be better at seeing it, enjoying it, and contributing to it. This doesn’t mean that others do not enjoy the actual common good and do not contribute to it. But the more we seek it—again by self-denial and preferring what is good for my brother, rather than what is good for myself—the more we will enjoy it.

The common good requires that each of us be our true selves in Christ. This is to say that the common good is in no way detrimental to my personal good. In fact, human beings can’t fully flourish unless they belong to communities of some kind, and contribute to the common good of these communities. Nor can communities truly flourish except when the brothers within flourish as themselves. So there is no competition between my good and that of the community.

Similarly, our community will flourish to the extent that we become our corporate selves within the larger communities of our neighborhood, our Province and Congregation, and the Archdiocese.

Celebrating Saint Athanasius and Nicaea

Today is the feast of Saint Athanasius, the great champion of the teaching of the First Council of Nicea. He was made bishop of Alexandria shortly after his attendance at the Council, but he spent much of his episcopacy in exile for his opposition to Arius, whose theology enjoyed a favorable reception among the governors of the empire. He was a stalwart supporter of the early monastic movement in Egypt, writing the biography of Saint Anthony the Great. In turn, the monks could be counted upon to support Nicene orthodoxy.

Here is a selection from my homily last Sunday:

This year we are celebrating the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicea, the first ecumenical council. This council was convoked by the first Christian Emperor Constantine, and brought together nearly all of the bishops of the Church in the year 325. The principal item on the agenda was the teaching of a priest from the diocese of Alexandria in Egypt, whose name was Arius. Arius taught that Jesus was a man who was adopted by God. This was not an easy argument to make, given that Jesus says things in John’s gospel like, “Glorify me, Father, in your own presence with the glory which I had with you before the world was made.” John’s gospel also famously begins with the lines, “In the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh.”

So as I say, it seems like Arius’s teaching would be a non-starter. And yet, it was quite popular, and the problem raised by Arius continued to plague the Church in different forms for many centuries. In fact, Arianism, the doctrine that Jesus is a man, not consubstantial with the Father, but adopted in some way as God’s Son, is a perennial temptation. This is because our reason, our rationality tends to say that two different things can’t also be the same, right? If I have an apple, I don’t say that it is also an orange; the two concepts are distinct. And so to say that Jesus is man, and also God at the same time, seems to be irrational. And Arius and his followers were simply ironing out problems with revelation by subjecting it to human reason, as it was understood at the time. Jesus can’t be both the uncreated God and a human creature.

What the Council of Nicea challenges us to do is to force our reason beyond its normal limits and to accept that, in fact, Jesus is consubstantial with the Father. In a few moments, we will say this, that Jesus Christ is consubstantial with the Father, in what is often known as the Nicene Creed, the statement of belief produced by the bishops at the First Council of Nicea. The Church honors the great achievement of the Council by reciting these words at the liturgy. But this word “consubstantial” itself was controversial. It’s not a word that appears in Scripture, though Saint Paul hints at the idea frequently in his letters. Jesus not only has a human nature, but He is also by nature God, of the same substance as the Father.

What happens when we allow our reason to be suspended, and to take on faith that Jesus is God and man, is that our understanding of God and creation changes. God actually become more transcendent—or perhaps we would more accurately say that, because of the Incarnation, we now understand what it means to say that God is utterly transcendent.

As a side note, this is why the English translation of the Creed changed fifteen years ago. We used to say that Jesus Christ is “one in being with the Father.” But this seems to imply that the idea of “Being” comes before the idea of God. In fact, God’s transcendence, as we understand it from the mystery of the Incarnation, means that we can’t really speak of the concept of Being outside of God. God Himself is the Existence, the eternal Being, in which we partake.

The fact that Jesus is described as both God and man in the Scriptures forces us to stretch our reasoning abilities to account for what appears at first as a paradox. We can believe this truth even if we don’t fully understand it, even if we still have certain doubts about its proper meaning.

Homily for Easter Sunday

Catholic filmmaker Mel Gibson recently announced that he would begin filming the sequel to his most famous movie, The Passion of the Christ. The new film is set to be released next year, and the current working title is The Resurrection of the Christ, and it apparently will chronicle what happens after Jesus rises from the dead and appears to the women and the apostles.

On the Joe Rogan podcast, Gibson explained, “It’s the story of the Resurrection; It’s a nonlinear story. It took my brother, Randall Wallace, and me about six or seven years to finish the script. We’ve worked with historians. All the apostles died, but nobody dies for a lie; they die for the truth. I wanted to show that. Who rose three days after being killed in public? Certainly not Buddha.”

It is interesting to me that Gibson implies that the Resurrection is unique. And he has historians who are corroborating this conviction that he has. If he were working alongside his fellow filmmakers instead, he might come to a different conclusion. In Hollywood, resurrection seems to happen all the time. In the past thirty years, we’ve been treated to—or subjected to, depending on your cinematic tastes—films entitled Alien Resurrection, Halloween: Resurrection, Mechanic Resurrection (I kid you not), The Mummy: Resurrection, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, and perhaps most surprisingly, four separate releases of movies simply called Resurrection. I could go on and on. From this small sampling, it would seem that people are being resurrected all the time. A cynic might suspect that an effort being made to downplay the uniqueness of the specific Resurrection that we are celebrating today.

It should also be noted that several of these movies are in the horror genre, which is to say that the mechanics, aliens and mummies rising from the dead (and to be honest with you, I’m not sure what it means to have a mummy rise from the dead), that these characters returning to life is something that puts them back into this same world that we thought that they had left for good.

So it appears that the notion of resurrection is commonplace today, and is almost certainly not good news. I presume that these resurrected aliens and mechanics and mummies will head back to the grave at some point. What I’m getting is this: we are so accustomed to the idea of resurrection that we might be in danger of domesticating its revolutionary meaning. It might come as a surprise to discover that the people of Jesus’s own day were rather unfamiliar with the concept. In the year 52 A.D., Saint Paul preached one of his most famous sermons in the city of Athens. In it, he announced that God raised Jesus from the dead. How do the sophisticated, philosophical Greeks respond? They scoff at him. “Sure! Come back another day and tell us more about this crazy idea.” Resurrection certainly was unique at that time. Even unthinkable.

Now, from this perspective, I want to point out something very interesting about the gospel from last night’s vigil and this gospel reading this morning. Here it is: Jesus does not appear at all. It’s amazing that, of all the Sundays and feast days of the Church, the only time Jesus doesn’t appear in the gospel reading is a few times in Advent, when He is not yet born, and then on Easter Sunday. What could this apparent absence mean for us?

First of all, it means this: the Resurrection is emphatically not simply a return of Jesus to the old life He had in this world. It’s not a resuscitation. He has somehow passed into the higher realms, and yet maintains contact with us, as if he were, for example, God. He challenges us to seek Him out, to follow Him. This is, in essence what Saint Paul was saying in today’s second reading—”seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.”

The absence of a visible Jesus in this morning’s gospel is also a sign of just how new and baffling the actual resurrection was and is. There’s another very telling detail in the stories of the resurrection. The Apostles never seem to have questioned that Jesus life is now an eternal life—they do eventually see Him again in the flesh. But he is strangely changed. He is often completely unrecognizable at first. He’s a stranger on the road, a gardener, a man taking a walk on the sea shore at dawn. He is present, but He is present in a new and transfigured form. This is the opposite of the mundane understanding of resurrection trafficked by our contemporary culture. This isn’t more of the same. It is an elevation of human nature into the realm of the divine.

And, my brothers and sisters, we have been made partakers of this resurrection, even though we are still alive in the flesh. In baptism, we were united mysteriously to Christ in His death and Resurrection. This baptism, the promises of which we are going to renew in just a moment, conforms us to Christ, and it is what makes it possible for us to follow Him toward the hidden heavenly realms. Let’s look at the second reading again. Saint Paul says “If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is.” Paul is speaking of the Resurrection that we were given when we were baptized, the light of Christ that now dwells mysteriously in our hearts, if we care to search for it.

Paul continues, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” So not only is Christ invisible to us in the gospels this morning, but our own new life is a hidden one, one that we must seek out to experience it. How do we seek it out: through prayer, through attentive participation at the liturgy, through the efforts we make to see Christ in our neighbor, in the poor, in the sick and imprisoned. What we discover then, is that all of Jesus Christ’s teachings were not about making this a better world, but a map, an instruction manual on how to find God, to seek what is above while still in the flesh below. At the center of this is His presence in the Holy Eucharist, where He is visible only to the eyes of faith.

In today’s first reading, Saint Peter says that Jesus was not visible to everyone after the Resurrection. He appeared only to those who ate and drank with Him. Saint Peter is referring to us. We are the ones who now eat and drink with the Lord, and this means that we seek the things that are above not merely for ourselves, but to be able to report back to a world that labors, in so many ways, under the shadow of death: “Christ is risen indeed! He shall wipe away every tear from your eyes, and death shall be no more!”

Two Paradoxes for Holy Week (Part 2)

My second paradox is closely related to the first.

When the Son of Man is lifted up, he draws all to Himself [John 12: 32]. In John’s Gospel especially, it is the moment of Christ’s death on the Cross, His “lifting up,” that is the moment of Jesus’s glorification. Herein lies the paradox: how can glory emanate from the face that is hardly recognizable as human because of His wounds, His exhaustion, and the utterly shameful nature of death by Crucifixion?

While this paradox has been commented upon by many theologians, I first remember encountering a form of it in an essay by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, in a book entitled On the Way to Jesus Christ. He observes, in the Liturgy of the Hours, two antiphons attached to the same Psalm 45 (44 in the Latin numbering) at Evening Prayer on Monday of Week Two. The Church has always taken this Psalm to refer to the marriage of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church His Bride. During the Second Week of Lent, the Church attaches to this Psalm the antiphon, “You are the fairest of the children of men and graciousness is poured upon your lips.” Jesus’s beauty is therefore emphasized, but especially the “inner beauty of his words,” as Cardinal Ratzinger puts it. He is the perfect man.

But this changes during Holy Week, when the antiphon is now a text taken from the prophet Isaiah: “He had neither beauty nor majesty, nothing to attract our eyes [Isaiah 53: 2].”

To make sense of this contrast, Ratzinger points out that it cannot be a contradiction, since both antiphons derive from the same Holy Spirit, who has spoken through the prophets. Invoking the English poet John Keats, he points out that the aphorism, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty” forces us to a critical evaluation of what we consider beautiful. We must accept that true beauty must somehow involve “wounds, pain, and even the obscure mystery of death and that this can only be found in accepting pain, not in ignoring it.”

Thus in the suffering Christ we see the beauty of our God accepting our pain in love, transforming it into life. We see a man, driven by a fervent love, freely willing to endure all manner of human violence and hatred in loving obedience to the Father. He loves His own to the very end and goes to any length to rescue us and to show us how lovable we are, even in our frequent unloveliness. That this is a kind of beauty can be inferred by its effects on us: it causes a kind of “compunction,” a breaking open of our hearts, often connected with tears, partly of joy, partly of pain.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s essay is primarily a reflection on Christian aesthetics, a topic to which he often returned in his occasional essays. He recognizes certain premonitions in Plato’s aesthetics (especially in the Phaedrus and Symposium), in the pagan philosopher’s belief that beauty wounds the beholder (which is to say, it causes a kind of compunction) and thus awakens in us a thirst for a deeper truth, something beyond superficial notions of beauty.

I would add that a similar premonition in the Greek pagan world can be found in the poets. As the great Alasdair MacIntyre observed, Homer’s Iliad demonstrates, subtly, how one can win a war by losing it. By this he means that the reader, in the end, tends to sympathize more with the vanquished Hector, even when his “appearance was so marred beyond human semblance [Isaiah 52: 14],” by the disgraceful treatment of his body by Achilles. There seems to be greater glory in the moral goodness and inner nobility of Hector than in the acknowledged excellence of Achilles. Why is this? We could speculate at length, but we see Hector dying for love of his city, versus Achilles fighting as a kind of hireling, a soldier of fortune. In the end, what redeems the character of Achilles, as is the case in all Greek tragedy, is our knowledge of his doomed mortality, not his perfections as a manly warrior.

[I note in passing that in this analysis, I part ways with important aspects of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Greek culture.]

What the pagans were not fully able to grasp (and indeed was anyone able to do it, except in prophecy by the Holy Spirit?) was that this inverted glory would be fully vindicated by God in the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of God’s Son. The final beauty, for which the Christian hopes in the Iliad, is the vision of Hector and Achilles, like Saint Stephen and Saint Paul, reconciled by the death of Christ, and now, as friends, adoring the one, true God of us all. Until this final vision, all earthly beauty is provisional, existing in a tension between the intimation of God’s glory and the realism of human cruelty and suffering.

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].”

Temptation, Transfiguration, and the goal of Lenten discipline

The first two Sundays of Lent each year give us two significant events in the life of Jesus. Why these two? Can we say something about the relationship between the temptation of Christ in the desert and the Transfiguration of Christ on the mountain? And what might these tell us about the holy season of Lent?

This year, we are reading Luke’s versions of these events, and it is noteworthy that for Luke, they both look forward. To what do they look forward? Let’s look at each one. On the First Sunday of Lent, the temptation of Christ ended with an ominous note: “When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him…for a time.” What is Luke getting at here? The temptations aren’t over, is what he is saying. When we aren’t experiencing temptations, that doesn’t mean that they are over and done. The Tempter has just departed for a time. Temptations will return, and our job is to be vigilant.

But I think that Luke also had something more specific in mind. How about this: the great war between Jesus and the Devil, between the Son of Man and the ruler of this world, isn’t over when Jesus wins this opening battle. The war won’t be decided until the Crucifixion. At that time, Jesus’s human nature will again be tempted to use His divine power in opposition to the will of His Father. The Father’s mysterious will is to send His Son into the world as a man, to save us by sharing in our mortality, our weakness and suffering. When we arrive at Holy Week, and we recall all of Jesus’s suffering—the betrayals, the mockery, the scourgings, and finally Crucifixion—this is the Devil throwing every he has at the Son of God, Who conquers Him by a quiet obedience and faith.

The Resurrection marks the definitive destruction of the power of hell. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. We need to see how the Transfiguration also looks forward to Holy Week and Easter. In this case, it is quite direct. When Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus, what are they discussing with each other? Here is what Luke says: “Moses and Elijah…appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.” Jesus is going to accomplish an “exodus.” Isn’t this interesting? So much could be said about what this means, since the Exodus is, in some ways, the theme of the entire Torah. Let’s focus on one important aspect of the Exodus, to see a deeper connection with Moses and Elijah.

What do these two have in common? Both of them spoke to God on Mount Sinai. When God first spoke to Moses on Sinai, He commissioned him to go to Egypt to bring the Israelites out, right? But when Moses went to Pharaoh and demanded that he let the people go, it was not his immediate aim to lead them to the Promised Land. Rather, his goal was to worship God on Mount Sinai. It was to make a new covenant with God—in a certain sense, a renewal of the covenant between God and Abraham. On Mount Sinai, the terms of the covenant are sharpened: God will adopt Israel as His beloved people, and the people, for their part, will obey God’s law.

But why did Elijah go to Mount Sinai, or Horeb, as it was called in his time? As a matter of fact, God asks Elijah that very question, “Elijah, why are you here?” And what does he respond? “Because your people have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars…” and so on. Note that God does not renew the covenant at this time; He simply sends Elijah back with reassurance that a remnant of the people had remained faithful. From that point on the prophets will have the job of reminding the people of the covenant and calling them back to it.

Alright, back to the Transfiguration. Jesus, we said, was going to accomplish His Exodus. Where is He leaving and where is He going? He is leaving this world, the fallen world, and going to the new creation, what we might call heaven, the right hand of the Father. Along the way, just like Moses at Mount Sinai, He is going to ratify a new covenant, in His own Blood. He will give us the new law—this is why the Father says, “Listen to Him!”

Now I’ve downplayed something crucial here: for Jesus to leave this world and pass over into the new world, He must die. And with that observation, we are brought back, finally, to Lent. Lent is a time to battle temptations after the model of Jesus, and it is also a time to practice mortification. For us, this mortification of fasting, almsgiving and prayer, involves a frank acknowledgement of our sin. The goal isn’t to make us feel guilty and therefore punish ourselves the more, even if contrition and reparation are part of the process. What is the goal? In the gospel, the Apostles see it before their eyes: glory. The glory of God and, dare we say, the deification of humankind in Jesus Christ. Every time we accept mortification, we are stepping tentatively out of this world and into the next, with the hope of glory. When we see the brilliant light of the Transfiguration, shining through the body of Jesus, we are seeing a foreshadowing of our own transfiguration. Saint Paul says that Jesus “will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body.”

So the goal of our Lenten discipline and the goal of Christ’s Exodus is the regeneration of creation and the reinstitution of all of the children of Adam and Eve as His beloved sons and daughters. Lent is not, therefore, a time in which we try to “make ourselves” better by increments. It is a time to participate in the death of Jesus so that we may also share in His bodily Resurrection from the dead.

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