Monastery of the Holy Cross

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Homily for the Annunciation: Twenty-five years of saying “Yes” to God

What makes Our Lady such a powerful intercessor when we are in need? All the saints agree that we can do no better than to turn to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In the beautiful prayer called the Memorare, we address her in this way: “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided.”

Now, Mary does not grant our requests directly. Rather, she takes them to her Son, Jesus Christ. And He seems very willing to grant her requests, even when they happen to be, let’s say, “tangential” to God’s own plan.

What I mean by this is illustrated in the story of the wedding at Cana. Mary goes to Jesus to inform Him that the host has run out of wine. She clearly hopes that He will remedy the situation, even if He must perform a miracle to do so. In response, Jesus indicates that her request requires a bit of an adjustment to the schedule of His ministry. He says, “My time has not yet come.” Notice that He doesn’t yet say whether He is going to give a favorable response to Mary’s request.

But even before He agrees to do anything, she tells the servants to do whatever He tells them. She fully expects that her Son will grant her what she is asking. From where comes this confidence?

The answer is simple: Mary knows that she can ask her Son anything, because He knows that God can ask Mary anything.

When the angel Gabriel announces that Mary will bear God’s Son, she surely has some foreboding of what the cost of agreeing might be. But she says, “Let it be done to me.” In this way, she provides the perfect complement to Jesus, Who says, “not my will but thine be done.” Both are willing to do whatever the Father asks, practicing perfect, trusting obedience even unto death, as we will hear many times during Holy Week.

Today, we commemorate that mysterious day when God sought out the young Virgin and, with a ready heart, she said, “Yes,” to Him. She could not have known what this would eventually entail. She knew from the examples of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses, Jeremiah and Jonah that God’s call may well involve great sorrows along the way. But in faith, she also believed that one day God’s victory would bring great joy.

Now, just as Mary was invited to become the Mother of God and carried the life of God’s Son within her, so each of us, in our baptisms, was invited to say “yes” to God and bear the life of Christ within us. We now have the charge of nurturing this divine life and becoming part of the mystery of the Incarnation, as members of Christ’s Body. Our baptismal vocation requires us to listen each day for God’s invitation to enter more deeply into the mystery by our ready obedience to whatever He asks of us.

How ready am I to say “yes”? How much do I trust that God’s glorious plan will be worked out in me, especially when it involves walking through many trials on the way?

Now as it happens, today is a very significant day in the history of our community. On March 25th, 2000 our founders said their definitive “yes” to God’s invitation to follow Him in the Benedictine way of life.  And so today, we celebrate the 25th anniversary of our community’s entrance into the Benedictine Confederation.

Our founders did not know what the ensuing twenty-five years would look like.  I’ve been around for all of them, so I can say that this time has brought both joy and great hardship, including moments when it appeared that the community could not survive. But God has been faithful through it all, and He continues to invite us to follow His plan, no matter what.

We have also known, first-hand, the power of Our Lady’s intercession. This is why, at the top of the icons above the altar, we have placed Our Lady of the Protecting Veil. When I was a newly-arrived monk, we encountered one serious crisis that had us considering a move away from Chicago. We decided first to make a pilgrimage to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and ask for her help.

Shortly afterward, a man came to stay at our bed and breakfast. His professional expertise happened to be exactly what we needed to solve the problem that had been plaguing us.

This is only one of many such instances. After all, it was probably the Mother of God who brought us here in the first place to reopen this church dedicated to her Immaculate Conception. Today, as we renew the covenant in Christ’s Blood, let us renew our desire to say “yes” to whatever God asks of us, and to seek Our Lady’s help whenever we are in need, knowing that her generous “yes” was and is the beginning of our salvation.

Lent and Transfiguration

In the Church’s first three centuries, we have very little overt information about the liturgical calendar. Since the sacraments, the heart of the liturgy are ‘mysteries’, the early Christians were often circumspect in describing them in writing, where they might fall into the hands of the unbaptized. A certain amount of catechesis was required to prepare for initiation into baptism, confirmation (or ‘chrismation’) and the Holy Eucharist. Add to this the fact that the Church was largely underground, and it is understandable why the earliest layer of liturgical development is obscure.

Once we do have good documents, especially from the seventh century onward, we find more or less the fully-formed liturgical year, with a period of fasting preceding the great Paschal Mystery. Already, in this early period, we see the gospel of the temptation of Christ in the desert on the first Sunday, and the Transfiguration proclaimed on the second Sunday. Lent was still understood primarily as a preparation for baptism: the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, along with a new set of behaviors made the catechumen a fit receptacle for the divine life given at the Easter Vigil.

It was quite common in the early Church to refer to baptism as ‘enlightenment’ or ‘illumination’. With the gift of the Holy Spirit, the newly baptized began to see the world and his own life as if for the first time in the daylight. Obscure prophecies were explained as foreshadowing the Incarnation and Crucifixion; evil was revealed as a kind of parasite, destined for destruction at the end of time. In addition, the baptized were robed in white, a clear reference to the shining garments of Christ on Mount Tabor. The divine nature begins to shine through human nature after the pattern of the Son of God.

Changing behavior is laborious and demanding. Most of us are accustomed to regular setbacks in our Lenten discipline, and where we manage to hold the line, we are sorely tempted to ease up on the fast, to skimp on prayer. We tangle with the inner darkness that stubbornly resists cooperation with grace. By proclaiming to us the gospel of the Transfiguration on the second Sunday of this season, the Church reminds us that “the light shines in the darkness [John 1: 5],” and that in Christ, it is we whom the Father addresses as ‘well-pleasing’ and ‘chosen’.

In his apostolic exhortation Vita Consecrata, Pope Saint John Paul II makes use of the Transfiguration to explain the particular contours of self-denial in the acceptance of the evangelical counsels (poverty, chastity, and obedience). This way of life in close discipleship with Christ is a way of transformation “from glory to glory.” “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness [cf. 2 Corinthians 3: 18].”

Interestingly, Saint Benedict, the great Lawgiver in the Western tradition of monasticism, and hence of much of subsequent religious life, tells us that the whole of a monk’s life should be like Lent. So the Holy Father’s connection of the Transfiguration with the renunciations of religious life is exactly parallel with the liturgy’s use of the Transfiguration to help us make sense of the self-denial asked of all the baptized during this holy season. The glorified body of Jesus Christ is a reminder of the goal of transformation that we are seeking via our Lenten discipline.

Let me add one more detail from the story of this mystery. Jesus chooses His three closest disciplines, Peter, James, and John, to witness the irruption of His divine glory. These same three will later be with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. Once again, they will be sleepy! Indeed, they will flee when Christ refuses to manifest His divinity before the arresting soldiers.

After the resurrection, Christ appears to them once again under the appearance of His human nature, but His divinity is now known, and His glory recalled from this mysterious anticipatory moment in His ministry. Peter, James, and John chose to record this event for us who would come after the resurrection. We are urged to see Christ in our neighbor, in the poor, in the sick and the imprisoned, under the appearance of His human nature. Let us not forget the hidden glory that lurks potentially in each of us, veiled by the perishing flesh. When service of our neighbor becomes a burden, let us seek, by meditation, to see Christ in glory whenever He presents Himself in ‘distressing disguise.’ And may this Lent see us grow in love for God and neighbor, ready to celebrate with renewed joy and peace the mysteries of our salvation.

St. Benedict’s Lenten fare

Here in the monastery, our Lenten observance is relatively austere. We abstain from meat and fish, dairy products, olive oil, eggs, and alcohol, with a few exceptions. We also undertake individual mortifications. In spite of this, I can say with some certainty that the brothers look forward to Lent. In some ways, it is when we are most ourselves as monks. Saint Benedict says that every day for a monk is meant to be Lent. Moreover, he mentions joy twice in his short chapter on Lent, which gives a good insight into the meaning of mortification. It is done in the expectation of the glory of Easter and a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ, Who leads us by way of the Cross.

Another aspect of Lent for Benedictine monks is special reading. In his Lenten schedule, Saint Benedict allots an extra hour each day for reading. He instructs the superior to assign to each monk a book which is to be read straight through. In his day, reading would have meant primarily Scripture and some Church Fathers. In our day, I assign books from more contemporary writers, but the intent is the same: that we apply ourselves to a six-week dialogue with a master who will challenge us with new insights into the gospel that we wouldn’t have arrived at ourselves.

Homily for Ash Wednesday

During Lent, the Church urges us to pay attention to what we eat. Let’s focus our attention today on a significant fact about food. Almost all of what we eat was either once alive or comes from an animal that is or was alive. We eat plant products, like fruits, vegetables and legumes. We eat animal products like eggs, milk and cheese. And then we also consume animals themselves: fish, cows, pigs, chickens, and so on. We sometimes speak of a food chain, the top of which is inhabited by predators, whether it be lions or humans.

What this reveals to us is that our life is borrowed, in some sense, from other living things. This is true of all animals; plants receive their life from sun and water, but then other animals make use of the life that is in these plants to obtain necessary nutrients and complex molecules necessary for more complex life. While we might see ourselves as the top of the food chain, this reflection also reveals our total dependency on other living things for our own life. We can’t survive without plants and animals reproducing, growing, and, most significantly, dying so that we may sustain our own life.

The Lenten fast should spur us to reflect on the primal need for eating, and the significance that our life is not self-generated. We are dependent on other living things, and ultimately, our life comes from God Himself. We do not generate our lives; we receive them from God, and God sustains our life through His gifts of sun, water, plants and animals. We, of course, are meant to participate in this sharing of life by cultivating the garden of this world. But the sustaining and handing on of life has become toilsome, painful, and in the case of childbirth, where a child’s life is fully sustained by the life of its mother, even dangerous. This toil and pain is a result of sin. Work has become labor, laborious, difficult, refractory.

In the gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly teaches us about food and about work. He does this, though, in order to bring new life and a new notion of work into the world. He has come into the world to share His own life with us. He becomes our food, laying down His life for us on the Cross as the Lamb of God, inviting to His Supper. Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood, you have no life in you. In point of fact, Jesus’s own life is not even His own; he receives from the Father. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” This is quite an astonishing statement. As the Son of God receives life from the very Father, we are being invited at the Eucharistic to receive this same life from God through the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ.

Elsewhere, Jesus says, “Do not work for perishable food, but for the food which endures for eternal life [John 6: 27].” And again, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish His work [John 4: 34].” This work is the harvest of souls, the return of humanity to its rightful Father and God. But idea that the food that sustains Jesus is the doing of the Father’s will is significant for us today on Ash Wednesday. Let me begin to tie up all of these ideas.

As we undertake the fast today, and as we practice various kinds of fasts and abstinence from meat during Lent, let us be conscious of the fact that we are dependent on God. As we experience hunger, let us recognize that this hunger is meant to be a hunger for the true Bread of Life, the Holy Eucharist, in which we receive true and abiding life. To receive this new life fully, we must consent to die to ourselves, to take up our Crosses daily in imitation of Jesus. This is to share in His work, and so, paradoxically, to be fed by the will of the Father. The ashes that we will receive in a moment are a sign of our consenting to die to sin and the old life. Let us remember especially the catechumens and candidates who will receive the Holy Eucharist for the first time at the Easter Vigil, and who are striving to do the will of God and change their lives throughout this holy time.

And then, as we see around us birds returning, plants gradually coming back to life, let us turn our thoughts to the glorious Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, in which we hope to share. And with these thoughts, let us lay aside every weight and sin that clings to us, and run with a lighter step the race that God has set before us, looking always to Jesus who has opened to us the way to eternal blessedness. May He be praised forever. Amen.

The Feast of the Presentation

“Is a lamp brought in to be put under a bushel, or under a bed, and not on a stand? For there is nothing hid, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light.” [Mark 4: 21-22]

When the Son of God, the light of the world, was sent by God into this world, He arrived in a surprising, even hidden, way. Rather than manifesting power, He embraced smallness and dependency, becoming an infant, a child of the Virgin Mary. This unspectacular entrance upon the world scene meant that, without jubilant angels singing before shepherds and miraculous stars drawing astronomers from the East, the presence of the Redeemer among us would have gone almost entirely unnoticed. Today’s celebration is the capstone on what used to be called “Epiphanytide,” that period of time after January 6 in which the Church meditates on the various ways in which Jesus Christ’s divinity was revealed in the flesh.

This points to an important reality about the Gospel, and in fact, the entire created cosmos: it is a revelation of things previously hidden. The inner meaning of the human person is only fully understood in the discovery that we are meant to share life with God, just as food and drink, bread and wine, find their full meaning in the Holy Eucharist, God feeding us with His own life.

In theory, God could have saved us without our knowing. There is something potentially mischievous, even manipulative, in that idea. What we see, rather, is that God invites us to be His coworkers in bringing mercy and healing to the world. For this to happen, we need to recognize His presence, how to read “the signs of the times.” The “ true light which enlightens every man” has entered the world, and now illuminates all of God’s creatures from within. The Word of God, through Whom all things were made, is revealed to be the life within all things, making them holy and lovable.

When the aged and devout prophet Simeon takes the infant in his arms, he not only proclaims Him to be the long-awaited salvation of Israel, but “a light for revelation to the Gentiles [Luke 2: 32].” Salvation and reconciliation with the great Creator of the cosmos is being offered to all, though it is Israel’s special “glory” to be the nation that prepared the way and who calls Jesus a son of the tribe of Judah.

Let’s turn to another aspect of today’s 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’s adventures 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 yet 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 long-awaited sudden arrival of God in His temple. The long exile of the chosen people was finally ended, that moment for which holy Simeon and Anna had kept vigil with such love for God.

In the second antiphon from First Vespers of today’s feast, this arrival is seen as the consummation of the marriage covenant into which God had entered with Israel: “Adorn your bridal chamber, O Zion, and receive Christ the king; him whom the Virgin conceived, the Virgin has brought forth; after giving birth, the Virgin adores him whom she bore.” 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 today’s Mass, we 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.

 

Homily for the Solemnity of the Epiphany

Nearly four thousand years ago, there was a man living in the vicinity of the ancient city of Babylon. This man heard God speak to him, and it turned out to be a major turning point in history. That might not seem like an exaggeration. After all, don’t we believe that God speaks to us on a regular basis? The answer would be, “yes, of course.” But whatever confidence we might have that we can separate out God’s voice in our hearts from the other voices clamoring for our attention, we owe very much to this man who lived so many generations ago.

I am referring, of course, to Abraham. At the time of which I am speaking, he lived in what we would call a pagan land, where there were many gods. The stars themselves were held to be divine in some way, and the wise men of Babylon were expert at mapping the heavens, watching them for divine messages. Later Jewish and Christian tradition held that Abraham was grieved by this perplexing multitude of gods and the superstition and magic that went along with them. In other words, Abraham wanted the Truth, and despaired of finding it in the paganism around him.

In Abraham, God, the One, True God, found a heart ready to hear the Truth. What Abraham heard was that to follow this Truth required of him a great sacrifice. He would need to leave his homeland and his family and travel to a place that this God would show him. But Abraham followed, because the Truth is better than make-believe, and certainly better than lies. As I said earlier, we owe a great deal to these patriarchs and their wives who heard the voice of God and obeyed, often at high cost to themselves. Through them, God was establishing a foothold in this world that had rebelled against Him. Abraham’s children, the Israelites, became a light for the nations because they worshipped the One, True God.

This vocation, to hear God’s word and follow, was often very costly, because the old gods were not about to give up their power easily. Unsurprisingly, the most powerful and successful by worldly standards were often the most dedicated to the false gods. Someone like Socrates, who had a similar thirst for Truth as Abraham, ended up being executed by those who felt threatened by him. This was a world of conflict, scarcity, fear, and mistrust. Too often, it was held together simply by the threat of violence and the predations of the stronger against the weaker. This is why God’s call to Abraham required him to renounce that world.

Today, on the Epiphany, God speaks again to a group of three men from the East. What is more, God speaks to them through one of the stars which they watched so carefully. The stars had always belonged to God, and were intended to be His messengers, but fallen man had forgotten how to read them properly. With the arrival of God’s Son, fallen nature begins to regain its true purpose, to offer us signs of God’s presence and His love. These three men do exactly what Abraham did many years before. They set off for a place unknown, following this star.

They know that a king has been born, and he is somewhere in this small country of Judea. By their obedience, by their willingness to set out, they make known the identity of this child. I said that the willingness to follow God comes at a cost. The gospel tells us that King Herod and Jerusalem were in an uproar about this news that God was sharing with them. In his famous poem “Journey of the Magi”, T.S. Eliot captures this cost well. He has one of the Magi, many years after his encounter with the baby Jesus, say this: “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,/But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods.”

Today we celebrate the fact that God did not only call Abraham’s descendants, the Jews, to know the Truth. In the Magi, we see His rescue mission reaching the Gentiles as well. God reveals Himself to us and to all. In the Incarnation of His Son, Jesus Christ, we have a perpetual point of reference to discern God’s voice in today’s world. In the Church, which is the extension of the Incarnation in space and time, we continue to enjoy the assurance that we can hear God. He speaks through nature, through stars and trees and wind and rain.  With God’s Word alive in our hearts, we can learn to read these signs. But His invitation still calls us to leave all that is fallen within us and in the world. In other words, following it will require our ongoing conversion. Not everyone welcomes this. Herod heard what the Magi had to say, and he rejected it. He was unwilling to give up that old world in which he enjoyed power and status.

Where is God speaking to me today? How can the Church help me to clarify God’s voice and His invitation to conversion? Will we set off in faith toward what is still unknown in God’s plan? Will we put it off, or even reject what God is asking, fearing the cost? Guide our hearts Lord God, to hear and heed, and to follow where so many holy men and women have gone before, believing not only that the Truth is better than make-believe and lies, but that Your Truth is greater than all we can imagine.

The Holy Family

While doing a bit of searching in connection with yesterday’s Feast of the Holy Family, I discovered this striking–and humorous–image by the early 14th century Sienese iconographer Simoni Martini. It shows the finding of 12-year-old Jesus in the temple after Mary and Joseph had been searching for him for three days. Anyone who has parented an adolescent will, I hope, find this depiction amusing:

Let me take this opportunity to invite you to join us for Solemn Vespers tomorrow, Tuesday, December 31 at 5:15 p.m. In addition to exquisite music by Josquin and Willaert, our Schola will reprise a motet I composed for last year’s celebration: Virga Iesse floruit. At the bottom of this post is a sneak preview of the first of Josquin’s antiphon settings for this solemnity. The text, O admirabile commercium, with a translation, is also given below.

Merry Christmastide to all!

–Prior Peter, OSB

 

O admirabile commercium!
Creator generis humani,
animatum corpus sumens,
de Virgine nasci dignatus est:
et procedens homo sine semine,
largitus est nobis suam Deitatem.

O wondrous exchange:
the creator of human-kind,
taking on a living body
was worthy to be born of a virgin,
and, coming forth as a human without seed,
has given us his deity in abundance.

The Nativity of the Lord 2024

Dearly beloved, today our Savior is born; let us rejoice! Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness. (Pope St. Leo the Great)

“Et Incarnatus Est” is on hiatus during Twelve Days of Christmas but will return after Epiphany.  Merry Christmas to you and yours!

The Progress of Advent

In days long ago, before the invention of Twitter, when kings, governors, and others occupying the highest levels of authority wished to communicate with their subjects, they relied on the spoken word. Most often, messages from the palace or capital were delivered by heralds. Upon more solemn and serious occasions, however, the monarch would make his or her own “progress” through the cities, towns, and villages of the realm. These were graver occasions not merely because of the requirements of royal pomp. Certain pressing issues at a local level were reserved for the judgment of the sovereign himself. When the sovereign was just, this was good news for those who loved peace and justice. The arrival of the king, his “advent,” was an affair of great municipal fervor. Extending several miles from the destination town, the royal route would be richly decorated. At various stations along the way, singers and dancers awaited the royal progress and celebrated the king’s or queen’s approach. When the sovereign finally arrived, the celebrations began in earnest. Then, of course, the work began, courts were drawn up, cases were heard, and judgments were dispensed. The sovereign then began the journey to the next town.

Before the institution of a hereditary  monarchy in ancient Israel, the king was God Himself. God communicated through heralds, who occupied the social positions of prophet or judge (priests, too, occasionally divined God’s will by use of the mysterious urim and thummim). God’s most memorable advent was His descent into Egypt to take Israel out from slavery and to pass judgement on Pharaoh and his army. As time went on,  such miraculous manifestations of God’s judgment became harder to discern. The great crisis was the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 586 B.C. and the deportation of the most important Judahites to exile in Babylon.  In spite of the high-flown and inspired rhetoric of Second Isaiah (chapters 40-55 of the book of that bears his name), the restoration of Jerusalem under the benevolent sponsorship of the Persian empire never quite took hold of the people’s imagination as had the Exodus. No wonder: many Jews opted to remain in Babylon and in Egypt, where life was decidedly less rugged than in the hills of Judea.

Most of the literary prophets of the Hebrew Bible grapple with this problem. The general solution proposed is that God will, at some future time, once again make His royal progress from His heavenly throne, and through an appointed Messiah, execute judgment on the idolatrous nations that successively dominated God’s chosen people. This “day of the Lord” was often enough a frightful event, but the goal was always the eventual restoration of justice and shalom, the peace that is “ordered tranquility [Saint Augustine’s phrase],” the world as God had intended it to be.

In the Christian proclamation, when God did make His advent, it was in a most unexpected manner. His herald, the angel Gabriel, went not into the public square, not to the courts of Herod (much less those of the faraway emperor, now in Rome), but to the humble dwelling of the Virgin Mary. God was indeed to make His solemn entry into the world, but it would be in an obscure village as a vulnerable infant. He would go unrecognized by nearly everyone until, ironically enough, His return to the Father at the Ascension. In the Incarnation, the Son of God came not to issue final judgment, but to invite all to a new way of thinking about the world. No longer is it divided into antagonized interest groups and national factions (though Israel would always remain God’s first love). Salvation and shalom (“My peace I give you—not as the world gives…”) would be offered to all peoples by the humble carpenter of Nazareth to those who would take seriously His offer to repent and undergo a change of heart.

We now wait for the ultimate advent, what is often called the Parousia or Second Coming, but each year, we call to mind this first “royal progress” of the infant King, so as to be reminded of His offer of peace and joy. “No one ever spoke like this man [John 7: 46]!” May these Final Days assist us in our preparation to celebrate the approaching Kingdom of God!

 

Ritual: Social Control? Or Liberation for Love?

Catholic and Orthodox believers are sometimes criticized because of the weight of ritualized behavior at worship and elsewhere: rote prayers, signs of the Cross, and so on. Ritual appears to be a form of social control that interferes with personal authenticity. Of course, what ‘authenticity’ means or whether it is an unambiguous good is not often examined, in my experience.

The fact is that we depend on ritualized behavior every day. Many, if not most, social interactions depend on ritualized behavior. I arrive at the train station at 7:05 and meet the train there at that time. I use the same desk everyday at work, and I expect that when I go to my superior’s office, he will be there and not someone else. Conversations make use of stock phrases, particularly at the beginning and end, and not to make use of these can be a sign of hostility. I turn on the television at a certain time, and at the same time, the people in the news studio begin to talk into a camera. The range of options for my clothing is limited by ritualistic restraints.

By following ritualized behavior, I help to create and sustain a sense of the ‘normal’, and make social life possible by making my behavior predictable to others in crucial ways. By steady adherence to such behavior, I demonstrate my dependability and make possible deeper levels of interaction by showing my trustworthiness. Ritual, it turns out, is in some measure the condition of commitment to others, even to love. It is a sign of my willingness to put others’ needs and expectations before my own at certain crucial times.

Of course, opening ourselves to this sort of basic love, as is the case with any kind of love, is a risk. Social rituals can be manipulated and the good faith of persons can be preyed upon by those with some control over rituals who do not have the common good at heart.

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