Monastery of the Holy Cross

Et Incarnatus Est – The Prior’s Blog

The Eighth Day

[The following is from the program notes for Solemn Vespers of Saturday, April 7.]

The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was more than a new event within the old, tired world, laboring under sin and death.  In fact, it was the end of that world and the inauguration of a new creation.  All who are baptized into Christ belong to this new creation, and our lives “are hidden with Christ in God.”  As the first creation was made in six days, with God resting on the seventh, the new creation required a new day, the ‘eighth day’, a day outside of the closed cycle of the broken world.

One important symbol of this eighth day is the celebration of an ‘octave’.  Each day between Easter Sunday and the Sunday following (now referred to as ‘Divine Mercy Sunday’) is part of the same Easter reality, each day a liturgical solemnity, the eight days of the new cosmos breaking into ‘secular’ time and renewing the old world from within.

Traces of the eighth day motif are already present in Saint John’s gospel.  It is on the eighth day that Jesus appears and invites Thomas to touch his hands, feet and side, and Thomas comes to believe.  Jesus then pronounces blessed all who believe without having seen, who put their faith in this hidden life in Christ.

In the present Roman calendar (of the ‘ordinary form’), only two official octaves remain, those of Christmas and Easter.  In the medieval calendar, virtually all major feasts had ‘octaval’ commemorations at the very least.  The liturgical reformers around the time of the Second Vatican Council considered these to be cumbersome complications.  Perhaps this was so in some cases.  It also may be that the traditional language of the eighth day had fallen into desuetude, perhaps as part of the overall weakening of an eschatological theology (a theology of the ‘last things’, as both present and yet to come).  The Orthodox churches have tended to retain a robust sense of the octave as theologically central.  In the center icon of Christ in glory behind the altar in the monastery church, one sees two interlocking stars of four points each.  The combined eight points indicate that Christ’s coming, both now at every liturgy, and fully revealed at the summation of history, happens on the eighth day.  As we celebrate the eighth day of Easter, we are overjoyed to join with you to praise God for the victory of His Son and the gift of new life in the Spirit.

One of the implications of a “new creation” is that God’s manifest beauty is, in the memorable words of Saint Augustine, “ever ancient, ever new.” Kevin and I have frequently discussed together the importance of the creation of new liturgical music that reflects the perennial confidence and vigor of the Catholic faith. After making a few attempts to realize a collaborative Renaissance English setting of tonight’s troparion on Psalm 115, we decided that this would be a perfect text for our own collaboration. We took turns setting the verses meant for the Schola as part of an effort to forge a shared style. We hope that all profit from our labors as we meditate upon and celebrate our own Exodus from the world to the Kingdom of God.

Christ is truly risen!

 

Third Sunday of Lent

[The following is from the program notes for Solemn Vespers of Saturday, March 3.]

According to St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism and co-patron of Europe, every day in a monk’s life should be as if in Lent.  I like to think that this is because every tomorrow for a monk is the Resurrection.  We rise early every morning in the hope of Christ’s glorious return, and learn to live in this taut expectation.

The Church’s liturgy offers us a similar perspective, this time on the life of all the faithful.  We might say that there are indications that the lives of Christians during Lent should be more ‘monastic’.  One interesting indication has to do with the place of the Psalms in the Church’s liturgy for Lent.  This can be best seen by looking at the Church’s Divine Office antiphons during Advent and comparing them to Lent.

The antiphons for Sundays in Advent tend to be somewhat free paraphrases of texts from Isaiah and other prophets.  This allows for an enjoyable re-interpretation of the typical Psalms sung on Saturday and Sunday evenings and on Sunday morning (Pss. 144b-147, Pss. 109-112, and Pss. 50, 62, 117, and 148-150 respectively).  The antiphons color the meaning of the Psalms and encourage us to pray imaginatively.

During Lent, the situation is a bit more plain and even, we might say, ‘chaste’.  Now the antiphons for Sunday are taken from the Lauds Psalms and so highlight the Psalm texts themselves, unadorned with the prophetic sense of expectation.  Traditionally, the Psalms are to be prayed with the voice of Christ, and in this fashion, we are drawn repeatedly to contemplate the Passion of Christ, His appeal to the Father in ‘reverence [Hebrews 5: 7]’, and His triumph in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Thus, contrary to what we might expect, we are called not so much to a focus on repentance that might become self-involved; rather we are invited to contemplate the One Who walks with us this path to redemption.

We note a similar phenomenon in the liturgy of the Mass.  The texts of the communion chants for each weekday of Lent are taken from consecutive Psalms, beginning quite deliberately with Psalm 1.  That is to say that Psalm 1 appears as the communion on Ash Wednesday, Psalm 2 on the following Thursday, and so on.  This intense focus on the Psalms is quite ‘monastic’, as any monk would be quick to point out.  The 150 Psalms shape everything we do at prayer in community, and much of how we think even in private.

The focus on the Person of Christ comports well with the traditional gospels for each Sunday (preserved as the selections for ‘Year A’ in the current lectionary cycle).  The First Sunday retells Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, the Second Sunday brings us the foretaste of Christ’s glorification in the story of His Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. And on this third Sunday, we find Him promising the Holy Spirit to the woman at the well.

These indications within the liturgy are a good reminder that the austere life of the monk is not at all meant to be joyless, but provides precisely the atmosphere in which the believer can better assent to the fullness of the Good News of our salvation and sanctification.  Lenten fasting and abstinence is far more than a means simply to address deficiencies in our moral characters; they form the context in which we conform ourselves to Christ’s self-emptying [Philippians 2:6-11], so as to receive with greater intensity the indwelling of the divine life given at our baptisms. This we long for as we make our way toward the renewal of our baptisms at the Easter Vigil and on Easter Sunday, the foretaste of our own resurrections in Jesus Christ.

Feast of Lights

[The following is from the program notes for Solemn Vespers of Friday, February 2.]

The Feast of the Presentation is one so expansively rich, it is not easy to know where to begin a short reflection such as this. At the center of the many images surrounding our Lord’s first visit to the temple in the flesh is the temple itself, and a bit of scriptural archaeology perhaps can unearth certain foundations for us. The temple is the meeting place between God and man, but—importantly, if uncomfortably—it is also the place of sacrifice.

Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple in obedience to a commandment found in the book of Exodus: “The first-born of your sons you shall give to me [Ex. 22: 29]. As Jewish scholar Jon D. Levenson has conclusively demonstrated, this would have been understand by ancient peoples as requiring human sacrifice. However, we know from plentiful other commandments of the Lord that, unlike the bloodthirsty gods of neighboring peoples, God in fact abhors human sacrifice. Much as he asks a last-minute replacement for Isaac, just as Abraham raises the knife to slaughter his son, in Exodus, God also provides a ’redemption’ for the first-born sons of the Israelites. Parents are not only permitted, but required to “buy back” from God the little child with an animal sacrifice, a substitute for the real thing.

So far, so good; but what perhaps is still a bit unsettling is the whole idea of the ritual sacrifice of a child in the first place. The word “sacrifice” is derived from a Latin compound using “sacer” and “facio,” and it means to “make holy.” The sacrifice of any item is meant to translate the object from the profane realm into the realm of the holy. This was typically done by slaughtering an animal and burning the portion meant for God. In the case of human sacrifice, the people who practiced this (and we know that it was a constant temptation for Israel as well) understood themselves to be giving the person to God, as a servant. It was the greatest gift one could make. The prophet Micah, speaking on behalf of the people who had sinned against God, asks what a fitting gift would be to reconcile with God, as a sign of heart-felt repentance. The prophet asks rhetorically, “With what shall I come before the Lord?…will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? [Micah 6: 6a, 7]” After this rhetorical question, in which the gift of the son comes last in a series, demonstrating that it is the highest gift Micah’s hearers can imagine, Micah makes a stunning statement, dulled to our ears by out-of-context repetition. What is the great gift? “He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justive, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God [v. 8]?”

So God, as a good teacher, honors the good intention behind the wrongful action, and directs, but the laws of redemption, a practice initially pagan, driven in no small part by fear and superstition, toward the liberating and enlightened truths of revelation. This change of perspective is, already in the Old Testament, a foreshadowing the great enlightenment that Jesus Christ was to bring. And He brings this light not only to the chosen people of Israel, but to all peoples. Sacrifices of all kinds, as well as substitute political rituals like public executions (including crucifixion) have slowly been disappearing ever since the Christ appeared in the flesh as the one, true sacrifice, the one fitting offering that we can make to God.

Now, to acknowledge that we are still impelled to offer something when we come before the Lord is to acknowledge that in order to fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament and to reveal sacrifice for what it is, Jesus had to assume our mortal flesh and submit to death. In this statement we see how today’s feast points in two directions, forming a hinge between Christmas and Easter: in order to make the one sacrifice to end all sacrifice, Christ needed to become man. As the letter to the Hebrews says it, “Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.  [10: 5].” But Christ also needed to be offered, and today in the temple, the offering of our human nature upon the Cross is foreshadowed in the mysterious fulfillment of the law. God and man are reconciled by the supreme gift of Christ’s human nature to the Father, and His divine nature to us.

May our gratitude for this overwhelming gift cheer our hearts in these dark and cold days of February, and spur us to a fervent celebration of Lent, that we may again proclaim the Light of Christ at the Easter Vigil.

After Epiphany

Guests frequently ask us why we leave our Christmas tree up until February. This isn’t mere sentimentalism on our part, but is rooted in the nature of this time of the Church year, even in the “ordinary form” of the Mass.

Traditionally, the time between Epiphany and Lent is marked by a gradual transition. This is clearer if one is celebrating the extraordinary form with the old calendar. This Sunday will be the Second Sunday after Epiphany rather than the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. However, the new calendar and the ordinary form of the Mass still conform in important ways to the old rite. This week, the collect at Mass (the opening prayer) is the same as that in the old rite, and the collect, prayers, and chant propers for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time are the same as for the Second Sunday after Epiphany. This correspondence continues for several weeks. So even though we are in Ordinary Time, the prayers and chants continue to emphasize the mystery of Epiphany, the appearance of God made visible in our human flesh.

This is not as clear if you don’t sing the traditional chants! But we do.

There are two primary hinges that move us away from Epiphany toward Lent. The first no longer appears in the calendar, and that is the Sunday called “Septuagesima.” This is roughly 70 days before the Easter Octave, and in the extraordinary form, one wears begins to wear violet vestments and stops singing Alleluia, as if Lent had already begun. This Sunday is movable, and this year falls on January 28. We don’t follow the old calendar, but we still mark this date with a higher level of asceticism in the cloister and darker chants at Mass.

The second hinge is the Feast of the Presentation. This is traditional a ‘joyful’ mystery in the prayer of the rosary, and it is especially known for the blessing of the candles to be used at the liturgy throughout the year. But it also has echoes of a ‘sorrowful’ mystery. Christ is presented in the temple as a sacrifice. He is redeemed, ‘bought back’, at the price of two turtledoves, but the imagery is clear. This is the child destined to offer Himself for the salvation of the world, to be the new and true temple. This celebration falls forty days after Christmas, and is really the end of the season that follows Epiphany. Hence, we keep our tree up until the Presentation.

We hope to see many of you at 7:00 p.m. on the evening of February 2, when we will celebrate Solemn Vespers. It will be your last chance to see our tree for this year!

On the Mystical Antiphons

[The following is from the program notes for Solemn Vespers of Sunday, December 31.]

The coming of God in human flesh is the central event in human history. After the Word became flesh, all of creation appeared changed to those who encountered Jesus Christ risen and glorified. Christ’s sacred humanity became the key that reinterpreted all of the Scriptures and indeed unlocks the mystery of the human person and human destiny: to be divinized by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

The Incarnation has had a way of scandalizing those who feel that it is beneath God’s majesty to inhabit the ordinariness and weakness of the human state. Early ‘gnostic’ movements in the Church’s history invented a variety of ways of protecting God from His own rashness, it would seem. In this milieu, the Church discovered that the virgin birth by Mary, the Mother of God was a central guarantee of the mystery of the Incarnation. Christ took flesh from the Blessed Virgin while retaining His divinity, as shown by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.

As the Church re-read the sacred Scriptures of Israel to understand more profoundly the mystery of Christ, she also began to discover a multitude of allusions to the mystery of His conception and to the sanctity of His Mother. The antiphons (the short texts at the beginning and end of each Psalm) of today’s solemnity assist us in reinterpreting the Psalms according to their Christology and excavating for us hidden meanings of the Old Testament. The mysterious fleece of Gideon (see Judges, chapter six) was covered with heavenly dew while all the ground around it remained dry and barren. This descent of the dew portended the Lord’s triumph in battle and salvation for Israel. The bramble bush that drew the attention of Moses burned with heavenly flame but was not consumed. And from it, he heard God’s Word, the Son, according to the Fathers of the Church. Mary received the fullness of deity in her womb without losing her virginity, nor being consumed by God’s powerful presence. And the Word that was her only Son was to lead all peoples, not through the Red Sea, but through death itself.  He did this by taking our sins upon Himself, becoming the Lamb of God, attested to by John the Baptist.

The length and density of the traditional antiphons attached to today’s solemnity are unusual. Most antiphons quote or directly paraphrase Biblical texts. The theological content of these ‘mystical’ antiphons is surely related to Mary’s status as the ‘vanquisher of all heresies’, the guarantor, as explained above, of the orthodox interpretation of the Incarnation.

Even more unusual is Josquin’s decision to do a full setting of the antiphons of this one liturgical day. Aside from his numerous Mass settings, Josquin set almost no fully liturgical music (in contrast to the paraliturgical devotional works for which he is justly renowned). Musical settings of Mass Ordinaries (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, etc.) have the advantage of being usable on almost any day of the year, whereas the ‘proper’ antiphons for today’s solemnity can only be performed on this one day of the year—at least if one wishes to honor the traditional placement of liturgical texts.

In Josquin’s day, the Roman liturgy celebrated the Circumcision of Christ on January 1, but this was a relatively recent observance, especially at Rome. And even when the Circumcision was adopted in the universal Church, it retained the more ancient association with the motherhood of Mary. Surely part of Josquin’s decision to set these texts is motivated by his own well-attested Marian devotion and the growing popularity of such devotion (especially in the use of the rosary) in his day. Even so, it is striking that he chose to set the texts of this solemnity rather than other devotional poems, which were numerous in his day.

The richness of this evening’s liturgy admirably brings 2017  to a close and reminds us of the fecundity of the mystery of our Faith. May the New Year be blessed by the Lord, the Lord of history and King of the nations!

 

 

On Ezekiel’s Vision

[The following is from the program notes for Solemn Vespers of Saturday, November 18.]

A church building is an eschatological sign. Explaining this and this evening’s Magnificat antiphon from the prophet Ezekiel is the burden of the rest of these notes. First of all, what is eschatology?

The dictionary definition will say that eschatology is the study of the “last things,” from the Greek word eschaton, “the end.” This definition is not, however, theologically precise. The believing Christian does not merely study eschatology any more than the believing theologian studies God. We can, of course, and should, learn things about God. But our God is a living God Who “cares for us.” In a more ancient sense, theology is the simple act of knowing God more and more intimately, the ascent of the mind to greater union with the mysterious Trinity.

In a similar way, the Christian does not study eschatology as if it were something yet to come. The former things are passing away as I type, and the Kingdom of God is breaking in all around us, if we possess the eyes of faith to see it. We already dine at the heavenly banquet, the wedding feast of the Lamb, every time we approach the altar, whereupon the one and only sacrifice for sins was and is offered. This one sacrifice inaugurates the end times.

In fact, we entered into this new existence at our baptisms. It is for this reason that the baptismal font is traditionally at the entrance to the church, and why we re-activate this baptismal grace by signing ourselves when we come into church. We go out from the world to undergo a “translation” from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son [cf. Colossians 1: 13], who is the Light that enlightens everyone. Our entry toward the altar is a figure of our ascent, as the Body of Christ, to where the Head has gone before us, in His return to the Father.

This is why the church is an eschatological sign. The church building is meant to be more than a gathering space or even a worship space. In a recent lecture, master iconographer Vladislav Andrejev cautioned us against understanding icons as windows to some other place, openings by which we look through to something not yet entirely here. In fact, the icon is a kind of “surface” of the present spiritual realities.  It makes visible to our physical eyes what is truly present to the eyes of faith, so that the eyes of faith may become more and more accustomed to the otherwise blinding light of divine life.

I would like to suggest that the whole of the church building is just this kind of “surface.” Thus the twelve pillars of our church are not merely symbols of the Twelve Apostles, the foundation of the heavenly temple being built up from the bodies of believers. They are the Apostles, manifesting themselves as great supporting columns of the space in which these spiritual realities are appearing.

Sacred music is a similar phenomenon. It is not merely a diversion, a sign of the beauty of something that we hope to encounter one day. It is the song of the angels, made audible to our ears.

This can only happen if human creativity is bridled by genuine asceticism, the work of listening to what is already being sung in heaven by those who have received the gift of hearing from the Holy Spirit.  Cooperation requires a silence with regard to earthly sound, even secular music. This is perhaps why, in many churches today, music and art don’t strike the worshippers as “sacred.” It’s music and art that comes from us, not from the inbreaking spiritual world.

All of this said, we can now look at the antiphon for the Magnificat. “I saw a closed gate in the house of the Lord, and an angel said to me, ‘It shall remain closed; the Lord alone shall come and enter in and go out.’” This passage is taken from Ezekiel’s stunning vision of the reconstituted temple (which had been destroyed some years earlier by the Babylonians when they captured Jerusalem in 587 B.C.). Solomon built the first temple based on a pattern given by Moses. Moses saw this pattern in a vision of heaven. We would say today that this vision of Moses was a first glimpse and foreshadowing of what was to be the reality of the true Temple, the Body of the Lord, which was destroyed not by the Babylonians, but by the Romans, only to be raised up in three days as the sole and eternal Temple.

Only God could bring this about. Only God supplies the gifts of the artist, the composer, the singer. We receive this gift from God; we do not earn it or otherwise bring it about. God alone will rend the veil that separates this world from the new age, the spiritual kingdom that is breaking in as we sing together this evening. May our gathering and common liturgical prayer open the eyes and ears of our hearts, that we may receive Him Who is coming!

 

Who “Owns” the (English) Augustine?

Fresh takes on towering historical icons like Saint Paul and Saint Augustine are rarer than book publishers would like to claim. This is in part because of the stubborn presence of actual words that any interpreter must confront. Many moons ago, I discovered all of this to my dismay as I labored over a thesis on the Letter to the Romans. I felt decidedly less clever at the end of it all than at the outset. The text of Paul’s epistle had this funny way of funneling my fresh insights back into the common stew of Pauline studies. In other writers, I have sometimes discovered apparently novel interpretations, only to find later on the very same interpretation lodged in a patristic tome of old.

Eventually, one finds this general sense of agreement a comfort, at least if one believes in and is searching for Truth. It would disconcerting, to say the least, to find that the Church has been misreading Saint Paul for nearly twenty centuries, even if one were himself or herself the Vessel of Correction. Most new ideas about the Bible or the Church Fathers have in common a willingness to ignore counter-evidence from those same stubborn texts that rerouted my barque back into harbor.

So it was with no small delight that I read Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People some years ago. Amidst teaching assignments at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town, Ruden has been a prolific author and translator for nearly a decade. What makes her work on Saint Paul so compelling is her awareness of classical culture and her sympathy for the earthy realities of life in antiquity. She is able to depict Paul as a great champion of love and freedom by stripping away the anachronisms accumulated over five centuries of interdenominational debate. She writes with a light touch, an assurance that avoids the preachy or polemic tone.

The reader can imagine how excited I was to see that, after tackling Virgil’s Aeneid and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, she turned her Latin skills to a Christian classic, Saint Augustine’s Confessions. I’ve begun making my way through it, and so far Ruden’s quirky but compelling take has won me over. I’ve read chunks of Confessions in the original Latin, and I’ve read four or five different translations. Most translations tend to err in the direction of pious seriousness. In my opinion, this is a disservice to Augustine, whose poignant observations on boyhood games and love of puns have slowly charmed me away from the early impression I had of him as a dour, mitered scold. Being not much more of a Latinist than I am an expert in Saint Paul’s Greek, I had been keeping my arriviste opinion to myself. Then I was emboldened by the endorsement of the “unsurpassed biographer of Augustine,” Peter Brown.

Brown’s NYRB review of Ruden’s translation focuses not so much on the changed tone of Augustine himself, but on the effect that this change of tone has on the depiction of God. Since the 1981 publication of previously unknown letters of Augustine by Austrian scholar Johannes Divjak, Brown has made a point of softening the adamantine image of the bishop of Hippo. If you read Brown’s biography (you should!), be sure to read the revised edition that contains Brown’s reappraisal. Browns’ influence is such that scholarly opinion has been following his lead. I want to emphasize here that the interpretation of Augustine as a proto-Puritan with Jansenist scruples is, like the Saint Paul of Luther’s imagination, a modern production. Anyone familiar with Saint Augustine’s “afterlife” in the Western Middle Ages will quickly become aware of the love that both monks and schoolmen shared for Augustine’s prodigious output, and for the man himself. As was the case with Saint Paul, Ruden’s new translation of Confessions is a vindication of the bulk of Catholic testimony regarding Saint Augustine, a genuinely fresh take that succeeds in restoring, in a modern idiom, an older appreciation for his humanity as well as his genius.

Calvin College’s James K. A. Smith will have none of it. I found it a bit disheartening when an intellectual of his status and caliber gave up on Ruden literally after one line. He claims to have been chastised by Brown’s review into questioning himself. This probing self-doubt seems to have lasted about two minutes before he’s back trying to burnish the statuesque, seriously pious Augustine. His big beef? Ruden’s decision to translate dominus as “Master” rather than as the (supposedly) traditional “Lord.” Smith seems to concede that “master” is a legitimate option–for a classicist. But the rest of us, he believes, want not accuracy but a “devotional classic.” It is telling that Smith begins his review openly admitting that when it comes to translations his preferences are nostalgiac and emotional and not rational. And, frankly, it is irrational to insist that Augustine say what Smith thinks he ought to say, based on his queasiness with the (modern, American, contextual) connotations of the word “master.”

Smith does ask two important questions: “which afterlife of words is most germane to the project that Augustine himself is engaged in?  Which history of connotation overlaps with Augustine’s endeavor?” This gets at the heart of my difference from Smith on a number of related issues. Different confessional traditions will answer these questions differently. I would like to think that Benedictines, whose Rule of Life is deeply influenced by Saint Augustine’s own experience as a monk, who read large portions of Augustine’s work–ranging across the different genres of treatise, Biblical commentary, homiletic, and personal letters–at the daily liturgy, and whose institutional history includes at least two centuries of direct engagement with international politics, have as good a claim as anyone to bearing the standard of Augustine’s project/endeavor. From my (Catholic, monastic) perspective, Jean Calvin’s interpretations of Saint Augustine are just those sorts of “new” interpretations that can only exist by suppressing counter-evidence and dissenting voices.

And, in fact, English-speaking Catholics readily use the word “Master” to address God, for example, in the misattributed “Prayer of Saint Francis.” “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console…” English-speaking Orthodox will be familiar with this translation of the prayer of Saint Ephraim, “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth…”

But more to the point, we are arguing about a word choice in a modern language. Before the Reformation, and for plenty of Catholics since, God is Dominus. It is understood, at some level, that whether we use Lord or Master, what we mean is Dominus or Kyrios (perhaps even Adonai). Whatever connotations have attached themselves to Lord or Master in the past five hundred years, a span in which the English language has largely developed apart from direct influence by Rome or Constantinople, they may well be part of the shared distortion that has afflicted the memories of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. More power to Sarah Ruden for inviting us to step back from our allegiances and question ourselves.

On the Nativity of Mary

The Church celebrates the birthdays of only three individuals, preferring, in most circumstances, to celebrate instead the entrance of the saints into everlasting life. The three exceptions appear in the monastery’s Deisis, the triptych of icons above the high altar. On either side of Christ Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God, are the two esteemed forerunners of His gospel. On our right is John the Baptist, the greatest prophet and exemplar of the Old Testament or Torah. On the left, the Holy Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven, whose birth was the dawn of salvation. Parallel to John the Baptist, she is frequently named as the greatest disciple of her Son and the exemplar of the new life of grace.

Today’s celebration marks nine months from the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. The Catholic Church has formulated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The large window in the south transept of our church shows Pope Pius IX declaring the dogma infallibly, surrounded by a variety of Church Doctors whose teachings had clarified Mary’s role in salvation history. The pope’s decision to define this dogma has occasioned some controversy and some tension—hopefully creative tension—with the churches of the East, where Our Lady’s sinlessness has been understood in differing ways.

This range of interpretations makes today’s feast all the more significant doctrinally and historically. The first celebrations of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary take place in the East, probably in Syria. This is a clear indication that the devotion of the faithful to the Mother of God included an awareness that her birth was extraordinary.

In fact, the roots of this awareness go back even further, to the remarkable second-century document known to us today as the Protoevangelium of James. Calling this book “apocryphal” is something of a slight, even if it was not ultimately accepted as Holy Scripture. In it, we find the story of Joachim and Anne, an annunciation of the birth of the Virgin (again, parallel to the annunciations by the Archangel Gabriel of the births of John the Baptist and Christ Himself), and the early consecration of the child Mary to service in the temple.

Recent scholarship has made this temple service more plausible. It seems that groups of virgins were designated to weave the curtain that separated the main body of the temple from the Holy of Holies, the same curtain that was torn at the death of Christ. In iconographic depictions of the Annunciation, the Blessed Virgin Mary is shown either reading Scripture, or, in the Eastern fashion, weaving. Whereas the curtain separated the sacred from the profane, Our Lady would, from that moment on, knit together the body of the Savior, Who weds heaven and earth, drawing all things to Himself in a supreme act of reconciliation.

As Solomon’s temple had been understood to be God’s residence on earth, the womb of the Blessed Virgin became the new tabernacle, the tent in which sojourned God the Son before the time of His birth. As the temple was to be kept pure, Mary’s body was understood to be free of the stain of Adam and Eve’s transgression. Quietly, in an obscure home in Nazareth, God prepared a dwelling for Himself and began, with the consent of the Virgin Mary, the restoration of the cosmos.

With this momentous event now widely known and celebrated, the Church hearkens back to an even quieter and more obscure commencement, the entry into the world of the one person chosen to be the Mother of God and the Mother of all the living. And here is the last distinguishing feature I would like to highlight. In ancient patriarchies, the birth of a son was widely anticipated and celebrated. Here is a new occurrence. We celebrate the birth of the great “daughter of Jerusalem,” and it is precisely Mary as woman that we honor. In the Blessed Mother of God we glimpse the full and unique dignity of women. Rightly let us sing together, “Today is the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose splendid life illuminates the whole Church!”

[Please come and pray Solemn Vespers with us tonight–Friday–at 7:00 p.m.]

The Transfiguration

“He did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid [Mark 9: 5].” With this little detail, Saint Mark reveals quite a bit about the character of Saint Peter and the human condition in general. Under normal circumstances, we are unprepared to behold the full glory of God, and when suddenly God’s grandeur “flame[s] out, like shining from shook foil,”  it can be a terrifying, disorienting experience.

We have many testimonies of this encounter. One early, telling encounter was that of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah was a priest and probably had entered God’s temple countless times to offer sacrifice. One day, he suddenly saw in reality what he had been celebrating in shadowy, symbolic ways. “I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up….And I said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips…for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts [Isaiah 6: 1, 5]!” Isaiah is rendered voluntarily speechless until his lips are cleansed by a coal from the altar.

Similarly, Saint Thomas Aquinas, toward the end of his earthly life, was celebrating the Eucharist as he had many times before. This time was different. Like Isaiah, he glimpsed something of the reality that he had celebrated in the half-veil of sacramental mystery. The author of the Summa Theologica, perhaps the greatest intellectual achievement of all time, wrote no more after this, leaving the Summa unfinished. “All that I have written seems as so much straw,” he confided to a friend.

Saint Peter suffers no such scruples. Beholding Christ transfigured, he was properly afraid. Not knowing what to say, however, he said whatever came to mind. In this, he seems to be of a kindred mindset to modern man. Is it not the case that our incessant talking, the swarming proliferation of words, is so much nervous chatter to cover over our anxiety and alienation? We hardly know what to say, yet we can’t stop talking. In our case, I suspect that silence doesn’t occur to us because our fear is not the result of an encounter with the living God, but with the dreadful possibility of His utter absence.

I began by saying that we are not normally prepared to meet God in the unmitigated power of His limitless Being. What the Transfiguration begins to teach us is that, under the dispensation of grace, in the afterglow of the Resurrection and Pentecost, we live under a “new normal.” We live in the in-between time, the time of the holy Liturgy, after the shadows of animal sacrifice but not yet at the full consummation of the world. The Kingdom of God is breaking into the world that itself is passing away. The baptized, as God’s adopted children, are being trained to “see [God] as He is [1 John 3: 2].” The training of our senses and their elevation to the spiritual realm takes place in the liturgy.

This past June, we were blessed to be able to unveil our two newest icons, the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, flanking the Mother of God and John the Baptist. Gradually, our sanctuary is being populated with the communion of the saints. Icons are not mere representations of model believers. The iconographer truly receives the image from the inbreaking realm of heaven. Iconography is, therefore, an ascetical craft, a discipline of visual listening and receptivity, a training of the interior vision to see beyond the sacramental into the reality of God’s holy court. At the same time, icons train the worshipper to attune his or her senses to this new reality. The icons are a central part of the liturgical act, and as conduits of grace, help to elevate the sense of sight to its proper spiritual register.

Similarly, sacred music is much more than pleasing ornamentation of holy words. As Kevin Allen and I have discussed at various time in our decade of collaboration, the composer of sacred music must, like the iconographer, exercise a discipline of spiritual listening. The aim is, through purification of hearing, to catch something of the overwhelming beauty of the perpetual song of heaven. At Solemn Vespers this coming Saturday evening (August 5, 5:15 p.m.), the First Vespers of the feast of the Transfiguration, Kevin and I humbly offer two new motets in this spirit. We pray that our double motet will be a similar conduit of grace, to prepare our hearts to hear God’s Word in its fullest transformative power.

Thoughts Determine Our Lives

St. Ignatius of Loyola died on this date 561 years ago. He did not set out at first to be a saint, but a soldier. Then Providence intervened. A cannonball shattered his leg, and as he was recovering from this terrible compound fracture, he underwent this remarkable experience:

He asked for some of these books [of knight-errantry] to pass the time. But no book of that sort could be found in the house; instead they gave him a life of Christ and a collection of the lives of the saints written in Spanish….When Ignatius reflected on worldly thoughts, he felt intense pleasure; but when he gave them up out of weariness, he felt dry and depressed. Yet when he thought of living the rigorous sort of life he knew the saints had lived, he not only experienced pleasure when he actually thought about it, but even after he dismissed these thoughts, he still experienced great joy. Yet he did not pay attention to this, nor did he appreciate it until one day, in a moment of insight, he began to marvel at the difference. Then he he understood his experience: thoughts of one kind left him sad, the others full of joy.

Ignatius’s circumstances didn’t change. His joy and sadness did not depend on the healing of his leg, or on his future prospects as a soldier and a dandy. In other words, our contentment in life, or lack thereof, is not, primarily, a function of the external circumstances of our lives. What determines the emotional shape of our lives (and therefore, that aspect of our lives that really matters!) is our thinking.

This profound insight of Saint Ignatius comports with ancient monastic wisdom, both in Christian and Buddhist forms. The difference between Christianity and Buddhism, in this regard at least, is that traditional Christianity does not aim at avoidance of suffering by the elimination of the ego. Rather, the Gospel allows the newly, intentionally reborn self [in the image of Christ] to embrace joyfully the suffering that comes from standing out to the full, which is to say, the suffering that comes with sainthood. Our suffering is embraced “for the sake of the joy that was set before” us [Hebrews 12: 2]. We do this by changing the way we think, by the “renewal of our minds [Romans 12: 2].” How is this done? By, among other things, faith in God’s promises.

This future-oriented, eschatological thinking finds yet another interesting corroboration in the insights of Jewish psychotherapists Viktor Frankl and Rabbi Edwin Friedman. Both men asked this question: “Why is it that, under experiences of extreme stress, some persons not only continue to function but even thrive?” It’s good to note that Frankl himself was a Holocaust survivor. Both men experienced quasi-Ignatian moments of insight. Frankl’s very language echoes the experience of Ignatius [my emphases in bold]:

Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the [prisoner] marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

Frankl and Friedman both challenge us to change our thoughts, to substitute thoughts of love, hope, purpose, and meaning for thoughts of hatred, anxiety, frustration, and resentment. I will be returning to Friedman, whose overall insights are especially counter-intuitive in our present world (which, from the perspective I’m adopting here makes them actually more persuasive). For today’s feast of Saint Ignatius, let me offer one more example of a change of thinking, this time a literary one. As Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins trudge their way through the soul-killing terror of Mordor, Sam experiences this moment of insight. It changes nothing of the external horror to which he and Frodo have been consigned. But it does something quieter, yet more radical. It changes Sam’s heart, and, in Tolkien’s story, this small, hidden change of heart changes the world.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

Our thoughts determine our lives.

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