Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with liturgy

The Holy Triduum

We have arrived again at the holiest time of the Church’s Year, the annual celebration of the Paschal Mystery, our Lord’s Passover. It’s hard for me to believe that this will be my 27th Triduum at the monastery. The liturgy for this holy time can be bewildering when we first encounter it, but also exhilarating–and for the same reason. Everything is new, slightly disorienting. Time is suspended. Melodies and rituals suddenly appear that remind us of our first childhood memories of Easter.

Over time—and this is especially true for monks who must study the liturgy and practice it regularly—the ceremonies become more familiar, even if they remain special to this time of year. For some of us, there is a temptation to a bit of boredom—the old feelings no longer emerge with the same intensity. Every Triduum features a liturgical blunder or two–sometimes the same one many years running, and this can tempt us to cynicism. But these temptations should be dealt with in the same way that we deal with every temptation: with resistance. When we begin to understand the liturgy, not as a prompt for good and edifying feelings, appropriate as these might be, but as central to our permanent identity as children of God, we can transition into a deep sense of belonging to Jesus Christ and His Church. This identification and belonging will remain with us and inform the rest of our lives as Catholics throughout the year.

Once again, this applies especially to monks and nuns, who have espoused themselves to Christ. The transition of which I am speaking is analogous to one that we see in certain married couples. They begin their lives together with excitement, expectation, even a kind of infatuation with each other, and the joy of having been loved and accepted. There are new experiences of owning a home, of pregnancy, childbirth, school, in-laws, new family rituals at Christmas, and so on and so forth. This gives way eventually to routines, and as the new and exciting becomes the familiar and dull, there is a risk of each spouse focusing on the small annoyances of any relationship with inherently limited and even flawed persons. There are heartaches with children who suffer health problems, disappointments with careers and there are compromises. The temptation is to boredom and even a sense of resentment. But if this temptation is resisted, what emerges is the beauty of belonging to one’s spouse, of totally identifying with that person with whom I have made a lasting covenant, and struggled to live those vows in fidelity. These are the couples who can sit together for long periods of silence, simply content to be with their “better half,” appreciating the presence of the long-beloved.

The Holy Triduum is like the Church’s wedding anniversary, the annual reminder that we have been espoused by the great Bridegroom Who laid down His life for us, Who poured out His Blood to cleanse us and make the Church a worthy Bride for Himself, spotless and beautiful. When this reality is newly embraced, it can move us to great torrents of emotion. It can so move us even after many years. But it can also carry us away to a different kind of experience, that of profound and peaceful contemplation, the silent adoration of the Holy Trinity, to Whom be glory and honor forever. Amen.

Our Lady of the Rosary

My mother taught me to pray the rosary. In her family, they had the old custom of praying a decade nightly on their knees, with my grandfather leading the prayer. While that lovely custom didn’t continue into my generation, the rosary continued to be the primary mode of prayer. It was definitely what we turned to when life became anxious for any reason.

The rosary developed over many centuries and through many twists and turns. The pious legend that Our Lady gave it directly to Saint Dominic has helped to cement the connection between the “Domini Canes” (the “hounds of the Lord” as the Dominicans have been playfully nicknamed) and Our Lady as the Vanquisher of All Heresies. The deep history is in the lay spirituality of the high medieval period, when lay brothers in monastic communities used beads to count 150 Paternosters in place of the 150 Psalms that were required weekly of the choir monks (who could read, and thus were expected to digest these extensive texts).

Eventually, these 150 beads came to represent 150 Ave Marias, and these were further divided into 15 decades, to which were assigned the familiar Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. Connecting the prayers to the Mysteries seems to have been another monastic innovation, this time from the Carthusian Dominic of Prussia. Confraternities of the rosary became popular in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

But it was the clash of civilizations that culminated in the great Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571 that cemented today’s feast into the liturgy. As the Ottoman fleet prepared to square off against the Holy League of Catholic states, led by the soon-to-be famous Don John of Austria, Pope Saint Pius V urged all Catholics to pray the rosary in defense of Christendom, already tottering in the wake of the Reformation. The League’s decisive victory was attributed to Our Lady’s intercession, and effectively ended the Ottoman threat for another century and a half.

While the contemplative dimension has never been absent from the rosary, this more “militant” aspect also became more typical of the devotion. It is a part of spiritual warfare, as I discovered as a child, learning to ask Our Lady fervently for her protection under duress. The addition of the Fatima Prayer (…Lead all souls into heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy) strengthened the sense of prayer as battle. Pope Leo XIII, in his 1883 encyclical  Supremi Apostolatus Officio, urged Catholics again to take up the rosary in battle, this time a more clearly spiritual battle than at Lepanto, against the incursions of particular evils into modern society.

More recently, Pope Saint John Paul II wrote his own apostolic letter, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, in which he extolled the contemplative dimensions of this devotion, even adding five new Luminous Mysteries. While I have heard some criticism of these additions (they disrupt the parallel between the 150 Ave Marias and Psalms), they are very much in line with another important document from his papacy, issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. In this directory, pastors were urged to help the faithful to draw the connections between popular lay devotions and the liturgy. The 15 original Mysteries of the rosary corresponded to the most important mysteries of the Liturgical Year. John Paul’s introduction of the Luminous Mysteries fills out the traditional mysteries of Epiphany (adding the Baptism of Jesus and the Wedding at Cana), adds the central feast of the Transfiguration and the solemnity of Corpus Christi, and invites us to meditate on the feasts of the Apostles in the third of the Luminous Mysteries.

We happen to live in a most perplexing moment when, as in the times of Pius V and Leo XIII, the demonic spirit of deceit, division, and violence is visibly attacking the Church and humanity. In 2018, Pope Francis issued his own call to Catholics to engage anew the spiritual battle under the banner of the Virgin Mary, “asking the Holy Mother of God and Saint Michael  Archangel to protect the Church from the devil, who always seeks to separate us from God and from each other.” It is not a coincidence that the rosary has recently been in the news, albeit with a certain amount of misinterpretation, as a symbol of (spiritual) militancy.

May our celebration this evening be pleasing to Almighty God, and may the Virgin Mother of God once again crush the head of the Serpent, that we may spend our days in peace and conversion of life. And may Christ lead us all to everlasting life. Amen.

 

He Is Not Here! Homily for the Easter Vigil

On the seventh day of creation, God rested.

From a theological and philosophical standpoint, this is quite a statement: philosophers would say that God’s Being is interchangeable with His acting. There is no separation between the two, and for God to rest seems like a contradiction, in one sense. Jesus Himself said that His Father is always at work. But we see two meanings of it in tonight’s liturgy.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy burdened. Enter into my rest.

The first is that it is on the seventh day of the week, that Christ, the Son of God—Who is God—rests in the tomb. And we see even more profoundly that this is the cost to God of creation. God’s willingness—His “permissive will”—to open a space for other creatures of reason and will to act, to be free—this is a great risk that God takes, inviting us to act freely, to act reasonably (one hopes). And the cost of this is shown exactly by Christ’s death. This is the price of giving us freedom.

God is not giving up on us, though: in Christ’s Resurrection, which we celebrate tonight, we see an “eighth day” opening up, a new creation. And we are “recapitulating” this action of God.

The liturgy is the manifest action of Jesus Christ in the world. In the document Sacrosanctum Concilium [par. 7], the first document issued by the fathers of Vatican II, it says that the liturgy is the action of Christ, the High Priest. So what are we doing, then?

Well, we the baptized are members of His Body In acting out the liturgy, we are making visible what Christ is doing. When we participate in the liturgy, by our actions and by our attentiveness, we are conformed, body, mind, and spirit, to Christ Himself, Who is acting through us, impressing the form of His own life upon our own, giving us a new life. In celebrating the mystery of His Passion, Death, descent into hell and Resurrection, we ourselves undergo this same experience, in a mysterious way. As Saint Paul says in tonight’s epistle: “if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.”

These are lovely words of comfort and consolation in the midst of, and at the end of, an annus horribilis.

So, how much do we feel—experience—the effects of our resurrection?

Now before you think that I’m trying to give you a guilt trip, implying that we all need to try harder to feel good about our resurrection in Christ, let me assure that I mean no such thing. I’m not here to increase your burdens—I promise you!

For starters, we should never try to engineer our own salvation by works.  And that includes working up happy feelings to prove to ourselves that we are saved. Rather, our salvation mysteriously takes place in the realm of faith, and this may or may not be accompanied by corresponding feelings.

I want to emphasize this particularly because I suspect that many of us have experienced at least a year of ambiguous feelings at best. I imagine that most of us, on the earthly plane, have been feeling helpless, anxious, frustrated, even depressed. And if we associate how we feel with the objectivity of our salvation in Jesus Christ, we probably will end up feeling hopeless besides, judging ourselves unworthy of God’s attention, just at the moment we need God’s solicitude more than ever.

Christ healing the paralytic. Haven’t we all had the experience of feeling paralyzed in the last year?

Most of us have never had quite the opportunity to share in Christ’s death before this year, when we’ve experienced a cascade of sufferings, many of them unforeseen and unpredictable.  The sufferings associated with a pandemic, with quarantines, loss of contact with loved ones, loss of pastimes, travel, and cultural events that lighten our lives, have in turn made the normal sufferings that much harder to bear: the deaths of loved ones, illness, broken relationships, financial hardships, difficulties at work, and so on.

Now with that background, let me return to my central question:

How am I experiencing Resurrection in Christ?

We have been led into the darkened church by the inextinguishable light of Jesus Christ, our brother and our head. We have heard of the empty tomb, and Paul has confirmed what the young man in white told the women inside that empty tomb: He is alive: death is not the end. What will this mean for us when we go forth from this celebration tonight, the celebration of our own resurrection and illumination in faith?

Assuredly, we all have some immediate grasp of what it means to live. I don’t mean merely to be alive and not dead. Rather I mean the experiences of great joy, hope, great encounters with beauty and goodness and love

The best we can say about the life that God gives us after our resurrection is that it in some way fulfills all the best promises that these previous experiences betoken. But we don’t really know what this new life is like until we experience it. There is something incomprehensible—at least at first—about living a resurrected life. Because this is an eternal life, God’s own infinite life, there will always be something about it that is unfamiliar.

We’ll never exhaust the mystery of God. If we feel out of our depth, that might be a good sign—that we are open to God revealing to us a new way to think, to feel, and experience the world.

All praise to Christ our Light!

In the meantime, we continue to live in an in-between state, remaining in the flesh even as we strive to live according to the Spirit. This means that much of the Christian interior life depends on interpretation—we can interpret in one of two ways: the flesh or the Spirit. We can interpret every single event of our lives in these ways, events like we’ve been experiencing.

Two chapters after tonight epistle, Saint Paul tells us that we can set our minds on the flesh or on the Spirit. And that the effect of setting our minds on the Spirit is life and peace.

In this same eighth chapter of Romans, Saint Paul tells us something that should be very comforting. We are heirs with Christ, provided that we suffer with Him. Suffering is not meaningless if it done with Christ. This means that our suffering is not proof of God’s abandonment—far from it.

As the Easter candle went before us into the dark Church tonight, Christ has gone before us into the hell of suffering. He’s gone into the darkness of each of our hearts, and brought His light there. so that when we go into our hearts, and we feel all this difficulty, when we arrive there ourselves, He is there to accompany us, to comfort us, and…to show us the way out.

Christ leading Adam and Eve out of hell, and, in them, all of their children–including you.

Perhaps in years past, when life seemed to be going reasonably well compared to the last few years, we could confuse the good feelings about Easter, natural feelings, not bad in themselves, but still somewhat human and limited, with what a resurrected life of faith feels like. But this year, many of us have had a taste of what death feels like, and consequently, I would think that our experience of the resurrection can undergo two transformations as well.

First of all, it might not feel like previous feelings associated with Easter because we have been more closely conformed to Christ’s Passion. But if this is true, it is also true that we can be more confident this year that Christ has been walking with us through that shadow of death that has been threatening us.

What Pope Benedict XVI said about Christ’s death can be applied both to our deaths and to our suffering:

“Death, the illogical, the unspiritual and senseless…becomes [in Christ’s death] an active spiritual event. Death, the end of communication, becomes an act of communion of Jesus with everyone, and in him, of everyone with everyone.”

We all share the experience of suffering and death.

If we can discover in our recent suffering our communion with Christ’s suffering, we can discover our communion with each and every person who is our neighbor. We can be ambassadors of compassion. And, through suffering in communion with Christ, we can discover our communion with God, which is to say, mysteriously but truly, with our eternal life.  If we can re-enter those places of darkness and find in them waiting for us the lumen Christi, the light of Christ alive and life-giving.

How blessed we are to be together this night, the night of nights, when death was broken and God’s love was poured in our hearts. For the sake of the rest of the church, especially for those not able to be in an assembly tonight, let us welcome God’s love anew. And let us ask the Holy Spirit for to renew our minds, to help us think differently, with the mind of Christ, that we may know how to identify the signs of the resurrection in our lives, to become more and familiar with this inbreaking new life, and to live out of it.

[To listen to a podcast of this homily, click here.]

Monastic Life As an Essential Service

[The following is a slight edited version of a newsletter article from last summer. I am republishing it because of the positive response it generated at the time.]

I had just returned from a Provincial Council meeting a year ago on March 13 when alarms began pulsing through the media about the looming pandemic. We had Solemn Vespers scheduled for Saturday evening the 14th, but as I spoke to the pastor of the local parish and to the brothers, it became clear that we would need to close our doors for the time being and cancel public services. As local and state governments got up to speed with executive orders meant to regulate the quarantine, churches, mosques, and synagogues received the somewhat dismissive label of “non-essential services.”

Monastic life revels in essential tasks like cooking and clean-up–and prayer.

What this label obscured about our cloistered life is that, in fact, little changed in our day-to-day schedule, especially in that which is most essential about monastic life: our dedication to prayer, devout celebration of the Church’s liturgy, and the intensive search for God. If anything, these activities received greater prominence during this time when our guesthouse and Bed and Breakfast were closed, and we didn’t have to attend to the demands of hospitality [N.B. we’re back open!].

As I wrote on our website at the very beginning of the pandemic: “we are all members of the One Body of Christ by baptism, and the reception of Holy Communion by priests at their private Masses nourishes all the members of the Body by virtue of our unity. I have encouraged all of our monks to be aware of this, that our reception of Holy Communion during this time be done devoutly and worthily for the sake of the whole Church and the world.”

So while many Catholics were separated from Holy Communion, we monks had an especially essential service, to celebrate the Mass and be fed by Christ’s Body and Blood on behalf of the whole.

To outsiders then, it may have appeared that the monastery was just another one of the non-essential services shuttered to the public. But in fact, the monastery was the institution within the Church where business went on as usual, precisely because the monastic vocation is essential.

Shortly after entering the monastery, I read a classic book of pre-Vatican II spirituality, The Right to Be Merry, by Poor Clare author Mother Mary Frances. One idea that I found there that truly gripped me was that the powerful of this world often understand the Church better than we do. Proof of this is that hostile regimes typically go after the contemplative monasteries first. In recent times, we have seen examples of this in the Soviet Union and communist China.  The contemplative life is the foothold of the Church militant in our true homeland of heaven. When the contemplative vocation is stamped out, there’s a sense in which the Church can be properly subdued and channeled toward secular ends. As long as monasteries exist, they serve as a reminder that the state is never all-powerful, that we are all answerable to God, the Just Judge.

As we gradually reopen, it is a great blessing once again to be with our friends. I hope that the lockdown experience, though, will be a spiritual goad for us monks to tenaciously hold to the core of our calling, that persistent and uncompromising search for God, the radical desire to empty ourselves entirely that grace may illuminate the Church. Let us together pray for the whole Church, that our sufferings may strengthen the life of Christ in each of us, that we may be voices of consolation, peace, and mercy for all those laboring under the uncertainty of the present.

The “Crisis” of Candlemas

The month of February, despite its brevity, is full of critical liturgical celebrations. I use the word “critical” in a precise sense: “of, relating to, or being a turning point…” according to Webster’s. These turning points were somewhat more transparent in the old calendar, before the invention of “Ordinary Time.”

Giotto’s rendering of the Presentation

I invite you to consider the feast of the Presentation (or, as it is often traditionally called, “Candlemas”), which we just celebrated this past Tuesday. This celebration falls forty days after Christmas and is rich in symbolic associations. It is the Incarnate Word’s first visit to the temple—his temple. In the hymn at Lauds on February 2, we sang,

“Parentes Christum deferent,
in templo templum offerunt.”

”His parents carry the Christ;
in the temple, they offer the [true] Temple.

Aside from the obvious paradox in this poetic line, there is a quiet allusion to Christ’s Passion. Christ is brought to the temple as an offering, to be redeemed on the same mount where Abraham had nearly sacrificed Isaac to God. Not only that, but in referring to Christ as the Temple, the hymnist surely is reminding us of a different exchange. The new Temple of Christ’s Body is inaugurated and revealed through His death and resurrection [cf. John 2: 19-22].

The Magnificat antiphon at Vespers this evening (taken from the Benedictine lectionary for the office of Vigils) once again uses the word temple, but in yet a different sense. Here is the text in full, from 1 Corinthians 3: 16-17:

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.

According to the traditional four senses of Scripture, Herod’s temple is the “literal” temple, and Christ’s body is the temple in the “allegorical” or Christological sense. In this quotation, Saint Paul shows us the “tropological” or moral sense. “You are the temple of God! And the Holy Spirit dwells in you!” Thus, the procession on Candlemas, accompanying Christ to the temple, is, in a sense, a procession inward, to the temple that we are. We carry lighted candles, the illumination of the Holy Spirit, into our hearts where Christ wishes to abide.

Candlemas at the Monastery, February 2, 2020

Again, the beauty of this theological reality is accompanied by a serious challenge for us: that we strive to be more and more faithful to our baptismal vows. After all, in our baptisms, we died to ourselves, and we were conformed to Christ’s own Passion, that we might also be conformed to His Resurrection. If we are, with Christ, the temple of God, then we are also an offering to God. Let us, then, today, rededicate ourselves, to “present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God [Romans 12: 1].” In making this effort, we will undoubtedly discover various resistances to this spiritual renewal, and this in turn will help us to craft a realistic and effective ascetical plan for Lent, only eleven days away.

The world needs spiritual pioneers more than ever. Let us accept God’s invitation and join the saints’ procession to the final temple (the “anagogical” temple), the Church Triumphant in heaven.

New Year, New Life: All Hail the Mother of God!

Evergreen boughs abound during the Christmas season. Like the image of the Burning Bush, the evergreen points us toward a mysterious source of life, a current just beneath the surface of our world, bursting through like a hidden spring at certain moments. Amid the entropy of our deciduous (Latin cadere, to fall) world, this inexhaustible font is thus perceptible. The contrast between the autumnal coloring of leaves and the steady greenery of needles, like the contrast between the fixed firmament of constellations and haphazardness of plummeting meteors, speaks to us of a contrast between a permanent world, as yet only hinted-at, and the restless burgeoning and decay of the palpable.

(O wonderful exchange! The creator of the human race, taking a living body, deigned to be born of a virgin; and becoming man without man’s seed, enriched us with his divinity.)

The signs of permanence and stability, the evergreens, the stars, the Burning Bush, appear very much within our world of flux. This is itself significant, for it suggests that our salvation is not so much a separation from the material world as it is a rejuvenation of the very cosmos itself. So says Saint Paul:

“Creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

—Roman 8: 20-21

It is because of this link between our salvation and the liberation of creation that the prophecies of the Old Testament have retained their value. Even after the Fall, creation has borne traces of its lost transparency as well as its destined rebirth. This is to say that creation itself has continued to point toward God its boundless Source. “Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things have been made [Romans 1: 20].”

Danger enters from the darkening of our intelligence that followed on the loss of trust in God. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil lost its sign value as a marker of God’s love and guardianship of Adam and Eve and became (falsely, by the trickery of the serpent) a counter-sign of a supposed arbitrary tyranny. Once faith has been broken by this kind of mistrust, creation ceases to speak lucidly. We ourselves are tempted to be entrapped by the disintegrative forces unleashed by sin, to try and hold on to creatures whose decay is meant to warn us to return to the source of life.

According the Wisdom of Solomon, our predicament can be thus summarized:

“From the greatness and beauty of created thing comes a corresponding perception of their Creator….as [the pagans] live among his works…they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful….But [they are] miserable, with their hopes set on dead things.”
—Wisdom 13: 6-7; 10

Even the chosen people of Israel needed constant reminding of the invisible and immaterial God Who communicates through the visible and material. It is significant (another “sign-being-made”) that in Hebrew, the same word, dabar, means “word” and “thing”—a commingling of the spiritual and the perceptible. The prophets communicated not only by speaking, but by proto-sacramental actions and objects. All of these point to the mystery that we celebrate at the beginning of each calendar year. We see the sudden illumination, not of a lowly shrub on the side of Mount Horeb, but of the human race and all creation by the Motherhood of the Virgin Mary.

We can describe in minute detail how conception takes place, in terms of the mingling of genetic material and the implantation of an embryo in the tissue of its mother’s womb. But can we perceive how a human life, consciousness, the whole mystery of personhood is set in motion by these intricate biological events? Once more we are brought to the boundary between contingent materiality, and the mysterious Source of life itself. This Source has been at work since the beginning of time. Moses and the prophets, culminating in John the Baptist, pointed to its manifestations, celebrated in the antiphons chanted at the Divine Office (I’ve linked to polyphonic versions of these texts, with translation where they aren’t provided with the video on YouTube).

We the baptized have the joy of partaking in it:

“For in the mystery of the Word made flesh
a new light of your glory has shone upon the eyes of our mind,
so that, as we recognize in [Christ] God made visible,
we may be caught up through him in love of things invisible.”
—Preface I of the Nativity

May your New Year be filled with the illumination of the Son of God and His immaculate Mother! May we learn anew how to live sacramentally, pointing others to God’s manifestations in our world today.

Merry Christmastide!

—Fr. Peter Funk, OSB

 

Homily for Easter Sunday, 2020

My great-grandmother was born in 1890, and she just missed living in three centuries, dying in 1997. I have fond childhood memories of walking a few blocks south from my grandparents’ house along the Wisconsin River to visit her. She always asked about our education, what did we like to study in school?       Occasionally, she would tell us stories from her childhood. From my perspective now, I wish I had asked her more about what it was like to grow up at the turn of the twentieth century. One of her most-told stories involved her being lost in a snowstorm and the horses knowing the way home. When she was a child, there was no church where her family lived. As the story goes, the German settlers there wanted a church very badly, but in those days, with no telephone and limited transportation options, it was difficult to get an audience with the bishop to secure proper permission. So they went ahead and built the church, then sent a note to the bishop saying that the church was ready to be consecrated.  The bishop was not at all pleased that this project had gone forward without his knowledge, and as he rode the train into town, he was rehearsing the rebuke he would give these impertinent townsfolk.

But when he stepped out, he was greeted by all the townspeople standing on wooden planks laid over the cranberry marshes. They were singing and playing musical instruments. The children were dressed up in their first communion dresses and suits. They were there to greet the risen Christ present in their bishop.

He was so moved by their faith and warm welcome that instead of scolding them, he went with them to the church and consecrated it.

Not only was there a lack of church buildings in those days, there were also very few priests. My great-grandmother only got to Mass several times a year, and, one imagines, Easter Masses were themselves rare occurrences. Among the many questions I wish I had thought to ask her is, “How did you celebrate Easter when you couldn’t go to Mass?”

It must have called for creativity among the simple faithful, as did their sly  plan for even getting a church in the first place. I’ve been in contact with many Catholics this past week. I’ve seen all kinds of creative responses to our stay-at-home orders. This has gotten me thinking about the many odd ways that Christians have had to observe Easter throughout the Church’s history. Someone who is a friend of our community, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, tells the story of the Christian prisoners secretly saying to one another, “Christ is risen.” “He is risen indeed!” to remind each other that it was Easter Sunday.

One of the strangest stories is that of our Holy Father Saint Benedict. When he was still a very young man, he secluded himself in a cave in a mountainous area about fifty miles west of Rome. His biographer, Saint Gregory the Great, tells us that a nearby priest was just sitting down to a sumptuous Easter dinner, no doubt fatigued from his own liturgical duties, when our Lord visited him in a vision. Jesus told him to bring some of the food to his servant Benedict. Our Lord didn’t tell him where Benedict was, so this anonymous priest had to climb around the mountains of Subiaco to find his cave. When he found young Benedict, he greeted him, saying, “Come, let us eat, for today is Easter!” Benedict didn’t realize that it was Easter, and he thought that the priest was using a figure of speech. So he responded, “I know that it is Easter because you have graced me with your presence.” So Saint Benedict sees the risen Christ in this otherwise unknown priest who brings him food, and he has achieved this kind of mystical vision without the benefit of attending the liturgy with any regularity in the preceding years.

I don’t recommend Benedict as a pattern, any more than I would recommend that we celebrate Easter every year the way we are today. But it is another indication that our faith in the resurrection, and the joy that is ours in this faith, can remain in us and even grow stronger when we encounter obstacles.

Perhaps the strangest Easter was the very first. The Apostles were practicing their own stay-at home strategy, fearfully hiding. The women of the group dared to go out to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus, but the body is gone. The result is a mixture of confusion, fear, sadness, indignation, and, some glimmer of belief.  It is quite remarkable that the gospel of this morning’s Mass is one of the few in the Church’s liturgical year in which Jesus makes no appearance whatsoever. Even after Jesus does appear to the disciples, they continue to experience fear, disbelief and confusion. It is not until Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit that the full meaning and effect of the Resurrection is felt. Traditionally, the first forty days after Easter were a time when Jesus continued to visit and teach his disciples the mysteries of the faith, which were fully inaugurated in the church’s liturgical life beginning with the Ascension of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps we are being called this year to stay in the upper room with the Apostles and Mary, listening to the teachings of the risen Lord, to stay in the city waiting to receive the power of God from on high, to renew our hearts with saving doctrine, and then to implore God our Father to set our hearts ablaze with the fire of the Holy Spirit’s love. The risen Christ is among us, and we can learn to recognize him as Benedict recognized Him in the priest who brought him food, and as the townspeople did in their bishop. We can learn to recognize Christ in all we meet, in all those who are sick and caring for the sick. And perhaps this year our Easter celebration can break out from a single day, from which we would typically return to life as normal, and be a living reality at all times. Our creative celebration of the resurrection can become a habit of mind and action in which our faith becomes more and more alive in all that we do, and in all that we say, taking every thought captive for Christ, to whom be glory, honor, and praise forever. Amen.

Homily for Holy Thursday

[The following is the text preached by our deacon Brother Joseph at the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper.]

On a late November morning in 2004, I got up at 5 a.m., stopped at Starbucks for coffee and a pumpkin scone just as they opened, and blazed my way up the winding ascent of the Ute Pass into the Front Range of Colorado, where I was living at the time.  I spent several hours hiking up to the snowy, wind-scoured heights of Bison Peak in the Lost Creek Wilderness, seeing no one until almost halfway back down the mountain.  On the way home, I picked up a take-and-bake pizza from Papa Murphy’s, which I ate alone in my apartment.  And that was how I celebrated Thanksgiving.  It was not a Norman Rockwell slice of Americana with generations of family members gathered around a table groaning under a roast turkey and all the trimmings.  Neither was it a despondent, lonely day.  It was the fourth consecutive Thanksgiving I had spent in Colorado, and in previous years I had celebrated with friends who were also unable to make it back home.  But I was moving back to Michigan in just over a month to be closer to my family, and Thanksgiving alone was not the most lonely option.  I knew where I was from, where I was going, and where I belonged, even if I wasn’t actually there.  And while I was still eating a mediocre pizza by myself, I knew that 1500 miles away there was a table in my father’s house with a place for me.  I expect that we all have had these experiences of gatherings that were incomplete, whether we were the one absent or it was someone else.

We are gathered tonight to celebrate the institution of the Eucharist, the great festal family banquet of the Church.  But this year is different.  The church is decorated as usual and ablaze with light.  The brothers have entered with incense and chant.  But I stand here at the ambo and look out over empty pews, and I know the doors of the church remain locked.  It threatens to cast a pall over the celebration.

But this overlooks the important fact that we only miss what ought to be present.  We don’t miss strangers who aren’t at Thanksgiving dinner with us: we miss our absent family members.  The very sense of absence and loss we feel tonight is proof that we all have been called to the Supper of the Lamb.  We all belong here, where God has prepared a place for us, his beloved children.  It is a place that was created for us from before time began, that became ours in baptism, and has become ever more our own by our past participation in the Mass.

We can also overlook the reality that at times God withdraws from us, not to punish us, but because in his love he desires to rekindle and stir up our longing for him.  “Familiarity breeds contempt,” says the proverb, but “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”  This is a time of absence and spiritual hunger, but even that proves that our true food is in Christ.

And while to the disciples the Last Supper was complete in their small group, Jesus saw beyond to all those who would ever be members of the Church.  In that small gathering he saw everyone who would ever come to believe through the message they would proclaim, a message that would spread and bear fruit throughout the whole world, across all time.  Even there in the upper room he saw you and prayed to the Father for you, even as tonight be sees you and prays for you, for he sees not only what is, but what will be, when he has gathered us all to himself in heaven.  The words of Shakespeare’s sonnet could be our Lord’s own when he says, “Thyself away are present still with me, For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move, And I am still with them, and they with thee.”

The Mother of God and the Incarnation

It is common to use evergreen boughs to decorate for the Christmas season. Like the image of the Burning Bush, the evergreen points us toward a mysterious source of life, a current just beneath the surface of our world, bursting through like a hidden spring at certain moments. Amid the entropy of our deciduous (Latin decidere, to fall into ruin, to die) world, signs point us toward this inexhaustible font. The contrast between the autumnal coloring of leaves and the steady greenery of needles, like the contrast between the sidereal firmament and plummeting meteors, speaks to us of a contrast between a permanent world, as yet only hinted-at, and the restless burgeoning and decay of the palpable.

The signs of permanence and stability, the evergreens, the stars, the Burning Bush, appear very much within our world of flux. This is itself significant, for it suggests that our salvation is not so much a separation from the material as it is a rejuvenation of the very cosmos itself. So says Saint Paul:

“Creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.”
—Romans 8: 20-21

It is because of this link between our salvation and the liberation of creation that the prophecies of the Old Testament have retained their value. Even after the Fall, creation has borne traces of its lost transparency as well as its destined rebirth. This is to say that creation itself has continued to point toward God its boundless Source. “Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things have been made [Romans 1: 20].”

Danger enters from the darkening of our intelligence that followed on the loss of trust in God. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil lost its sign value as a marker of God’s love and guardianship of Adam and Eve and became (falsely, by the trickery of the serpent) a counter-sign of a supposed arbitrary tyranny. Once faith has been broken by this kind of mistrust, creation ceases to speak lucidly. We ourselves are tempted to be entrapped by the disintegrative forces unleashed by sin, to try and hold on to creatures whose decay is meant to warn us to return to the source of life.

According the Wisdom of Solomon, our predicament can be thus summarized:

“From the greatness and beauty of created thing comes a corresponding perception of their Creator….as [the pagans] live among his works…they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful….But [they are] miserable, with their hopes set on dead things.”
—Wisdom 13: 6-7; 10

Even the chosen people of Israel needed constant reminding of the invisible and immaterial God Who communicates through the visible and material. It is significant (another “sign-being-made”) that in Hebrew, the same word, dabar, means “word” and “thing”—a commingling of the spiritual and the perceptible. The prophets communicated not only by speaking, but by proto-sacramental actions and objects. All of these point to the mystery that we celebrate this night, the sudden illumination, not of a lowly shrub on the side of Mount Horeb, but of the human race and all creation by the Motherhood of the Virgin Mary.

We can describe in minute detail how conception takes place, in terms of the mingling of genetic material and the implantation of an embryo in the tissue of its mother’s womb. But can we perceive how a human life, consciousness, the whole mystery of personhood is set in motion by these intricate biological events? Once more we are brought to the boundary between contingent materiality, and the mysterious Source of life itself. This Source has been at work since the beginning of time. Moses and the prophets, culminating in John the Baptist, pointed to its manifestations, celebrated in tonight’s antiphons. We the baptized have the joy of partaking in it:

“For in the mystery of the Word made flesh/a new light of your glory has shone upon the eyes of our mind,/so that, as we recognize in [Christ] God made visible,/we may be caught up through him in love of things invisible.”
—Preface I of the Nativity

May your New Year be filled with the illumination of the Son of God and His immaculate Mother! May we learn anew how to live sacramentally, pointing others to God’s manifestations in our world today.

Merry Christmastide!

Form Focuses and Releases Energy

Today is Debbie Reynolds’s birthday. She is the most energetic woman I’ve ever seen on screen. What strikes me whenever I’ve watched her dance is this: her mastery of technique is what makes her energy so intense and infectious. Her poise and carriage are never tense nor slack; she is an icon of the (apparently) effortless channeling of the potential into the kinetic.

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