My Peace I Give You

I was troubled, pouring over in my head so many things. Then a voice spoke to me saying,

"Those things that trouble you, they are of no consequence; they are nothing. They cannot bring peace. Even if all your difficulties were resolved now, you would still not be a peace. I know you long for peace. But you could have peace now, if only you would truly desire it. If you turn to me to all your heart, I will give you peace."

Stained glass window photo taken in St. Joseph Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio.

Father, forgive me for I have sinned...

Here is a posting I made on my classroom blogsite. Perhaps remembering the kid's first confessions will help a few adults remember their need for it, too.
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I know a lot of my students this year are making their 1st Holy Communion with our Lord Jesus in the Eucharist, but some of you are wondering why you also have to make your 1st confession.

Remember when we discussed that only perfectly pure souls can stand before God? Well, it's the very similar when receiving Christ God in the Eucharist: only souls in a state of grace can receive him, that is, souls with no serious, mortal sins.

Let's look at a story Jesus told about a king who threw a marriage banquet for his son (found in Matthew 22). Now, Jesus called himself the Bridegroom (we usually just say "groom" today). So, the story is really Jesus' wedding banquet! Who is the bride, then? The Church! And through your baptism, you are part of the Church. That's how intimate a connection you are called to have with Christ Jesus in the Eucharist: as close - even closer - than husband & wife.

Back to the story: The king notices a man who tried to sneak into the wedding celebration who was not wearing the usual wedding clothes, & he says to him, "Friend, how did you come in here not wearing a wedding garment?" You see, back then all of the guests were given a lovely, white robe to wear for the wedding. So, someone wearing just their dirty street clothes was probably a party-crasher, or just bad mannered. The king had him thrown out.

We, too, were dressed in a beautiful white robe at our baptism, when all of our sins were wiped away & our souls were made perfectly clean. But as our lives wore on, we did selfish things that smudged up our clean soul. Perhaps we did some really bad things that made it so dirty, it wasn't even recognizable anymore. If we showed up wearing that to a wedding banquet, we'd be thrown out, too!

But Jesus gave his apostles his own power to forgive sins, because he doesn't want anyone separated from him; his entire mission on earth was to restore the relation between sinners & God & one another. The power of the priests to forgive sins happens in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

So what is the difference between "ordinary" sins & serious sins? Venial sins are everyday faults we have of selfishness & uncharity. These things damage our relation to God & each other, but we can heal it through prayer, fasting, & alms-giving.

However, when we've done something really wrong, we destroy our connection to God altogether - things like fighting, lying, swearing, stealing, bullying, gossiping, unforgiveness, or sins against sexual purity. It is also a very serious sin to skip Mass or to receive Communion with serious sin on your soul. These sins are also called mortal because they kill us spiritually until we go to confession.

It's like saying, "No, God, I don't want you in my life. I can get on fine without you." And God respects your decision & will patiently wait until you discover that you really do need him & come back to him in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. If someone died having said "No" to God without being sorry, God will respect that decision, too; unfortunately, this time the decision is final. We call eternal separation from God & one another hell.

Remember, the Sacrament has 5 steps...

1) You must honestly & prayerfully Examine your Conscience to see where you have failed in your walk with God. Be honest - there's no fooling God.

2) You must Be Sorry for your Sins, because sins, even minor ones, are horrible compared to God's perfect holiness. If you are not sorry for what you've done, you cannot be forgiven.

3) You must Confess your Sins to the Priest, whether behind a screen or face-to-face. You have to tell EVERY serious sin you've done, no matter how difficult or embarrassing. If you hold back anything, your confession is invalid & your sins are not forgiven. The priest will not & can not ever tell anyone what was said during Confession.

4) You must Firmly Resolve not to commit those sins again. Your sorrow for having sinned against God & your desire to live rightly afterward is expressed when you say an Act of Contrition.

5) You must Do the Penance the priest gives you to help repair the harm you've done to the Church, the Body of Christ. Whether it's as easy as saying prayers or as difficult as apologizing to someone you've offended, do your penance as soon as you can.

The priest will then give you absolution by saying the Church's prayer of forgiveness over you, invoking the name of God the Holy Trinity. You are now as free of sin as the day you were baptized, so rejoice!

- Mr. Mark

BTW, the photo at the top is a painting of the story from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 15 about the son who returns home to beg forgiveness from his father.
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What is Truth?

There is only 1 cardinal sin in this modern era: claiming to hold an absolute truth.

"There shall be a time when they shall not endure sound doctrine but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers with itching ears, and will indeed turn away from the hearing of the truth... " - 2 Timothy 4:3-4

You can hold any opinion under the sun, & under this new dispensation, everyone of them must be held as absolutely equal, even sacrosanct - beyond questioning or criticism. What you cannot do, ever, is state that you are right & someone else is wrong.

I was flipping channels before heading out to Mass & I came across a catchy headline on a CNN news program: "Gay bishop speaks out," or something to that effect, apparently about Gene Robinson running his mouth about something. Always curious to see how legion are the misinterpretations & mis-presentations of Christian faith in the media, I stuck around long enough to hear Joy Berhar say to an openly-gay pastor she was interviewing, "What part of 'Love one another' do these people not get?"

This nerf dart of error is apparently aimed at mainstream Christians who take God - speaking through St. Paul - seriously when he says:

"Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Neither fornicators not idolaters nor adulterers; nor the effeminate nor liers with mankind nor thieves nor covetous nor drunkards nor railers nor extortioners shall possess the kingdom of God. And such some of you were..." - 1 Corinthians 6:9-11

This is really a classic case of taking something you want to do - say, openly practice a sexual deviancy - & then use a fan dance of vague religious language & scriptural references to convince yourself & everyone else that God not only tolerates your sin, but that Jesus actually taught approval of it. Further, any church that does not embrace your deviancy is archaic & backwards & any person who does not support your cause is at best ignorant & prejudiced or at worst a hate-monger.

Note that it's not enough that these things be tolerated. We are required to approve of them. One doesn't have to have a very keen eye or razor-sharp insight to recognize the tremendous increase in overt sexual imagery in the media over the past 30 years or so. It should be clear that pornography has basically gone mainstream, & along with this culture of sexual license is the huge push for homosexuals & other sexual deviants to demand their "rights."

The problem is, you can't grant equality of truth to something that is false. St. Thomas tells us that truth is Nature in accord with right reason. Homosexuality is false prima facia. One cannot create their own reality. There is not, has never been, & will never be a child on this earth with 2 fathers or 2 mothers. It is simply not possible. If one brings up that male-female sex is no longer required in this age of test-tube babies, I refer you back to St. Thomas: you're barking up the wrong tree again.

Now consider this in the context of theology, where Christ is the bridegroom & the Church is his bride. In what sense can a priest - the tangible presence of Christ within the sacred assembly - be homosexual? What are we to make of the Bride receiving the Bridegroom in the consummation that is the Eucharist? Further, it is not even possible without overt blasphemy to discuss homosexuality in regards to the sacrament of Matrimony. Do you see how far reaching this issues goes into the life & nature of the Church, who she is before Christ Jesus? This is far beyond a matter of being "nice" or "fair" to a certain group. In a word, caving into our perverted society's pressure to accept homosexuality as some kind of state equal to the natural state between man & woman is really to deny the Christian Faith, to deny Christ himself. The Holy Faith is interlinked in such a way that denial of one truth of the Faith will inevitably lead to a collapse of all of them.

After saying all this, I, with the Church itself, advocate tolerance in the proper sense of the word - to deal with a known disorder by peaceful means, by persuading instead of coercing. The Church acknowledges that people are afflicted with same-sex attraction, but sees it as a symptom of our fallen nature & urges them to embrace continence - as all Christians are in their state of life - as the cross they must bear, but also as their path to holiness. We are all called to sainthood despite our brokenness. Paul continues his above statement with:

"But you are washed; you are sanctified; you are justified; in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of God." - 1 Corinthians 6:11

The real key here is embracing Christ, not one's bodily urges, to be defined by the Man, the Risen Man, the Glorified Man, not by the craven desires of fallen man. It is a quest for holiness; the waging of a war against all that would keep us from God. Throwing out the stale canard of pedophile priests is not very helpful here; the Church sees this, too, as a grave disorder, the worst of which - mercifully - is in the past.

So, to paraphrase a famous saying, everyone is entitled their own belief, but not their own truth. There is only one truth & that is the One who is the Way, the Truth, & the Life. There really are no new heresies, just old ones dressed in today's fashions. When faced with a dilemma of how to handle them when they pop up, one should not try to rationalize them with today's woolly spiritualities, but instead return to the source: to Christ Jesus, to the Scriptures, to the sure teachings of the Church, & to penance & prayer. In the light of Christ's truth, all error evaporates.

The Ying-Yang of Happiness

One of my Chinese business colleagues was in town for a visit this weekend. She was out to dinner last night at one of Knoxville's most authentic Chinese restaurants with another workmate, and relayed this story to me.

Apparently, it was the birthday of one of the waiters, who was perhaps a University of Tennessee student. The manager brought him a big bowl of noodles - a Chinese custom, because noodles are very long, which symbolizes a long life.

The young man said he didn't want it because he didn't want to live a long life.

So the manager then said he would bring out the birthday cake. The young man then said he didn't like birthday cake.

Talk about the arrogance, cowardliness - though ultimately, ignorance - of today's lost & self-serving youth!

I mean, who doesn't like birthday cake!

A word on "Active Participation" by St. Pius X...

"The Holy Mass is a prayer itself, even the highest prayer that exists. It is the Sacrifice, dedicated by our Redeemer at the Cross, and repeated every day on the Altar. If you wish to hear Mass as it should be heard, you must follow with your eye, heart and mouth all that happens at the Altar. Further, you must pray with the Priest the holy words said by him in the Name of Christ and which Christ says by him. You have to associate your heart with the holy feelings which are contained in these words and in this manner you ought to follow all that happens on the Altar. When acting in this way you have prayed Holy Mass."

In the Beginning by Joseph Ratzinger, Homily 1, Part II

However, because God is the true author of the Scriptures, we can understand the spiritual meanings of them when we read them in the light of Christ, who is their true object, as the human authors of the New Testament well understood. Thus, St. John’s 1st Letter & his Gospel open with words that mirror the first verses of Genesis. We now see that Scripture is not closed in on itself, because God’s revelation of himself in Christ, & his people’s understanding of it & their reflecting it in their writings, unfolds throughout history. So we must not read the Genesis test complete by itself & purely within itself – we must look toward its end, which is Christ. Ratzinger says, “Christ frees us from the slavery of the letter, & precisely thus does he give back to us, renewed, the truth of the images (p.16).”

Only recently was this dynamic forgotten, that all Scripture is a living unity. Scholars seemed far more interested in researching Scripture like a puzzle to solve with an eye toward “explaining” it rather than understanding it with a view toward Christ. Ratzinger says that they became obsessed with the “particulars, but meanwhile it forgot the Bible as a whole. [They] no longer read the texts forward but backward – that is, with a view not to Christ but to the probably origins of the text…(p.17).” Thus began the altogether unnecessary - & ultimately false - enmity between faith & science.

In conclusion of his first homily, Ratzinger argues that faith in creation as a gift of God is reasonable, in fact, the better hypothesis. The very reasonableness of the universe confirms the God who is Reason, Truth, & Love. In God’s freedom as Creator, creation itself becomes a gift for man, a sharing with him of God’s own freedom, reason, & love. In responding to this gift in faith, man is able to call upon God in prayer.

Church attack in Baghdad

Please read this aticle on the attack on the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Baghdad & pray for the souls of the dead, comfort for their families, & healing for the wounded. Pray for Christ's peace to rest upon both the victims & the attackers.

You may also want to pray for the intercession of some of the martyr-saints that surely comprised this congregation for the conversion of hearts to Christ & peace in the region.

Here is a comment on the tragedy from Pope Benedict.

Agnus Dei, qui tolis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tolis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tolis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem.
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P.S.: Various updates & links to other sources can be found at New Advent.