Easter Monday

Today, I’ve been asked by several coworkers something to the effect of, “Did you have a nice Easter?” Now, I naturally say Yes, but I also found myself clarifying that the Church regards Easter Day to last a whole week, inclusive of next Sunday. And further, that the season of Easter is 50 days. By their somewhat surprised & skeptical reactions of “Oh, really?”, it seems most of my small-town Tennessee friends & their Baptist churches keep the Walmart liturgical calendar. It’s a sad that this amazing aspect of the Church’s liturgical life has been long discarded by so many. I was about to say Protestants, but I know that many Catholics also get back to business as usual once the festivities end.

Further, I could not really answer their question, “Did you do anything special?” I mean, the whole week leading up to Easter is special! Each liturgy is brain-bafflingly special in its own way, for its own purpose. How to explain Maundy Thursday’s celebration of the institution of the new ministerial priesthood in Christ, Friday’s veneration of the cross, the multitude of Easter Vigil rituals, or any of it without unpacking the whole Catholic Faith centered on Christ Jesus’ abiding presence in the Church in the Eucharist? Not really possible in an exchange only a few seconds long. But perhaps that time will come. Perhaps I will be prepared & able to share with someone ignorant of the Faith exactly what makes these days so special.

Easter!

I hope you all had as lovely an Easter celebration as I did.

During the Friday liturgy, I realized something for the first time that colored my participation in the weekend liturgies – something I read from Fr. Z – that the Church dies with Christ on Friday, & rises with him Saturday night. As the Lord in the Eucharist disappears from the Church’s altars, the Bride weeps without her Groom & cannot live without him. Mary, not as Bride, but as the Mother present at Golgotha, descends to the grave with her Son & mourns throughout the night, awaiting the first rays of morning light & life to touch her tear-sodden face. How dreadful a thing is a Bride without her Groom, a Mother without her Son. Then how she rejoices at his return!

It’s a bit more than a metaphor, though – the Church throughout the world foregoes her true source of strength, sanctity, & life. She is a Church unable to move, unable to speak, unable to breathe. A Bride with her heart broken. A Bride in waiting. An empty tabernacle is a tomb all its own.

The Vigil never fails to move the soul – the Church never being more who she is than when celebrating her risen Lord & bearing him new children of God through holy Baptism, Confirmation, & finally consummating her love for him by celebrating the Eucharist again.

Sunrise Mass this morning at St. Thomas lived up to its promise. The pink & peach light shining through the clouds & beaming through the windows fulfilled the Psalm that heavens tell the glory of God.

If the day started beautiful, it only grew more so. The Afternoon E.F. Mass at St. Therese in Clinton was for me like new life breathed into dead lungs. The chants & hymns & motets filled the ears as sweetly as the incense filled the nostrils. “Gloria in excelsis Deo!” & “Victimae Paschali laudes!” simply filled the soul with gladness.

And yet, Easter is not a moment to celebrate & leave behind, but an entire new creation to be lived out in joy & thanksgiving for 7 more days, & a season to be celebrated for 50 days, & a new life to live forever.

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"He is risen! Indeed, he is risen! Alleluia!”

The Day of the Lord

Today begins a truly sacred time in the Church. My day started off gloriously with a stop by the chapel to pray the Rosary & was accosted by this glorious sight! It looked & smelled wonderful!

Also, since I will refrain from any blogging from Good Friday until probably Easter Monday, I offer now these images ("icons"?) of a pair of icons of the Crucifixion & Burial of Jesus. There are all kinds of fascinating details in them.

On of my favorites is the depiction of Jerusalem in the background, not as the ancient Roman-occupied city, but more like the glory days of Constantinople; ditto the soldier to whom pious tradition has assigned the name Longinus (I believe he has a feast day in the Roman Martyrology?). I ponder the exact point that iconographer wished to make.

Also striking is the sun & moon in the Crucifixion, a passage predicted by Joel (3:3) & preached by Peter as fulfilled by the Passion & Resurrection of Christ Jesus (Acts 2:20-21) - "The sun shall be turned into darkness & the moon into blood before the Day of the Lord comes, that great & manifest day, & it shall be that whoever calls on the Name of the Lord shall be saved." RSV
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Fr. Romano Guardini said that the heart of the Pater Noster is "Fiat voluntas tua" - "Thy will be done". I propose it is "Sanctificetur nomen tuum" - "Hallowed be thy Name". We are baptized in his Name; we are blessed in his Name; we call on his Name; we are saved in his Name; we are sent in his Name - all to do his will, of course. But it seems that God's ineffable Name is immediate to - almost the same as - who he is, which becomes the starting point of all the other petitions & aspirations of the Lord's Prayer. Also, the Name & the Word seem to be related to each other in a special way, as are the Name & the Image. The Israelites who would not speak the holy Name also longed to see God's holy face. In Christ Jesus, both have been revealed. I suppose I'm lost now, but a good icon will do that to you.
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May your Holy Days be blessed &
Have a very blessed Easter!

The Higher Path

As mentioned in a previous post, Bible Study classes uncover all kinds of loose ends in people's understanding of Scripture [In case that sounds snobby, it includes me, first of all]. Take for example 1 Samuel 15:2-3...

'I will punish what Amalek did to Israel when he barred his way as he was coming up from Egypt. Go, now, attack Amalek, and deal with him and all that he has under the ban. Do not spare him, but kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and asses.'"

God's command to Saul to put the Amalekites under "the ban," that is, to commit genocide by putting every man, woman, child, & domestic animal to the sword, with the entire town & all spoils of war to be burnt. A total annihilation of the tribe, as if they never were.

Naturally, Christians instinctively recoil at that kind of passage, which at a glance, seems at odds with the teachings of Jesus: "Love your neighbor." That's probably a good initial response; I'd be worried about someone if that wasn't their first response. But, in the face of such a contradiction, one must seek out the truth, right? Well, my experience is that, instead of doing the cerebral leg work required to get to the root of such puzzling passages (read, read, read! - both the Scriptures & credible commentaries, new & ancient) & due to the sheer size of the corpus of Scripture in all of its baffling forms, most people just select a lesser path, both in effort & reward.

Rather than trying to understand something that is not immediately apparent & immediately to our liking, we simply dismiss it or assign it an interpretation that it is no longer offensive to our comfortable understanding of The Way Things Are. "Jesus was right; that other passage is wrong." In the process, the power of God's word to reach us, challenge us, & (cue dramatic 40's scary movie music) change us is all but eliminated. The encounter with Mystery is neatly avoided.

So, the engaging & erudite website (& magazine, I understand) First Things - headed until recently by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (+ 2009) - has an intriguing article called "Either Way, Amalek Must Die, A Passover Meditation" by David P. Goldman.

I'd be curious on your thoughts. Have a blessed Holy Week.

Palm Sunday

Yesterday was a beautiful day. You simply couldn’t ask for a lovelier Palm Sunday. Since the procession begins outside in the courtyard, I sat down by the columbarium to read a bit before the liturgy began. It’s interesting to ponder those lives: where & how they grew up, what their school rooms looked like, who their teachers were, what they dreamed about, what they struggled with, all their discoveries, all the travels they made, attempts, failures, joys, fears, sorrows, reflections, loves. All that was present to them once is now hidden in the past, now undiscoverable, at least from an earthly viewpoint. So will my life be. So will yours. In faith, we can say that they, along with everything they were & did, all belong to God, now. Ultimately, everything belongs to God.

As Father alluded to in his homily, there are 2 formal liturgical processions in the Church calendar – Palm Sunday & Easter Vigil. I think there may be a bit of confusion about this rite. It seems that Palm Sunday is treated as a sort of Easter warm-up, with the gathering outside, the singing, the palms – all festive. But the hint of Easter joy was on Laetare Sunday, not today. Also, the contrasting clash between the joyful procession & the tearful Passion read aloud later is striking. This procession is more like a New Orleans funeral march. We welcome the Lord, but to his death; a death ultimately caused by our sins, but a death that liberates us from them. What sort of ritual action can make this mystery clear? Perhaps this is simply an irreconcilable mystery.

The Palm Procession from the Old Rite is very similar, but with some notable differences – there is far more singing, all ancient hymns like Hosanna filio David. The priest reads the Gospel, sprinkles the palms, & distributes them individually – each person kneeling, receiving the palm with a kiss, & then kissing the hand of the priest, a hand consecrated to touch the Holy Things, the hand of Christ who gives us all things. While this seems odd to people raised in the New Rite, in the Old Rite the servers kiss any object received from the hand of the priest & then the hand itself. St. Thomas Aquinas said that Baptism “deputes us to cult”, that is, we are enabled & permitted to worship properly only through baptism. Even our ability to worship is a gift from God. So, it them makes sense that the blessed & sprinkled palms are given to us by Christ so that we can then use them to praise him.

This day also tells us something about our nature – how difficult it is for us to recognize & desire true & good things. We do not want to change; we want everything to change for us. We don’t want to take the time to come into understanding of a mystery; we want everything to be immediately apparent. I think this is a problem in the New Rite, at least the way it is commonly celebrated, the problematic ideology that people bring with them to it. It is impossible that man can ever understand God. God has revealed enough of himself for us to desire him, to approach him; but to say “understand” is simply self-delusion. The temptation is to turn away from the Mystery & reduce God to a formula, a ritual, or an intellectual proposition. It can lead to indifference. Instead we must continuously re-engage the Mystery, straining forward. The heart of God is impossible to reach, but as we strain forward we become more like that heart, more desirous to be in that love. Even as it shows itself in shadowy wisps & disguised messengers to us now, it is no less real or desirous.

This whole week is about Mystery. I hope I am able to participate in the Church’s liturgies of this week, & I pray for the time for prayerful reflection on their meanings. I pray that at least a part of me will be able to detach from the daily routine to joyfully & thankfully rest in the Mystery of Salvation.

The Sex Talk

Last Fall, one of the other Religious Ed teachers came to me, saying she was teaching the Ten Commandments, but just could not bring herself to discuss the 6th & 9th Commandments - as Catholics number them, the proscriptions against adultery & coveting another's spouse.

Well, after stewing on it for a while, we gathered up both the 6th & 7th grades, & I gave "The Sex Talk", the premise being that kids are continuously being bombarded by explicit & destructive images of sexuality by our permissive & immoral culture. The Church, then, must speak the truth about human sexuality boldly & without fear of ridicule or reprecussions, because if we can't, no one will. We will have failed our Lord. I concentrated mainly on God's plan for marriage as an exclusive & indissoluable union of two lives, & sex as properly reserved for married couples. I also discussed some of the abuses of this plan, both the more (sadly) common ones such as premarital sex, living together before marriage, & homosexuality, & the more extreme examples of pornography or sexual abuse.

I presented the picture of the above billboard , located just past Lenoir City exit 81 on I-75N, & pointed out that every girl wants to be a cherished & admired princess on her wedding day, & that the white was a symbol of her purity & the veil a symbol of her modesty. I entreated them that their purity was a gift to be preserved for their husband, & so not to let it all be a lie on the wedding day. May God bless the folks at Waiting 4 Dreams.com for putting this up. It makes me smile every time I drive past it.

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It is probably not by accident that this billboard is just a couple of miles up from the other one. They don't call these "porn shops" anymore, they are "relationship enhancement stores." I warned the boys that viewing girls as objects was extremely dangerous & damning. As Christians, they should look on other women as sisters in Christ, as belonging to Christ. The pornography industry is sponsored by Hell & has these young lads squarely in their sites.

Something I did not discuss with them, but was heavily on my mind was the way the early Church understood all this. In many places in the Empire, going to the theatre was a prime social activity, a community builder. The stories of their culture were enacted on stage, thus helping to make Romans more Roman. The problem is that many of the stories of the gods & godesses of antiquity were highly immoral, & these sexual liasons between dieties were performed on stage as erotic entertainment. Christians, however, had embarked on a new mode of life that clearly could not be reconciled with such licentiousness. For this, they were reviled. If everyone participated, it was cool; but when Christians refused & instead showed this depravity in the light of Christ, the culture sought to extinguish the light & return to the shadows. For the early Church, viginity before marriage was simply a given. In some areas, pre-marital sex might get one exiled from the Church & simply commended to the mercy of God. In other places, a years-long penance might be imposed before one could be reconciled to the Church. The Fathers preached virginity for the sake of the kingdon as the highest virtue, & still today, the Church considers it a "higher state." It is said that some parents would not let their daughters hear some of the Fathers preach because so many were becoming professed virgins through their exhortations!

I lament that Christians today, including Catholics, are largely indistinguishable from the secular population when it comes to these matters. That points to a misguided or false notion about what the Christian vocation is in the world, what marriage & sexuality are, who man is called to be, & perhaps even, who God is. With the Church in general & priests in particular in the world's cross-hairs over the sexual abuse scandals, there has been precious little talk of either the wonderful goods of marriage & conjugal love or the darkness & death that result from the abuse of sexuality coming from either pulpits or catechists (or parents?) these days. Yet, in the face of such evil, what incalculable damage must this silence be wrecking on boys & girls, men & women!

Some might think the kids are too young for this kind of material. I agree that it would be inappropriate for 4th or 5th graders. But my kids know all about this stuff anyway. They are bombarded with it by the media & popular culture. They have older sisters who are pregnant. They have divorced parents. They know all about broken relationships. They are experiencing the trials that come from the maturation of their own bodies. Believe me, they know. They can either learn its proper place & use from the teachings of Holy Mother Church, or we can just wash our hands of it & let the world teach them.

Leading Us Home

I'm lazy today. So besides the obligatory gorgeous sunrise photos, just read the post over at the Scripture Study blog, Grace & Truth.

Parting thought: God is at work in your life in some way today & every day. Be alert for his movements. Seek out him out. Be ready to go where he leads you. Scared? Don't be. His sole motivation is your eternal happiness.