What time is it?

I've been practicing the Gregorian chant Mass propers for Christmas Day. One way that chant is different from modern music is that the "beat" is irregular. There isn't a steady downbeat every measure of music to ground the melody. Chant is built out of notes in groups of 2 or 3 with a regular, pulsating rhythm. Sometimes a phrase is written 1 note per syllable. Sometimes a single syllable lasts a half a page. You might say chant is timeless.

This is not the result of medieval ignorance, though. No, it is a carefully thought-out theological statement; it is a participation in the timelessness on the other side of the veil. Remember that chant's proper place is in the liturgy & that the earthly liturgy is a reflection of, a participation in the heavenly liturgy. The timelessness of chant reflects the timelessness of heaven.

If you've been paying attention to the readings & prayers of the Mass & the Liturgy of the Hours, you may be a little confused at what time it is right now. All Advent we have been preparing for the coming of the Christ child, right? Yet we know that Jesus already came as a child over 2,000 years ago. We don't expect him to come back again as a child, do we? Further, many of the prayers & readings refer to Christ's return in glory to judge the world at the end of time. This is especially confusing at Mass when Christ Jesus is present with us in the Eucharist & we say he has dies, he has risen, & he will come again. How can we square all this up?

Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum.

Peter reminds us that for God a thousand years is like a day & a day like a thousand years. God is not subject to time; it is a creation of his on behalf of man. Eternity is not a really long time, it is no time. It is also called all time present before God. This is the "as it was in the beginning, is now, & shall be forever unto ages of ages." Of course, we can scarcely comprehend a life apart from time, so entrenched in it are we. But time is belongs with the changeable, & the changeable belongs to the corruptible. And death has no part with God.

Further, the Church prays like it is the first coming of Christ Jesus because - as the LOH tells us - we should adopt the spirit of Mary, to give ourselves fully to God & patiently & joyfully await his coming into our lives & into the world. This attitude, this closeness to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, will keep us properly focused to hear the Word of God spoken to us & respond, both now & and at the end.

So, even though this time of "yesterday, today, & forever" can bewilder us a bit, don't resist - let yourself enter its whirlwind. We are like the Jews who even today participate in the events of the Passover & Exodus even as they ritually remember it. This holy remembering is how God saves his people. It is foundational to the Church's sacraments. Jesus told us to "Do this in remembrance of me," & we are made present not only to his Crucifixion & Death, but also his Resurrection from the Dead in the Eucharist. This "making present now" is how the sacraments - especially the Eucharist - are a foretaste of sharing in Christ's eternal life.

Perhaps we forget that our destiny is a timeless one. This is why the Church presents us with so many clues. Even if this remains cloaked in mystery, we can be sure of Christ's presence in his Church, today, tomorrow, even unto the consummation of the world. Gaudete! Dominus prope est.

Ringing that bell...

In case you didn't know, the Salvation Army is not a charity per se, but a Protestant denomination, founded by William Booth in London, England around 1878, currently claiming about a half-million adherents ("soldiers") in the U.S.

It is one of a slew of renewal movements that sprouted up in the late 1800's, particularly in England, but also in the U.S. The Army holds for the Catholic view of God (that is, Trinitarian), a very Protestant view of the Church (useful but optional), & a very traditional Protestant moral code (that is, loving but rigid). They hold for the Protestant Bible as God's exclusive revelation & rule of faith (despite the Bible as we know it not existing until the Catholic Church declared it to be so in 395 or so). They hold for total abstinence from alcohol (despite this being contrary to the Bible - Ps 104:15 as one example of so many) & recreational drugs, partly because their Franciscan-like ministry to the destitute in the streets has shown them the destructive power of such substances abused.

The S.A.'s Position Statements reveal that they have been skimming the Catechism for the wording of many of their positions. They hold for the sanctity of life from birth to natural death, calling abortion "deplorable," yet include some curious language about recognizing the difficult decisions mothers may face. They are essentially silent on the flip side of abortion coin - contraception - mentioning only that it is opposed to abortion as a means of birth control. They are against euthanasia, giving an insightful statement into the value of the process of death.

They correctly uphold marriage as an exclusive & permanent bond established by God between a man & a woman, yet are silent on the evil of divorce. They encourage respect for the dignity of homosexuals, even as they encourage them in a life of chastity, indeed, as they do for all the unmarried. In a great number of moral issues, the Salvation Army stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Catholic Church as being a sign of contradiction in a very permissive & suicidal world.

I only mention these things because, being curious, I couldn't find anything on their site about how their vast collections are spent. There's verbiage about their programs, but nothing about disclosure & accountability. Not that I harbor any special distrust of them, but because their presence is so pervasive, I thought it a curious omission. Also, I think of how different the reaction would be if it were Catholics taking collections outside of stores (maybe habited religious sisters would get a pass). People just give to the S.A. with complete trust. Does that say something about people, the Salvation Army, or about the Catholic Church? All three, I suppose.

Now, I am in no way discouraging anyone contributing to the Salvation Army - I do myself when I pass their bell-ringing volunteers - but don't forget about the multitudes of Catholic missionaries hitting the streets, or the jungles, bringing the succor of Jesus Christ to the world's crushed & abandoned. Take a look at the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal , Franciscan Missions, or countless others, to be sure, including the cloistered religious who pray for the salvation of souls - including yours & mine.

Remember, co-conspirators, this Advent... Spend less. Give more. Worship fully. Love all.

And that really does count as a conspiracy these days.

Spotted! Inner Goddess!

Well, I haven't had an inner goddess spotting in a while. It's amazing where they turn up. This time it blindsided me at an otherwise lovely Mass for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady.

I think the OCP composers - you know, the same 6 people who wrote the same 24 songs we've been strumming on guitars for 40 years now? - are probably geniuses. Let's write a series of dreadful, nearly impossible to sing accompaniments to the Psalms of the Sunday Masses & they'll have to sing them; we'll be nearly immortal! We'll be more popular than the Beatles! We'll be more popular than Jes... er, never mind.

And so we have Psalm 98 with the oh-so-familiar melody "All the ends of the earth (I hope you're all swaying side-to-side) have seen the glory of God; all the ends of the earth have seen (go down here instead of up) the glory of God."

Well, I thought I just had wax in my ears again, but I was sure I had heard the cantor skip a word here or there or use different words in the verses of the psalm.

Sing to the Lord a new song, for God has done wondrous deeds; God's right hand has won the vic-tory; God's holy arm... Then the cantor signals "Touchdown!" & everyone joins in the refrain.

The Lord has made salvation known... Revealing justice to the nations (or something like that)... Remember your kindness & faithfulness to Israel...

OK, so what are my problems with that, you ask? Well, a few. First, this little ditty doesn't follow the approved text of the Psalm. Hopefully, the new translation will fix that.

Further, the version we sang last night didn't even match the same one we've been singing forever. What was different? Every reference to God as masculine was eliminated. The Psalm for Mass was hijacked by someone with a feminist agenda. They want God castrated. The psalm actually goes:

Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done wondrous deeds His right hand has won victory for him; his holy arm.

The Lord has made his salvation known; in the sign of the nations he has revealed his justice. He has remembered his kindness and his faithfulness toward the house of Israel.

The psalmist was pretty careful to include those masculine references. I'm not sure by what authority someone would arbitrarily eliminate them. I guess by Luther's.

Why all the fuss, you ask? God is neither male nor female, right? Well... There are libraries full of theological explanations of why God is "father" & not "mother" or simply "it." But consider this: the Second Person of the Trinity took on human nature & flesh by way of the Blessed Mother. Jesus was a man & Jesus was God. Jesus called the First Person Father. It is unequivocal that God & the masculine, even maleness, are related in a special way.

Look, I know when I'm being played, & last night someone decided that the Sacred Liturgy was the place to air out their radical feminist ideology. Since this was not my parish, I tried to put it aside & focus on the more important aspects of the liturgy. But, I hope the pastor intervenes. I hope this miserable arrangement is never played again. I hope people holding & publicly forwarding heretical notions either repent or formally leave the Church; the scandal they give is awful. Hasn't enough damage been done?

Holy Mary, vanquisher of heretics, pray for us.

Breaking the Bonds of Charity

Ever wonder what goes on in the head of someone who leaves Mass early, say just after Holy Communion? Well, we must not be too judgmental, because as the saying goes, everyone's dealing with something. Perhaps they're doing the best they can.

Yet, we can't help but notice when folks come down the line for the Eucharist with their coat & cap on, keys already in hand. We know they're going to head straight up the aisle & slip out the door. They will miss the most precious & fragile time of prayer - physical communion with the Lord, they will miss the post-Communion prayer, they will likely miss announcements about the various activities of parish life - the life in Christ that we are meant to live in service of God & others, & they will miss the final blessing. In the more fortunate parishes, they may also miss an appropriate & well-sung closing hymn.

In my parish, the Saturday vigil Mass is where these people are prominent. Many times I have been present at a sign-up table or ready to distribute Little Blue Books or something else & watched these folks leave in droves after Communion, sometimes what seems to be the entire back third of the congregation! And, man, is it difficult to catch their attention! Eye-contact is avoided at all cost. On some occasions, I felt compelled to literally chase someone down in the parking lot to hand them their prayer book.

But we know that an action of one member of the Body of Christ is never a matter private to them alone - it affects the entire Body. So, I think deeper down we feel a little betrayed & hurt by those who seem to want "a minimal experience of the Faith" as one pastor of souls said about "down-n-outers." What is betrayed is our understanding of ourselves as the Body of Christ, indivisible under Jesus himself. It is a tacit denial or at least a diminishing of the reality that is the Church & of the bonds of spiritual communion that exist among the members of said Church. In fact, one of the primary fruits of the sacrament of the Eucharist is an increase in those bonds of charity.

With all this in mind, I was taken back a bit by this passage of the Didascalia, a 3rd century liturgical manual presented in Mike Aquillina's book, The Mass of the Early Christians:

"When you teach the people, O bishop, command and exhort them to come faithfully to church , and never forsake it for any reason, but gather together continuously. Let no one diminish the Church by withdrawing themselves. If they do, they deprive the body of Christ of one of its members."

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.