The Weakness of Christ

My wife and I took our family to mass on Christmas morning, and the opening prayer (the same as for Evening Prayer II on Christmas Day) made me think.

Lord God,
we praise you for creating man,
and still more for restoring him in Christ.
Your Son shared our weakness:
may we share his glory,
for he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

That phrase "your Son shared our weakness" struck something within me. I know that Jesus was fully human, like us in all things but sin. But when I think of our greatest weakness, it is a result of original sin. We struggle with concupiscence, the disordered appetites that produce in us an inclination to sin. Surely, I thought, Christ didn't have any disordered appetites. I've wondered before about whether Mary, immaculately conceived, was born with concupiscence. Baptism obviously does not remove the effects of original sin, but the sinlessness of Jesus and Mary were, it seems, quite different from baptism. Mary was, for instance, able to remain a virgin even in giving birth to Jesus.

In thinking about this over the last week, I've concluded that, in order to undo the sin of Adam and redeem mankind, he would have to assume our fallen nature. That means that his human nature would have had all of the effects of Adam's original sin. Christ however, was able to align his fallen human nature and his human will with his divine will. And that gives some hope to the rest of us that, with God's grace, we too can overcome our weakness, and share in His glory.

An American Gorbachev?

Fr. Schnippel noted yesterday that a Russian "academic" is predicting the collapse and division of the United States in 2010. It seems that the story is also being carried by the Wall Street Journal. Also yesterday, Jonah Goldberg at The Corner noted an opinion column at the Boston Globe in which James Carroll dreams of Obama following the lead of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Didn't Gorbachev oversee the breakup of the Soviet Union? Are these two items related?

Note: I agree with Jonah that drawing a moral equivalence between the U.S. and the USSR is despicable.

A Symptom of My Disease

The liturgical celebrations of the Church are (or are supposed to be!) filled with signs that point to supernatural realities. There is a piece at Catholic Exchange today that discusses the significance of the vestments worn by priests and deacons when they celebrate the mass. I started to read it this morning before work, but I stopped less than halfway through. Why? Because the thought came to me that I was only setting myself up for more disappointment. If I know what the vestments could be teaching us, I'll only be disappointed when I note how the vestments at the masses I attend fall short.

I want to know more, but I'm afraid that I'll be happier in ignorance.

A Gift And A Curse

Our family enjoys watching the television show Monk. Even little Erin gets excited when we all sit down to watch the latest Monk disk from Netflix. For those who might not be familiar with the show, the premise is that Adrian Monk is a former detective who is now a consultant for the police department. The catch is that he has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Everything has to be arranged just so, and his fear of everything makes him practically helpless without his assistant. However, his attention to details that others overlook make him brilliant at solving crimes. In several episodes during the first six seasons of the show, people have marveled to him that he has a real gift, to which he replies, "and a curse . . . mostly a curse."

I can't help but wonder whether I know too much for my own good, or not enough, particularly with respect to the liturgy. I took a class on liturgy and prayer a few years ago, and it was surprisingly good. If nothing else, it helped to elevate my appreciation for the Church calendar and the Litury of the Hours. In some respects, I've stepped back from where I was a few years ago. During my Navy years I was stationed in northern Virginia, and the parish that we attended did not use extraordinary ministers of communion at all. At Sunday masses the "extra" priests and deacons would troop in from the sacristy at communion time to aid in distribution and then disappear after communion. When we would come home to our home parish during visits, my wife and I would be scandalized by the parade of lay distributors up to the sanctuary during the Lamb of God (or Agnus Dei if we were lucky). The EM parade is one of the things that I've come to accept over the years.

I have learned enough about liturgy, especially the mass, to fall in love with it. When I participate in the liturgy, I am praying with the entire Church, with the mind of the Church. That's what I love about the Liturgy of the Hours--it's not just my prayer, it's our prayer. And the mass is the source and summit of the whole Christian life. All of the other sacraments are oriented toward the Eucharist. Our life between masses is both nourished by and preparation for the mass. When we worship at mass, the sacrifice of Calvary is made present to us, and we are able to unite ourselves to the perfect sacrifice of the Lamb of God. We are simultaneously in the Upper Room, at the foot of the cross, and outside the empty tomb. We are united with the entire Church in offering worship to God the Father. I can still remember attending a mass on All Saints Day and wondering in awe at the thought of being surrounded by the cloud of witnesses that is the Church Triumphant in heaven. It has been a great gift.

And then I see others who don't see what I see in the liturgy. There is a casualness surrounding the celebration of the sacred rites that is disturbing. To one who loves the liturgy and knows how it should be or could be celebrated, every omission or deviation from the rubrics becomes a wound to the heart that saddens and depresses the spirit that wants to soar with the angels. Other people, who I know are good and faithful Catholics, are able to offer their worship through what causes me to stagger and stumble in emotional and spiritual pain. A part of me envies them. In a way, my love has become a curse.

I certainly don't want to strain at gnats. I'm not looking for all the bells and whistles of the extraordinary form or the traditional Latin mass. I happen to think that the vernacular is a good thing, even if the current English translation is less than perfect. I can put up with a homily that isn't inspired. I just want the rites to be performed the way the Church, with all of her authority, has approved. But how much should I be willing to compromise? Should I accept what I shouldn't have to accept, just to get along?

I am in love, and I want to stay in love.

Augustine’s Confessions, 10.27.38

by Timothy Murphy
Copyright (c) 2008 First Things (October 2008).

Wrongly thinking that beauty lay without,
blindly I cast about.
How late did I begin
to realize your beauty lay within.
To one bereft of sight
you said Let there be light.
Thus to my deafened ear
you called, you cried! hoping that I might hear.
I thirsted, hungered, yearned.
You touched me, and I burned.
How late I came to you,
to beauty ever ancient, ever new.
How late I came to you.

The Babe in Bethlehem

I have a sister in the Dayton area who, for the last several years, around Thanksgiving, has given me a copy of At Home with the Word for the coming year. It's nice to have all of the readings for Sundays and holy days collected in one place, and occasionally I'll read something in the commentary that sparks a thought. And so it was today, on the Feast of the Holy Family, that I read this:

Imagine yourself holding Mary's infant. Look at his tiny hands, his mouth, his sleeping face.

For some reason, when I usually imagine the scene at Bethlehem, the baby Jesus is not a newborn, but a child of several months. Perhaps it's the effect of all those nativity scenes where the statue of the infant is holding out his arms and smiling.

Newborns don't do that. Newborns are tiny and helpless, totally dependent upon others to care for them. It staggers the mind to think that God the Son, in becoming incarnate, made himself totally helpless and dependent upon Mary and Joseph. Perhaps that is why he was born in such humble and inconspicuous circumstances, with the glorious news announced not to the learned or to the masses, but to the shepherds in the fields with their flocks.

Of course, Mary and Joseph did care for the child. Joseph might have needed a little prompting from the angels to take Mary as his wife and to lead the Holy Family into exile in Egypt. But upon receiving the messages from the angels, he promptly acted in faith upon what had been revealed to him.

On this Feast of the Holy Family, let us all emulate Mary and Joseph in responding to God's revelation. Mary and Joseph, pray for us. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.

Christmas Continues

Christmas is over now . . . or is it? On the day after Christmas, I turned on the radio to a station that had been playing nothing but Christmas music since Thanksgiving. There were no more carols. With temperatures near 65° F today, I expect that many will use this brief respite from Winter to remove their outdoor decorations. The struggle at our home on the day after Christmas is to get all the gifts put away—not to abolish all signs of the holiday (the decorations stay up!), but rather to allow us to walk through the house without stepping on things not meant to be stepped on and to allow the baby to play on the floor without us having to constantly check whether she’s sticking tiny little toy pieces in her mouth. The clutter raises our stress level more than anything!

And yet, thankfully, there are signs that the holiday continues. The kids will still be home from school next week. The week between Christmas and New Years Day (The Solemnity of Mary Mother of God, if you prefer) is always just a little more relaxed, and another extended weekend adds to the holiday feel. Breakfast will include waffles on the new waffle iron, and the kids (especially nine year-old Catherine) will bombard us with steady requests to play family games, half of which unfortunately end in sibling squabbles which leave me grinding my teeth or worse.

And there are hopeful signs outside of our own home. Although the all-Christmas station has returned to their usual fare, I was still able to catch some carols on the country music station out of Dayton. When my daughter Erin was born on January 5th six years ago, I remember seeing a Nativity scene on display at the nurses’ station and giving thanks that someone there understood the season. [UPDATE: There goes my memory again. It seems that Erin was born on the 10th of January rather than the 5th, which means that the Nativity scene at the nurses' station was still up a few days after Epiphany.]

Christmas continues. May the joy of the season when angels proclaimed peace on earth and goodwill to men find a home in our hearts.

What Christmas Is All About

Joseph at Bethlehem

If I were Joseph, I think that I would have felt more than a little inadequate.

God, having chosen to bless Mary with the singular privilege of bearing the Messiah, appointed Joseph their guardian, and with the birth of the young Messiah imminent, Joseph couldn't even find them a decent place to stay. Yes, it was the Romans' fault for making everybody return to the town of their fathers to register for the census, but surely a more industrious man could have made arrangements for his pregnant young wife to sleep in some comfort and security.

But Joseph, arriving in Bethlehem with Mary, was turned away from the inn. At least he was able to swing permission for them to sleep in the stable with the animals. For a person with great faith, such as Joseph was, he must have been thankful for that. I think that I would have been discouraged. I would have been tempted to wonder what God could have been thinking. The child is about to be born in a stable! He deserves so much more! He deserves more than I (Joseph) can give him.

In retrospect, we all know that God had his reasons. The circumstances surrounding the birth of Christ serve to highlight the humility of the incarnate deity. The trappings of wealth and power are not significant to God. In fact, they often get in the way.

On this blessed night, I pray that God will grant me the graces that I need to surrender to his will. I look to Joseph as a model of what a father should be, and I pray for his intercession. St. Joseph, pray for us.

No Room in the Inn

From Fulton J. Sheen:

Mary is now with child, awaiting birth, and Joseph is full of expectancy as he enters the city of his own family. He searched for a place for the birth of him to whom heaven and earth belonged. Could it be that the Creator would not find room in his own creation?

Certainly, thought Joseph, there would be room in the village inn. There was room for the rich; there was room for those who were clothed in soft garments. . . . But when finally the scrolls of history are completed down to the last word of time, the saddest lines of all will be: There was no room in the inn.” No room in the inn, but there was room in the stable. The inn was the gathering place of public opinion, the focal point of the world’s moods, the rendezvous of the worldly, the rallying place of the popular and the successful. But there’s no room in the place where the world gathers. The stable is a place for outcasts, the ignored and the forgotten. The world might have expected the Son of God to be born in an inn; a stable would certainly be the last place in the world where one would look for him. The lesson is: divinity is always where you least expect to find it. So the Son of God-Made-Man is invited to enter into his own world through a back door.

A Common Greeting?

Earlier this week, the gospels for mass recounted the Annunciation of Mary, where the Angel Gabriel appeared to her in Nazareth. The readings recalled to my mind an occasion a couple of years ago, when I was taking a class offered by the Archdiocese and taught by a priest. One of the other students in the class, a convert, asked the instructor a question about the greeting of the angel to Mary. He responded that it was just a common greeting for the time, and had no special meaning!

I just shook my head and bit my tongue. I was picking my battles carefully in these classes, and I didn’t want to spend my ammo fighting over secondary territory (not that Mary’s singular grace is secondary; rather, the question that was asked was an aside and not directly relevant to the primary topic covered by the class).

I followed up with the other student after class. “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you,” is anything but a standard greeting, especially given Mary’s reaction: “She was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.” The NAB translation of “full of grace” is “favored one.” I understand that neither phrase fully captures the meaning of the Greek term (which I won’t attempt to spell). Mary certainly didn’t seem to think that it was just a common greeting. Neither did the fathers of the Church. Neither does the Church (capital “C”) today. But that it how it was stated by a priest placed in a position of authority (i.e., instructing a diocese-sponsored class) by my local church.

We have no choice but to look to our local churches for sacraments and liturgy. Occasions such as the one just recounted make it tempting to look elsewhere for teaching. I hate that I have to apply a filter of orthodoxy to everything that comes to me from a source that should be reliable, especially since I know that I am far from infallible. I can only imagine that priests and catechists must be frustrated to know that anything they say might be compared against a more authoritative Church document. As a sometimes catechist, however, I want to present the Truth, and if I say something that is not in agreement with Church teaching, I hope and pray that somebody will correct me.

We must remember in our prayers those who pass the faith on to others, that the Holy Spirit will place words of truth in their mouths and grant them the humility to accept correction.

New Year's Day, 1998

On the evening of New Year’s Day, 1998, I was driving my family to our new home from my in-laws house. We had just moved back to the area from Virginia, and we had to drive about 20 miles to get home.

As I drove west along the state route, we hit a patch of ice. Maybe a gust of wind caught the van, but for whatever reason, the front of our Aerostar van pulled left and would not respond to steering. I remember thinking, as we slid down the road sideways, that if we were to suddenly hit dry pavement, we would probably flip and roll.

We continued to spin and ended up in a field. The van was still upright, and everyone was OK. The road was empty when we spun across the eastbound lane and off the south side of the road. We were able to drive out of the field, back onto the road, and continue on to our home. There was no apparent damage, other than to our nerves.

The next day, we drove back along the same state route, trying to identify where we had gone off the road. We couldn’t tell, and for much of that stretch of road there was either a ditch or a fence along the south side. We could say that we dodged a bullet, or we could say that our guardian angels were working overtime that night. Or we could say that God was trying to send us a wake-up call.

We cannot know in this life why some are spared and some are not. All that we can do is accept the situation for what it is and try to learn from it. I believe that God communicates with us through the events of our lives. If we can recognize the moments of actual grace for what they are, then we can learn something about where God is leading us, and what his plan for us might be. Our faith helps us to contextualize the mysteries of life.

God allows bad things to happen so that a greater good can come from it. We have to trust him, even when we do not and cannot understand his reasons.

Every Death Is A Learning Experience

Sometimes two or more separate events come together to shed a ray of insight into an existence that is otherwise like looking through a clouded window.

Item 1: In Battlestar Galactica, when a Cylon dies, they are reborn on a resurrection ship, if one is within range. In an episode (I forget which one) a couple of years ago, one of the Cylons stated that every death is a learning experience.

Item 2: An accident on Tuesday claims the lives of three coworkers.

Item 3: At a Christmas party on Saturday, I was talking with one of my nephews about things that his dad would get really upset about if he ever caught him doing. One of my wife’s uncles commented that it meant his dad had probably done those things and learned his lessons from them, to which I commented that it is always better to learn from the mistakes of others than to make those same mistakes yourself.

Suddenly, a silver thread ties the three together. Every death is a learning experience, but it isn’t our death from which we learn. Every person we know that dies leaves something behind. There is always a lesson to be learned, either in how that person lived his life and affected those around him, or in how I interacted with that person. Every death can tell me something about how I should live, and I’m much better off if I learn those lessons from others before I have to face it personally.

Be Watchful! Be Alert!

Earlier this week, I arrived at work to learn that three of my coworkers had died in an automobile accident, and two others were in the hospital. The van they were traveling in left the road in icy conditions, turned on its side, slid across the median, and was hit by a semi trailer traveling in the opposite direction. Along with everyone else in the office, I was filled with shock.

We are told throughout Advent that the coming or our Lord is immanent. In the first week of Advent, we were told by Christ himself, “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come. . . What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch!’ (Mark 13:33-37)” The message seems obvious; we must always be ready to face our judgment.

The three men who died illustrated that point perfectly. One was a 61 year old grandfather nearing the end of his career and looking forward to retirement. One was a 45 year old man in the middle of his career. The third was a young man of 23 years, just out of college and beginning his career. None of the three expected their life to end on Tuesday. I can only pray that when death came, they were ready.

And, I can only pray that I will be ready, should my death come unannounced. I know that there are things I can do to prepare myself. In modern parlance, I must keep my fundamental option properly directed toward God. Love is central to that – love of God and love of neighbor.

Prayer Before Praying the Liturgy of the Hours

Lord God,

I offer this Divine Office to you, together with the adoration and praise of the angels and saints in heaven, as well as that of all the priests of your Church and all other consecrated souls. I present to you, holy Father, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, this chorus of prayer, made Holy in the Heart of Jesus and made one with His most holy prayer. May all the words of this prayer be acts of pure love, adoration, thanksgiving, satisfaction, trust, and surrender to your holy Will. Let this prayer be for my weak self a spiritual communion, an act of humility, and of perfect self-denial; and may it be a sacrifice of praise and glory to you, O Blessed Trinity.

Amen.

Kiss a Wookie!

This a cappella Star Wars tribute to John Williams has been on my brain for days now.

Confession - the Video

I saw this over at Catholic Exchange. Narrated by Dr. Ray Guarendi, it goes well with two earlier posts from this week. There's still one more parish reconciliation service this week in our area - tonight at St. Michael.

Memento Mori Prayer Request

I arrived at work this morning to learn that three of my coworkers were killed and two were injured when their van slid off the road in the icy conditions and into the path of an oncoming semi trailer. Please keep them and their families in your prayers.

Not Quite Like Elizabeth

When I saw the headline last week about a 70 year-old woman giving birth, my first impulse was to send a quick email to a friend with 11 children whose mid-forties wife is expecting number 12. Looks like she could have another 25 years of fertility, I was going to say.

But I paused to read the story and found that the conception was not exactly natural. Rather, it took place through invitro fertilization. I feel for those who have not been blessed with children, but I'm certain that it didn't happen this way with Sara, Hannah, or Elizabeth.

I know that much of the world, even those who profess to be Catholics, do not accept the Church's moral position on life issues such as invitro fertilization, contraception, and abortion. I pray that hearts will be softened to see that children are not a "right"; that sex, marriage, and parenthood are intimately connected; and that every human life has inherent dignity.

The Confession Line

Amy and I decided to go to confession before mass at Maria Stein Center on Saturday. Mass is at 11:30, and the celebrating priest normally starts hearing confessions at 11:00. The last time we went, there were only two people in line at 11:00, so we figured that if we got there by 10:55, we should be fine.

When we arrived, we found the line for confessions was pouring out of the waiting room and into the hallway. Amy asked me if I wanted to get in line, and I said no, there are too many penitents to get through before mass. So we took are seat and joined in saying the rosary before mass. At about 11:15, Amy looked back and said to me, "The line's about half down, do you want to go get in line?" I glanced back and saw that the line now ended at the doorway to the waiting room. I shook my head no; there were still too many to get through before mass.

Now that I think about, she seemed awfully anxious to get me into that confessional line. I wonder why?

About 11:25, a bunch of people started taking seats in the chapel. "Must be all the people who didn't get through line," I thought to myself. Mass started, as normal, at 11:30. After mass, the celebrant said that, since he was retired and didn't have anywhere that he needed to be, he would hear the confessions of those who didn't get to go before mass. "I think there were five," he added.

By the time Amy and I got in line, there were at least 15 of us. I know that sin doesn't just happen before or during Advent and Lent, but I am grateful that at least people become more aware of their need to reconcile with God during these seasons of preparation.