Eagle and Elephant

2011-12-26T12:57:00.001-08:00

Jesus, the Physician

Throughout the Gospels, Jesusperforms many miracles. He heals people from different social classes. He healsJews and non-Jews. He even heals sinners. His healings are not just physical.Though he does heal people of their physical ailment (blindness, paralysis, flowof blood, leprosy, a withered hand, and so on), he also and more importantlyheals people of their spiritual ailments (most notably forgiving their sins).As a result, Jesus is known as a physician, a healer. Since he is God, he isthe Divine Physician.

TheHealing of the Paralytic

I encourage you to slowly readthrough this scene. (Mk 2.1-12) Every time I do, I am struck by the choice ofwords.

A man is paralyzed. Does he askto go to Christ? No, the text just says his friends bring him. A man is sick.His friends take him to Christ. Simple. However, they can't get in. The houseis packed. The place is full. Do they give up? Do they say, "Well, wetried"? No. They persist. Without ceasing, they—in a sort ofprayer—continue to get their friend to the One they believe in. Does the friendsay anything? Does the friend say he wants to go to Christ? No. The friend issick and paralyzed. For whatever reason, he is quiet, as if he cannot talk, asif he is too sick to communicate his desires or voice his protests. Yet friendsare friends. They will not be turned away. They will continue to try for afriend, for a loved one.

The friends raise the paralyticup to the roof and lower him down through an opening. Now, the key, the wordthat always resonates: "... their ..."

And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to theparalytic, "My son, your sins are forgiven."

We remember that Jesus forgives hissins. As well, he soon heals the man of the paralysis. That is what we havecome to expect from Jesus. But why? Why did Jesus do it? The textreveals the answer: "And when Jesus saw their faith ..."

Their faith.

Jesus saw their faithand was moved. Jesus saw what they had done. Jesus saw that a group ofbelievers in him loved a friend. Jesus saw that this group did not let crowdsor a full building get in the way of transporting their friend to him.Jesus saw that this group risked to get their friend to him. Theyraised him up to the roof, made an opening, and lowered theirparalyzed friend down into Jesus' midst.

Because of their faith,he turned to the paralytic and forgave the man his sins. Jesus did not forgivehim because of anything he (the paralytic) had said or done. No. Jesus forgavethe man because of the man's friends. More precisely, Jesus acted because ofthe faith of the man's friends.

We can help our friends and lovedones by carrying them to Jesus, not letting obstacles of whatever sort get inthe way. Thus, we truly become "co-workers" with the Lord. (1 Cor3.9) We bring to him and thus help him in the work of salvation, in the work ofsaving souls.

This is Jesus, the Divine Physician, the one who heals those brought to himout of faith, those we hope he turns to and once again utters those soughtafter words: I say to you, rise ... andgo home. (Mk 2.11)

Empty Tomb

2011-04-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

When Mary Magdalen came to the tomb and did not find the Lord's body, she thought it had been taken away and so informed the disciples.

After they came and saw the tomb, they too believed what Mary had told them. The text then says: "The disciples went back home," and it adds: "but Mary wept and remained standing outside the tomb."

We should reflect on Mary's attitude and the great love she felt for Christ; for though the disciples had left the tomb, she remained. She was still seeking the one she had not found, and while she sought she wept; burning with the fire of love, she longed for him who she thought had been taken away. And so it happened that the woman who stayed behind to seek Christ was the only one to see him. For perseverance is essential to any good deed, as the voice of truth tell us: "Whoever perseveres to the end will be saved."

--St. Gregory the Great

The Risen SON: Easter Sunday

2011-04-24T06:01:00.000-07:00

Christos Anesti!

"I did not make you for the dungeon." In this Easter hour let us ask the Lord to visit the dungeons of this world; ... Let us ask him to enter into the spiritual prisons of this age, into the darkness of our lack of truth, revealing himself as the Victor who tears down the gates and says to us, "I, your God, have become your Son. Come out! I have not created you to be in prison for ever. I did not make you for the dungeon." In his play No Exit Jean Paul Sartre portrays man as a being who is hopelessly trapped. He sums up his gloomy picture of man in the words, "Hell is other people". This being so, hell is everywhere, and there is no exit, the doors are everywhere closed.

Christ, however, says to us, "I, your God, have become your Son. Come out!" Now the exact opposite is true: heaven is other people. Christ summons us to find heaven in him, to discover him in others and thus to be heaven to each other. He calls us to let heaven shine into this world, to build heaven here. Jesus stretches out his hand to us in his Easter message, in the mystery of the sacraments, so that Easter may be now, so that the light of heaven may shine forth in this world and the doors may be opened. Let us take his hand! Amen.

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope BenedictXVI)

Alithos Anesti!

CHRISTOS ANESTI! Christ Is Risen

2011-04-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

Only since Easter can we really utter the first article of faith; only on the basis of Easter is this profession rich and full of consolation: I believe in God, the Father Almighty. For it is only from the Lamb that we know that God is really Father, really Almighty.

This greatest festival of the Church's year encourages us, by looking at him who was slain and is risen, to discover the place where heaven is opened. If we comprehend the message of the Resurrection, we recognize that heaven is not completely sealed off above the earth. Then--gently and yet with immense power--something of the light of God penetrates our life. Then we shall feel the surge of joy ....

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope BenedictXVI)

Christos Anesti!

The Son Is Rising

2011-04-24T05:59:00.000-07:00

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (Jn 1:5)

Easter is concerned with something unimaginable. Initially the event of Easter comes to us solely through the word, not through the senses. So it is all the more important for us to be won over by the immensity of this word. Since, however, we can only think by employing sense images, the faith of the Church has always translated the Easter message into symbols which point to things that the word cannot express. The symbol of light ... plays a special part; the praise of the Paschal candle--a symbol of life in the midst of the darkened church--is actually a praise of him who proved victor over death. Thus the event of long ago is translated into our present time: where light conquers darkness, something of the Resurrection takes place.

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope BenedictXVI)

Arise from the Dead

2011-04-23T18:29:00.000-07:00

Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light. I have not created you to be in prison forever. I did not make you for the dungeon.
--Epiphanius

Holy Saturday : Christ the Swimmer

2011-04-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

It is similar to a man in the middle of a raging river, covered by water. He lies lifeless, drowning in the midst of horrible, dreadful monsters. If a man who does not know how to swim wishes to save the drowning person, he likewise will perish and be drowned. Certainly, what is needed is an expert swimmer to dive into the deep water, swim out, and save him who was drowning with wild monsters all around him. [...] In a similar way, man has been plunged into the abyss of darkness and the depths of death. He is suffocating and has lost God’s life within himself, surrounded by ferocious beasts. Who is able to penetrate into those depths of hell and death except that very Workman himself, who fashioned the human body? He himself penetrates into two parts, namely, the depths of hell and the deepest region of the human heart where the soul with all its thoughts is held captive by death. And he leads out of the dark depths the dead Adam.

--St. Macarius of Egypt

Holy Saturday : Your Heart Is a Tomb

2011-04-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

When you hear that […] the Lord freed the souls from hell […] and that he descended into hell […], do not think that this does not have any personal meaning for you. […] For your heart is a tomb and a sepulcher. When the prince of evil and his angels have built their nest there and have built roads and highways on which the powers of Satan walk about inside your mind and in your thoughts, then, really, are you not a hell and a sepulcher and a tomb dead to God?

[…] But the Lord descends into the souls of those who seek him. He goes into the depths of the hellish heart and there he commands death, saying: “Release those captive souls that seek after me, those that you hold by force in bondage.” He breaks through the heavy stones that cover the soul. He opens the tombs. He truly raises to life the dead person and leads that captive soul forth out of the dark prison.

--St. Macarius of Egypt

Holy Saturday : The Light in the Darkness

2011-04-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (Jn 1:5)

For the East the image of Redemption is the descent into Hades: the bursting open of the eternally-closed gate, when Christ stretches out his hand to the first Adam who, hardly trusting his eyes, sees the Easter light in the darkness of death.

--Hans Urs von Balthasar

Holy Saturday : He Descended into Hell

2011-04-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

The icon ... represents as it were the mysterious inner dimension of the event of Easter which is indicated by a few words of Scripture and which we profess in the Creed when we say, "He descended into hell". In the perspective of the icon, this is an affirmation concerning Jesus' victory. The icon shows him having shattered the bolt of this world, having torn its gates from their hinges. It depicts him as the "stronger man" who has opened and penetrated the domain of the "strong man". It portrays him as the Victor, having burst through the supposedly impregnable fortress of death, such that death is now no longer a place of no return; its doors lie open. Christ, in the aura of his wounded love, stands in this doorway, addresses the still somnolent Adam and takes him by the hand to lead him forth. The liturgy of Holy Saturday circles around this event.

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope BenedictXVI)

He brings consolation to this place of desolation, he brings warmth to this place of infernal cold.

--Adrienne von Speyr

Christ's suffering, the greatest one could conceive, was like that of the damned who cannot be damned any more. That is, his suffering went to the length of infernal punishment ... He alone through such a death entered into glory. He wanted to experience the poena sensus like the damned in Hell for the glorifying of his Father, and so as to show that one should obey the Father even to the utmost torture. That means: praising and glorifying God in every possible way for our justification--which is what Christ has done.

--Nicholas of Cusa

Lord, Make Me Your Shroud

2011-04-22T22:48:00.000-07:00

The eyelids closed, the lips together, the composed features of the face—more than making us think of a dead person, it makes us think of a man immersed in profound and silent meditation. It seems to be a translated image of an ancient antiphon for Holy Saturday: Caro mea requiescet in spe, “my body rests in hope.” The ancient homily for Holy Saturday in the Office of Readings also acquires a particular power when it is read in front of the shroud:

“Something strange is happening—there is great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep.”

Theology tells us that at his death, Christ’s soul was separated from his body as is the case for any person who dies, but his divinity remained united both to his soul and to his body. The shroud is the most perfect representation of this christological mystery. That body is separated from the soul, but not from divinity. Something divine hovers over the face, tortured but full of the majesty, of the Christ of the shroud.

In order to perceive this, we only need to compare the shroud with other representations of the dead Christ by human artists, for example, the dead Christ of Andrea Mantegna and even more that of Holbein the Younger, in the art museum in Basel, Switzerland, which represents the body of Christ in all the rigidity of death and the incipient decomposition of its members. Dostoevsky, who had long contemplated this painting on one of his trips, said that one could easily lose one’s faith before this image. Before the shroud, on the contrary, one can find faith or find it again if it has been lost.

The face of Christ on the shroud is like a boundary, a wall that separates two worlds: the world of people full of anxiety, violence, and sin, and the world of God that is inaccessible to evil. It is a shore on which all the waves break. It is as if, in Christ, God said to the force of evil what he said to the ocean in the book of Job: Thus far shall you come, and no farther.

And here shall your proud waves be stayed. (Job 38:11) Before the shroud we can pray, “Lord, make me your shroud. When you are deposed from the cross again and come to me in the sacrament of your body and blood, let me enshroud you with the burial garments of my faith and my love in such a way that your features imprint themselves on my soul and leave on it an indelible trace. Lord, make the rough, coarse cloth of my humanity your shroud.”

--Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa

Good Friday : Entombment of Christ

2011-04-22T22:37:00.000-07:00

This is what is known as a first-class funeral.
The solicitous ones seem to be chiefly intellectuals.
With solemn gestures they flourish gravecloths,
making a liturgy,
absorbing themselves in its dignity.
Nothing indicates they expect a resurrection.

The corpse is swathed according to custom.
Only the face cannot be subdued.
All suffering stares from that head.
Impossible to wrap it in a great and festive forgetting.

So already his unquiet image haunts heads and hearts.
Already the spirit is freed.
Already the Easter question takes shape...

But silently.
For tomorrow is only Holy Saturday.
The day when God is dead,
and the Church holds her breath.
The strange day that separates life and death
in order to join them in a marriage beyond all human thought.
The day which leads through hell,
and, after all the paths of the world,
into a pathless existence.

--Hans Urs von Balthasar

Good Friday : The Deposition of Christ

2011-04-22T22:36:00.000-07:00

Jesus is taken down from the cross and his mother--accepting the pain that his Son bore for the sake of the world--is there to receive him in her bosom. Each of the seven swords which transfixed the heart of the mother was Mary's renewed assent to her Son's sufferings. It is beyond human comprehension that a person should say "yes" to everything, even to the most harrowing pain.

In her unconditional "yes" Mary becomes the "redeemed earth," capable of receiving on her lap the dead body of the Redeemer. This scene wrapped in silence reveals that Christ's Passion was not suffered in vain: Mary in this moment of weariness and infinite sorrow, represents humanity who accepts with gratitutde heaven's blessings. In the end her Son's body is not buried ina cold and inanimate matter ("matter" comes from the Latin word mater meaning "mother") but it is placed in the maternal and fruitful bosom of Mary, a prototype of incarnate love which finds its culmination in Mary. The Pieta therefore is not a fleeting image of sorrow but one engraved forever in human history: a mysterious image portraying maternal fecundity enshrouding the dead Son's body--the source of a new fecundity for the mother.

--Hans Urs von Balthasar

Good Friday : God has been murdered

2011-04-22T12:16:00.000-07:00

And who has been murdered?
[...]
Now in the middle of the street,
and in the middle of the city,
in the middle of the day before the public gaze,
the unjust murder of a just man has taken place.

And so he is lifted up on a tall tree,
and a placard is attached to show who has been murdered.
Who is it? To say is hard and not to say yet more fearful.
Listen then, shuddering at him through whom the earth shook.

He who hung the earth is hanging.
He who fixed the heavens in place has been fixed in place.
He who laid the foundations of the universe has been laid on a tree.
The master has been profaned.
God has been murdered.
[...]
and the day was turned to darkness.

--Melito of Sardis

Good Friday : Christ on the Cross ... Some Thoughts

2011-04-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

The entire life of Christ is with a view to "his hour." The hour of Jesus is the hour when he fully accomplishes his mission, which is to glorify the Father and save us. It is for this reason that he came. "Behold why I have come to this hour, Father, glorify your name." (John 12:27-28) "Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son that your Son might glorify you." He came to glorify the Father and to save us. It is the mystery of the Cross which unites this contemplative gaze (glorifying the Father) with the apostolic work par excellence (saving us). It is the will of the Father that this be realized by means of the suffering of the Cross, and the suffering of the Agony where there is sadness (there is no true suffering without the interior sadness of the soul, Therese tells us), sadness such that Jesus could have died from it, "My soul is sad to the point of death." This sadness-- which takes hold of Christ's entire soul-is sadness caused by the weight of sin, by the horror of sin whereby man turns from God and turns in on himself: the sin of personal pride and/or the sin of collective pride (symbolized by the tower of Babel). The mystery of the Cross begins with the Agony and continues to Golgotha. Between the two there is the scourging at the pillar, the carrying of the cross, and the various forms of suffering that Jesus experienced because of the Crucifixion.

Why did God, in his wisdom, wish to unite, in the mystery of the Cross, love in its greatest, most powerful and purest aspect with suffering, with sadness? It is because of the wisdom of the Cross that the Little Flower [St. Therese] unites so closely and constantly love and suffering in an extremely practical and simple fashion. ... Why does the Father--who sends his Son to glorify and save us--establish a connection between love and suffering, extreme suffering, that is, suffering which leads to and implies death. Why does the Father unite love and the deadly sadness of the Agony? Why is this? It would have been more normal to unite love with joy, with success. Jesus would have been capable of succeeding. He would have been able to bring salvation to humanity with the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, or with the amazing procession shown in Chapter six of John's gospel, when Jesus is followed by a crowd of 5,000 men, not including the women and children. Salvation could have been given there. Indeed, none of these things are extrinsic to salvation, but they are not Jesus' "hour," the moment for which he came. His hour is an act of love realized by means of the sadness of the Agony, the suffering of the Cross and the offering of his earthly life, in obedience to the Father.

Let us understand that the Cross, with all the suffering it entails, is a passage whose end is joy. Its end is not sadness, its end is not suffering (that is why suffering does not finalize). Its end is love that blossoms in joy. This blossoming is the mystery of the Resurrection. "If Christ is not risen, vain is our faith" (1 Cor. 15:17). Exteriorly, the Cross is a failure, the most horrible failure that ever existed on earth: amongst the 12 disciples of Jesus there is a traitor, one whom Jesus chose to be his successor who betrays him, and the others flee...save one. Only one of 12, John, is present at the Cross. What would be said of a Novice Master who had formed 12 novices amongst whom only one remained faithful? We would pity him: "Poor novice master. What an idiot; he understood nothing." Exteriorly, the Cross is a horrible failure, and the devil is convinced it is his great victory. In reality, the Cross is the victory of love, a hidden victory: the grain of wheat must fall to the earth to bear much fruit. Here, one touches the fruitfulness of love-- not only love, but the fruitfulness of love. So that there be this fruitfulness of love, we must pass through the Cross, a difficult passage which Jesus indicates for us, but only a passage, whose end is the Resurrection.

--Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe, OP

Good Friday : Stabat Mater

2011-04-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

At the Cross her station keeping,
stood the mournful Mother weeping,
close to Jesus to the last.

Through her heart, His sorrow sharing,
all His bitter anguish bearing,
now at length the sword has passed.

O how sad and sore distressed
was that Mother, highly blest,
of the sole-begotten One.

Christ above in torment hangs,
she beneath beholds the pangs
of her dying glorious Son.

Is there one who would not weep,
whelmed in miseries so deep,
Christ's dear Mother to behold?

Can the human heart refrain
from partaking in her pain,
in that Mother's pain untold?

Bruised, derided, cursed, defiled,
she beheld her tender Child
All with scourges rent:

For the sins of His own nation,
saw Him hang in desolation,
Till His spirit forth He sent.

O thou Mother! fount of love!
Touch my spirit from above,
make my heart with thine accord:

Make me feel as thou hast felt;
make my soul to glow and melt
with the love of Christ my Lord.

Holy Mother! pierce me through,
in my heart each wound renew
of my Savior crucified:

Let me share with thee His pain,
who for all my sins was slain,
who for me in torments died.

Let me mingle tears with thee,
mourning Him who mourned for me,
all the days that I may live:

By the Cross with thee to stay,
there with thee to weep and pray,
is all I ask of thee to give.

Virgin of all virgins blest!,
Listen to my fond request:
let me share thy grief divine;

Let me, to my latest breath,
in my body bear the death
of that dying Son of thine.

Wounded with His every wound,
steep my soul till it hath swooned,
in His very Blood away;

Be to me, O Virgin, nigh,
lest in flames I burn and die,
in His awful Judgment Day.

Christ, when Thou shalt call me hence,
by Thy Mother my defense,
by Thy Cross my victory;

When my body dies,
let my soul be granted
the glory of Paradise. Amen.

Good Friday : "Woman, Behold, Your Son"

2011-04-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

We must constantly return to this last gaze that Jesus fixes upon Mary, His Mother. The Infant Jesus' first gaze upon His Mother remains in silence. The Infant Jesus' first smile for His Mother existed, yet we know nothing about it. What the Gospel does give us is this last look which is doubtless accompanied by a smile, the smile of Christ Crucified, wherein Jesus conveys all His love, looking at Mary and saying to her: "Woman." Under the motion of the Holy Spirit, we must hold this name in great esteem. We must not become accustomed to it. Rather, we must see what is so astonishing in it. This final gaze of a beloved son upon his mother--especially when that Beloved Son is God!--consists in His calling her: "Woman."

Let us understand that Christ is not using this term in the sense that is generally used when referring to "man" or "woman." It is much deeper. Is it true that Christ uses the conventional term. Perhaps this is precisely becaue Mary at the Cross is the Woman par excellence. She is the Woman as God has seen her in all her strength, the Woman par excellence. She is the New Woman, entirely relative to Jesus in His Mystery par excellence: the mystery of the Cross. She is the one who suffers with Jesus. She is the one who lives the same mystery that Jesus lives, who lives it with Him. She is so closely united with the Heart of Jesus that she endures everything He endures at the Cross, with and in Him. They are "one" as Jesus is "one" with the Father. We can say that Mary is "one" with Jesus at the Cross and that she brings to completion what is lacking in His Passion. [Cf. Col. 1:24] Of course, nothing is lacking as far as intensity of love is concerned; however, there is a lack as far as extension is concerned. And it is the proper role of woman to enable love to assume everything. This is perhaps the mystery of woman: to enable love to take hold of everything--that is, body and sensitivity, intelligence and will--and to render this love fruitful, to allow this love to become the source of another love, another life. Perhaps this is the ultimate secret.

--Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe, OP

Stealing Heaven : Christ and the Two Thieves

2011-04-22T00:54:00.000-07:00

The good thief is a found sheep. ...

The one thief joined in the mockery with cutting scorn born of his own desperate plight. "Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!" Luke tells us that he "railed" against Jesus. ... In his dying he turned, and it seems he turned definitively, against the light.

Not so with the other one. The other thief rebuked the first, we are told. "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong." Painfully twisting his neck, he looked toward Jesus. "Jesus," he said, "remember me when you come into your kingdom." And Jesus said to him, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise." In his dying, the second thief turned toward the light.

--Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

On the Cross : Dictations from a State of "Hell"

2011-04-22T00:52:00.000-07:00

The wages of sin is death. The death on the Cross now represents this wage. Death is the reward and result of my sin. Every sin leads to death. But who will see the connection? Who has any idea how much of what is positive is destroyed in men through sin? ...

[Stretching out her arms] Now the crown of thorns is put in place; now the nails are hammered in, and with every blow sins are hammered into the soul and body of the Lord. The crown is formed from existing sins, those I intend to commit or those I am not finished with. The nails are formed of those of the past, the forgotten ones, those one no longer wishes to acknowledge or remember. [Sighing] Ah, and he made up for it all. For everything, everything. For everyone.

When the nails penetrate, they burst into the body of Christ all at once. Imagine that all the sins of my whole life, even those of mere thought, become present and penetrate into me through my hands and feet. They penetrate through an unimaginiable painful recognition. And the sins of the crown do no penetrate but make their mark. And the more painful it is and the more tired one is, so much the more still follows after. Don't you see it?

This monstrous shame. Now one has to receive for every sin the wage that is called death. Imagine someone who would want to make reparation in his living flesh for everything, for example, for every murder. Every murderous intention as well. He would become mincemeat. Even taking on just one small category of sin would already be totally unthinkable. But the Lord bears all sins and, so, all the kinds of death one could think of. And he bears it not as victim, as blows from without; he does not merely offer his body but hands over his whole being. He bears every sin from within as if he himself had committed it, with all its shame. A shame that now does not admit of repentance. Repentance and confession belong together in a unity that originates from the Cross, beyond the Cross. On the Cross, the Lord only reaches the insight into the heinousness of sin.

This Son who has handed over his divinity, his whole spirit to the Father, in order to be only man, is that man who lived without experiencing sin otherwise than in others. But because he now wants to be only the Son of Man, the exemplar of man, he has to experience every sin in the same way men would if ...

There is nothing ever so intimate that does not now undergo profanation. Every possible form of love is wounded in every possible way. And the Son has here to discover himself with his pure soul: in the midst of the most secret malice. As if someone finds himself doing what he had sworn to himself he would never do. The Son feels the same abhorrence for every sin, but he does not repel it as something foreign; he allows it to settle on himself. There is no way of deadening the impact. One sin more or less does not matter to a sinner; he would not mind taking on one for another person occasionally. His conscience is blunted. But the Lord feels every sin with his whole soul and body. In his death he dies all deaths. He leaves no sin behind as something finished with. Each one causes his death. The sin that is intended, the sin that is willed, the sin committed, everything always up to the limit where repentance begins, up to total abhorrence. And by going the way of terrible, perfect recognition (by means of his purity) he opens for us the way to repentance and confession. He himself is now unable to confess; he has no time left. Everything clashes so monstrously together that in grasping one thing, he always grasps everything else with it.

And all this in obedience! What can that mean: "Into your hands I commend my spirit"? ... There are still more parts that have to die ... I thirst. ... Adieu.

--Adrienne von Speyr

Good Friday : Crushed by Eros

2011-04-22T00:32:00.000-07:00

Like a blacksmith the Love God has hammered me and crushed me

on his anvil, and has plunged me in a winter torrent.

--Anacreon

The Eucharist : The Silent Touch

2011-04-21T18:25:00.000-07:00

"On Charon's Wharf":

[M]y belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.

--Andre Dubus, from Broken Vessels

Lent : Stabat Mater 3

2011-04-18T13:55:00.000-07:00

Lent : Stabat Mater 2

2011-04-18T13:52:00.000-07:00

Lent : Stabat Mater 1

2011-04-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

Lent & Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) : The Desert a Place of Grace

2011-04-03T23:10:00.000-07:00

The desert is the place of silence, of solitude; it is the absence of the exchanges of daily life, its noise and its superficiality. The desert is the place of the absolute, the place of freedom, which sets us before the ultimate demands. Not by chance is the desert the place where monotheism began. In that sense it is a place of grace. In putting aside all preoccupations we encounter our Creator.

Great things have their beginnings in the desert, in silence, in poverty. It is not possible to share in the mission of Jesus, in the mission of the Gospel, without sharing in the desert experience, its poverty, its hunger. That beautiful hunger for justice of which the Lord speaks in the Sermon on the Mount cannot be born in the fulness of satiety... And let us not forget that for Jesus the desert did not end with those forty days. His final, extreme, desert was to be that of Psalm 21: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And from that desert sprang up the waters of the life of the world.

--Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Journey towards Easter (14) re-published as Journey to Easter

Lent : Fr. Philippe and the Cross as Passage to the Resurrection

2011-04-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

The entire life of Christ is with a view to "his hour." The hour of Jesus is the hour when he fully accomplishes his mission, which is to glorify the Father and save us. It is for this reason that he came. "Behold why I have come to this hour, Father, glorify your name." (John 12:27-28) "Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son that your Son might glorify you." He came to glorify the Father and to save us. It is the mystery of the Cross which unites this contemplative gaze (glorifying the Father) with the apostolic work par excellence (saving us). It is the will of the Father that this be realized by means of the suffering of the Cross, and the suffering of the Agony where there is sadness (there is no true suffering without the interior sadness of the soul, Therese tells us), sadness such that Jesus could have died from it, "My soul is sad to the point of death." This sadness-- which takes hold of Christ's entire soul-is sadness caused by the weight of sin, by the horror of sin whereby man turns from God and turns in on himself: the sin of personal pride and/or the sin of collective pride (symbolized by the tower of Babel). The mystery of the Cross begins with the Agony and continues to Golgotha. Between the two there is the scourging at the pillar, the carrying of the cross, and the various forms of suffering that Jesus experienced because of the Crucifixion.

Why did God, in his wisdom, wish to unite, in the mystery of the Cross, love in its greatest, most powerful and purest aspect with suffering, with sadness? It is because of the wisdom of the Cross that the Little Flower [St. Therese] unites so closely and constantly love and suffering in an extremely practical and simple fashion. ... Why does the Father--who sends his Son to glorify and save us--establish a connection between love and suffering, extreme suffering, that is, suffering which leads to and implies death. Why does the Father unite love and the deadly sadness of the Agony? Why is this? It would have been more normal to unite love with joy, with success. Jesus would have been capable of succeeding. He would have been able to bring salvation to humanity with the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, or with the amazing procession shown in Chapter six of John's gospel, when Jesus is followed by a crowd of 5,000 men, not including the women and children. Salvation could have been given there. Indeed, none of these things are extrinsic to salvation, but they are not Jesus' "hour," the moment for which he came. His hour is an act of love realized by means of the sadness of the Agony, the suffering of the Cross and the offering of his earthly life, in obedience to the Father.

Let us understand that the Cross, with all the suffering it entails, is a passage whose end is joy. Its end is not sadness, its end is not suffering (that is why suffering does not finalize). Its end is love that blossoms in joy. This blossoming is the mystery of the Resurrection. "If Christ is not risen, vain is our faith" (1 Cor. 15:17). Exteriorly, the Cross is a failure, the most horrible failure that ever existed on earth: amongst the 12 disciples of Jesus there is a traitor, one whom Jesus chose to be his successor who betrays him, and the others flee...save one. Only one of 12, John, is present at the Cross. What would be said of a Novice Master who had formed 12 novices amongst whom only one remained faithful? We would pity him: "Poor novice master. What an idiot; he understood nothing." Exteriorly, the Cross is a horrible failure, and the devil is convinced it is his great victory. In reality, the Cross is the victory of love, a hidden victory: the grain of wheat must fall to the earth to bear much fruit. Here, one touches the fruitfulness of love-- not only love, but the fruitfulness of love. So that there be this fruitfulness of love, we must pass through the Cross, a difficult passage which Jesus indicates for us, but only a passage, whose end is the Resurrection.

--Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe, OP

Lent : Kneeling before the Lord

2011-03-29T21:51:00.000-07:00

I know many words, O men, but today you must kneel--
Your knees are your wings.

--Gertrud von Le Fort, Hymns to the Church (50)

A leper comes to Jesus and begs him for help. He falls to his knees before him and says: "If you will, you can make me clean." (Mark 1.40)

The bodily gesture itself is the bearer of the spiritual meaning, which is precisely that of worship. Without the worship, the bodily gesture would be meaningless, while the spiritual act must of its very nature, because of the psychosomatic unity of man, express itself in the bodily gesture. The two aspects are united in the one word, because in a very profound way they belong together. When kneeling becomes merely external, a merely physical act, it becomes meaningless.

On the other hand, when someone tries to take worship back into the purely spiritual realm and refuses to give it embodied form, the act of worship evaporates, for what is purely spiritual is inappropriate to the nature of man. Worship is one of those fundamental acts that affect the whole man. That is why bending the knee before the presence of the living God is something we cannot abandon.

Again, there is a story that comes from the sayings of the Desert Fathers, according to which the devil was compelled by God to show himself to a certain Abba Apollo. He looked black and ugly, with frighteningly thin limbs, but most strikingly, he had no knees. The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence of the diabolical.

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), The Spirit of the Liturgy (189-93)

I [...] fell upon my knees and spread out my hands to the Lord my God.

--Ezra 9.5

Annunciation : God became man ...

2011-03-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

"God became man so that man might become god." --St. Athanasius

Lent : Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity

2011-03-22T16:10:00.000-07:00

I still remember the first secret you shared with me at Gemeaux, you were very little, but already the Master had taken your little heart captive, and my soul felt drawn toward yours! ... A Carmelite, my darling, is a soul who has gazed on the Crucified, who has seen Him offering Himself to His Father as a Victim for souls and, recollecting herself in this great vision of the charity of Christ, has understood the passionate love of His soul, and has wanted to give herself as He did! ... And on the mountain of Carmel, in silence, in solitude, in prayer that never ends, for it continues through everything, the Carmelite already lives as if in Heaven: "by God alone." The same One who will one day be her beatitude and will fully satisfy her in glory is already giving Himself to her. He never leaves her, He dwells within her soul; more than that, the two of them are but one. So she hungers for silence that she may always listen, penetrate ever deeper into His infinite Being. She is identified with Him whom she loves, she finds Him everywhere, she sees Him shining through all things! Is this not Heaven on earth! You carry this Heaven within your soul, my little Germaine, you can be a Carmelite already, for Jesus recognizes the Carmelite from within, by her soul. Don't ever leave Him, do everything beneath His divine gaze, and remain wholly joyful in His peace and love, making those around you happy!

--Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity

St. Joseph

2011-03-19T23:02:00.000-07:00

Suspending our Lenten observations, this is how we spent our St. Joseph Day:

Lent and Matthew the Poor : Finding Comfort in the Good Samaritan

2011-03-18T21:50:00.000-07:00

"The penitent is described by Christ as a stranger who has fallen into the hands of robbers in a foreign country. They strip him of his clothes, rob him, humiliate him, wound him, and leave him more dead than alive. The penitent is like a man stripped of the garment of his honor by the devil, whose will has therefore been stripped naked and whose members have been defiled. The devil robs him of his treasure--the treasure being the sanity of the mind, the light of insight, and the action of conscience--his person being humiliated, his fall disclosed, and his will shattered. Last of all, he wounds him deeply with lust to draw off his life quickly. At the end he leaves him a dead corpse unable to live! It is thus that the good Samaritan finds no occasion to ask questions or time to reproach, but immediately gathers him in his arms.

"The good Samaritan in the parable (Lk. 10.30-37) is Christ, and our interpretation hits the mark exactly, for He does not upbraid him or ask him to perform any action, but comes to him personally where he fell and stoops over him with His affection, washes and dresses his wound by His own wound, stops his bleeding by His own bleeding, and pours upon him the oil of His compassion and of His life, carrying him on the arms of His mercy, offering him a ride to the inn of His Church, asking His angels to serve him, and expending His grace on him till he recovers.

"Such is the penitent, a wretched man that has fallen on the way after being attacked by the oppression of man and the spite of the devil, and no longer able to do anything. After his strength has been drawn off, he finds room at the house of the Benign, room in His heart, room between His arms, on His beasts of burden, and in His Kingdom."

--Abouna Matta al-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor), "Repentance," Communion of Love (98)

Lent : Practice in Silence

2011-03-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

A life properly lived includes practice in silence. This begins with keeping our mouth shut whenever this is required by the confidence of another person, the duties of our vocation, tact, or respect for others. It goes on to include keeping silence at times even when it might be permissible to speak, especially if speaking would create an impression. Not to speak at such times is a good exercise in keeping our mastery over the inordinate desire to talk. We should strive to conquer the mania for constant chatter and idle talk. How many superfluous things we say in the course of the day--how many foolish things! We must learn that silence is beautiful, that it is not emptiness, but true and full life.

--Romano Guardini

Lent and Leiva-Merikakis : Repentant Tears and Grasping the Incarnation

2011-03-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

Tears are a mystical indication of true joy, as the Lord showed when He said, "Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh."

Tears that spring from hope are part of the mystery of repentance; they are evidence that the penitent has entered into grace and a secret sign that the state of true joy has been attained.

[...] Tears are a clear sign of the process of inner change and also evidence of the truth and power of the mystery of repentance.

--Matta al-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor), Communion of Love, 88

One of the Pharisees asked [Jesus] to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house, and sat at table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was sitting at table in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. [...]

Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much [...].

--Luke 7.36-50

Jesus' mere presence in the town mysteriously draws the sinful woman to him, magnet-like, and how different are her motivations from those of the hypocritical Pharisee! While Simon wants to use Jesus to enhance his own public image as a pious and holy man, the woman for her part feels that the simple presence of Jesus' holiness in her proximity is an instant judgment that reveals all the ugliness of her sins. How truthful and bold she is in her self-appraisal! But, instead of going to hide like Adam and Eve at feeling so shamefully naked before the glance of the Son of God, penetrating miraculously through all the walls of the town to arrive at her own heart, what does she do?

[...] In one moment of luminous intuition, this woman realizes that Jesus is at once the destroyer of her sins, the victor over all evil, and the Bridegroom of her soul.

--Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, The Way of the Disciple, 89-90

Thus leaving her to say:

It is you, my Lord, who desired that we should grasp you and implore you. For, if you had not wanted us to grasp you, you would not have become incarnate. It is you who called me to come near you. I saw your beauty and ran toward you.

--Syriac Liturgy for the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalen (quoted in Leiva above, 90)

How impressive this woman who, despite the great emotions shaking her soul, does not utter a single word throughout the episode. Instead, she makes herself present to Jesus [...]. All the verbal dialogue takes place between Jesus and the Pharisee; what transpires between Jesus and the woman is the mute dialogue of love, in which only the gestures of the body and the expression of the eyes can communicate what is happening in the soul. Deep and overwhelming love is beyond words and arguments, beyond reason. The Pharisee's words have the effect of separating him from Jesus, of keeping Jesus far from his soul, while the woman's silence unites her to Jesus as the surest bridge and bond. She has understood the full meaning of the injunction, "Be still, and know that I am God!" (Ps. 46.10)

--Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, The Way of the Disciple, 90-91

Truly, she has understood:

For, if you had not wanted us to grasp you, you would not have become incarnate. It is you who called me to come near you. I saw your beauty and ran toward you.

Lent and Corbon : Kenosis of the Cross

2011-03-10T22:42:00.000-08:00

In the kenosis of the Incarnation grace dawned; in the kenosis of the Cross it shines forth where the darkness is thickest. After all, when day dawns, what happens? Night is scattered. Night was simply an absence; it had no existence in itself; [...] and consequently when it is there nothing exists for anyone; people do not even recognize each other. Night as such is empty of meaning and strips everything else of meaning. Well, at the core of every human event, at the bottom of every human heart, there is a night of death and rupture, of nonmeaning and absence. "Flesh and blood", or mere human nature (Jn 1.13; 1 Cor 15.50), cannot dissipate this night; nothing outside man can introduce light into that blackness. It reigns in the heart and from that vantage point spreads its veil over everything, from the depths of the person to its most conscious structures. Only he who is Light can assume the human without damaging any part of it. And only this Man-God, in whom death finds no complicity with itself, can enter into the thickest darkness of death; that is what happens in the kenosis of the Cross.

[...] Did the executioners realize what they were doing when they raised the Lord of glory on his Cross? What happened when the Light was immersed in this darkness? Not a romantic dawn, but a struggle, the combat that decided the salvation of all men. Death feeds on lies and engenders lies; it feeds upon appearances and leaves emptiness behind it. Here, at the ninth hour, the hour when darkness reigns (Lk 22.53), death seizes its prey--only to be throttled by him whom it expects to swallow up. It is "gripped by terror", for he who enters into it is not mortal because caught in the nets of sin, but mortal out of love, mortal by grace and truth. Death has been deceived; its lies have been turned back upon it. When truth shines forth, all lying is shown up for what it is and is scattered like the night before the dawning day. Death is no longer: the Son of the Living God has crushed it by his own death.

--Fr. Jean Corbon, OP

Lent : Temptation and the Will

2011-03-10T21:44:00.000-08:00

Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast.

--Gen 3.1

Temptation properly so-called is rarely the exclusive work of the devil. Ordinarily he uses his knowledge of the dominant tendencies of a soul and his power over the senses in order to make an image more enticing, to stir up an impression, to intensify a pleasure, to quicken thus a desire, or make a solicitation more attractive and more actual, so that it will invade the field of conscience and win the consent of the will.

--Fr. Marie-Eugene of the Child-Jesus, OCD

This kind can be cast out in no way except by prayer and fasting.

--Mark 9.28

Lent : Matthew the Poor & the Deep Meaning of Fasting

2011-03-09T03:53:00.000-08:00

If we eat of a sacrificed body and do not sacrifice our own selves, how can we claim that a union takes place?

--Abouna Matta al-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor)

Fr. Matthew the Poor was a Coptic monk who affected the lives of many, both Coptic and non-Coptic Christians, especially Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, who writes that Father Matthew the Poor is "[o]ne of the great spiritual masters of our time." (201)

Well, one of the first writings I read from him is on fasting and it is in his book Communion of Love. This chapter, "The Deep Meaning of Fasting," can also be found here. Some selections from throughout the chapter:

Fasting, in the life and works of Christ, ranks as the first response to the act of unction and of being filled with the Holy Spirit. It represents the first battle in which Christ did away with His adversary, the prince of hte world. [...] For when a person enters into prayerful fasting, Satan departs from the flesh.

Fasting was to elevate the flesh to the level of war with the spirits of evil, those powers that hold sway over our weaker part, the flesh.

[B]aptism, being filled with the Holy Spirit, and fasting form a fundamental and inseparable series of acts in Christ’s life that culminated in perfect victory over Satan in preparation for his total annihilation by the cross.

The ultimate aim of [...] fasting is that Christ Himself may dwell in us: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Ga. 2:20).

[F]asting is a divine act of life.

[F]asting is an extremely important stage between baptism and crucifixion. [...] He [Christ] thus raised the flesh to the stage of the cross.

He invites us to a total communion with Him in suffering and glory alike. We thus have to prove our communion with Him in faith by having communion with Him in His works; only works testify to the genuineness of our faith. Yet He, as a true Bridegroom, did not leave us to invent works for ourselves but laid down the course of our works and life: ‘I am the way.”

Fasting is a test in which the personality defies the self. [...] Fasting may therefore be considered an act of love of the highest order, a physical way of entering into the experience of the cross.

You know that the effort of fasting is felt primarily by the body, which is the physical area that contains the self where it reveals its nature and desires. Thus, when we fast we exhaust the body, and so, indirectly, subdue the self.(3) If we subdue the self through the subjugation of the body, we have in fact come close to the destruction of the self, at least partially. So it is that by fasting we fulfill the word of the Lord: “Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it” (Lk. 9:24).

As for the Lord Jesus, He fasted not to receive something but to make a free offering of Himself in an act of will and to manifest the coming sacrifice of the cross.

As for us, we fast not to receive anything or to offer anything, for we have received Christ, and in Him we have already received everything before we fast. In Him we receive everything even before we are born. No offering of ours, even if we go to our death, is of any avail in removing a single sin.

We fast and offer our bodies as a sacrifice; the outward form of this is bearing fatigue, but its essence is the intentional acceptance of death, that we may be counted fit to be mystically united in the flesh and blood of Christ. It is then that we become, in Christ’s sacrifice, a pure sacrifice, capable of interceding and redeeming.

Fasting [...] has to be consummated in Communion, partaking in the pure body and blood, to become a perfect sacrifice, efficacious in prayer and intercession. Every Holy Communion Has to be preceded by fasting, and every fast has to end with Holy Communion.

If we eat of a sacrificed body and do not sacrifice our own selves, how can we claim that a union takes place?

Whenever we eat of the body and drink of the blood, we are mystically prepared for preaching the death of the Lord and confessing His resurrection. Every testimony to the death and resurrection of the Lord carries with it a readiness for martyrdom. And every martyrdom carries with it a resurrection.

A Carmelite is ...

2010-07-16T08:22:00.000-07:00

Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

What is a Carmelite?

I still remember the first secret you shared with me at Gemeaux, you were very little, but already the Master had taken your little heart captive, and my soul felt drawn toward yours! ... A Carmelite, my darling, is a soul who has gazed on the Crucified, who has seen Him offering Himself to His Father as a Victim for souls and, recollecting herself in this great vision of the charity of Christ, has understood the passionate love of His soul, and has wanted to give herself as He did! ... And on the mountain of Carmel, in silence, in solitude, in prayer that never ends, for it continues through everything, the Carmelite already lives as if in Heaven: "by God alone." The same One who will one day be her beatitude and will fully satisfy her in glory is already giving Himself to her. He never leaves her, He dwells within her soul; more than that, the two of them are but one. So she hungers for silence that she may always listen, penetrate ever deeper into His infinite Being. She is identified with Him whom she loves, she finds Him everywhere, she sees Him shining through all things! Is this not Heaven on earth! You carry this Heaven within your soul, my little Germaine, you can be a Carmelite already, for Jesus recognizes the Carmelite from within, by her soul. Don't ever leave Him, do everything beneath His divine gaze, and remain wholly joyful in His peace and love, making those around you happy!

--Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity

Mary: Ever-Virgin?

2010-07-06T23:40:00.000-07:00

Click here for an essay on the perpetual virginity of Mary. I wrote it many years ago. It could use some updating and editing, but the main points and biblical citations are still valid. One day, I will make the necessary revisions.

For much, much more on explaining or defending teachings about Mary, go here or for more on Mary and the Saints go here.

This Tree is my eternal salvation ...

2010-04-08T09:51:00.001-07:00

This Tree is my eternal salvation. It is my nourishment and my banquet. Amidst its roots I cast my own roots deep: beneath its boughs I grow and expand, revelling in its sigh as in the wind itself. Flying from the burning heat, I have pitched my tent in its shadow, and have found a resting-place of dewy freshness. I flower with its flowers; its fruits bring perfect joy--fruits which have been preserved for me since time's beginning, and which now I freely eat. This Tree is a food, sweet food, for my hunger, and a fountain for my thirst; it is a clothing for my nakedness; its leaves are the breath of life. Away with the fig-tree, from this time on! If I fear God, this is my protection; if I stumble, this is my support; it is the prize for which I fight and the reward of my victory. This is my straitened path, my narrow way; this is the stairway of Jacob, where angels pass up and down, and where the Lord in very truth standing at the head.

This Tree, vast as heaven itself, rises from earth to the skies, a plant immortal, set firm in the midst of heaven and earth, base of all that is, foundation of the universe, support of this world of men, binding-force of all creation, holding within itself all the- mysterious essence of man. Secured with the unseen clamps of the spirit, so that, adjusted to the Divine, it may never bend or warp, with foot resting firm on earth it towers to the topmost skies, and spans with its allembracing arms the boundless gulf of space between.

He was All, and in all, filling it with himself; stripped naked for battle against the powers of the air. . .

With him two thieves were extended, bearing within themselves the marks of those two peoples, the marks of those two types of mind. . .

When this cosmic combat came to an end ... the heavens shook; almost, the stars fell from the skies; the light of the sun was extinguished for a time; rocks were split asunder; the entire world was all but shattered ... But great Jesus breathed forth his divine Soul, saying: "Father, into Thy hand I commend my spirit." And lo, even while all things shuddered and heaved in earthquake, reeling for fear, his divine Soul ascended, giving life and strength to all; and again creation was still, as if this divine Crucifixion and Extension had everywhere unfolded and spread, penetrating all things, through all, and in all.

O Thou who art alone among the alone, and all in all! Let the heavens hold thy Godhead; and paradise, thy soul; and earth, thy blood. For the Indivisible has become divided, so that all might be saved, and the world below might not remain ignorant of the coming of God....

We beseech thee now, Lord God,
Christ, eternal King of souls:
stretch forth thy mighty hands over thy sacred Church,
and over a holy people for ever thine.

-Ancient Paschal Homily, 51
(aka Pseudo-Chrysostom, Sermon VI for Holy Week)

Feeling the Light of the Risen Son

2010-04-08T09:50:00.001-07:00

Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.

I needed blood to tell me the truth,
the touch of blood. Even
my sight of the dark crust of it round the nailholes
didn't thrust its meaning all the way through to that manifold knot in me
that willed to possess all knowledge, refusing to loosen
unless that insistence won the battle I fought with life.

But when my hand led by His hand's firm clasp
entered the unhealed wound, my fingers encountering
rib-bone and pulsing heat, what I felt was not
scalding pain, shame for my obstinate need,
but light, light straming into me, over me, filling the room
as if I had lived till then in a cold cave, and now
coming forth for the first time, the knot that bound me unravelling,
I witnessed all things quicken to color, to form,
my question not answered but given its part
in a vast unfolding design lit by a risen sun.

--Denise Levertov, "St. Thomas Didymus"

Dominus Meus et Deus Meus : My Lord and My God

2010-04-07T06:59:00.000-07:00

Thomas, you have plunged your finger into my open Heart.
--Hans Urs von Balthasar

The wound of the body also reveals the spiritual wound. ...

Let us look through the visible wound to the invisible wound of love.

--St. Bonaventure, Mystical Vine

Where did I triumph if not on the Cross? Are you as blind as the Jews and the pagans to think that Golgotha was my downfall and my failure? … Look: this is my secret, and there is no other in heaven or on earth: My Cross is salvation, my Death is victory, my Darkness is light. At that time, when I hung in torment and dread rushed into my soul because of the forsakenness, rejectedness, uselessness of my suffering, and all was gloomy, and only the seething rage of that mass of teeth hissed up mockingly at me, while heaven kept silence, shut tight as the mouth of a scoffer (but through the open gates of my hands and feet my blood bubbled out in spurts, and with each throb my Heart became more desolate, strength poured out from me in streams and there remained only faintness, death’s fatigue, infinite failure), and at last I neared that mysterious and final spot on the very edge of being, and then—the fall into the void, the capsizing into the bottomless abyss, the vertigo, the finale, the un-becoming: that colossal death which only I have died. Through my death this has been spared you, and no one will ever experience what it really means to die: This was my victory.

Haven’t I told you that if the grain of seed falls into the ground and dies it bears much fruit?

Of whom was I thinking when, as a freezing child, I lay in the crib, if not of you? Of what did I speak in the splendor of Tabor with Moses and Elias, if not of my suffering for you? For whom did I ask the Father for signs, if not for you? For whose sake did I stumble my way through fourteen endless stations, if not for yours? And my divinity and the embrace of my Father: for whom did I leave these if not for you? You want to follow me? You want to be called my disciples? Then let that mind be yours which animated me: being God in my very substance, I did not cling to my equality with God, but rather emptied and annulled myself. I took on the figure of a slave, becoming wholly like men and descending below myself in men’s everyday appearance, in bondage unto death, unto death on the Cross.

For to be God was not enough for me. … I wanted to prove my divinity to you in no way other than by letting go of it in order to become your slave.

[T]he most divine thing about God (and to show this was my whole concern): God was free enough to give himself up. … This was his self-sufficiency: that he began to hunger and to thirst and that, in the person of his members, he suffered every sort of poverty and disgrace and imprisonment and nakedness and disease. This, my brothers, was his victory: that I was able to defeat even my divinity and that in the slave’s form I was able to manifest the Lord, and in sin’s likeness the essence of love. That, being outside of God, I knew how to be in God. That I became all in everything I was not.

Understand what it means to give oneself away. To strip oneself of one’s freedom out of freedom; and out of love, no longer to be free or to be lord over oneself; no longer to be able to determine where the journey will take you; to surrender oneself, to deliver oneself over to the series of consequences that carry us off in a direction we did not want—where to? You leap down from a high cliff. The leap is freely made, and yet, the moment you leap, gravity leaps upon you, and you tumble exactly like a dead stone to the very bottom of the gorge. This is how I decided to give myself. To give myself right out of my hand. To whom? It did not matter. To sin, to the world, to all of you, to the devil, to the Church, to the kingdom of Heaven, to the Father … I wanted to be the one given away par excellence. The corpse over which the vultures gather. The Consumed, the Eaten, the Drunk, the Spilled, the Poured Out. The Plaything. The Worn Out. The one squeezed to the very dregs. The one trod upon to infinity. The one run over. The one thinned to air. The one liquified into an ocean. The Dissolved. This was the plan; this was the will of the Father. By fulfilling it through obedience (the fulfillment itself was obedience), I have filled the world from heaven down to hell, and every knee must bend before me, and all tongues must confess me. Now I am all in all, and this is why the death which poured me out is my victory. My descent, my vertiginous collapse, my going under (under myself) into everything that was foreign and contrary to God—down into the underworld: this was the ascent of this world into me, into God. My victory.

Thomas, you have plunged your finger into my open Heart.

--Hans Urs von Balthasar

The wound of the body also reveals the spiritual wound. ...
Let us look through the visible wound to the invisible wound of love.

--St. Bonaventure

Event of Emmaus: Word and Sacrament

2010-04-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

[H]ere too he [Christ] remains unrecognizable to the accustomed eye. … [H]e sets the hearts of the two wanderers aflame by his interpretation of the Scriptures and by breaking bread he opens their eyes. This is a reference to the two basic elements in early Christian worship, which consisted of the liturgy of the word (the reading and expounding of Scripture) and the eucharistic breaking of bread. In this way the evangelist makes it clear that the encounter with the risen Christ lies on a quite new plane; he tries to describe the indescribable in terms of the liturgical facts. He thereby provides both a theology of the resurrection and a theology of the liturgy: one encounters the risen Christ in the word and in the sacrament; divine service is the fashion in which he becomes touchable to us and recognizable as the living Christ. And conversely, the liturgy is based on the mystery of Easter; it is to be understood as the Lord’s approach to us. In it he becomes our travelling companion, sets our dull hearts aflame and opens our sealed eyes. He still walks with us, still finds us worried and downhearted, and still has the power to make us see.

Experience of the risen Christ is something other than a meeting with a historical man, and it must certainly not be traced back to conversations at table and recollections which would have finally crystallized in the idea that he still lived and went about his business. Such an interpretation reduces what happened to the purely human level and robs it of its specific quality. The resurrection narratives are something other and more than disguised liturgical scenes; they make visible the founding event on which all Christian liturgy rests. They testify to an approach which did not rise from the hearts of the disciples but came to them from outside, convinced them against their doubts and made them certain that the Lord had truly risen. He who lay in the grave is no longer there; he—really he himself—lives. He who had been transposed into the other world of God showed himself powerful enough to make it palpably clear that he himself stood opposite them again, that in him the power of love had really proved itself stronger than the power of death.

The comfortable attempt to spare oneself the belief in the mystery of God’s mighty actions in this world and yet at the same time to have the satisfaction of remaining on the foundation of the biblical message leads nowhere; it measures up neither to the honesty of reason nor to the claims of faith. One cannot have both the Christian faith and “religion within the bounds of pure reason”; a choice is unavoidable. He who believes will see more and more clearly, it is true, how rational it is to have faith in the love that has conquered death.

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

Top icon written by Sister Marie-Paul. Bottom icon by Nicholas Papas.

A Love Stronger Than Death: ALITHOS ANESTI!

2010-04-05T09:47:00.000-07:00

“Love is strong as death” (Song of Sol. 8.6). … [L]ove demands infinity, indestructibility; indeed it is, so to speak, a call for infinity. But it is also a fact that this cry of love’s cannot be satisfied, that it demands infinity but cannot grant it; that it claims eternity but in fact is included in the world of death, in its loneliness and its power of destruction. Only from this angle can one understand what “resurrection” means. It is the greater strength of love in face of death.

For [man], since he has no continuance in himself, survival, from a purely human point of view, can only become possible through his continuing to exist in another.

[O]nly one could truly give lasting stability: he who is, who does not come into existence and pass away again but abides in the midst of transience: the God of the living, who does not hold just the shadow and echo of my being, whose ideas are not just copies of reality. … In him I can stand as more than a shadow; in him I am truly closer to myself than I should be if I just tried to stay by myself.

[O]nly where someone values love more highly than life, that is, only where someone is ready to put life second to love, for the sake of love, can love be stronger and more than death. … If the power of love for another were so strong anywhere that it could keep alive not just his memory, the shadow of his “I”, but that person himself, then a new stage in life would have been reached. … [This new realm] would signify the end of the sovereignty of bios, which is at the same time the sovereignty of death; it would open up the realm which the Greek Bible calls “zoe” that is, definitive life, which has left behind the rule of death. … It would no longer be evolution but decision and gift in one.

[A]s man has no permanence in himself his survival could only brought about by his living on in another. … [O]nly the love which takes up the beloved in itself, into its own being, could make possible this existence in the other. … Jesus’ total love for men, which leads him to the cross, is perfected in total stepping-over to the Father and therein becomes stronger than death, because in this it is at the same time total “being held” by him.

[I]mmortality always proceeds from love, never out of the autarchy of that which is sufficient to itself. … [T]his principle, properly understood, also applies even to God as he is seen by the Christian faith. … [W]hat is revolutionary about the Christian view of the world and of God … is that it learns to understand the “absolute” as absolute “relativity”, as relatio subsistens.

[L]ove found immortality, and immortality proceeds from love alone. … [H]e who has love for all has founded immortality for all. That is precisely the meaning of the biblical statement that his resurrection is our life. … [I]f he has risen, then we have too, for then love is stronger than death; if he has not risen, then we have not either, for then the situation is still that death has the last word, nothing else. … [E]ither love is stronger than death or it is not. … This also means, it is true, that our own love, left to itself, is not sufficient to overcome death; taken in itself it would have to remain an unanswered cry. It means that only his love, coinciding with God’s own power of life and love, can found our immortality.

It goes without saying that the life of him who has risen from the dead in not once again bios, the bio-logical form of our mortal life inside history; it is zoe, new, different, definitive life; life which has stepped beyond the mortal realm of bios and history, a realm which has here been surpassed by a greater power. … [T]his new life begot itself in history and had to do so, because after all it is there for history, and the Christian message is basically nothing else than the transmission of the testimony that love has here broken through death and thus transformed fundamentally the situation of all of us.

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

Top icon written by Joanna Ferencz.

Two Hearts

2009-12-10T05:32:00.000-08:00

From a sermon by Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP:

St. Augustine says that she conceived the Word in her heart before she conceived the Word in her flesh. So that her maternity was accompanied by an intensification and growth in faith, in contemplation, in the intelligent perception of mystery. The second Vatican Council says that during the time of her pregnancy the heart of the Incarnate Word beat gently below the heart of Mary, her immaculate heart. Two immaculate hearts, beating silently and prayerfully in the night of this world.

And during this time, Mary grew in faith and in love, in expectation and in quite joy. Such should be also our advent, a time to accept the silence of mystery and expectation, of quiet penance and joy, waiting for the dawn of Christmas, and the light of Christ that is to illumine the world.

Hmmm. Thomas Joseph? Like that name.

Chaput on Conscience and Responsibility

2009-10-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

Archbishop Chaput on "Conscience, Courage, and Children With Down Syndrome":

The American Jesuit scholar Father John Courtney Murray once said that “Anyone who really believes in God must set God, and the truth of God, above all other considerations.” Here’s what that means. Catholic public officials who take God seriously cannot support laws that attack human dignity without lying to themselves, misleading others, and abusing the faith of their fellow Catholics. Catholic doctors who take God seriously cannot do procedures, prescribe drugs, or support health policies that attack the sanctity of unborn children or the elderly, or that undermine the dignity of human sexuality and the family. And Catholic citizens who take God seriously cannot claim to love their Church and then ignore her counsel on vital public issues that shape our nation’s life. God will demand an accounting. As individuals, we can claim to be or believe whatever we want. But God knows our hearts better than we do. If we don’t conform our hearts and actions to the faith we claim to believe, we’re simply fooling ourselves.

St. Dominic & Dominican Prayer

2009-08-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

THE NINE WAYS OF PRAYER OF ST. DOMINIC is worth reading.

From the Office:

He spoke with God or about God
Dominic possessed such great integrity and was so strongly motivated by divine love, that without a doubt he proved to be a bearer of honour and grace. He was a man of great equanimity, except when moved to compassion and mercy. And since a joyful heart animates the face, he displayed the peaceful composure of a spiritual man in the kindness he manifested outwardly and by the cheerfulness of his countenance.
Wherever he went he showed himself in word and deed to be a man of the Gospel. During the day no one was more community-minded or pleasant toward his brothers and associates. During the night hours no one was more persistent in every kind of vigil and supplication. He seldom spoke unless it was with God, that is, in prayer, or about God, and in this matter he instructed his brothers. Frequently he made a special personal petition that God would deign to grant him a genuine charity, effective in caring for and obtaining the salvation of men. For he believed that only then would he be truly a member of Christ, when he had given himself totally for the salvation of men, just as the Lord Jesus, the Saviour of all, had offered himself completely for our salvation. So, for this work, after a lengthy period of careful and provident planning, he founded the Order of Friars Preachers.
In his conversations and letters he often urged the brothers of the Order to study constantly the Old and New Testaments. He always carried with him the gospel according to Matthew and the epistles of Paul, and so well did he study them that he almost knew them from memory.
Two or three times he was chosen bishop, but he always refused, preferring to live with his brothers in poverty. Throughout his life, he preserved the honour of his virginity. He desired to be scourged and cut to pieces, and so die for the faith of Christ. Of him Pope Gregory IX declared: “I knew him as a steadfast follower of the apostolic way of life. There is no doubt that he is in heaven, sharing in the glory of the apostles themselves”.

4th of July : The American Flag

2009-07-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth.

--Henry Ward Beecher from " The American Flag"

Fly the Flag!

4th of July : Freedom Is Not Free

2009-07-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

Freedom Is Not Free

By LCDR Kelly Strong, USCG - Copyright 1981

I watched the flag pass by one day,
It fluttered in the breeze.
A young Service man saluted it,
And then he stood at ease.

I looked at him in uniform
So young, so tall, so proud,
With hair cut square and eyes alert
He'd stand out in any crowd.

I thought how many men like him
Had fallen through the years.
How many died on foreign soil
How many mothers' tears?

How many pilots' planes shot down?
How many died at sea
How many foxholes were soldiers' graves?
No, freedom isn't free.

I heard the sound of Taps one night,
When everything was still,
I listened to the bugler play
And felt a sudden chill.

I wondered just how many times
That Taps had meant "Amen,"
When a flag had draped a coffin.
Of a brother or a friend.

I thought of all the children,
Of the mothers and the wives,
Of fathers, sons and husbands
With interrupted lives.

I thought about a graveyard
At the bottom of the sea
Of unmarked graves in Arlington.
No, freedom isn't free.

4th of July : Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

2009-07-04T10:23:00.001-07:00

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

For the rest of the Declaration of Independence, go here.

Now, to show some gratitude and appreciation for those Brave ones who protect and defend our freedoms, the precise freedoms you are celebrating today, go to

United Warrior Survivor Foundation

Special Operations Warrior Foundation

Naval Special Warfare Foundation

Adopt a Sniper

Soldiers' Angels

and contribute either financial support or some other type, but contribute.

4th of July : Schall and Chesterton on America

2009-07-03T08:44:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, Fr. Schall, SJ, wrote "Do We Deserve To Be Free? On The Fourth of July, 2006," wherein he said:

Chesterton said someplace that the United States is almost the only country ever to have been founded on an idea. [1] That is to say, it was founded by men who knew well the English and Western Christian tradition, themselves thinking with principles formulated in that tradition. These men who signed the Declaration also knew their Cicero and Aristotle, their Bible. They were presenting before mankind an argument that explained the validity of their political action. They did not intend to act unwisely or unreasonably. They knew it was a delicate situation that merited rational statement. They did not know whether they would succeed or not. No small part of their eventual success was in fact the persuasive force of their principles. But we know that rightness of cause does not, in world history, always assure political success. They had to risk, as they said at the end of the Declaration, their lives, their fortunes, and their "sacred honor." Not all men are so willing. Men who have no conception of what this "risk" means have no grounds for freedom or to the truth on which it is based. Nor should they really live in regimes based on "sacred honor."

Speaking of Chesterton, in his What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton, he writes:

The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism. and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.

Love Triumphs : The Easter Octave and the Liturgy of the Redemption Fills the World

2009-04-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

When on the Cross my Heart was sweating in the wine-press, when all strength had already been surrendered and only the emptiness and the impotence still suffered; when all it could yield, drop by drop, was “I can’t any more,” and “I hardly have the will”;

when all blood had abandoned the Heart and all spirit the soul: then it was only nothingness that bled, only the water of perfect exhaustion that still flowed when the lance bored in (visibly into the Heart of flesh, and invisibly into soul, spirit and God): in me God himself became exhausted. The Inexhaustible was exhausted. Life was lived out. Love was loved out.

Life was lived out.

Love was loved out.

This was my victory. In the Cross was Easter.

In death the grave of the world was burst open.

In the leap into the void was the ascension to heaven.

Now I fill the world, and at last every soul lives from my dying.

You do not bear the judgment, but the grace. … Your participation in the redemption (your status as co-redeemers, we might say) is but an analogy, an expression of my love. But it is real: I myself make it real and valid. I make up for your failure and bring it to plenitude. … Taste with me the futility of the redemption. It is from such stuff that the Father has always wrought his grace. There is a judgment; in the Father’s hand there is a balance. In the one scale there lies the heavy and oppressive futility of it all. In the other, a buoyant, mounting hope. And, as the first scale falls, the judgment is decided. Hope mounts up and my Kingdom triumphs; a soaring escape.

--Hans Urs von Balthasar

Let us look steadfastly to the blood of Christ, and see how precious that blood is to God, which, having been shed for our salvation, has set the grace of repentance before the whole world.

--Pope St Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians

***Considering the event of today, you might want to watch/listen to/pray with "Divine Mercy and How This Effects Your Thinking," a program that features Fr. Benedict Groeschel and a good friend, Br. Michael Gaitley, MIC.***

This Tree is my eternal salvation ...

2009-04-17T19:07:00.000-07:00

We beseech thee now, Lord God,
Christ, eternal King of souls:
stretch forth thy mighty hands over thy sacred Church,
and over a holy people for ever thine.

-Ancient Paschal Homily, 51
(aka Pseudo-Chrysostom, Sermon VI for Holy Week)

The Resurrected Christ : Wellspring & Liturgy

2009-04-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

Now, in the hour when the economy of salvation reaches its climax, it is Jesus himself who opens “paradise” (Lk 23:43), the garden of life, to men who are straying far from God. He can do so because the source, the wellspring, is now here.

Christ is risen; he is truly risen! Now everything begins.

On this day of birth the river of life becomes LITURGY as it spreads out from the tomb and reaches us in the incorruptible body of Christ.

[T]he risen Christ [is] the inexhaustible wellspring of the liturgy. […] He is united to the Father and radiates the glory of God from his own body; being united to the wellspring he gives life (see Jn 5:20-21 and 26-27). The river of life can now flow forth from the throne of God and from the throne of the Lamb. The liturgy has been born; the Resurrection of Jesus is its first manifestation.

The Resurrection of Jesus is not in the past, for if it were Jesus would not have conquered our death. […] [T]he death of Jesus was by its nature the death of death. But the event wherein death was put to death cannot belong to the past, for then death would not have been conquered. […] The hour on which the desire of Jesus was focused “has come, and we are in it” forever; the event that is the Cross and Resurrection does not pass away.

More than that, it is the only true event in all of history. All other events are dead and will always be dead; this one alone remains.

The hour in which the Word with a loud cry handed over his Breath of love so that men might live is no longer in the past; it is, it abides, it lives on through history and sustains it.

This unprecedented power that the river of life exercises in the humanity of the risen Christ—that is the liturgy! In it all the promises of the Father find their fulfillment (Acts 13:32). Since that moment the communion of the Blessed Trinity has ceaselessly been spreading throughout our world and flooding our time with its fullness. Henceforth the economy of salvation takes the form of liturgy.

--Fr. Jean Corbon, OP, The Wellspring of Worship

He Makes All Things New Again

2009-04-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new."
(Rev. 21.5)

He has brought total newness by bringing himself.

--Saint Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses

He was going to inherit a world already made,

And yet he was going to remake it entirely.

--Charles Peguy

Feeling the Light of the Risen Son

2009-04-15T06:01:00.000-07:00

--Denise Levertov, "St. Thomas Didymus"

Dominus Meus et Deus Meus : My Lord and My God

2009-04-15T05:58:00.000-07:00

Thomas, you have plunged your finger into my open Heart.
--Hans Urs von Balthasar

The wound of the body also reveals the spiritual wound. ...

Let us look through the visible wound to the invisible wound of love.

--St. Bonaventure, Mystical Vine

Thomas, you have plunged your finger into my open Heart.

--Hans Urs von Balthasar

The wound of the body also reveals the spiritual wound. ...
Let us look through the visible wound to the invisible wound of love.

--St. Bonaventure

Event of Emmaus : Word and Sacrament

2009-04-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

Top icon written by Sister Marie-Paul. Bottom icon by Nicholas Papas.

Empty Tomb

2009-04-12T06:36:00.000-07:00

When Mary Magdalen came to the tomb and did not find the Lord's body, she thought it had been taken away and so informed the disciples.

After they came and saw the tomb, they too believed what Mary had told them. The text then says: "The disciples went back home," and it adds: "but Mary wept and remained standing outside the tomb."

--St. Gregory the Great

The Risen SON : Easter Sunday

2009-04-12T06:35:00.000-07:00

Christos Anesti!

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope BenedictXVI)

Alithos Anesti!

CHRISTOS ANESTI! Christ Is Risen!

2009-04-12T06:32:00.000-07:00

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope BenedictXVI)

Christos Anesti!

The Son Is Rising

2009-04-12T06:30:00.000-07:00

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope BenedictXVI)

Arise from the Dead

2009-04-11T05:58:00.000-07:00

Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light. I have not created you to be in prison forever. I did not make you for the dungeon.
--Epiphanius

Healing of the Paralytic

2009-02-22T13:00:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite readings is today: The Healing of the Paralytic. Here are some thoughts on the event of his healing and the impact his "friends" had.

As Lent Approaches

2009-02-22T09:30:00.000-08:00

"Lent: Why the Christian Must Deny Himself" (by a Benedictine brother) is good reading and preparation for the weeks ahead.

Communion and Liberation : A Witness to His Beauty

2009-02-21T20:29:00.000-08:00

"Being a Witness in the World to the Beauty of Knowing Christ."
(Skip to minute 16.)

Iviron Icon

2009-02-02T08:51:00.000-08:00

Russian Icon

2009-02-02T08:49:00.000-08:00

Obama and Mexico City

2009-01-23T15:53:00.000-08:00

Now that President Obama has ended the Mexico City Policy, others will not get the same chance.

Pope Leo on Coffee

2009-01-21T10:41:00.000-08:00

Recently found this from Pope Leo XIII:

And, last, delicious fragrance of the East!

With cups of steaming Mocha close the feast;

But taste the amber with a lingering lip

No hasty draught! t'was made for gods to sip!

Now if you diet thus, why, I'll engage,

You've found the secret of a green old age.

MLK Day and Abortion

2009-01-19T10:38:00.000-08:00

With two events in mind, MLK Day and the upcoming anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, here is an essay from undergrad days. Though I would rephrase certain parts, the main argument still holds.

Language and Liberty

This country recently commemorated two events: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the ... anniversary of Roe v. Wade. They are related by similar concerns: freedom and equality for all. Recalling the former sheds some light on the latter.

The fundamental source of King’s message is “the moral law or the law of God.” This law binds all humans in granting liberty and demanding justice. As history has shown, unfortunately, man-made law does not always conform to this greater and higher law. When a law, as Rev. King put it, is “out of harmony” with the universal law, it is an “unjust law” and thus no law at all. During the American experience, there have been many unjust laws. In fact, this country was founded in response to unjust laws.

Rooting himself in a tradition that incorporates America’s Founding Fathers, King suggested a response: disobedience. However, the disobedience of King is not a license to do anything. It is a morally-superior response to grave injustice. He writes, “One who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.”

This disobedience of King is his extremism. It is a truly morally-uplifting extremism. For King, the question “is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremist will we be.” This sense of action rooted in justice harkens back to the abolitionists of the mid-1800s. “I will be as harsh as truth,” David Walker wrote in 1831, “and as uncompromising as justice.” Faced with the great deprivation of rights in the battle against slavery, Walker continued to voice his commitment to endure and persevere against any and all injustice, “On this subject [of slavery] I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation....I am in earnest—I will not equivocate –I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.” I am sure King felt the same sentiment and passion for his cause of true justice and liberty for all.

The Declaration of Independence asserts that “all men are created equal” with the same “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Slavery and many laws of the early and mid-1900s were not in harmony with this truth of the Declaration and this is what King and Walker attested to.

They were arguing against a system at odds with itself. The black American was considered a “subordinate and inferior class of being,” “an article of property,” and even “not a person.” This abuse of language was the legal foundation upon which racist attitudes could translate into discrimination and acts of evil. What happened to “all men are created equal”?

The abuse of language is part of what happened. “When words lose their meaning,” Confucius once said, “peoples lose their liberty.” This is probably one of the greatest evils of man: Deny the full personhood or humanity of those we do not like and then we have the legal justification to discriminate, segregate, enslave, and even murder in mass numbers (e.g., the Holocaust).

Before being elected President, Abraham Lincoln joined in the debate over the evil of slavery: “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” He went on to later voice his concern over the abuse of language and the relative manner by which men selectively acknowledged humanity in others: “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?”

Some other man? Yes. Today, society has found another, but this time, this “other” is a baby. The unborn baby! The humanity of the child in the womb is unquestionably affirmed by science. The zygote “results from fertilization of an oocyte by a sperm and is the beginning of a human being.” (The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 1) Besides, what else could the entity be? If the natural and physical source is human (the mother and father), then the result (the new life) will be human. Basic common sense. Thus, the entity in the womb who is often torn apart in an abortion is none other than a little defenseless child, the most vulnerable of all human life. What do these issues all have to do with each other, one might ask?

The answer is simple. The attempt to redefine a human person, whether it is with regard to black Americans, Jews, or even the child in the womb, is nothing but “semantic gymnastics,” as one critic (William Brennan) put it. Again, the words of Confucius reveal great wisdom, “When words lose their meaning, peoples lose their liberty.” And, I might add, their lives!

One should never forget where our rights and privileges come from. The rights to property, free speech, religion, liberty, etc. are great, but what roots them? It is the right to life. It is my right to keep and maintain my life which no one on earth has sovereignty over. Sincere and unbiased seekers of justice and liberty must acknowledge that at conception, a new human being is present. Since this new being is human, all rights predicated to a human as basic must be predicated to all humans, whether they be Black, Jewish, disabled, elderly, or even a young human in the womb. This young human being is a person with rights that must be protected. What good are all the other rights if we forego the right to life? It is the right upon which all others are rooted. Without it, the others are worthless.

Rev. King had a dream where “all men...would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is a dream where the nation’s people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Today, we still face the test of our character. We made it through the evils of slavery and racist laws. Now, we face the test with abortion. How we treat the defenseless is a true mark of our character. With slavery and the Holocaust, this country was involved in bloody wars. The same need not happen to save the unborn child. However, true seekers of justice for all will not back down. The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremist we will be. We do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. We are in earnest. We will not equivocate. We will not excuse. We will not retreat a single inch. And we will be heard: Direct abortions are the unjust killing of innocent human beings, of little children! Life is not negotiable and neither are the passions and principles of those who truly seek liberty and justice for all, as we will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice!

Fr. Neuhaus, RIP

2009-01-08T08:06:00.000-08:00

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, RIP

We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word “good” should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.

Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die every day, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.” Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.

Update:
Here is a video interview with Fr. Neuhaus on his book As I Lay Dying: Meditations upon Returning. Well worth watching or listening to.

Romania Still Has Saints

2009-01-08T07:19:00.000-08:00

God Also Was a Cave-Man?

2008-12-27T10:11:00.000-08:00

This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human history, which was like a new creation of the world, also begins in a cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; […] It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here beneath the very feet of the passersby, in a cellar under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born. But in that second creation there was indeed something symbolical in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God also was a Cave-Man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously colored upon the wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.

--G. K. Chesterton

Merry Christmas : All Love and Mercy

2008-12-24T23:35:00.000-08:00

I am unable to fear a God who makes himself so little for me ... I love him! ... for he is all love and mercy.

--St. Therese of Lisieux

There Is a Santa Claus

2008-12-24T23:32:00.000-08:00

"Yes, Aquinas, There Is a Santa Claus." A very fun read, especially if you are familiar with St. Thomas.

But Your God Is Your Belly

2008-12-22T15:04:00.000-08:00

Listen to him as he says, With someone who has a proud eye and a greedy heart I shall not eat. [...] As you celebrate my coming, you honor me with your lips, but your heart is far from me. You do not worship me, but your god is your belly and your glory is in your shame. Unhappy is the person who worships pleasure of the body and the emptiness of worldly glory; but happy the people whose God is the Lord.

--St. Bernard, On the Lord's Advent: Sermon Three: "On the Seven Pillars" (2)

What Not to Give This Christmas : Staying out of the Doghouse

2008-12-07T11:11:00.000-08:00

Stay out of the Doghouse this Christmas.

An Enduring Advent : On Not Living "Before" or "After" Christ

2008-11-30T23:04:00.000-08:00

"It is Advent. ... The first thing we have to accept is, ever and again, this reality of an enduring Advent. If we do that, we shall begin to realize that the borderline between 'before Christ' and 'after Christ' does not run through historical time, ... it runs through our own hearts. Insofar as we are living on a basis of selfishness, or egoism, then even today we are 'before Christ'. But in this time of Advent, let us ask the Lord to grant that we may live less and less 'before Christ', and certainly not 'after Christ', but truly with Christ and in Christ: with him who is indeed Christ yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13.8). Amen."

-Joseph Ratzinger, First Sermon, What It Means to Be a Christian (40)

Obama and Kennedy : Economically I Hope So

2008-11-23T11:53:00.000-08:00

With all the talk about President-elect Obama being another Kennedy, here's to hoping he embraces and promotes these aspects of President John F. Kennedy:

But the most direct and significant kind of Federal action aiding economic growth is to make possible an increase in private consumption and investment demand--to cut the fetters which hold back private spending. In the past, this could be done in part by the increased use of credit and monetary tools, but our balance of payments situation today places limits on our use of those tools for expansion. It could also be done by increasing Federal expenditures more rapidly than necessary, but such a course would soon demoralize both the Government and our economy. If Government is to retain the confidence of the people, it must not spend more than can be justified on grounds of national need or spent with maximum efficiency. [...]

The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system; and this administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes to be enacted and become effective in 1963.

I am not talking about a "quickie" or a temporary tax cut, which would be more appropriate if a recession were imminent. Nor am I talking about giving the economy a mere shot in the arm, to ease some temporary complaint. I am talking about the accumulated evidence of the last 5 years that our present tax system, developed as it was, in good part, during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peace time; that it siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power; that it reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking.

In short, to increase demand and lift the economy, the Federal Government's most useful role is not to rush into a program of excessive increases in public expenditures, but to expand the incentives and opportunities for private expenditures.
[...]
[A]ny new tax legislation enacted next year should meet the following three tests:

First, it should reduce net taxes by a sufficiently early date and a sufficiently large amount to do the job required. [...]

Second, the new tax bill must increase private consumption as well as investment. [...] But that after-tax income could and should be greater, providing stronger markets for the products of American industry. When consumers purchase more goods, plants use more of their capacity, men are hired instead of laid off, investment increases and profits are high.

Corporate tax rates must also be cut to increase incentives and the availability of investment capital. [...]

Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. [...]

In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. The experience of a number of European countries and Japan have borne this out. This country's own experience with tax reduction in 1954 has borne this out. And the reason is that only full employment can balance the budget, and tax reduction can pave the way to that employment. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.

I repeat: our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy; or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve--and I believe this can be done--a budget surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future.

[...]

This Nation can afford to reduce taxes, we can afford a temporary deficit, but we cannot afford to do nothing. For on the strength of our free economy rests the hope of all free nations. We shall not fail that hope, for free men and free nations must prosper and they must prevail.

-President Kennedy's "Address at the Economic Club of New York, December 14th, 1962"

Veteran's Day

2008-11-11T10:17:00.000-08:00

"When you go home

Tell them for us and say

For your tomorrow

We gave our today."

Thank a vet!

Vote Early, Vote Often?

2008-11-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

Not that this necessarily decided the election, but something is wrong.

Here is to hoping that there will be good change in the amount of election fraud that goes on.

Itching Ears

2008-11-09T12:11:00.000-08:00

Apparently, the time is already here:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. (2 Tim. 4.3-4)

I guess it is back to being the loyal opposition.

Election 2008 : Some Thoughts

2008-11-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

Things to consider before you vote:

"When Does Human Life Begin? A Scientific Perspective"

"Obama's Abortion Extremism" by Robert George

"Obama and Infanticide" by Robert George

If you are pro-life and voting for Sen. Obama, then you should consider the arguments put forth by George Weigel in:

"Pro-Life Catholics For Obama: Should abortion be the litmus test for political support?"

and his follow-up response to certain critics in:

"Flawed Thinking: Why pro-life Catholic intellectuals are wrong."

The Voters Guides for Serious Christians by Catholic Answers

If you want to know why the financial crisis happened ... and will continue if certain actions go mostly unknown and thus with impunity, then read this: "Why the Loan Crisis Happened."

Short answer: government attempts (CRA) in the 90's to "spread the wealth" without sufficient consideration of the way markets work, government penalties against banks that would not risk the dangers of loaning to people that normally could not qualify for loans, donations from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to "key" senators, a lack of proper oversight as certain former Clinton administration officials and supporters "earned" millions of dollars through Fannie and Freddie, and Democrat resistance to Republican attempts to fix these problems (in the 90's but more thoroughly from 2003-2007, one of whom was Sen. John McCain in 2005).

And lastly, consider these questions and thoughts:

The picture on this page is an untouched photograph of a being that has been within its mother for 20 weeks. Please do me the favor of looking at it carefully.
Have you any doubt that it is a human being?
If you do not have any such doubt, have you any doubt that it is an innocent human being?
If you have no doubt about this either, have you any doubt that the authorities in a civilized society are duty—bound to protect this innocent human being if anyone were to wish to kill it?
If your answer to this last query is negative, that is, if you have no doubt that the authorities in a civilized society would be duty—bound to protect this innocent human being if someone were to wish to kill it, I would suggest—even insist—that there is not a lot more to be said about the issue of abortion in our society. It is wrong, and it cannot—must not—be tolerated.
But you might protest that all of this is too easy. Why, you might inquire, have I not delved into the opinion of philosophers and theologians about the matter? And even worse: Why have I not raised the usual questions about what a "human being" is, what a "person" is, what it means to be "living," and such? People who write books and articles about abortion always concern themselves with these kinds of things. Even the justices of the Supreme Court who gave us "Roe v. Wade" address them. Why do I neglect philosophers and theologians? Why do I not get into defining "human being," "person," "living," and the rest? Because, I respond, I am sound of mind and endowed with a fine set of eyes, into which I do not believe it is well to cast sand. I looked at the photograph, and I have no doubt about what I saw and what are the duties of a civilized society if what I saw is in danger of being killed by someone who wishes to kill it or, if you prefer, someone who "chooses" to kill it. In brief: I looked, and I know what I saw.
But what about the being that has been in its mother for only 15 weeks or only 10? Have you photographs of that too? Yes, I do. However, I hardly think it necessary to show them. For if we agree that the being in the photograph printed on this page is an innocent human being, you have no choice but to admit that it may not be legitimately killed even before 20 weeks unless you can indicate with scientific proof the point in the development of the being before which it was other than an innocent human being and, therefore, available to be legitimately killed. Nor have Aristotle, Aquinas or even the most brilliant embryologists of our era or any other era been able to do so. If there is a time when something less than a human being in a mother morphs into a human being, it is not a time that anyone has ever been able to identify, though many have made guesses. However, guesses are of no help. A man with a shotgun who decides to shoot a being that he believes may be a human being is properly hauled before a judge. And hopefully, the judge in question knows what a "human being" is and what the implications of someone's wishing to kill it are. The word "incarceration" comes to mind.
However, we must not stop here. The matter becomes even clearer and simpler if you obtain from the National Geographic Society two extraordinary DVDs. One is entitled "In the Womb" and illustrates in color and in motion the development of one innocent human being within its mother. The other is entitled "In the Womb—Multiples" and illustrates in color and in motion the development of two innocent human beings—twin boys—within their mother. If you have ever allowed yourself to wonder, for example, what "living" means, these two DVDs will be a great help. The one innocent human being squirms about, waves its arms, sucks its thumb, smiles broadly and even yawns; and the two innocent human beings do all of that and more:
They fight each other. One gives his brother a kick, and the other responds with a sock to the jaw. If you can convince yourself that these beings are something other than innocent and living human beings (perhaps "mere clusters of tissues," as one national newsmagazine suggests), you have a problem far more basic than merely not appreciating the wrongness of abortion. And that problem is—forgive me—self—deceit in a most extreme form.
Adolf Hitler convinced himself and his subjects that Jews and homosexuals were other than human beings. Joseph Stalin did the same as regards Cossacks and Russian aristocrats. And this despite the fact that Hitler and his subjects had seen both Jews and homosexuals with their own eyes, and Stalin and his subjects had seen both Cossacks and Russian aristocrats with theirs. Happily, there are few today who would hesitate to condemn in the roundest terms the self—deceit of Hitler, Stalin or even their subjects to the extent that their subjects could have done something to end the madness and protect living, innocent human beings.
It is high time to stop pretending that we do not know what this nation of ours is allowing—and approving—with the killing each year of more than 1,600,000 innocent human beings within their mothers. We know full well that to kill what is clearly seen to be an innocent human being or what cannot be proved to be other than an innocent human being is as wrong as wrong gets. Nor can we honorably cover our shame (1) by appealing to the thoughts of Aristotle or Aquinas on the subject, inasmuch as we are all well aware that their understanding of matters embryological was hopelessly mistaken, (2) by suggesting that "killing" and "choosing to kill" are somehow distinct ethically, morally or criminally, (3) by feigning ignorance of the meaning of "human being," "person," "living," and such, (4) by maintaining that among the acts covered by the right to privacy is the act of killing an innocent human being, and (5) by claiming that the being within the mother is "part" of the mother, so as to sustain the oft—repeated slogan that a mother may kill or authorize the killing of the being within her "because she is free to do as she wishes with her own body."
One day, please God, when the stranglehold on public opinion in the United States has been released by the extremists for whom abortion is the center of their political and moral life, our nation will, in my judgment, look back on what we have been doing to innocent human beings within their mothers as a crime no less heinous than what was approved by the Supreme Court in the "Dred Scott Decision" in the 19th century, and no less heinous than what was perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin in the 20th. There is nothing at all complicated about the utter wrongness of abortion, and making it all seem complicated mitigates that wrongness not at all. On the contrary, it intensifies it.
Do me a favor. Look at the photograph again. Look and decide with honesty and decency what the Lord expects of you and me as the horror of "legalized" abortion continues to erode the honor of our nation. Look, and do not absolve yourself if you refuse to act.
Edward Cardinal Egan Archbishop of New York

I disagree with Sen. John McCain on some key issues but it is clear to me that Sen. Obama is a worse choice for this country. So though I know I will not like some policies a President McCain will seek to enact and since I also know I will not like most policies and vision a President Obama will pursue, Sen. John McCain will get my vote.

Vote McCain-Palin 2008

St. Bernard of Clairvaux : Doctor Mellifluus

2008-08-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

Today is the feast day of St. Bernard:

From a sermon by St. Bernard, abbot

I love because I love, I love that I may love

Love is sufficient of itself, it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. Its profit lies in its practice. I love because I love, I love that I may love. Love is a great thing so long as it continually returns to its fountainhead, flows back to its source, always drawing from there the water which constantly replenishes it. Of all the movements, sensations and feelings of the soul, love is the only one in which the creature can respond to the Creator and make some sort of similar return however unequal though it be. For when God loves, all he desires is to be loved in return; the sole purpose of his love is to be loved, in the knowledge that those who love him are made happy by their love of him.
The Bridegroom’s love, or rather the love which is the Bridegroom, asks in return nothing but faithful love. Let the beloved, then, love in return. Should not a bride love, and above all, Love’s bride? Could it be that Love not be loved?Rightly then does she give up all other feelings and give herself wholly to love alone; in giving love back, all she can do is to respond to love. And when she has poured out her whole being in love, what is that in comparison with the unceasing torrent of that original source? Clearly, lover and Love, soul and Word, bride and Bridegroom, creature and Creator do not flow with the same volume; one might as well equate a thirsty man with the fountain.
What then of the bride’s hope, her aching desire, her passionate love, her confident assurance? Is all this to wilt just because she cannot match stride for stride with her giant, any more than she can vie with honey for sweetness, rival the lamb for gentleness, show herself as white as the lily, burn as bright as the sun, be equal in love with him who is Love? No. It is true that the creature loves less because she is less. But if she loves with her whole being, nothing is lacking where everything is given. To love so ardently then is to share the marriage bond; she cannot love so much and not be totally loved, and it is in the perfect union of two hearts that complete and total marriage consists. Or are we to doubt that the soul is loved by the Word first and with a greater love?

Now, be sure to live this feast day: feast!

Pope Benedict XVI: "On Saint Bernard of Clairvaux"

For him, love is the greatest force of the spiritual life. God, who is love, creates man out of love and out of love rescues him. The salvation of all human beings, mortally wounded by original sin and burdened with personal sins, consists in adhering firmly to divine charity, which was fully revealed to us in Christ crucified and risen.

In his love, God heals our will and sick intelligence, raising them to the highest level of union with him, namely, to holiness and mystical union.
[...]
It is necessary to pay attention to the dangers of excessive activity, regardless of one's condition and occupation, observes the saint, because -- as he said to the Pope of that time, and to all Popes and to all of us -- numerous occupations often lead to "hardness of heart," "they are no more than suffering for the spirit, loss of intelligence and dispersion of grace" (II, 3).
This admonition is valid for all kinds of occupations, including those inherent to the governance of the Church. The message that, in this connection, Bernard addresses to the Pontiff, who had been his disciple at Clairvaux, is provocative: "See where these accursed occupations can lead you, if you continue to lose yourself in them -- without leaving anything of yourself for yourself" (ibid).
How useful for us also is this call to the primacy of prayer! May St. Bernard, who was able to harmonize the monk's aspiration for solitude and the tranquility of the cloister with the urgency of important and complex missions in the service of the Church, help us to concretize it in our lives, in our circumstances and possibilities.
[...]
He [St. Bernard] wrote these famous words: "Whoever you are that perceive yourself during this mortal existence to be rather drifting in treacherous waters, at the mercy of the winds and the waves, than walking on firm ground, turn not away your eyes from the splendor of this guiding star, unless thou wish to be submerged by the storm. ... Look at the star, call upon Mary. ... With her for guide, you shall not go astray, while invoking her, you shall never lose heart ... if she walks before you, you shall not grow weary; if she shows you favor, you shall reach the goal," ("Homilia super Missus est," II, 17).

Mary, Star of the Sea, Pray for us.

2008-08-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

08/08/08

St. Dominic & Dominican Prayer

2008-08-08T09:42:00.001-07:00

THE NINE WAYS OF PRAYER OF ST. DOMINIC is worth reading.

From the Office:

He spoke with God or about God
Dominic possessed such great integrity and was so strongly motivated by divine love, that without a doubt he proved to be a bearer of honour and grace. He was a man of great equanimity, except when moved to compassion and mercy. And since a joyful heart animates the face, he displayed the peaceful composure of a spiritual man in the kindness he manifested outwardly and by the cheerfulness of his countenance.
Wherever he went he showed himself in word and deed to be a man of the Gospel. During the day no one was more community-minded or pleasant toward his brothers and associates. During the night hours no one was more persistent in every kind of vigil and supplication. He seldom spoke unless it was with God, that is, in prayer, or about God, and in this matter he instructed his brothers. Frequently he made a special personal petition that God would deign to grant him a genuine charity, effective in caring for and obtaining the salvation of men. For he believed that only then would he be truly a member of Christ, when he had given himself totally for the salvation of men, just as the Lord Jesus, the Saviour of all, had offered himself completely for our salvation. So, for this work, after a lengthy period of careful and provident planning, he founded the Order of Friars Preachers.
In his conversations and letters he often urged the brothers of the Order to study constantly the Old and New Testaments. He always carried with him the gospel according to Matthew and the epistles of Paul, and so well did he study them that he almost knew them from memory.
Two or three times he was chosen bishop, but he always refused, preferring to live with his brothers in poverty. Throughout his life, he preserved the honour of his virginity. He desired to be scourged and cut to pieces, and so die for the faith of Christ. Of him Pope Gregory IX declared: “I knew him as a steadfast follower of the apostolic way of life. There is no doubt that he is in heaven, sharing in the glory of the apostles themselves”.

Fr. Schall on His Sister's Piano and Celebration

2008-08-06T11:29:00.001-07:00

Worth reading is Fr. Schall's essay "Last Things: My Sister's Piano":

When our family moved to San Jose in California in 1945, the piano was boxed and shipped with the other household goods. In a way, the piano still gives me nightmares. When the truck arrived, it backed into the narrow driveway of the McKendrie Street house. My father, brothers, some neighbors, and the truck driver came to the point of unloading the heavy piano. They used a sort of steel track on which to slide the boxed piano down to the ground from the truck. I was stationed next to the house with some bushes alongside.
As the piano came down, it began to tip off the railings in my direction. I could not hold it up. Fortunately, it fell against the bushes and house, thereby saving Schall at an early age from being smashed by his sister’s piano. It taught me a first principle: “You can never be too careful unloading pianos.” If I close my eyes, I can still see the piano tipping over my way. Every human life, I suppose, includes a near miss or two. We call it luck or providence, not that luck does not fall under providence in a sound philosophy.
[...]
There is probably on this earth no experience quite like singing a Hayden or Bach Oratorio in a large choir before a silent, riveted audience. Music is not an occupation but a celebration of something beyond itself. Let us hope, in any case, that the heavenly choirs are closer to Mozart than much of the raucous music we hear. Still, I think of my sister’s piano. It means that any home can have its own music played by someone within it. German and Czech families will often have string quartets midst its members, at least in the days that the Germans and Czechs had children. Eric Voegelin, himself a lover of music, once remarked that no one needs to participate in the aberrations of his time. This is true of music too, something I learned listening to my sister play her Baldwin Grand Piano.

More Roger Scruton : The Sacred and the Human & Laughter

2008-08-01T11:24:00.001-07:00

More Roger Scruton:
"The Sacred and the Human":

The rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw the poison of resentment.

"The Decline of Laughter":

And only a rational being can laugh. Hyenas make a noise like laughter, but it is not a sign of amusement, nor does it have the social function that laughter has -- which is to make light of our differences and to rejoice in what we share. Laughter is not only a joy and a balm, it is the principal way we have of accepting the failings of our fellows.
[...]
For the feminist the failings of men are no laughing matter. Not surprisingly, therefore, the literature of feminism is devoid of humor -- and advisedly so, for if it ever were to employ this resource it would die laughing at itself.
[...]
Jewish humor is one of the greatest survival mechanisms ever invented -- which has aided not only its own survival but the survival of Jewish identity, through an unparalleled history of attempts to rub it out.

When is August 22 August 1? Iran and the Return of the 12th Imam?

2008-07-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

When is August 22 August 1?

A couple years ago, there was talk about August 22, Iranian policy, and the return of the 12th or Hidden Imam. Well, August 22 was the date of the Islamic calendar's Rajab 28, the day of the expected return of a great Islamic leader.

This year Rajab 28 falls on our August 1. Hmmm.

Iranian president: 'Big powers' going down

Iran's president on Tuesday blamed the U.S. and other "big powers" for global ills such as nuclear proliferation and AIDS, and accused them of exploiting the U.N. for their own gain and the developing world's loss.
[...]
"The big powers are going down," Ahmadinejad told foreign ministers of the Nonaligned Movement meeting in Tehran. "They have come to the end of their power, and the world is on the verge of entering a new, promising era."

Perhaps more talk like last time.

Scruton and "Evangelical Atheists"

2008-07-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

Roger Scruton on the "The Return of Religion":

Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’
Scores of enlightened thinkers followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and which thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins is the most influential living example of this tradition, and his message, echoed by Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, sounds as loud and strident in the media today as the message of Luther in the reformed churches of Germany. The violence of the diatribes uttered by these evangelical atheists is indeed remarkable. After all, the Enlightenment happened three centuries ago; the arguments of Hume, Kant and Voltaire have been absorbed by every educated person. What more is to be said? And if you must say it, why say it so stridently? Surely, those who oppose religion in the name of gentleness have a duty to be gentle, even with -- especially with -- their foes?
[...]
The evangelical atheists are subliminally aware that their abdication in the face of science does not make the universe more intelligible, nor does it provide an alternative answer to our metaphysical enquiries. It simply brings enquiry to a stop. And the religious person will feel that this stop is premature: that reason has more questions to ask, and perhaps more answers to obtain, than the atheists will allow us. So who, in this subliminal contest, is the truly reasonable one? The atheists beg the question in their own favour, by assuming that science has all the answers. But science can have all the answers only if it has all the questions; and that assumption is false. There are questions addressed to reason which are not addressed to science, since they are not asking for a causal explanation.

Aquinas Augustine Nature Supernatural Creator Creature

2008-07-28T10:34:00.000-07:00

An interesting conversation is over at Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex: "An Essential Difference Between Thomism and Augustinianism."

4th of July : Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

2008-07-04T00:10:00.000-07:00

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

For the rest of the Declaration of Independence, go here.

Now, to show some gratitude and appreciation for those Brave ones who protect and defend our freedoms, the precise freedoms you are celebrating today, go to

United Warrior Survivor Foundation

Special Operations Warrior Foundation

Naval Special Warfare Foundation

Adopt a Sniper

Soldiers' Angels

and contribute either financial support or some other type, but contribute.

4th of July : Schall and Chesterton on America

2008-07-04T00:05:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, Fr. Schall, SJ, wrote "Do We Deserve To Be Free? On The Fourth of July, 2006,"

wherein he said:

Chesterton said someplace that the United States is almost the only country ever to have been founded on an idea. [1] That is to say, it was founded by men who knew well the English and Western Christian tradition, themselves thinking with principles formulated in that tradition. These men who signed the Declaration also knew their Cicero and Aristotle, their Bible. They were presenting before mankind an argument that explained the validity of their political action. They did not intend to act unwisely or unreasonably. They knew it was a delicate situation that merited rational statement. They did not know whether they would succeed or not. No small part of their eventual success was in fact the persuasive force of their principles. But we know that rightness of cause does not, in world history, always assure political success. They had to risk, as they said at the end of the Declaration, their lives, their fortunes, and their "sacred honor." Not all men are so willing. Men who have no conception of what this "risk" means have no grounds for freedom or to the truth on which it is based. Nor should they really live in regimes based on "sacred honor."

Speaking of Chesterton, in his What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton, he writes:

The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism. and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.

Got It : Cistercian Monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz

2008-07-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

Just got it: Chant: Music For The Soul by the Cistercian Monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz, an ancient monastery in Austria.

Very beautiful! And tranquil. And solemn. And ...

You can watch a little intro to the monastery and the CD here: "The Cistercian Monks Of Stift Heiligenkreuz - EPK."

Or watch this:

Prayers, Tears, and Truth

2008-06-30T22:26:00.000-07:00

He lived in a kind of rapture and perpetual ecstasy. He prayed without ceasing, wept, fasted, yearned. Each of his syllogisms is as a concretion of his prayer and his tears; the kind of grace of lucid calm which his words bring to us springs doubtless from the fact that the least of his texts retains invisibly the impregnation of his longing and of the pure strength of the most vehement love. While he was living, did not the mere bodily sight of him procure, according to his contemporaries, a grace of spiritual consolation? The masterpiece of strict and rigorous intellectuality, of intrepid logic, is thus brimming over from a heart possessed by charity.
On his return to Naples after the death of Thomas, Reginald was to exclaim: "As long as he was living my Master prevented me from revealing the marvels that I witnessed. He owed his knowledge less to the effort of his mind than to the power of his prayer. Every time he wanted to study, discuss, teach, write or dictate, he first had recourse to the privacy of prayer, weeping before God in order to discover in the truth the divine secrets, and, though he had been in uncertainty before praying, as a result of his prayer he came back instructed." When doubtful points would arise, Bartolommeo di Capua likewise reports, he would go to the altar and would stay there weeping many tears and uttering great sobs, then return to his room and continue his writings.

--Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, 47

St. Bernard : He Gave Me Back Myself

2008-06-29T15:42:00.000-07:00

I must love Him more than I love myself because, besides myself, He gives me also Himself, a gift of infinitely greater worth. [....] If, then, I owe myself entire to my Creator, what shall I give my Re-Creator more? The means of our re-making, too, think what they cost! It was far easier to make than to redeem; for God had but to speak the word and all things were created, me included; but He Who made me by a word, and made me once for all, spent on the task of my re-making many words and many marvellous deeds, and suffered grievous and humiliating wrongs.
[...]
By His first work He gave me to myself; and by the next He gave Himself to me. And when He gave Himself, He gave me back myself that I had lost. Myself for myself, given and restored, I double owe to Him. What, though, shall I return Him for Himself? A thousand of myself would be as nothing in respect of Him?

--St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Love of God, 5.

Need a Laugh? : Psychiatrist and Proctologist

2008-06-27T18:58:00.000-07:00

Got this in an email:

Two doctors, a psychiatrist and a proctologist, opened an office in a small town and put up a sign reading:
"Dr. Smith and Dr. Jones: Hysterias and Posteriors"

The town council was not happy with the sign, so the doctors changed it to read,
"Schizoids and Hemorrhoids"

This was not acceptable either, so in an effort to satisfy the council, they changed the sign to
"Catatonics and High Colonics"

No go. Next, they tried
"Manic Depressives and Anal Retentives"

Thumbs down, again. Then came
"Minds and Behinds"

Still no good. Another attempt resulted in
"Lost Souls and Butt Holes"

Unacceptable again! So they tried
"Analysis and Anal Cysts"

Not a chance. "Too graphic," said the council. So they tried
"Nuts and Butts"

Definitely not.
"Freaks and Cheeks"

Shot down, again.
"Loons and Moons"

Forget it. Almost at their wit's end, the doctors finally came up with:
"Dr. Smith and Dr. Jones:
Odds and Ends."

Everyone loved it.

Krauthammer on Obama :

2008-06-27T18:45:00.000-07:00

First, there was Fund (amongst others). Now, Krauthammer's "The Ever-Malleable Mr. Obama" continues to reveal more about Obama's politics:

"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." -- Obama spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 24, 2007

That was then: Democratic primaries to be won, netroot lefties to be seduced. With all that (and Hillary Clinton) out of the way, Obama now says he'll vote in favor of the new FISA bill that gives the telecom companies blanket immunity for post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping.

Back then, in the yesteryear of primary season, he thoroughly trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement, pledging to force a renegotiation, take "the hammer" to Canada and Mexico and threaten unilateral abrogation.

Today the hammer is holstered. Obama calls his previous NAFTA rhetoric "overheated" and essentially endorses what one of his senior economic advisers privately told the Canadians: The anti-trade stuff was nothing more than populist posturing.

[...]

The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.

When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.

Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.

Ouch.

Fund on Obama's Gaffes

2008-06-27T16:25:00.000-07:00

In "The Obama Gaffe Machine," John Fund reveals a very telling side to Sen. Obama and the media coverage of his campaign:

As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter. He has large gaps in his knowledge base, and is just as likely to dig in and embrace a policy misstatement as abandon it. ABC reporter Jake Tapper calls him "a one-man gaffe machine."

Take the Auschwitz flub, where Mr. Obama erroneously claimed last weekend in New Mexico that his uncle helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp. Reporters noted Mr. Obama's revised claim, that it was his great uncle who helped liberate Buchenwald. They largely downplayed the error. Yet in another, earlier gaffe back in 2002, Mr. Obama claimed his grandfather knew U.S. troops who liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka – even though only Russian troops entered those concentration camps.
That hardly disqualifies Mr. Obama from being president. But you can bet that if Hillary Clinton had done the same thing it would have been the focus of much more attention, especially after her Bosnia sniper-fire fib. That's because gaffes are often blown up or downplayed based on whether or not they further a story line the media has attached to a politician.
When John McCain claimed, while on a trip to Iraq in March, that Sunni (as opposed to Shiite) militants in Iraq are being supported by Iran, coverage of the alleged blunder tracked Democratic attacks on his age and stamina. (In fact, Iran may well be supplying both Sunni and Shiite militants.) Dan Quayle, tagged with a reputation as a dumb blond male, never lived down his misspelling of "potatoe."
Mr. Obama, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, has largely been given a pass for his gaffes. Many are trivial, such as his suggestion this month that America has 57 states, and his bizarre statement in a Memorial Day speech in New Mexico that America's "fallen heroes" were present and listening to him in the audience.
Some gaffes involve mangling his family history. Last year in Selma, Ala., for example, he said that his birth was inspired by events there which took place four years after he was born. While this gaffe can be chalked up to fatigue or cloudy memory, others are more substantive – such as his denial last April that it was his handwriting on a questionnaire in which, as a state senate candidate, he favored a ban on handguns. His campaign now contends that, even if it was his handwriting, this doesn't prove he read the full questionnaire.
Mr. Obama told a Portland, Ore., crowd this month that Iran doesn't "pose a serious threat to us," saying that "tiny countries" with small defense budgets aren't much to worry about. But Iran has almost one-fourth the population of the U.S. and is well on its way to developing nuclear weapons. The next day Mr. Obama had to reverse himself and declare he had "made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave."
Last week in Orlando, Fla., he said he would meet with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez to discuss, among other issues, Chávez's support of the Marxist FARC guerrillas in Colombia. The next day, in Miami, he insisted any country supporting the FARC should suffer "regional isolation." Obama advisers were left explaining how this circle could be squared.
In a debate last July, Mr. Obama pledged to meet, without precondition, the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Syria and Cuba. He called President Bush's refusal to meet with them "ridiculous" and a "disgrace."
Heavily criticized, Mr. Obama dug in rather than backtrack. He's claimed, in defense of his position, that John F. Kennedy's 1961 summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna was a crucial meeting that led to the end of the Cold War.
Not quite. Kennedy himself admitted he was unprepared for Khrushchev's bullying. "He beat the hell out of me," Kennedy confided to advisers. The Soviet leader reported to his Politburo that the American president was weak. Two months later, the Berlin Wall was erected and stood for 28 years.
Reporters may now give Mr. Obama's many gaffes more notice. But don't count on them correcting an implicit bias in writing about such faux pas.
Over the years, reporters have tagged a long list of conservative public figures, from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, as dim and uninformed. The reputation of some of these men has improved over time. But can anyone name a leading liberal figure who has developed a similar media reputation, even though the likes of Al Gore, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have committed substantial gaffes at times? No reporter I've talked to has come up with a solid example.

A Weak Democratic Party, Obama, and McCain's Real "Bipartisanship"

2008-06-27T16:11:00.000-07:00

In "Democrats and Our Enemies," Senator Lieberman takes the Democratic Party to task for turning away from the strong, pro-America foreign policy of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy (and even in a way Clinton). As he does so, he brings up an interesting point:

When total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price saw an opportunity to reassert themselves. By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy – not bin Laden, but Mr. Bush – activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party further to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years.

Far too many Democratic leaders have kowtowed to these opinions rather than challenging them. That unfortunately includes Barack Obama, who, contrary to his rhetorical invocations of bipartisan change, has not been willing to stand up to his party's left wing on a single significant national security or international economic issue in this campaign.

In this, Sen. Obama stands in stark contrast to John McCain, who has shown the political courage throughout his career to do what he thinks is right – regardless of its popularity in his party or outside it.

Hmmm. Apparently, McCain is more the "post-partisan," "bipartisan" candidate.