Category Archives: Prayer

Christ Living in Me

Grace, Prayer, Spiritual Life, The Life of Jesus, , , ,

In the midst of his battle against the Arians, St. Athanasius once pithily said, “that which Christ did not assume, has not been healed.”  The point that the Father of Orthodoxy was making was that Our Lord assumed the entirety of our human condition in order to redeem and renew us (2 Cor 5:17).  He did not just generically redeem our actions, in lived them in order that they might be sanctified.  He became a worker, in order to redeem our work.  He entered a family in order to redeem family life.  He had friends in order to redeem friendship.  He ate in order to redeem eating.  He suffered in order to redeem suffering.  He died in order to redeem death.  The list can go on and on, but the point is that whatever He did, He did as the Divine Redeemer, taking both ordinary and extraordinary actions and supercharging them with sanctifying power.

Realizing Our Beliefs

This principle helps us to understand why He lived the “Hidden Years” of His life, seemingly doing nothing but living an ordinary life.  He did not just one day, as Pope Benedict XVI is fond of saying, pick up the mantle of Redeemer.  It was Who He was the moment He took flesh to Himself.  We might be tempted to file this away as an interesting reflection on the truth of the Incarnation, as something that we simply believe, without taking the time to realize it.

The necessity of allowing our beliefs to be realized is at the heart of theology.  What I mean by this is that it is not enough to merely intellectually assent to some truth (that is belief), it must become realized by becoming an active principle by which we live our lives.  St. Thomas Aquinas is not a saint because he wrote the Summa, he is a saint because he lived the Summa.  He modeled his life after the Church’s first theologian, St. Paul.

St. Paul believed in Christ’s full redemption and made it the principle by which he lived his life.  By way of the Galatians, he instructs us to do the same thing when he said “it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me; the life that I live in the flesh I live in faith in the Son of God…”

We must first fully grasp that when St. Paul says this, he means it literally.  He is not talking about how he tried really hard to imitate Christ and got so good at it that he acts a lot like Him.  He means it quite literally that it is no longer his own life that animates him, but instead the life of Christ.  By exercising his faith in Christ as full-time Redeemer, he has become another Christ in the world and calls us to imitate him in order that we too might say the same thing.

Linking Our Lives to Christ’s

In short, the secret is that we must link our lives to Christ.  This happens not in some abstract way, but by linking each moment of our everyday lives to the moment in Christ’s earthly life that “matches” it.  This might still sound a little too abstract, so let’s take an example.

Let’s suppose that I just found out that a friend of mine has told a group of people something that I wanted to remain a secret.  I feel betrayed.  Rather than wallowing in that, I go to Christ in His moment of betrayal and speak with Him about the situation.  When He experienced His betrayal, being God, He also foresaw this moment in which I would be betrayed.  He submitted to it in order to redeem this moment for me.  He has already won for me whatever graces I am most in need of. I simply need to show up with my divinely bestowed claim ticket to receive it.  Still, it is His life, not just in the abstract, but really which moves me to respond in accord with the Divine Will. 

Returning back to Athanasius’ point, you cannot find a single moment of your life that does not link up to Christ’s.  Studying His life in the gospels is obviously helpful in making the connection, but it is not absolutely necessary.  You can just as easily tell Our Lord, “I unite myself to that moment in Your life when you were hungry and ask for the grace not to be hangry in my situation” as go to Him when He is hungry after fasting in the desert.  In either case, my willingness to go where Christ has already “remembered” me is the cause of the redemption and sanctification of the present moment.  This is why every saint counsels the necessity of meditating upon the life of Christ.  *****

Doing this occasionally is very fruitful, but once it becomes habitual, you will become a saint.  The life of Christ and your life become practically indistinguishable as you draw all of your movement from His life such that Christ re-lives His life in you.  This is what St. Paul was talking about.  He started by exercising Faith in the Jesus as the Son of God Who died for him and then carries all of that to its logical conclusion by uniting His  life at each moment with Christ’s.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me!    

***Seeing each moment of Christ’s life as a mystery in which I participate through prayer and receive graces He has already won for me specifically is at the heart of adopting this habit.  It is Blessed Columba Marmion who has worked out the theology surrounding this, but I have summarized his thought in a previous post.

Make Lent Hard Again

Fasting, Lent, Prayer, , , ,

In an age afflicted by ecclesial bar lowering, there is always a great danger that the inherent rhythm in the liturgical year will lose its meaning.  This is perhaps most true when it comes to the season of Lent.  Lent “officially” begins on Sunday, but Pope St. Gregory the Great added the four days between Ash Wednesday and the First Sunday in order to add four extra days so that the Faithful would fast for a total of forty days between Ash Wednesday and Holy Thursday (Sundays and the two Solemnities of St. Joseph and the Annunciation being days to relax the fasting).  In other words, unlike in our own times where we are required to fast two days during Lent, the great Pope wanted to raise the bar and make it harder!  It is in this spirit that we should all resolve to make this our hardest Lent ever.

A Harder Lent?

Now admittedly, Gregory the Great was not simply trying to make it harder, even if that was one of the side effects.  Instead, he was adjusting it so that Lent would retain its meaning.  He wanted us, day by day, to join Our Lord in the desert during His great fast.  Our Lord, true God and true Man, merited specific graces for each one of us individually each day that He fasted and fought in the desert.  Lent is meant to be the time when we receive those graces, but our Lord asks us to meet Him in order for Him to give them to us. 

It was no accident that Our Lord chose 40 days.  Whether it is the forty days and nights of rain during the Flood, the Forty Years spent wandering in the desert, or the 40 days by which Ezekiel had to lay on his side, forty is the number of punishment and affliction.  It is also the number of reparation with both Moses and Elijah joining Our Lord in reparatory fasting for 40 days.  It turns out, although not surprisingly, that forty is also the magic number for developing a new habit.  It is as if forty days of affliction and reparation is written into our fallen nature. 

Because Christ first instituted Lent in the desert, it has all the qualities of a Christian mystery.  And like all Christian mysteries it was instituted in order to bestow grace upon us.  It is like a sacrament, or better yet, a sacramental.  A sacred sign that is given to us that disposes us to receive grace.  Living out a true Lenten spirit disposes us to receive those graces Our Lord wants to give us.  Prayer, fasting and almsgiving take on a sacramental meaning, but especially fasting.  The emphasis of Lent is on fasting for good reason—Our Lord sanctified and weaponized it in the desert.  Lent is meant to be 40 days of hard fasting in reparation for our sins and growth in virtue. 

Lent Began Well, Ends Well

Another key component of Lent is the reception of ashes on Ash Wednesday.  This is not, as many think, because it is only a symbol of our sinfulness and need for Penance, but because it is a Sacramental that, when received in faith, disposes us to the necessary graces to live a hard Lent.  This disposal happens through the prayer of the Blessing of the Ashes.  One of the prayers of blessing in the Novus Ordo Mass says:

O God, who desire not the death of sinners, but their conversion, mercifully hear our prayers and in your kindness be pleased to bless + these ashes which we intend to receive upon our heads, that we, who acknowledge we are but ashes and shall return to dust, may, through a steadfast observance of Lent, gain pardon for sins and newness of life after the likeness of your Risen Son. Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

As I have spoken of previously, the power of Sacramentals come through their actual blessing and so we must, in order to properly take advantage of them, pay attention to what they have been empowered to do.  The ashes in particular then are true Sacramentals that, through the power of the Church, dispose us to receive all the graces necessary to have a “steadfast observance of Lent” and “gain the pardon of sins.”  By receiving the ashes, we are each individually guaranteed to receive the prayers of the Mystical Body that we can live a hard Lent.

As an aside, Ashes are a prime example of why the blessings from the Tridentine Rite are far superior to those of the Novus Ordo.  As a side-by-side comparison, take a look at the prayers.  The former clearly gives a more abundant blessing upon the ashes, rendering them far more powerful to aid us during Lent.   This is not a shot across the post-Vatican II bow, but a comment that, objectively speaking, the Church was far more generous in bestowing blessings upon the Faithful in the pre-Vatican II era.

Either way, armed by Our Lord in the desert and further disposed by the Ashes, we have everything we need to live a hard Lent.  What if each one of us, rather than measuring out “what we will give up”, went “old school” and fasted for these 40 days.  I have found that Dr. Jay Richard’s method detailed in his book is particularly effective for growing in the virtue of fasting and implementing as a daily practice in Lent.  Recalling that one of the reasons why the Church had so many fast days previously was so that we could develop the virtue of fasting, we may have to start at a level that is proportional to our current level of virtue.  But by the end of Lent we should all have developed the virtue and that only comes about through making it hard.

The “Great Bar Lowering” then must be met by a voluntary raising of our own bars.  Genuine contrition of soul can never be achieved without mortification of the body.  We are both body and soul and any attempt to separate the two in practice leads to great harm to our persons.  A hard Lent, fasting especially, will create in us a disposition of sorrow for our sins and a generosity of spirit in making reparation to Our Lord.  It is as if the diminishing of our physical energy brings about a supernatural energy.  Make Lent Hard Again!

Cutting Ourselves Off at the Knees

Church Fathers, Prayer, , , ,

In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, the future Pope Benedict XVI frets over the fact that believers have grown unaccustomed to kneeling.  Not prone to hyperbole, Ratzinger said that a “faith no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick at the core” because it “no longer knows the One before Whom kneeling is the right, indeed the intrinsically necessary gesture” ( The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 194). His is a clarion call to the Faithful to rediscover both the necessity and power of kneeling during prayer.

By referring to kneeling as an “intrinsically necessary gesture,” Cardinal Ratzinger is making a profound point, that given our cultural malaise, we are prone to miss.  A gesture can be necessary; necessary because as body-soul composites we are incapable of being “spiritual” without accompanying bodily postures.  To divorce our bodily actions from our spiritual ones does not make us more spiritual, but makes us less human.  Worship for man is done in his body and therefore must be reflected by his body bodies.  Not only that, but his bodily posture affects his soul and disposes it to receive Divine gifts.  Common sense would tells us that a man lying in a recliner and addressing Almighty God is far less likely to be disposed to receive the Divine Guest than a man standing at attention or kneeling.  Summarizing then, St. Thomas Aquinas says, “thus external, physical symbols are shown to God for the purpose of renewing and spiritually training the inner soul. This is expressed in the prayer of Manasse: ‘I bend the knee of my heart.’ ‘For every knee shall be bowed to me: and every tongue shall swear’ (Is. 45:24)” (Commentary on Ephesians, Chapter 3, Lecture 4).

If our bodily posture conveys a message both to the outer and inner world, then what makes kneeling specifically necessary?  There is, of course, the argument from authority.  We kneel before “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 3:14) because God has commanded it.  “Kneeling,” Ratzinger says, “does not come from any culture—it comes from the Bible and its knowledge of God.  The central importance of kneeling in the Bible can be seen in a very concrete way.  The word proskynein alone occurs fifty-nine times in the New Testament” (The Spirit of the Liturgy, p.185).  St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians says that “In the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth” (Phil. 2:10). Kneeling is our response to Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. This helps to explain why it is also the preferred position of Christ Himself when He prays, especially when He prays in the Garden of Gethsemane (c.f. Luke 22:42).  Since all of our prayer is simply a participation in His prayer, we should assume the same posture.  More accurately, when we kneel down to pray, we are kneeling beside Christ Himself and praying with Him.

Why God Wants Us to Kneel

But God does not command us to perform anything without reason so that the reason for kneeling also matters.  Kneeling is an exterior manifestation of our interior humility.  It is a recognition, and even at times a reminder, of the fundamental chasm between us and God.  Prayer, in order to be heard, must come from the place of humility (c.f. Ps 101:18, Sirach 35:21).  For “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6).  Kneeling is an act of recognition of one’s weakness and insignificance.  Also, because strength is found in the knee, to bend the knee is to make oneself weak and vulnerable.  As Ratzinger says, to bend our knee is to bend our strength to the living God in acknowledgment of His lordship over us.

Kneeling then is good for us because it disposes us to receive God as He is and as we are.  It is when we are on our knees that we are strongest—“for when I am weak, I am strong.”  Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History gives us two examples of kneeling that further demonstrate the point.  He tells of St. James the “brother of the Lord” having callouses on his knees from his constant prayer for others.  Likewise, he gives an account of a certain Abba Apollo who saw the devil as a hideous creature with no knees.  The Devil has no knees because he has rendered himself incapable of adoration.  He cannot stoop at all because of his pride.  He is, to use modern parlance, spiritual but not religious.  At the heart of religion is giving to God what is due to Him so that modern man has lost the ability to kneel because he has ceased to be religious. 

Kneeling is the only way in which we might see God.  We must make ourselves smaller to see the Big Picture.  This is why when Christ reveals Himself to soldiers who seek to arrest Him in the Garden, His words of self-revelation knock them to their knees.  Likewise the Wise Men when they journey to meet the King of Kings must stoop to enter the cave in which He was born.  It is only from that vantage point that He can be recognized.  Kneeling is necessary to see God.

Pentecost and the Three Conversions

Church, Communion of Saints, Grace, Heaven, Holy Spirit, Prayer, Spiritual Life, , , , ,

The first Christian Pentecost was a feast of fulfillment.  It was, in a very real sense, a graduation ceremony in which twelve simple men from various walks of life became prophets, preachers, priest, prodigies, and polygots.  A feast of fulfillment because they became what they were destined to be.  Removed some 2000 years from Pentecost, it is, for us, a feast of possibility.  The Holy Spirit is ever ready to pour out His power on each and every believer.  The problem though is that the average believer is not ready to receive His power.  Part of the reason for this is that we view Pentecost as an isolated event; a miracle for sure but not magical.  The Apostles were ready to receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit and in so doing, left for us a model of preparation that we need to follow.

Protestants would have us to believe that union with the Holy Spirit comes about through faith, that is, by a single moment of conversion.  Sacred Scripture and the Mystical Doctors of the Church teach otherwise.  They teach, each in his or her own way, that three conversions are necessary for union with the Holy Spirit.  One of them, St. Catherine of Siena, shows how the Spiritual life of the Apostles reveals the content of these three conversions which culminate in the fullness of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.

As in all activity, our spiritual lives are marked by three levels of maturity—beginners, proficients, and perfected.  These three stages are clearly delineated in the Scriptural account of the lives of the Apostles and therefore serve as a model for each of us.  St. Catherine in her Dialogue traces each of the three conversions of St. Peter and enables us to see some of the qualities of each in order to facilitate our own growth towards union with God.

St. Peter and the Three Conversions

The first conversion happens when St. Peter acknowledges he is “a sinful man” and Our Lord promises to make him a “fisher of men”.  From that point forward, St. Peter set out on what St. John of the Cross calls the Purgative Way.  This is the most active of the stages in that we must, under the instigation of actual grace, remove all the obstacles to true growth.  For St. Peter, this purgative stage lasts almost the entirety of the pre-Passion and Resurrection accounts in the gospels.  It also helps to explain why St. Peter shows such incredible flashes of sanctity while also being called “Satan”.  St. Peter will remain in this stage until he is no longer scandalized by suffering and is willing to mortify himself completely.  Even during the Trial of Jesus, he keeps the suffering Christ at a distance and therefore fails to admit to even knowing Him.  He loves Jesus, but not more than he loves himself. 

It is just after the three-fold denial that St. Peter experiences his second conversion.  When Our Lord gazes upon Him just after his third denial, He receives the grace of deep sorrow for his sin.  St. Peter’s second conversion occurs when he has him “come to Jesus” with Our Lord on the shore of the Sea of Galilea with his three-fold affirmation of his love for Jesus.  In loving Our Lord “more than these” St. Peter is no longer deterred nor scandalized by the fact that he will have to suffer.  Each of his affirmations, according to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, marks each of the three distinct motives for the second conversion.  We find the juxtaposition of the two Greek words for love—love of friendship (philia) and love of God (agape)—in the dialogue to mark the rooting out of all traces of self-love by a desire for Divine friendship and filial love of God.  Secondly, Peter is aware of the great price of Christ’s Blood.  Third is the love of souls that need to be saved in his desire to “feed my sheep.” 

Furthermore, he must first go through the Night of the Spirit where he no longer is aware of Christ’s continual presence.  He only “feels” His presence on a few occasions and loses it completely when Our Lord ascends into Heaven.  Just as in the transition from the first conversion to the second there must be a purgation of the sense, a purgation of the spirit must be undergone in order to pave the way for the third conversion.  It would seem that the Apostles were on the fast track in that they only had to endure the Night of the Spirit for 50 days, until we put ourselves in their sandals and realize how painful it must have been for them.  They had spent three and a half years, day in and day out, with the constant awareness of God’s physical presence.

All of this leads up to the third conversion on the day of Pentecost.  Our Lord had meticulously been leading St. Peter to this moment when he would be united to God in the fullest sense possible on Earth.  He still was not perfected, but he was closely yoked to God in the Unitive Stage.  What we need to focus on is that Pentecost was not just an isolated event in their spiritual journey but the culmination of it.  He, along with the other Apostles, received the Holy Spirit because they were ready for it. 

All of this talk of the need for a “New Pentecost” is really a call for more saints who have the courage to set out through the Dark Nights and to be so purified as to become completely united to the Holy Spirit.  Without the proper preparation work this “New Pentecost” will never happen.  With the path of the threefold conversion the Apostles have left us along with the instructions of the great Mystical Doctors of the Church, we “shall renew the face of the earth”  and share in the fruits of the same Pentecost that marked the birth of the Church.

The Power of Sacramentals

Church, Grace, Prayer, Sacramentals, Sacraments, , , ,

As Jesus entered the town of Bethsaida, some people there brought to Him a man who was born blind and asked Him to heal Him.  Jesus took some spittle and rubbed it in his eyes, but it effected only a partial healing.  The man could only see shapes.  It was not until He laid His hands upon the man that the man was able to see clearly (c.f. Mark 8:22-27).  This event has often plagued Biblical commentators who have struggled to interpret it.  At first glance it appears that Jesus was somehow limited in His power to heal, having to do it in stages.  But those who are familiar with the Catholic practice of using Sacramentals will recognize it for what it is, an institution of sorts of the practice.  The man receives the grace of healing after the man has been properly disposed after coming in contact with a consecrated object. It is with this in mind, that we shall discuss the Church’s use of Sacramentals.

Theology of Sacramentals

Any discussion of Sacramentals must begin with making an important distinction between Sacramentals and Sacraments.  As the Catechism puts it, “Sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the Sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (CCC 1671).  Sacramentals do not work ex opere operato the way Sacraments do, but instead their efficacy comes from the intercessory power of the Church.  In short they do not bestow sanctifying grace but only aid in disposing the person to receive them.

Because the efficacy rests upon the intercessory power of the Church, unlike Sacraments which were instituted by Christ, Sacramentals are instituted by the Church.  By bestowing a prayer of consecration over the object, it becomes a means by which those who use them become disposed to the infusion of sanctifying grace.  The specific grace of the Sacramental depends upon the prayer itself, a prayer that is said by a Priest but has the entire Church.  The consecrated object is given a power to effect a certain blessing, although it is not infallible as with the Sacraments.  Nevertheless, Sacramentals are a powerful help in the pursuit of sanctity.  This is what makes Sacramentals so powerful.  But they are also made powerful through the intercessory power of the whole Church.  In this way they are different from having someone pray for you.  If, as St. James says, “the prayer of a righteous man is indeed powerful and effective” (James 5:16), then the prayer of the whole Church, the spotless Bride of Christ is much greater.

St. Thomas in his Theology of the Sacraments says that the existence of Sacramentals is fitting because none of the Seven Sacraments “was instituted directly against venial sin. This is taken away by certain sacramentals, for instance, Holy Water and such like” (ST III q.65, art.1, ad.8).  This “supplementary power” placed upon some Sacramentals is a key point to grasp in their use so as to keep us from treating them like good luck charms.  They each contain a certain power that comes from the prayer of consecration by which they were made to be Sacramentals.

Some Examples of Sacramentals

Using St. Thomas’ example, this power to take away venial sins is bestowed upon Holy Water because it was specifically consecrated for that purpose by the prayer of consecration:

Blessed are you, Lord, all-powerful God, who in Christ, the living water of salvation, blessed and transformed us.  Grant that, when we are sprinkled with this water or make use of it, we will be refreshed inwardly by the power of the Holy Spirit and continue to walk in the new life we received at baptism.  We ask this through Christ our Lord.

A blessed crucifix is effective in providing both bodily and spiritual protection, especially “against the cruel darts of the enemy” (1962 Rituale Romanum).  Likewise, sacred images, be they of Our Lord, Our Lady, St. Joseph or any of the saints make available the merits and intercession of those who are depicted when a person pays devout homage to them.  In a very real way they make the person in the image immediately present to the person who seeks to speak with them.

Another important Sacramental, especially relevant to Lent is Palms.  As Dom Prosper Gueranger describes in his book The Liturgical Year, palms are blessed using “prayers that are are eloquent and full of instruction; and, together with the sprinkling with holy water and the incensation, impart a virtue to these branches, which elevates them to the supernatural order, and makes them means for the sanctification of our souls and the protection of our persons and dwellings.”   The palms act to give protection to houses and the people in them when they are kept there.  This is a reason why if palms are being offered, even if you can’t get to Mass, that you should seek them out.

Obviously then the efficacy of Sacramentals depends upon the blessing that has been bestowed upon them by the Priest.  When we ask for an object to be blessed then, we are not just asking to make it somehow holy but to have it set aside for a specific purpose.  We should always ask that the proper blessing be said over the object so that it can be used for the purpose that the Church puts forth.  Similarly, we should listen to the words of blessing so that we can learn exactly what the objects do.

Praying with Christ

Grace, Passion of Christ, Prayer, , , , ,

At various points along the Christian journey, believers must confront questions related to the true identity of Jesus Christ.  Those who persevere and grow, learn to plow through them one by one and in so doing, more deeply discover the personality of the Incarnate Son of God.  Among these questions there is one that is particularly illuminating, especially because it deals with something that has very practical implications for our own spiritual life.  Articulated in various forms, the question goes something like this: “If Jesus was God, then why did He pray?”

The question of the identity of Jesus is not just something that plagues the neophyte, but it was also a question that the Early Church had to face head on.  Although worked out over centuries, we can summarize their findings by articulating a single principle—the distinction between person and nature. 

The Person/Nature Distinction

In his encounter with individual objects in the world, man is confronted with a powerful question: “what is this?”  The answer as to the thing’s what-ness is its nature.  But a nature determines not just what a thing is, but what a thing can do.  A bird can fly because it has a bird nature, an elephant, because it has an elephant nature cannot.  Man can pray because he has a human nature, but a mantis’ nature limits him to merely posturing. 

When the object of one’s inquiry is also a subject, this innate tendency gives rise to a second question: “who is this?”  No longer concerned with the fact that the object has a human nature, the interlocutor turns their gaze to the person himself.  The human nature may determine what the person can do, but it is always the person who performs the action.  The nature, in a very real sense, limits what the person can do.

When we extend the person/nature distinction to the Incarnation, it is especially helpful in addressing our initial question.  The Divine Son, the Word Incarnate is a Person, but He is a Person Who has two natures or two modes of operation.  At any given time we can observe Him using one of those two natures.  He can change bread and wine into His Body and Blood using His Divine Nature, but He can pray using His human nature.  But in either case, it is always the same Divine Person who performs the action.  He simply has two modes of operation.  This is theologically referred to a the Hypostatic Union.

Christ then prayed using His human nature and not His divine.  He prayed as Man and not as God.  And Christ’s prayer, because it is the prayer of a Divine Person, is one of the means that He Providentially determined would be the cause of certain graces to flow into the world.  And in that way His prayer was always effective.  Two examples from His Passion are particularly instructive in this regard.

Two Dominical Examples

The first example of Christ praying shows us something that we naturally intuit.  If Christ prays as man and nevertheless it is God Himself who utters the words, then we should expect His prayer to do something.   During the Last Supper He tells Peter that “Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat.  But I have prayed for you that your faith will not fail so that when you have turned back you will strengthen your brothers” (Lk 22:32).  It is Our Lord’s prayer, expressed in an absolute manner, that is the cause of Peter’s repentance. 

The second Example shows us something deeper that if we are not diligent we might miss.  In the Garden of Gethsemane we find Christ, again in His human nature, praying that the cup be removed from Him only if it be in accord with the Divine will.  In so doing, Christ is praying in a conditional manner as far as the direct outcome is concerned.  But His prayer is always effective so that it accomplishes something, namely that those who are united to Him through faith and charity be awarded the graces for us to pray boldly and to endure those moments when prayer is not answered according to our will but the will of the Father. 

What this shows us is not just that Christ’s prayer was infallibly effective, but that our prayer is really just a participation in His prayer.  Every grace that we are given through our prayer was first merited by Christ in His.  Because He is God, He saw every instance of our prayer, all of our intentions, spoken and not, when He prayed.  It was in His moments of prayer that He won the necessary graces for us.  It remains for us to simply enter into His prayer with Him and receive what He intended to give us when He invited us in to begin with.

St. Cyril once said, “that which was not assumed, was not redeemed.” What he meant by this is that Christ took to Himself a true human nature with all its needs and redeemed every aspect of our nature. This includes our prayer. Christ prayed so that our prayer was efficacious. This union of Christ’s prayer with our own helps us to understand exactly what we mean when we pray “through Christ Our Lord.”  Our prayer insofar as it is genuine is always through His prayer.  He lives forever to intercede for us because time and eternity have met in the Incarnation.

Most of us are moved deeply by the Gospel accounts of Christ praying even if we are not able to articulate why.  If we merely see it as an example, which of course it is, then we will miss the invitation.  Christ’s prayer is an invitation for all of us to come and pray with Him.  He may have gone off alone to pray, but each one of us was there with Him. 

On the Necessity of Mental Prayer

Prayer, , , ,

In the thirteenth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, Our Lord gives us the Parable of the Sower.  He speaks of a farmer who indiscriminately spreads seeds over a variety of soil types.  Despite the farmer’s prodigality, the seed only produces a yield in the rich soil.  The implication is obvious: to produce the great yield of holiness, we must become rich soil.  What is not immediately obvious, however, is how one becomes the rich soil. 

One might be tempted to think that the solution is to be a “good” person.  When you are nice to other people and try not to sin, you become rich soil.  The problem with this viewpoint however is that soil cannot make itself rich.  It must be made rich by having things added to it.  Clearly then, the answer is to receive the Sacraments.  The Sacraments are like a strong fertilizer producing rich, dark soil.  But this interpretation is problematic as well.  While the Sacraments are, at least objectively speaking, like spiritual fertilizer, their effect depends upon the subjective disposition of the soil in which they land.  Even the Sacraments will have no effect upon a hardened heart.  Instead, the Fathers of the Church all thought the key to becoming rich soil was to become men and women of prayer.

But prayer is anything but a simple solution, especially living in the grasp of a ubiquitous technocracy.  Within its grasp, we have grown accustomed to thinking that all of reality can be controlled and manipulated by technique, our spiritual lives not excepted.   The technocratic mindset has led modern men and women to search for human techniques, usually repurposed from Eastern Religions, to solve the problem of prayer.  Rather than solving the problem, these techniques often lead us away from God because they are not in accord with human nature itself.

The Myth of Technique

Let’s suppose that we want to pray, but St. Paul is right when he says that “we do not know how to pray as we ought” (Romans 8:26).  It is normal to then think we must investigate various techniques to find out which one works best for us.  The problem with this mindset is that it is a subtle form of Gnosticism.  The knowledge of how to pray becomes some secret knowledge that we must discover.  The conclusion, one that a lot of people draw, is that a life of true prayer is not open to everyone and is reserved for a select few who somehow figure it out. 

We must hear St. Paul out.  While it is true that “we do not know how to pray as we ought ,” the Apostle reminds us that “the Spirit Himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings” (Romans 8:26).  Prayer is, first a foremost a gift.  It is a gift, but it is a gift that we are naturally inclined to receive.  As St. Thomas repeatedly says, whatever is given is received according to the mode of the receiver.  There is a natural way then to receive the gift of prayer.

Why it is Necessary

St. Alphonsus Liguori in his treatise on prayer said that “all the saints have become saints by mental prayer.”  The saint is telling us that in order to become rich soil, we must practice mental prayer.  He is not alone in this assessment as all of the saints say something similar.  Understanding why mental prayer is the entry point into a life of holiness will enable us to rely more fully on this method.

Our supernatural destiny is the Beatific Vision by which we will see God face to face.  What this means is that we will know Him directly and this knowledge will lead to an eternity of loving Him.  Prayer ought to in some way mimic this. In this life we can only know Him by way of intermediaries, “in a mirror darkly” if you will.  But this knowledge is still real knowledge even if it is only by way of reflection.  We can know the sun directly by looking at it, but even a man who has only seen the moon still knows the sun.  Mental prayer is the means, in this life, by which we come to knowledge of God through discursive reasoning upon both Revelation and Creation.  But in order to be a true preparation for our eternal destiny, it must not just be intellectual musings, but must consist in acts of the will as well.  In fact true prayer must always find its terminus in movements of love.

St. John of the Cross demonstrates these movements in his Spiritual Canticle. He begins by meditating upon creation:

O woods and thickets, planted by the hand of my Beloved! O green meadow, coated, bright, with flowers, tell me, has he passed by you?”

Pouring out a thousand graces, he passed these groves in haste; and having looked at them, with his image alone, clothed them in beauty.

Ah, who has the power to heal me? now wholly surrender yourself!   Do not send me any more messengers, they cannot tell me what I must hear.

Spiritual Canticle 4-6

Seeing God’s presence in a simple meadow that has been clothed with beauty, He is moved to wonder and then pleads for God to heal him and surrender Himself to John.  His musings have moved from the intellect to the will, from the head to the heart.

Mental prayer is the entry point to deeper level of infused prayer because it is the only truly human way of praying.  Because it is in accord with human nature, it is also the means by which prayer purifies us.  Through the power of abstraction, we can say that the “thing known is in the knower.”  This means that the thing known becomes a part of the knower.  When the thing known, is the One Thing that Needs to Be Known, then He necessarily becomes a part of the knower.  This is why those who truly pray are never heretics.  But it is also why not only our thoughts are purified, but our desires too.

Setting Our Expectations

If God wills all men to be saved and prayer, as we have shown, is absolutely necessary for salvation, then all men are given the grace to pray.  God not only wills our salvation but also provides all that is needed to make that happen.  What this means is that we should expect the grace of prayer because God has promised it.  God desires that we pray and if we remain open to it, He will provide us with all the necessary graces to reach levels of prayer that we thought only possible for great mystics.  This is for everyone.  We need only to beg Him for the grace of perseverance and then show up day after day.

At the outset we said that there are few among us that are immune to the effects of living in a technocracy.  Those few, if St. Alphonsus is to be believed, are the future saints who practice mental prayer.  Rather than trying to manipulate God through technique, they set themselves up to receive the gift of prayer and God delivers by raising up saints so desperately needed in our times.

The Divine Composer

Freedom, God's Will, Prayer,

If we were to encapsulate the teachings of the self-help gurus, then they would boil down to “never leave anything to chance.”  After all, at the heart of the self-help movement is, well, helping yourself, by taking control of your life and seizing the day.  The saints too would exhort us to never leave anything to chance.  But they would express this for a very different reason.  For the saints there is no such thing as chance.  Instead they would urge us to leave everything to Providence.  And it is this attitude that make them saints.  If we too want to join them in the Church Triumphant then it behooves us to study how the most practical of Christian doctrines, Providence, “works”.

Notice how any discussion of Providence will always have the idea of chance in its orbit.  To say that “there is no such thing as chance” might seem provocative at first, but once we unpack it then we will see that it must be profoundly true.  If any discussion of Providence cannot proceed without bumping into the notion of chance, then we must begin there. 

Toppling the Objections to Providence

On the one hand we know that pure chance, the notion that things “just happen” violates the principle of causality.  Everything that happens must have a cause.  Usually what we mean by chance then is when we cannot observe the causality or so many causes seemed to converge that the event was so unlikely that it had to be chance.  Labeling an event as chance really is a way in for us to admit that we cannot fully explain how an event happened.  But this leaves us with only two alternatives—either the causality was governed by some random force that we call chance or it is governed by God through His Providence.  Even if it is a tough pill for us to swallow in our empirical age, we must side with the saints in their choosing of the latter and their insistence that there is no such thing as chance.

This raises a second objection in that, by removing chance, it seems to also remove free will.  If everything is meticulously planned out, then how can there be freedom to choose?  But this is to confuse chance with contingency.  God’s Providence has left some things to necessity (like the Incarnation) and some things to contingency (like Mary’s cooperation).  But it is by His omnipotence that He governs the bringing about of the necessary things through contingent things (c.f ST I, q.22, a.4).  This bears some further explanation because it enables us to marvel more fully at God’s Providence.

Because God is the Creator of all things and, because He knows His own omnipotence, He can know all things that could happen or do happen because He is their ultimate cause.  So, despite leaving some things up to free will decisions, He can alter the events surrounding those decisions to suit His purpose.  This is not to suggest that He is constantly executing “Plan B”, but an admission that He foresaw all that was to happen.  Therefore, His eternal law is simply one plan.  Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange gives a useful example to demonstrate how this might work. 

Over time, the great composer Beethoven grew deaf but, despite not actually be able to hear them, was still able to compose beautiful pieces of music.  This was because he knew music not just in hearing it, but through its laws.  He could compose without audible experimentation because he knew how the notes would fit together and create harmony.  This higher way of knowing his music through the laws governing it made it unnecessary that he try all possible combinations of notes.  In knowing the law he, in a very real sense knew all possible combinations enabling him to say “these fit, these don’t” to every set of notes that entered his mind.   So too with God.  He knows the laws by which the universe is governed, even the “law” of free will by which our actions are presented to Him and thus can Providentially compose the world.

There is one final aspect that bears mention as well and that is the role of petitionary prayer.  Prayer is a gift from God meaning that true prayer is always inspired by God in order to conform our desires to the plans of Providence.  That is why the holiest of men and women, that is those who are most like God, willing what He wills, will always be the most effective of pray-ers.  In asking for what God intends to give, they are free instruments in the implementation of His plans.  Prayer then is one of the instrumental causes of Providence, perhaps the most powerful of all them.

The Laws of Divine Providence

The laws of God’s divine composition, which we call Providence, are essentially threefold.  First, nothing that happens is contrary to His purpose of Creation, namely, as a manifestation of His Goodness and the rational creature’s share in the revealed Glory of Christ.  Second, nothing that happens was not foreseen by God and willed either actively or permissively.  Finally, God sees to it that all things work to the spiritual benefit those who are called to be saints and persevere in His love (Romans 8:28).

At this point it is good to be reminded that the doctrine of Providence is practical.  Hidden within the word Providence is provide.  This means that although we make theological distinctions between God’s active and permissive will, in our daily living we should not make any such distinction.  We should see each and everything that happens as coming directly from the hand of God with the intent of providing for the spiritual needs of those who love Him.  And everything, means everything including our own sins.  God only allows us to fall if, in the end, it leads us towards being more fully invaded by grace. 

An example drawn from real life might help us bring all of this into relief.  Forgiveness, something most of us struggle with, is only possible with a firm belief in Providence.  Recall the story of Joseph the Patriarch.  When his brothers sought forgiveness he did not trivialize what they did nor did he forget it.  In fact, he remembered it and told them as such.  But he remembered it as it truly was, an instrument of Providence.  Joseph is the perfect model for the stance towards those that slight us.  When we submit to the plans of Divine Providence, we see those who harm us actually doing us a favor.  They become instruments in God’s Providential plan.  The “logic” is simple if we believe the laws of Providence elucidated above.  This does not mean we won’t suffer, but we are guaranteed to draw the fruit that God intended for us to receive when we submit to His will in it.  Our Lord was silent in the face of His oppressors precisely to win the grace for us to do the same.  Nor does it make what the person has done right.  It simply gives us a means by which we can move towards truly forgiving the other person.  Providence makes forgiveness possible and even easy.

Our Daily Bread

Bible, Church Fathers, Eucharist, Prayer, Sacraments, Spiritual Life, , ,

Pope Francis recently approved a new translation in French and Italian of the Lord’s Prayer that offers a re-translation of the petition “lead us not into temptation.”  The Holy Father has repeatedly expressed his concern that the phrase as it is translated is misleading, making it seem like it is God that actually leads us into temptation.  Whether or not this is theologically correct or even prudent, I will leave to others to argue.  But this new translation business certainly opens up the question whether there are other phrases in the current translation that need to be amended.  In particular, I have in mind the petition “Give us this day, our daily bread…”

Familiarity can create a blind spot, but if we come to the petition afresh, we must admit that it is awkwardly worded.  In particular, it is the repetition of this day and daily that strikes us as odd.  Why don’t we pray simply “this day for our bread” or, more succinctly, “give us our daily bread”?  Either one would seem to be more in line with conventional usage.  But to see why this wouldn’t work and why the current translation doesn’t quite capture its meaning we should return to the original Greek.

A Faulty Translation?

Obviously, Our Lord did not give the Apostles the prayer in Greek, but the Holy Spirit did when He inspired the sacred authors to include it within the gospels.  So, we can assume that any mis-translation would occur from Greek to (in our case) English.  The word that we translate as daily is epioύsios in Greek. This word is utterly unique to Sacred Scripture and is not found anywhere else in the Greek language prior to its appearance in the gospels.  This created a historical difficulty in defining exactly what it means (let alone translating it).  None of the Fathers agreed upon its exact meaning, although a number of them settled upon the in literal meaning— epi meaning super and oύsios meaning substance—from which we would derive with the English term supersubstantial.  This is hardly a word that is found in the English vernacular, but its meaning is “above material substance”. 

The use of the term supersubstantial led the Fathers of the Church to teach that the petition relates “not so much to the material bread which is the support of the body as the Eucharistic bread which ought to be our daily food” (St. Pius X, Sacra Tridentina).  Why then do we say “daily”?  After all supersubstantial hardly has the same connotation as daily.  Until, that is, we put on a Biblical mindset.  There is one place is Sacred Scripture in which God provides “daily bread”.  It is the giving of the manna in the desert.  This same bread was in a very real sense supersubstantial as it just appeared with the dew fall and spoiled as quickly as it came the next day.  But Our Lord said the manna was but a prefigurement of the True Bread come down from heaven, the true “daily bread” that can only be described as supersubstantial—the Eucharist.

When the emphasis is placed upon the Eucharist the context of the petition is thrown into relief.  We pray to Our Father as His adopted children, brought into the family of the Trinity and united as one family on earth.  We pray that He feed us with the family meal because the Eucharist is only for us, it is Our daily bread.  But there is another sense in which we must deal with the current choice of translation as daily.

Receiving Our Daily Bread

Like the manna in the desert, the petition is meant to remind us that the Eucharist is something that is given to the Church daily, a gift that we both express gratitude for and petition God to continue blessing us with.  For there will come a time, at least according to some of the Fathers of the Church like St. Augustine, in which the persecution will be so bad that the celebration of the Eucharist will cease.  Whether it was to cease completely or not, one can still imagine how difficult it would be to receive the Eucharist during that time.  There are plenty of places in the world where it already is.  We risk, especially in times like our own in which belief in the Real Presence of the Eucharist is in decline, becoming like the Israelites in the desert, taking the manna for granted and grumbling in disbelief.  “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me” (Mt 26:11).

Over a century ago, Pope St. Pius X made this connection between the manna the Eucharist in a decree that encouraged the “Frequent and Daily Reception of Holy Communion”.  The saintly Pontiff said that given the correct dispositions for worthy reception, all Christians “should be daily nourished by this heavenly banquet and should derive therefrom more abundant fruit for their sanctification.”  He states unequivocally that it is “the desire of Jesus Christ and of the Church that all the faithful should daily approach the sacred banquet.”  He encourages the Faithful to make use of the Sacrament for the purpose that Christ intended—extending the Incarnation in time in order to enable those who touch Him to receive His healing touch.  That is, “the faithful, being united to God by means of the Sacrament, may thence derive strength to resist their sensual passions, to cleanse themselves from the stains of daily faults, and to avoid these graver sins to which human frailty is liable…Hence the Holy Council calls the Eucharist “the antidote whereby we may be freed from daily faults and be preserved from mortal sin.”

St. Pius X also declares that the person “who is in the state of grace, and who approaches the Holy Table with a right and devout intention” should approach the Holy Table often.  This “right intention consists in this: that he who approaches the Holy Table should do so, not out of routine, or vain glory, or human respect, but that he wish to please God, to be more closely united with Him by charity, and to have recourse to this divine remedy for his weakness and defects.”

In short then, the Our Father ought to express a desire that Christ “give us always this bread” (John 6:34).  This of course assumes we understand what we are asking for.  One will be surprised how, once they commit to receiving Our Lord frequently, even daily, and prays as such, daily Mass begins to “work out” and they find their schedule opening up.   This is why a re-translation might lead not only to a re-education, but a re-invigoration of desire for the Eucharist.  This will start with the commitment to personally make this supersubstantial bread our daily bread.  If we nourish our bodies daily, then how much more do we need to nourish our souls? 

The Remedy for Desolation

Passion of Christ, Prayer, , , , ,

The first time that God spoke from a mountain, He gave the Ten Words (Decalogue) to His people through the mouth of Moses.  The last time He spoke from a mountain, it was the Mount of Calvary seated on the pulpit of the Cross.  This time, God Incarnate spoke only seven words, each of which represent the last will and testament to His people.  Each of the seven words, spoken by the Eternal Son, has both a timelessness and a timeliness about it.  But there is one in particular, the one packed right in the middle of the seven—“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”—that bears a special focus in our day and age.  For it is in this word that we find the summation of Christ’s Passion.

The return of pagan thought, supplemented by scientism, has born witness to a reemergence of many of the early Christological heresies.  This is, perhaps, put on display in no clearer manner than when the modern theologians try to explain point number four in Our Lord’s great Sermon.  Whether it be the neo-Docetists who say that the Son really didn’t suffer or the Calvinists who claim that Christ suffering was so intense that He yielded to despair, there is a great need of clarity if we are to pluck all of the fruit off of the true Tree of Life.  In order to have the convergence of the timeless and the timely, we must root ourselves in a proper understanding of the Incarnation.  Mysteries only remain mysteries when we are precise in our language and our thinking.  When we make room for ambiguity and imprecision, we come to explain them away like our Docetist and Calvinist compadres.

A Proper Christology

Because Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, Who took to Himself a human nature without any change to Himself, we must first admit the impossibility of Him ceasing to be God.  He is a Divine Person Who nonetheless had two modes of action or natures—human and divine.  He performed miracles using His Divine Nature.  He suffered using His human nature.  But in either case, it was He, that is the Second Person of the Trinity, that performed the miracle and suffered.  The union of the two natures in the Person, what we call the Hypostatic Union, means that from the moment of His conception, He had the vision of God.  His soul had the most intimate and unique union that a human soul can have with God and therefore His soul looked upon “the face of God and lived.”  “No man has ever seen the Father, except the One Who is from God” (c.f. John 6:46). If all of what we just said is true, then how is it possible for Him to ever experience abandonment from God?

There is, of course, the connection with Psalm 22.  But we must make sure that we do not put the cart before the horse.  Properly speaking Christ did not fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament in the sense that He was bound to do certain things.  The prophecies were made because the Eternal Word of God did certain things.  The prophecies are “after” the events in the mind of God.  The Psalm was inspired because Christ would utter those words from the Cross and not the other way around.  In other words, we cannot simply say that Our Lord was reciting a Psalm and leave it at that.  We must address the fact that in a real sense Our Lord experienced abandonment.

There is the obvious sense in which the words are meant.  The abandonment is not so much a spiritual desolation, but the fact that He was turned over completely to His persecutors without any Divine protection or exercise of His Divine Power.  It can also mean, according to Augustine, that the Son was forsaken in the sense that His prayer in the Garden to have the chalice removed was not answered.

Clearing the Way for the Deeper Meaning

By clinging to the truth of the personal union of the Divine and human natures we are able to also posit a much deeper level of meaning as well.  We said that it was one of the laws of the nature of the Incarnation that Christ experienced the Beatific Vision in His soul.  But through a miracle, the reverse of which was described in a previous post about the Transfiguration, He was able to suspend His awareness of the Beatific Vision in His soul.  Thus, according to St. Thomas (c.f. ST III q.46, a.6 ad 4), Christ was, in His human nature, no longer aware of His union with the Father.  The union was still real but He was prevented from having any consideration of it which would have alleviated sorrow.  Instead He focused only on those things that could produce sorrow and desolation such as the malice of sin, the terrible ingratitude of mankind, and all the souls that would be lost despite His sacrifice.   

In short, this desolation, unlike the desolation we “naturally” experience in the spiritual life, was directly willed.  And like all things He did, it had a twofold purpose.  The first is as an example.  By experiencing the most intense of desolations, Our Lord left us an example to follow by not only “hanging in there” but by speaking words for us.  He has given us a prayer to say in Psalm 22 when no prayer will come.  For those who have experienced true spiritual desolation, when absolutely no words come in prayer, this is an invaluable gift.

The second purpose is that by directly willing it and experiencing it, He sanctified desolation for all of us.  Despite not feeling anything except loss, the Christian is assured that by submitting their will to God’s in desolation, they are, in truth, being sanctified by it.  And this ultimately is why having a proper understanding of what Christ did and suffered is important.  By seeing Christ’s desolation as directly willed and not as a precursor to despair, we know we have been empowered to overcome any amount of desolation and avoid despair.  For Christ redeemed every aspect of our lives including spiritual desolation.  All we have to do then is to submit to it in an act of faith and trust, knowing that is part and parcel of Redemption.

Self-Esteem and the Spirit of Penance

Fasting, God's Will, Grace, Human Dignity, Lent, Prayer, Purgatory, , , ,

In his message for Lent, Pope Francis exhorted the faith not to let “this season of grace pass in vain!”  The Holy Father is echoing a sentiment that we have nearly all experienced.  We have all had the experience of letting Lent pass us by and many of us, despite the best of intentions, will suffer the same fate this Lent unless we do something different.  We need not just encouragement but a paradigm shift to see Lent and its purpose differently than ever before.

This paradigm shift begins with an understanding of the history of Lent.  This does not mean that we need to look at how the Church has classically celebrated Lent, but to understand where it comes from.  Like all the events within the Liturgical Calendar, the season of Lent is given to make the specific mysteries of Christ’s life present to us.  The particular mystery attached to Lent is Christ’s forty days in the desert.  Christ was driven by the Spirit into the desert for 40 days of prayer and fasting with one of the purposes being to obtain all the graces for all the Lents of all Christians for all time.  He did this not in any generic way, but in a very specific way because each member of the Faithful individually was there with Him.  As Pope Pius XII reminds us, “In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself” (Mystici Corporis Christi,75).  Lent then is the time where we go to Christ in the desert to lay claim to those graces He had merited for us.  We go not just in spirit but in truth because we are already there.

How We Should “Do” Lent

This understanding not only changes how we view Lent, but also how we do Lent.  Our typical approach is to see it as something primarily done by us.  We come up with a plan to “give up X” or “do this thing X” for Lent and then try to white-knuckle our way through it.  But if what we said above is true, then the proper way to look at it is that Christ is doing Penance through us.  The oft misquoted and equally misunderstood Scholastic maxim that grace perfects nature is apropos here.  Grace does not “build on nature” as if we do a little (or as much as we can) and God will do the rest.  It is all done by Christ—“I live no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).  Lent is no different.

This might sound passive or even quietistic, but it is the very opposite.  All grace requires our free response, but it first requires that we remove those impediments that keep us from adopting the true spirit of Penance that Christ won for us.  We often forget this as our primary role.  And this is why many of us struggle through Lent.  We try to do Penance without having the grace of Penance. 

Therefore our first acts should be to obliterate the obstacles.  These obstacles are not only interior but come from those unquestioned beliefs we have adopted from the spirit of the world.  These obstacles, two in particular, are the focus of this article and the next.  We will not fully receive the graces of Lent until we remove the spirits of self-esteem and luxury.

The Problem of Self-Esteem

Who could possibly have a problem with self-esteem?  To ask the question is to reveal that we have been infected with the spirit of the world.  For the spirit of the world always sends us mixed messages, locking us firmly in no-man’s land.  It takes some truth and twists it just enough that it blinds us to the implications of that truth.  It usually starts by baptizing it with a new name.  Then the new term, piggybacking on the old term, is given value by fiat.  “Self-esteem” is a prime example of this.

Self-esteem or “confidence in one’s own worth” is a psychological replacement for a theological term, dignity.  That a human being has worth is unquestionable.  But what has to be questioned is why a person has worth, that is, why a person should have any confidence in their worth.  The world would have us believe that the currency of “self-esteem” is valuable simply by fiat.  But it is not.  It is valuable currency because it rests upon the God-standard.  Human persons only have value because they are made in the image of God and because God has made Himself into the image of a man in Jesus Christ.  Our confidence lies in both of these things—our inherent God-imagedness and our offer of God-likedness in Christ.  The first can never be taken away, while the second must be achieved.   

The problem with self-esteem is that it overemphasizes the first and totally ignores the second.  The odd thing is that many in the Church have tried to “re-theologize” self-esteem through the language of “Temple of the Holy Spirit”.  This term is thrown around as an attempt to convince someone of their own worth.  But that is not how either Scripture or Tradition has understood it.  When St. Paul uses the term it is meant as a corrective to live up to the supreme gift of redemption (which includes the Divine Indwelling).  Tradition has taught that only those in a state of grace, that is those who have kept themselves unstained by serious sin, that are Temples of the Holy Spirit.  The language also betrays itself because a Temple, while it is the earthly home of Divinity, is also, and one might say primarily, the place of sacrifice.  In other words, you cannot say someone is a Temple of the Holy Spirit while not also calling them to make the necessary sacrifices within that same Temple. 

This leads us now to why the spirit of self-esteem is an obstacle to the spirit of Lent.  It always causes us to overvalue ourselves and destroys our spirit of sacrifice and penance.  If you don’t believe me, then let me propose a hypothetical.  Suppose, to use a seemingly trivial example, you are waiting for a parking space in a crowded shopping center and someone steals the space from you.  Now suppose you told me about it and I said “you deserved it.”  What would be your response?

I would bet that you would be angry with me and maybe even accuse me of being unjust.  But in truth, I would infallibly be right no matter what the situation was.  How do I know this?  Because God in His Providence thought you did.  Otherwise He wouldn’t have allowed it to happen.  This seems crazy until we follow out the line of reasoning.

Returning to our hypothetical, did God know the person was going to steal the space and did He allow it to happen?  Without question, but the important question is why.  And the answer ought to be “so that I could willingly accept it as penance for something I did wrong.”  In other words, you may not have deserved it this time, but you never got what you deserved last time.  The only thing that stops us from seeing this is our self-esteem.  “The space was mine and he had no right to take it.”  True, but that is not the point.  The point is that he did you a favor.  He gave you an opportunity to undo the harm you did to yourself when you sinned previously.  You offended God and all you have to endure is finding another space?  Yes, because your measly sacrifice when united to Christ in the desert becomes powerful.  Or you could just get stuck in how poorly treated you were and “pay down to the last penny” later (c.f. Mt 5:26).  Purgatory now is always better than Purgatory later.

So free from the false myth of self-esteem were the saints that they could even practice this for the big things. Not that they became doormats per se, but because they “humbly regarded the other person has more important than yourself” (Phil 2:3) that the only reason they put a stop to it is because of the harm the other person was doing to himself. In other words they would speak up not because of self-esteem but because of charity. In the spiritual life why we do what we do matters just as much as what we do.

The extreme cases obviously are far harder said than done, so we ought to just start developing the wisdom for the less extreme cases; not just because they are easier but because they are far more common.  This Lent let go of your self-esteem and see if there isn’t real growth in the spirit of Penance.  After all, these are the best kinds of Penance because they are not self-chosen, but come from the Provident hand of God.  When you meet with some slight during Lent, even if it seems like a big deal, say “I deserve this” and thank God for forming a spirit of Penance in you.

Next time, we will examine the second worldly obstacle: luxury.

Spiritual Combat and the Mass

Devils, Eucharist, Family, Grace, Prayer, Sacraments, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, The Life of Jesus, , , ,

As Christ panned the landscape from His throne upon the Cross, He saw both friend and foe.  The foes included not just the Roman and Jewish leaders that wanted Him dead, but the demons who had incited them to carry out His execution with the maximum amount of cruelty.  Likewise he saw not just His Mother, St. John and the holy women, but also all of His friends throughout the ages that would willingly join Him.  From the vantage point of the Cross, He saw a great battlefield forming before Him.  He saw very clearly who His real enemies were and asked for forgiveness for their pawns.  The spiritual combat that had begun in the Garden with Adam and Eve reached its zenith when the New Adam and the New Eve finally crushed the head of the Ancient Serpent.  A new weapon, the Cross had been introduced.  For the Cross was a key not only heaven’s opened not just Heaven’s gates but a portal into hell.  No longer outgunned, the Christian grasps the Cross like the hilt of sword and chases the demons back into hell.  Calvary is the terrain over which all spiritual combat traverses.  This truth is almost self-evident.  It is perhaps the “almost” that causes us to miss a very important corollary.  Just as the demons were actively engaged on the field of Mount Calvary, they are still actively engaged in the Mystical Calvary, that is, the Mass. 

Active and Conscious Participation and Spiritual Combat

The Second Vatican Council exhorted Christians to “active and conscious participation” in the Mass.  The “activity” is not on the part of more ushers, lectors and extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, but in the hand to hand combat begun on the hill of Calvary and continues over the pews of our little parish churches.  If the Mass is what we profess it is, the sacrifice of Christ made present to us explicitly so that we might participate in it, then it also demands that we take a side in the great battle and engage.  This is the activity of the Mass.  The “conscious participation” is the awareness of what we are actually entering into.  The Mass is a great battlefield in which each and every Christian engages in spiritual combat—not just in some abstract sense, but in actual hand to hand combat.  And, as in all spiritual combat, knowing you are engaged in a battle is, well, half the battle.  Once we become aware of it, we realize how we have known it all along.  Obviously there is a great ideological battle that has taken place that has obscured this truth and so we must begin by setting our minds and hearts firmly upon this truth.

Hand to hand combat is never just a “spiritual” thing but something real and practical.  First there is the battle that occurs remotely.  The great enemy of mankind hates the Mass and will do anything he can to keep us from being there.  Obstacles are thrown up left and right to leaving on time.  Otherwise peaceful families suddenly experience strife.  Family members experience agitation and begin to quarrel.  Accusations are thrown back and forth.  The difficult child becomes more difficult while the impatient parent becomes more impatient.  Clothes and keys can’t be found.  The battle lines have been drawn and Pilate is reminding you that he has the power to make it all go away.  Many will fall by the wayside because, after all, “what is truth?”  Then there are those who, having their peace stolen, will set out on the way, leaving the Cross behind.  Calling to mind what the Divine General did, the true soldier of Christ embraces the Cross and sets out on the Way.  Knowing that he is headed to the Front is not enough however.  He will serve as Simon of Cyrene by offering his cross for those in the first two groups who may not have the strength to carry theirs.

Once the Christian arrives at the Front, he is confronted with a new temptation—“to come down off the Cross” (c.f. Mk 15:30).  In fact this is the primary weapon that the demons use against us.  He will throw every distraction he can before our imagination.  “What are they wearing?” , “Look at her!  Look at him!”, “why doesn’t she pay attention to what her kid is doing?” “What do I need to do after Mass?”, “What is Father talking about?”.  The demons coordinate their attacks, tempting one person to do something and then setting the judgment in the mind of another.  You may have made it to the Front, but they can neutralize you through distraction.  Again in recognizing it for what it is we have won half the battle.  And with recognition, we derail the train of thought and hop back on the Cross with Christ Who has been waiting there for us from all eternity.    This is a battle and each time we join Christ on the Cross we not only draw deeply from the fruit of the Tree of Life but are dealing a blow to the Evil One. 

Take note Pastors, Liturgical Coordinators and Music Directors.  This is why the liturgy should be completely devoid of any novelty.  A well-disciplined army, one that has drilled so often that the battle itself becomes second nature, is a successful army.  The war may be over, but we are trying to limit casualties in the mop-up operation.  Novelty on the part of priests and coordinators only serve to distract and cause the army to fall from formation.  So too with the music, it should be chosen not for its entertainment value, but for its ability to keep us engaged in the battle.

In all that was said so far it might seem then that the whole purpose of us going to Mass is to avoid distraction so that we can focus on what is going on.  That is to see the battle only in terms of defensive tactics.  The primary purpose of the Mass is to enable each one of us and all of us (that is the Church as a whole) to make the sacrifice of the Cross our own by way of participation.  And this participation involves three different postures, each one based on those found at the Foot of the Cross on Calvary.

The Three Postures

The first posture is the Marian posture.  Those who unite themselves with the Mother of God and adopt this posture are those for whom Mass involves personal suffering.  Think for example of the special needs parent and child.  Or think of the person who had great difficulty in crowds.  Or the person who is undergoing a great personal crisis.  Or even the parents of young children for whom 60 minutes sitting still in one place is a great challenge.  These people are actively suffering with Christ

Those with the Marian stance are not only suffering with Christ, they are in a very real sense, suffering for Christ.  They could just as easily decide that it is simply too hard to go to Mass and skip it.  They may even be justified in so doing.  But their love for Him precludes it.  That is why the second posture, that of the holy women, is also necessary.  The holy women at the foot of the Cross were there not only because they loved Christ, but because they also loved His Mother.  It was not just His suffering that moved them, but hers as well.  Their offering to Christ was one of prayer and support for Him and His Mother.  The holy women (and men) of the Mystical Calvary, rather than giving in to the temptation to judge the Liturgical Marys in their midst, they support them through their understanding glances and prayers. 

Finally, there is a Johannine posture.  Motivated by a deep friendship, the Church’s first mystic was moved to great sorrow for his sins and a loving contemplation of the events unfolding before him.  The Liturgical Johns work hard to remain in this posture throughout the entire Mass, moving from sorrow to thanksgiving as they try to penetrate ever deeper into the Mystery unfolding before them.

Before closing, it is important to mention that although the three postures are mutually exclusive, it does not mean you must select one each time you go to Mass.  Very often God makes it abundantly clear which role you are to play in a given Mass and, even, during a particular part of a given Mass.  In other words, you will always be playing one of those parts, but not always playing the same part.

Light in the Darkness

Church, Church Authority, Prayer, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, , , ,

At the close of the Great Jubilee Year of 2000, Pope St. John Paul II drafted a blueprint for the Church in the next millennium in his Apostolic Exhortation Novo Millennio Ineunte.  Through his Petrine office, the Pope played the prophet by emphasizing that the Church must  “shine ever more brightly” in the third millennium.  Not prone to echo merely pious sentiments, the Holy Father’s words are a clarion call to us Catholics living in dark ecclesial times especially by reminding us that Church’s luminosity is nothing more than a reflection of the light of the face of Christ in every historical period.  Darkness sets in then when we have “not first contemplated His face.”  Confronted with scandalous silence piled upon scandalous actions, many Catholics feel abandoned by the Church.  But once we allow the prophetic character of JPII’s program for restoring the Church’s luminosity to invigorate our lives we realize that it is not the Church that has abandoned us, but we the Church.  By failing to contemplate the face of Christ we are incapable of “letting our light shine before men”(c.f. Mt 5:16).  But if we listen to what the Successor of Peter told us almost 20 years ago, we can find a path back to the light.

Before outlining his program, we would be remiss if we ignored an important point that the Holy Father makes: “We are certainly not seduced by the naive expectation that, faced with the great challenges of our time, we shall find some magic formula. No, we shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person, and the assurance which he gives us: I am with you!” (NMI, 29).  Notwithstanding, the program is not something new but a revitalization of those practices that are at the heart of the Christian life.   These things are pathways to the face of Christ.

The Plan…

The first is a commitment to a holiness that is devoid of any mark of “minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity” (NMI, 30).  We must each strive to attain a “high standard of ordinary Christian living” by which we judge everything on a scale of sanctity.  What I mean by this is that we live in a detached manner asking whether each and everything we do is contributing to our holiness.  God is, by His loving Providence, is providing at each and every moment means to grow in holiness.  We need only say yes and fully embrace what He has planned to give us from all eternity.

The “scale of sanctity” is related to the second pillar of the saint’s program: grace.  Fidelity to grace is the key to growing in holiness.  The pursuit of holiness is not enough because it is not something we can ever obtain on our own.  It depends solely upon how much sanctifying grace we are given.  As the word grace (gratis) suggests it is pure gift.  What that means is not that we must sit back and wait for it, but that we must be active in receiving the gift.  Receptivity and passivity are not the same thing.  We must have the docility to receive it in the manner in which God intends to give it to us, but also seeking out those encounters in which God bestows those gifts.

The remaining three pillars are related to those encounters.  The first is the rediscovery of the face of Christ in the Sacrament of Penance (c.f. NMI, 37).  Mercy is for the contrite and it is through the Sacrament of Penance in which our contrition and Christ’s mercy meet.  In an age in which sin remains bound by self-appointed victimhood, freedom is found by approaching the mercy seat of the One Who became a willing victim for us.  These true encounters with Christ, mediated by a Priest, should be frequent enabling us to see them as necessary even when our sin is not grave.

Likewise, the Sacrament of the Eucharist must be restored to a primacy of place.  The Pope “insist[ed] that sharing in the Eucharist should really be the heart of Sunday for every baptized person” (36) but we should be willing to go further and make the sharing of the Eucharist the heart of every day.  By contemplating the face of the suffering and resurrected Christ in the Eucharist, we are being conformed to Him Mass by Mass.  If we really believe that Christ is present and the source of all life, “where else would we go” but to Mass?  Our Lord will not be outdone in generosity so that when we generously make ourselves available for Daily Mass, we find it harder and harder to stay away.

Marked by the communal prayer of the Eucharist, we must also contemplate the face of Christ in prayer.  Prayer, especially mental prayer, is the ordinary means God uses to gift us with His grace.  Reading the signs of the times, especially the “widespread demand for spirituality,” the Pope called upon the Faithful not only to pray, but to be educated in the art of prayer.  This meant going the great spiritual masters of the Church like St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.  More explicitly the Holy Father is saying that rather than looking elsewhere, especially in New Age spirituality, for “methods” of spirituality, that we should all re-connect with the mystical tradition of the Church.  All too often Catholics are told to pray, but in truth do not know how to.  Therefore parishes should become not just places of prayer, but schools of prayer where prayer is taught.

…And the Difference it Makes

While this plan will help individual Christians, it isn’t immediately apparent how it will help the Church.  Holier lay people aren’t going to fix corrupt prelates, especially when those prelates sit in the high places of the Church.  To see things this way however is to make a very worldly mistake, namely, seeing the Church as an institution and not as an organism.  The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is the extension of the Incarnation throughout time (c.f Mt 28:20 and this previous post).  The Church is holy because Christ is the Head.  The Mystical Body is holy because it has the Holy Spirit as its soul.  All those who share the indwelling of that same Spirit are members of that body.  But it also has members that have become diseased and are no longer capable of acting as parts of that same body. And just as a body has varied means to heal diseased parts of the body, so too the Church has the same power because it is always the Person of Christ who acts, even if He uses other members of the body as instruments.

Holy Members of the Church, both Militant and Triumphant, are healthy members of the Body that act to heal the diseased members of the Body.  They represent the true hierarchy of the Church.  The hierarchy of the Institutional Church, a hierarchy that will disappear, is meant only to be a sign of the true hierarchy.  Sometimes it fails as a sign and that’s when it is incumbent upon the true hierarchy to step up—not to lead the Institutional Church per se, but to be translucent members allowing the light reflected from the face of Christ to shine through them.   And if we put St. John Paul II’s plan into action and seek his intercession, that will be enough to heal the Church and be a light to a desperately dark world.

God’s Choice?

Church, Church Authority, Divine Mercy, End of Life, Fasting, God's Will, History, Magisterium, Pope Francis, Prayer, Sin, Spiritual Warfare, , ,

As criticism continues to mount against Pope Francis amidst this time of ecclesiastical turmoil, a growing number of peacemakers have emerged, who, in an attempt to diffuse the situation, are quick to offer the reminder that “he was chosen by the Holy Spirit.”  One can certainly appreciate the attempt to maintain unity.  Especially because the Pope is the most visible sign of Catholic unity.  But this path to peace is a theological dead end.  The Pope is not “chosen by the Holy Spirit”, at least in the sense that the peacemaker means it.  Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI was once asked whether the Holy Spirit is responsible for the election of a pope to which he replied:

I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the Pope. . . . I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined…There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!

In his usual pedagogical succinctness, the Pope Emeritus gives us several important reminders, not only on the election of the Pope, but also on the nature of the Church, especially in times of crises such as we are currently facing.

The Holy Spirit and the Conclave

As Benedict is quick to point out, one need only study history to see that this hypothesis is highly questionable.  History is rife with scoundrels who came to occupy the Chair of Peter.  It is always a good idea to study Church history and remind ourselves of this, especially because most of us have lived under the reign of popes who became saints.  It is only with great intellectual dexterity that we could admit that the Holy Spirit “picked” both these saints and someone like, say, Pope Alexander VI.

One might object that, even if it is a highly informed one, Cardinal Ratzinger was just offering an opinion (“I would say so…”).  The tradition of the Church would suggest otherwise.  Lex orandi, lex credenda—as we worship, so we believe.  The Church, among her various liturgies, has a Mass for the Election of the Pope.   The Church Universal prays that the Conclave will be docile to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.  This implies that they can also operate under the promptings of mixture of other spirits as well.

Free will of the Cardinal electorate then is operative and “anyone” can be chosen.   Yet we are also treading on the horizon of free will and Divine Providence.   The man chosen to be Pope will be God’s choice, but only in the sense that the papal election, like all things, falls under God’s Providence.  We may be certain that the Holy Spirit directly wills the election of a given man as Supreme Pontiff, but through the mystery of Providence will allow another to take his place.

Our Lord told St. Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church.  What He meant by this was that no matter what, the Church would not fail.  The Barque of Peter may take on water, but it will never sink.  The Holy Spirit will allow the Church to take on water, but will always keep her afloat.  That is the extent of His protection.

This however is not the end of the story because of God’s Providence.  Regardless of whether it is a good Pope or bad, the Church will always get the Pope it needs.  Providence dictates that God will always provide the People of God with what they need.

Reading the Times

There may be a mutiny on the Barque of Peter and the Holy Spirit will pick a strong captain to lead a counter-mutiny, stopping the flow of the water.  Or, He may allow another man who joins the mutiny and ignores the water that continues to flow onto the boat.  Eventually all the compartments are flooded, washing the mutineers overboard.  The end result is the same, the corruption has been washed away and the Church was given exactly what she needed.

In a very real sense then the Pope is always God’s choice but only as an instrument.  As a type of the Church, Israel shows us this.  History continually moved in the direction towards the coming of the Messiah, the only question was whether the king and the people would cooperate.  Israel would flourish, grow fat, play the harlot, be chastised, and continue through the remnant.  This pattern is revealed so that we will come to recognize and expect it in the Church.  Either way history will continue to move towards the Second Coming.

In turbulent times this ought to serve as a great comfort.  The infestation of corruption in the Church is finally coming to a head and God is going to root it out.  He will use Pope Francis as his instrument.  The only question seems to be which type of captain Pope Francis will be.  Either way these scandals should not push us towards despair, but should instill hope into us.  God will not be mocked for sure, but neither will He ever abandon His people. He is always on the lookout for co-redeemers—those people who will pick up the Cross with Jesus and lay down their lives for the Church.  Only acts of reparation will repair the Church and each of us has an obligation to do this.  Every man must come on deck, stem the mutiny and start bailing water or risk being carried overboard.  “Penance, penance, penance!” the Angel of Portugal told us through the children of Fatima.  The time is at hand.  Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

Who’s Afraid of a Little Sin?

Mary, Passion of Christ, Prayer, Sacred Heart of Jesus, Saints, Scripture, Sin, , ,

With the smoke still rising from the second great war, Pope Pius XII surveyed the moral landscape and declared that “the greatest sin today is that men have lost the sense of sin.” This theme, a loss of the sense of sin, has been a recurring one highlighted by each of the subsequent six pontificates.  In many ways it represents one of the greatest challenges to the Christian in the modern world.  Most of us still believe in sin, but living in the midst of a culture that laughs at any mention in it, we fail to see the ugliness of even the “smallest” sin.  The thought of achieving our freedom and conquering sin is nice, but not something we truly desire.  And so we simply live a stagnant life by merely avoiding the big sins, or at least that is how we reason.  After all, how could we grasp the gravity of sin when it is all around us?  Does a fish know that it is wet?  So how could we even hope to avoid the little sins and climb the heights of holiness?

When we examine the question more deeply we realize that the problem is hardly unique, even if it is more acute in our age.  Preaching a Lenten homily 175 years ago, Blessed John Henry Newman asked pretty much the same question:

“As time goes on, and Easter draws nearer, we are called upon not only to mourn over our sins, but especially over the various sufferings which Christ our Lord and Savior underwent on account of them. Why is it, my brethren, that we have so little feeling on the matter as we commonly have? Why is it that we are used to let the season come and go just like any other season, not thinking more of Christ than at other times, or, at least, not feeling more? Am I not right in saying that this is the case? and if so, have I not cause for asking why it is the case? We are not moved when we hear of the bitter passion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for us. We neither bewail our sins which caused it, nor have any sympathy with it.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 6, Sermon 4).

The Blessed convert hints at the reason in the framing of the question.  We do not recognize the seriousness of our sins because the Passion of Christ, not just the entire event, but the whipping, the scourging, the being dragged in chains, the carrying of the cross, the falling , the crown of thorns, the nails, and the suffocation, leaves no lasting impression on us.  We might as well be watching a movie.  Disturbing perhaps to think about, but quickly left aside as we move on with life.  It is not that we are uncaring, it is just way too abstract.  And why is this?  Newman again responds saying “For this one reason, my brethren, if I must express my meaning in one word, because you so little meditate. You do not meditate, and therefore you are not impressed” (ibid.).

Why Meditation on the Passion Saves Us

Newman is really reiterating something that all the saints have said.  Meditation upon the passion of Christ is necessary for both our salvation and our perseverance in the quest for it.  Echoing s similar theme, a contemporary of Newman’s, Blessed Columba Marmion said that he was “convinced that outside the Sacraments and liturgical acts, there is no practice more useful to our souls than the Way of the Cross made with devotion.  It is sovereign supernatural efficacy” (Christ and His Mysteries, p.309).

Why would Blessed Marmion make such a profound statement?  Because he realized that the Passion and Death of Christ is an eternal event and that it has lost none of its power to heal and transform us. In his words, “When we contemplate the sufferings of Jesus He grants us, according to the measure of our faith, the grace to practice the virtues He revealed during those sacred hours…When Christ lived on earth there emanated from His divine Person an all-powerful strength…Something analogous happens when we put ourselves into contact with Jesus by faith.  Christ surely bestowed special graces on those who with love, followed Him on the road to Golgotha or were present at His immolation.  He still maintains that power now.”

Faith enables us to participate in the Passion of Christ simply by bringing it before us in meditation.  It gives us the opportunity to draw directly from its specific, and very personal fruits.  At the root of discipleship is Christ’s command, “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me”().  And only by meditating on His Passion can we know what that cross looks like or to have the power to pick it up.  “Follow me” is meant literally by walking right behind Him during His own Passion, something that can only be done by putting ourselves there.

Two Examples

Scripture offers us two contrasting visions of disciples who did and did not meditate upon the Passion of Christ that serve as a caution and a model respectively.

The three-fold denial of St. Peter is well known.  His disavowal of Christ is one of the things that make him very relatable to all of us.  Because we can easily relate to him, we can also fall prey to his blind spot.  Why, exactly, did St. Peter abandon Our Lord?  In short it was an unwillingness to meditate upon the Passion.

Throughout Our Lord’s public ministry the theme of His Passion and Death was always looming in the background, even if it was shrouded in mystery.  He announced it to the Apostles three times (no coincidence) and each time it was denied by Peter.  We should not be surprised that his unwillingness to sit with the mystery of the cross then led to his fall.  It was his willingness to relive the Passion in his mind and his own share in it that gave St. Peter the grace of final perseverance (c.f. Jn 21).

Our Lady on the other hand is the ultimate model of meditation upon the Passion.  Each of the three times it was presented to her in Sacred Scripture, rather than denying it or allowing it to become abstract, “she kept these words in her heart.”  This habit of sitting with the mystery of Christ’s Passion enabled her to assimilate that same spirit and to walk with Jesus on the road to Calvary.  It was this habit, in other words, that won for her the grace of perseverance.  It is for this reason that she can serve as both a model and a guide in our own personal meditation of the Passion of Christ.  It is also one of the ways in which she intercedes for us to obtain the grace of final perseverance.

After one of her many encounters with Mercy Incarnate, St. Faustina reflected that Jesus was pleased “best by [her] meditating on His sorrowful Passion and by such meditation much light falls upon my soul. He who wants to learn true humility should reflect upon the Passion of Jesus. I get a clear under-standing of many things that I could not comprehend before” (Diary, 267).  The habitual meditation upon Our Lord’s Passion is a constant among all the saints and will become a source of unlimited spiritual growth for the rest of us as well.  When we intimately come to know the sufferings our sins cause we will no longer find them desirable, transforming not only ourselves but everyone around us relegating the “loss of a sense of sin” to the past.

Resolving for a Change

Grace, Lent, Prayer, Saints, Spiritual Life, , , ,

Without having the benefit of Divine Revelation, Socrates, and by extension, Plato, was able to discover many truths about humanity.  Lacking an understanding of Original Sin and its effects however, he also made a serious mistake in the area of ethics.  This error is on display in the dialogue with Gorgias when Socrates makes the claim that all wrongdoing is a result of ignorance.  He thought that once we know the good, we would automatically do it.  Socrates’ ignorance was the problem, but it was ignorance of the Christian explanation of Original Sin that leaves him in error.  With the fall of man there was not only a darkening of the intellect that caused ignorance but also a weakening of the will that makes even the good we know difficult to do.  No one is immune to this defect in our nature, even the great Apostle to the Gentiles St. Paul, who candidly shared with the Romans his own struggle: “For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want” (Romans 7:19).   So universal is the experience that it almost seems to be common sense, which makes it odd that the wisest man in Athens did not catch it.  Odd, that is, until we, especially those who have earnestly set out on the Christian journey, realize that all too often we make the same mistake.

Why did I single out those who have “earnestly set out on the Christian journey”?  Because they are the ones who presumably pray, reflect upon their short comings and sins and do spiritual reading.  And, therefore they are the ones that, according to St. Francis de Sales, are the most likely to fall victim to a subtle form of self-deception.  They are the ones who, for example, want to learn from Our Lord to be meek and humble of heart.  They begin by reading about and meditating on humility and meekness.  They expose themselves to the lives of the saints who were meek and humble.  They learn all Scripture has to say about humility and meekness.  They even speculate what it might look like in their own life.

As all learning does is apt to do, knowledge about humility and meekness brings them great pleasure.  Hearing or reading of humility and meekness puts them in a humble and meek state of mind.  It gives them, as Screwtape says, “humble feelings”.  This pleasure serves as a counterfeit of the real pleasure attached to mature virtue.  That is, they become meek and humble only in their imagination.  This imaginary humility and meekness helps them to quiet their conscience causing them to leave aside any self-reflection in these areas.  They are virtues that have been conquered and it is time to move to the next set.  The problem is that meekness and humility, like all the moral virtues, reside in the will and not in the intellect.  You must do humble and meek things repeatedly and with ever greater vehemence to actually become humble and meek.  You must, as St. James cautions, “become not just hearers of the word, but doers” (James 1:22).

Becoming Doers of the Word

St Francis de Sales issues the above mentioned caution, but also offers us a simple solution, a re-solution, you might say.

“Above all things, my child, strive when your meditation is ended to retain the thoughts and resolutions you have made as your earnest practice throughout the day. This is the real fruit of meditation, without which it is apt to be unprofitable, if not actually harmful–inasmuch as to dwell upon virtues without practicing them lends to puff us up with unrealities, until we begin to fancy ourselves all that we have meditated upon and resolved to be; which is all very well if our resolutions are earnest and substantial, but on the contrary hollow and dangerous if they are not put in practice. You must then diligently endeavor to carry out your resolutions, and seek for all opportunities, great or small. For instance, if your resolution was to win over those who oppose you by gentleness, seek through the day any occasion of meeting such persons kindly, and if none offers, strive to speak well of them, and pray for them” (Introduction to the Devout Life II, 8).

In speaking with many Christians who are soberly trying to live out their Christian call, but find themselves stuck, I find a common thread.  They may devote consistent time to prayer, but they do not devote themselves to making concrete resolutions based on that prayer.  I find this because I saw it in my own life first.  I would religiously (literally) devote 30 minutes to meditation every day and would find that, when I wasn’t deceiving myself, that I had made little progress.  That is until I read St. Francis de Sales’ great treatise on living a lay Catholic life, the Introduction to the Devout Life.  It was the quote above that made me realize I was not consistently making resolutions and when I did they were too general.  And while that persisted I was simply a hearer of the word.  But when I allowed that word to penetrate not just my mind, but my will, I began to move again.

The key was making not just a vague resolution like “I will act humble today” but instead “when my co-worker who is constantly challenging me about everything does it again today, I will defer to him.”  We might fail, but it was not for a lack of trying.  The more effort we make even in failing, the more God responds with grace. Before long virtues that were arduous begin to bring some pleasure with them pushing along further.

Over the last few weeks my inbox has been flooded with this or that devotional for Lent.  They are all good, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if I simply put into practice what I already knew.  What if rather than purchasing another devotional, I practiced greater devotion?  Perhaps, you were wondering the same thing.

Praying with the Dead

Divine Mercy, Heaven, Last Things, Mercy, Passion of Christ, Prayer, Purgatory, Resurrection, Suffering, Theology, , ,

In a previous post, the supreme importance of avoiding personally canonizing those who have died was highlighted.  The “holy souls” in Purgatory depend greatly upon our prayers in order that they may be loosed from the lingering effects of their sins after their death.  Many of us grasp this and, out of charity, regularly offer prayers for the dead.  But there is a flip side to this coin—nearly every saint who has been canonized in the last two centuries was recognized because people began asking for their intercession.  In other words, rather than primarily praying for them, people began praying to them.  It seems that we must then exercise judgment as to whether the person is in Purgatory or in Heaven, the very thing I said not to do.  Stuck in a spiritual no-man’s land, we tend towards neither praying for them or to them.  The problem becomes theological rather than governed by the logic of love.  The rich relationship of the Communion of Saints becomes a sterile doctrine and our personal faith falters with it.  All of this seems unavoidable unless we can find a way around this spiritual dilemma.

A single paragraph in the Catechism, quoting an indulged prayer from Pope Leo XIII, helps part the clouds of obscurity.  The Catechism says:

“In full consciousness of this communion of the whole Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, the Church in its pilgrim members, from the very earliest days of the Christian religion, has honored with great respect the memory of the dead; and ‘because it is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins’ she offers her suffrages for them.’ Our prayer for them is capable not only of helping them, but also of making their intercession for us effective.” (CCC 959, emphasis added).

In summary, it is our prayers for the dead that not only help them, but also make their intercession for us effective.  What this tells us is that the holy souls in Purgatory, as members of the Church, have the power to intercede for the members of the Church Militant.  But this power comes in some way through our prayers for them.  How this works is obviously a mystery, but that it works is immediately relevant to the discussion at hand.  It gives us an immediate plan of action that will enable us to do both—pray for them and pray for their intercession.

Covering Our Bases

For some of us, this still has a Russian roulette type feel to it—like we are simply trying to cover our bases.  This only serves to make it more mechanical and less personal, the very antithesis of what prayer should be.  But this stems from a certain anxiety that our prayers may actually be wasted.  After all, if the person is in heaven and you are praying for their release from Purgatory, then your prayers have been wasted.

All of our prayer draws its power from the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ.  In other words, our prayer is caught up in the Eternal Now of Our Lord’s act of redemption where time and eternity met.  This means our prayer, although uttered in time, enters into the timelessness of God.  God knows “when” you will pray and He can apply the merits of those prayers as He sees fit.  More to the point, even if the soul of our departed loved one is in heaven, it is still your prayer here and now that got them there.  They may have even received the graces you interceded for just now while they were still on the earth.  Just as there are many natural causes that God uses to guide His providential plan, prayer too is a cause.  But because of its supernatural power, it operates outside of the natural constraints of time.

The Power of Prayer Over Time

Once we grasp this hidden power of prayer, we can see that our prayer, even if the soul has left Purgatory, is never wasted.  But it is still necessary because it is a power by which they have been or will be released.  It is also empowers them to intercede for the members of the Church Militant so that we should confidently ask for their intercession in our needs as well.  So our prayers for and to the dead are no different than they were while they were still living—praying both for them and asking them to pray for us.  Because “the prayer of a righteous man has great power to prevail” (James 5:16), we should go to them with confidence for our needs.  This also carries with it a rich experience of the true nature of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ.  It is a supernatural reality that spans Heaven and Earth and in between (Purgatory).

As long as we are speaking of covering our bases, how do we explain the prayers for the dead who are actually in hell?  Aren’t these wasted?  By now the answer ought to be clear that God wastes none of our prayers.  Our prayers obviously cannot lift them out of hell, but they could be applied to the person prior to their death.  They may lead the person towards conversion prior to their death (there is a beautiful account of the conversion of a despairing soul on the door of death who receives a final grace in St. Faustina’s Dairy #1486).  Or, perhaps it “only” kept them from further sin and, in a sense, lightened their suffering in hell.  Not knowing anyone’s destiny, we should confidently pray based on the overwhelming power of God’s mercy.  By praying, we become instruments of that same mercy.

Spreading Hope

Heaven, Prayer, Purgatory, Redemption, Resurrection, Saints, Suffering,

 

During a September series between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers in Dodger Stadium, Giants’ rightfielder Hunter Pence wore a necklace that contained the cremains of a devoted Dodgers’ fan, after the Dodgers refused the request to have the man’s daughter spread his ashes on the field.  The plea was one of many that the Dodgers and the rest of the MLB teams receive and routinely refuse yearly.  There is an ongoing campaign to develop a compromise of sorts in that the teams could allow on certain days a small amount of a person’s ashes to be spread on the field.  Setting aside the pragmatic reasoning, this decision ultimately represents an act of charity toward the dead and their loved ones.

The Book of Tobit reveals God’s pleasure in Tobit’s dogged persistence in burying the dead (Tobit 14:14) and it has long been considered a corporal work of mercy in the Christian tradition.  Understanding why God looks favorably upon this act however can help us to see the reason the Church insists that cremated remains not be scattered.

Spreading Faith

Christians have long seen death not as annihilation nor as the releasing of the soul from its incarceration in the body, but as having a fundamental positive meaning.  By being united to Christ’s death and resurrection in Baptism, the believer sees his own death in Christ as the pathway to a share in His glorious resurrection.  Like the resurrection of the Lord, the Christian’s is a bodily resurrection.  Our temporal bodies become as a seed of the body that will rise in glory (c.f. 1Cor 15:42-44).

This motivation helps to reveal the meaning of Christian burial.  If we really believe that our resurrected bodies are found in seed form in our earthly bodies, then our actions ought to reveal this.  Seeds must be buried and die so that new life may spring forth.   Christian burial is a sign of this; a sacrament that point to this reality.

Historically, pagans practiced funeral rites that included cremation, reflecting the widespread belief that there was no resurrection of the body.  Even when the pagans did practice burial (based on the belief that only when their bodies were buried could the soul rest), the Christians still buried their separately from the pagans because of the great difference in their understanding of the future resurrection.  It was this connection between paganism (and later certain secret societies and cults) and cremation that led the Church to remove it as an option for the faithful.

Considering some of the practical difficulties of burial in modern times (mostly exorbitant costs and decreasing space) the Church relaxed some of her restrictions on cremation when the new code of Canon Law was released in 1983.  Burial because of its nature as a sign remains the preferred method, but unless it is chosen for reasons contrary to Christian beliefs (i.e. a lack of belief in the resurrection of the body) then it is permitted when necessary (Canon 1176.3).  Cremation can testify to the omnipotence of God in raising up the deceased body to new life and therefore “in and of itself, objectively negates neither the Christian doctrine of the soul’s immortality nor that of the resurrection of the body” (Piam et constantem, 5 July 1963).

The cremated remains of the person should always “be laid to rest in a sacred place, that is, in a cemetery, or, in certain cases, in a church or an area which has been set aside for this purpose…” (Instruction Regarding the Burial of the Deceased and the Conservation of Ashes in the Case of Cremation, CDF, 2016).  This means that the ashes should never be scattered or preserved as mementos or pieces of jewelry.   To do any of these things would be testimony of pantheism, naturalism, or nihilism.

Based on what has been said so far, one might be willing to concede that the prohibition on scattering ashes should be binding on Christians, but what about non-Christians?  In other words, what if the man whose remains Hunter Pence wore didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body?  How is insisting on his burial an act of charity to both he and his family?

Of particular mention as well is that whether or not someone believes in the resurrection of the body has no bearing on whether it is true.  It may be an article of faith but it is an article of true faith, and so we as Christians have an obligation to do all that we can to bear witness to this truth.  Burial or interment also constitutes an act of charity to the dead as well.  For the dead it creates a “monument” that serves as a reminder to the living to pray for the deceased.  It assures that they will not be forgotten.  One whose ashes have been scattered will soon be forgotten, perhaps not by their immediate loved ones, but to subsequent generations they will be as one blotted out.  By not spreading ashes, we are spreading hope.

Spreading Charity

This highlights the intrinsic connection between the corporal work of mercy, burying the dead, and the spiritual work of mercy of praying for the dead.  This is perhaps the “easiest” of all works of mercy but also the most often neglected.  To pray for the dead is a great act of charity especially considering that only Catholics do it.  Very likely that man whose remains were worn by the Giants’ outfielder and many others like him have no one to pray for him.  We may have no way of knowing how the person has been judged, but we always trust that God’s mercy is more powerful than any man’s sins.  And so we pray and by praying, ironically enough, repair the harm done by our own sins, reducing our own time in Purgatory.  Charity covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8).

Many of the souls in Purgatory spend more time there than they should for want of having someone to pray for them.  Therefore the Church Militant devotes a whole month of special focus to relieving their suffering and offers a plenary indulgence for the Holy Souls during the week of Nov 2-Nov 8 each year.  By way of reminder, one can obtain a plenary indulgence (one per day), when in a state of grace and with a complete detachment from sin, receive Holy Communion, pray for the intentions of the Pope and go to Confession within 20 days before or after the act (one Confession can cover all 7 days, but the other acts must be done daily).  One can gain this particular indulgence by, in addition to the above conditions, devoutly visiting a cemetery and praying for the departed, even if the prayer is only mental.

A partial indulgence for the Souls in Purgatory can be obtained when the Requiem aeternam is prayed. This can be prayed all year, but should be especially prayed during the month of November:

Eternal rest grant to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

 

 

A Defense of Name Dropping

Prayer,

Is there a habit that is met with great disdain today than name-dropping?  Most of us hate when others do it, but have a hard time avoiding it ourselves.  In an age of “networking” it is practically unavoidable—who you know is often more important than what you know.  Your contacts bestow status.  Christians are not exempt from this practice.  In fact our eternal status is based on our contact with one Person—Christians should constantly be dropping His name—the Holy Name of Jesus.  We are admonished that “there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12) and told “whatever you ask in My name, that I will do” (John 14:13).

Traditionally, January has been set aside as dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus and in 2011, Pope St. John Paul II restored the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus to January 3rd.  Therefore it seems an appropriate time to reflect upon the name that should be the cause of every knee to bend (c.f.Phil 2:10).

The Power of a Name

A word first about names.  St. Thomas says that names “should answer to the nature of a thing” (ST III, q.37, a.2).  Building upon this, the Catechism says that a name is an “icon of the person” (CCC 2158).  What is meant by this is that someone’s name is a sacrament of the person.  Although this may have become obscure when names are often selected simply based on novelty, St. Thomas says that names ought to be “taken from some property of the men to whom they are given” (ST III, q.37, a.2).   The names may be given with respect to a saint (either one to whom the parents have a particular devotion or whose feast day the person was born on) or some blood relation or even based on some quality of the person (like Esau whose name means red).  The point is that the name reveals something of the person either relationally or personally.

When God gives a name it is always to signify some gift He has bestowed on them.  Abraham is made the “father of nations”, Peter is made to be the “rock upon which the Church is built” and Mary identifies herself as “the Immaculate Conception” to St. Bernadette.  In this regard, Jesus which means “God saves” is so named because “He will save the people from their sins” (Mt 1:21).

Our Lord’s name denotes the essence of Who He is because it reveals His mission.  He cannot be separated from His mission; He is never, as Pope Benedict XVI says, “off-duty.”  Everything that He did and said from the moment of the Incarnation until it was finished on the Cross was to save me and save you.  The power flowing from those actions touch me and you here and now.  Jesus saves me right here and right now and you as well.

It was said that the name is like a sacrament of the person not just because it is a sign of the person, but also because it carries with it a power to bring about the one it signifies.  This is why we name-drop—it is as if the person is present testifying for us.  It also gives as the actual power to make the person present.  In a loud and crowded restaurant I have the power to call the waiter to me immediately when I know his name.

This power is amplified when it comes to the name of Jesus.  Eternally God, He is present at all times and always.  But when I call upon His Holy Name, He is present to me not just as the source of my existence but as the source of eternal life.

This is what makes using the Lord’s name in vain so soul-deadening.  God commands that the name of Jesus is holy and to be revered at all times, but not because He is somehow disrespected by us when we abuse it.  The commandments are for our benefit, not God’s.  He gives us this commandment so that we never forget or take for granted the privilege we have in calling upon God by name.

The power attached to the knowledge of another’s name is why the Jews in the Old Testament would not utter the name of God.  Jesus’ very name (God saves) contains God’s name and thus we cannot say His name without also uttering God’s name.  The Catechism captures this well in the section on Prayer saying, “the divine name may not be spoken by human lips, but by assuming our humanity The Word of God hands it over to us and we can invoke it: ‘Jesus,’ ‘YHWH saves.’  The name ‘Jesus’ contains all: God and man and the whole economy of creation and salvation. To pray ‘Jesus’ is to invoke him and to call him within us. His name is the only one that contains the presence it signifies…” (CCC 2666).

If the name invokes the Person and the Person sanctifies by His presence, then we ought to make a regular habit of invoking Jesus’ name.  The Church has offered a partial indulgence attached to the recitation of the Litany of the Most Holy Name of Jesus.

The Jesus Prayer

As many people look to Eastern Spirituality and non-Christian forms of prayer in the West, I would like to commend to you a practice with roots in Eastern Christianity called the Jesus Prayer.  While no one knows exactly when it started, it has been in the tradition of the Eastern monks back to at least the 6th Century.  In an attempt to “pray without ceasing” the monks began to repetitively say short prayers invoking the name of Jesus.  The most common of these prayers was “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”  Rather than being a merely a mantra that seeks to empty the mind, the Jesus Prayer was meant to engage the whole person—body, heart and mind.  One exhales the name of Jesus and inhale His mercy while forming a mental picture of His presence and making acts of love towards Him.  Those who practice this with regularity will find it to be a powerful means of drawing closer to Our Lord by invoking Him and opening yourself up to the gift of higher levels of prayer.

In The Way of the Pilgrim, the master describes the prayer to the pilgrim saying:

 

“The continuous interior prayer of Jesus is a constant uninterrupted calling upon the divine name of Jesus with the lips, in the spirit, in the heart, while forming a mental picture of His constant presence, and imploring His grace, during every occupation, at all times, in all places, even during sleep. The appeal is couched in these terms, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ One who accustoms himself to this appeal experiences as a result so deep a consolation and so great a need to offer the prayer always that he can no longer live without it, and it will continue to voice itself within him of its own accord. Now do you understand what prayer without ceasing is?”

Make us, O Lord, to have a perpetual fear and love of Your holy name, for You never fail to govern those whom You establish in Your love. You, Who live and reign forever and ever. Amen

 

 

Running Through the Finish Line of Advent

Advent, Fasting, Prayer, ,

Within Church tradition, Advent has been viewed as a “little” Lent.  Lent, because it involved a prolonged period of preparation marked by the spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving.  “Little,” because it was a shorter time period (4 weeks vs 40 days) and because it lacked some of the rigor normally associated with Lent.  For many of us, despite the best of initial intentions, Advent has had any rigor at all.  The commercial trappings of Christmas can ensnare all of us to some degree, something we do not necessarily have to combat at Easter.  We may easily be tempted to give up and try again next year.  But there is still a week left in the season and the Church has the perfect prescription within her traditions to recoup some of the spiritual fruit that may have fallen off your Advent tree. It may be that Advent has been very good so far and you are looking for a way to stretch to gather the fruit from the top.  Either way, we can finish Advent by turning to the Church’s tradition of “little Advent.”

In the spirit of always acting with the end in mind, a brief reminder about the purpose of Advent.  All too often Advent and even Christmas can feel like a game of make believe.  We know that God has already come in the Incarnation.  We know that He is here in the Eucharist.  Sure we are awaiting His Second Coming in glory, but that is something that we are always waiting for.  Why do we need a special season of waiting?

It is precisely that reason that the Church gives us Advent leading up to the theophany of Christmas.  We may always be, as the embolism of the Mass says, waiting “in joyful hope for the coming of Our Savior.”  But Advent offers us a special time to focus solely on this waiting so as to stir up love in us and to awaken our otherwise dormant hope.  God’s promises really do come to fruition, not just “spiritually” but as history.  Not just once upon a time, but “in the first enrollment (of the census ordered by Caesar Augustus) when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”  God made good on His promise to be Emmanuel, God with us and He will continue until He has ransomed all of captive Israel.

This waiting is especially acute in Advent and ought to be our primary focus.  We do the things that waiting people do—pray, fast and give alms.

Prayer

Beginning on December 17th, the Church has traditional marked seven days with a series of special antiphons known as the O Antiphons.  These antiphons frame the Magnificat in each evening’s Liturgy of the Hours.  Not only are these antiphons tied to the official prayer of the Church, but are also well known to most of us as they comprise the verses of O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

Within the Liturgy of the Hours, antiphons are short verses that are sung (or recited) prior to and after the Psalm or Canticle that provide an interpretive key to the mystical meaning of the passage or the feast day.  This is what makes the O Antiphons perfect material to recharge or redeem Advent for us—they are short reflections that capture the meaning of the season.  The O Antiphons allow us to make present the expectation of Israel and ignite within us any aspect of hope that has lain dormant in our hearts.  And because they are appended onto the Magnificat, Mary’s great prayer of expectation and thanksgiving, they unite us with her as well.

Each of the Great Antiphons as some have called them, invokes the name of the Messiah under his various Old Testament titles and closes with a proper petition.  The medieval church masters say there are seven as a reminder of the miseries of our fallen condition; each of which the Messiah came to rescue us from.  On the first day we recall how it is the Wisdom from on high that can free us from ignorance.  On the second day, we beg for the coming Redeemer who will save us from eternal punishment.  On the third day, longing for our heavenly homeland, we invoke the promised Root of Jesse to hurry to us.  Imprisoned in sin and death, on the fourth day, we plead for the Key of David to unlock our chains and guard us.  Trapped in darkness, we beg for the Dayspring to enlighten our way on the fifth day.  Because we are enslaved under the terrible reign of the devil, we invoke the King of Nations on the sixth day.  Finally, separated from God, we invoke Emmanuel, God with us.  In short, each of the seven days we should meditate upon our fallen condition and God’s remedy as outlined by that day’s antiphon.

Fasting

At this stage of Advent, our longings ought to be felt, not just spiritually, but also bodily.  This is why the last week is a time to fast.  In teaching His disciples, Our Lord associates fasting with waiting for the Bridegroom (Mt 6:16).  It is a spiritual discipline that has fallen into disuse, but this last week of Advent offers a great time to get back into the practice.  Fasting allows us to truly experience longing for something we simply cannot live without.  By going without that which is necessary, namely food, we express our desire for the One Thing that is most necessary.  One would be hard pressed to come up with a better way to express the true meaning of the banquet most of us will partake of on Christmas Day than to have first fasted.  Feasts are only meaningful when we have had the experience of fasting.

Pope Benedict XVI often said we are living in the “already, but not yet.”  What he meant is that Christ has come and is with us really and truly, but we have not yet seen His glory.  It is in this spirit that fasting should always be accompanied by Daily Mass and reception of the Eucharist.  By having our actual hunger temporarily satisfied by the Bread of Life, we will again experience in our bodies the truth of what happens in our souls.

Almsgiving

In a season marked by a spirit of  giving, it seems that almsgiving plays a large part already.  But we often miss the real point of almsgiving which is to give until it hurts.  We do this not because we are nice, but because we love God and want to give in the way that He gives—until it hurts.  Almsgiving should always flow from a supernatural motive that is based on a love of God and a desire for Him to spread His love through us.

There is also the tendency to give only from our surplus, especially for those of us who have families to support.  It seems wrong to take from what the family needs in order to help another family.  This was my own thinking for many years until I came across a quote from Pope Francis in which he said “we would do well to ask ourselves what we can give up in order to enrich others by our poverty.”  What I took the Holy Father to be saying is that, and this is especially true for parents, we should look to see what we can sacrifice personally.  Then there is no conflict with our obligations to our children and spouses.  As a father I may not be willing to have one of my children forgo a thick winter coat, but as a man I might be willing to forgo one myself so that someone else can be warm.  By personally going without something of importance, I can enrich others.  These “others” include not just the direct beneficiary of your charity but your children as well who catch the spirit of sacrifice so inimical to our Christian spirit.

There is another aspect of our almsgiving that should be a focus during Advent which can be a time of great loneliness for many people.  The greatest poverty is often a lack of being loved.  Too often we are tempted to take a “I gave at the office” type mentality that removes us from actual contact with the poor.  Giving money is a good thing, but the problem with it is that, as Pope Benedict XVI said, we have a tendency to give too little of ourselves.  What the other person needs most is the knowledge that they are loved, a knowledge that is only acquired by our face to face contact with them.  Our almsgiving should not just be focused on meeting material needs, but should always leave the person spiritually enriched as well.  Christians are not social workers, but manifestations of Christ’s self-giving love in the world.

Entering the home stretch of our Advent journeys, there is still plenty of time to seize the graces God had planned from the beginning of time to give to us.  By returning to our Catholic roots—through Prayer, especially the great O Antiphons, fasting and almsgiving—we can with great joy welcome Christ the newborn babe.