Advent: Come on and work it on out

Okay, so what do our boys up there mean? What does it mean to “Rock Advent”.

Well, as with anything else, “it works, if you work it.” If you follow a food or exercise plan to become more fit, and you keep to it pretty well, you’ll see results. If you tend a garden, pulling the weeds and watering it a bit every day, you’ll generally have beautiful flowers or nice fresh salads in the summer.

Ditto Advent. If you pay attention to the readings of Advent, and meditate on them a bit; if you spend even five minutes more in prayer than you may (or may not) already do; if you consider where you were last year, and where you are this year, and realize that we’re are always on a journey not always of our own design, then you might discover that “working” the Advent season is helping you to look forward with a little more optimism; that you’re less interested in all the material aspects of the season because you’ve caught sight of a promise, off in the distance — one that’s real and closer each day.

A Promise in the Distance

Over at OSV, I’ve written a piece that touches on all of that, a little:

Without the Advent season, I might not manage to set aside a few minutes each day to reflect on the tangled trails I have traveled in the passing year, and to realize just how far into the wilderness I have strayed. Especially in an election year, it seems, one can wander pretty deeply into the wilds and the weeds. The world, beautiful as it is, is also full of spiritual potholes, tricky nettles and the thickets that make us feel entrapped, even if we are not. Without even realizing it, we turn inward, where things seem more comfortable.

Advent coaxes us out. We look up and there is a darker sky than before. The stars show more clearly, and they inspire us to hack through the stuff that has begun to imprison us within the year so that we may walk a freer path, made clear. Engaged and with a certain goal, our awareness shifts and becomes heightened. We hear a memory: “All things, all senses, all times, all places are alive in the sight of their King.” And the King makes everything new.

It’s late to start preparing the way we might have wanted to. Late to buy books of meditations — it might even be a little late to buy specific “Advent Candles” but you can always find some purple candles (for the lightly penitential aspect of the season most of us easily shrug off) and pink, or rose, because “we wait in joyful hope…”

But that doesn’t mean we can’t still “work” the season in order to enjoy its fruits.

The penitential stuff isn’t meant to be harsh or burdensome, just enough to keep you mindful.

Light Offerings Bring Light

Pray for the troubles you see when you’re online — not just for all the discomfiting headlines, but for the small personal pleas you spot as you’re scrolling social media. For people who are keeping watch over the final hours of a loved one, or dealing with a terrible medical emergency, of the loss of a job. Whisper up a prayer for them, “Lord, the one you love is  hurting…”

Perhaps shut off your smartphone an hour earlier than you otherwise might — make it a “nightly fast” — and offer it up, too, as prayer. Believe me, everything will still be there, next morning, as unchanged and predictable as sunrise. But by the end of Advent you might be different, less predictable.

If you can, increase your charitable giving even if it’s just by a few dollars (and that includes to your parish because expenses and costs go up there, too, just as for us…) and if it means fewer decorations or desserts for your own holiday table, well, consider that the sacrifice might be worth it, in more than material ways. Little things. Little sacrifices, little gestures, added together, bring surprisingly big rewards.

Along with the small increase in prayer and giving, little actions count, too:

Walk over a cup of hot chocolate to the elderly neighbor whose kids are scattered about the country and may not be able to come by this year. Better yet, share a meal. Instead of speaking, force yourself to LISTEN to others, even if they’re not saying anything all that interesting or even if you disagree. People really are still permitted to have their own opinions, and you are not required to share them. But to make a person feel seen and heard can go a long way toward them listening to you, in turn. One of my Bendictine spiritual directors has great advice on that score. He says “put your finger on the divot over your upper lip, to remind yourself to shut up and listen.” It’s a “shh” cue, for yourself.

Truly, listening is a great discipline and can be a great gift for others. And it’s something we are all becoming so bad at, largely thanks to social media which is, ironically, making us much less adept at being social.

Read more, if you can. Even better, read aloud to someone, because that is a warm way to make a gift of time spent in company with another.

Make a visitation to the blessed sacrament on the way to the stores.

Try Eucharistic Adoration if you haven’t really given it a shot, yet.  Bring a book of meditations with you or gift someone else with one, for Christmas.

Little Things Mean a Lot

Sometimes I think St. Therese of Lisieux should be a special patroness of Advent, because she understood so well the power of the little things, done for love. In The Story of a Soul she writes, “Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.” 

If you put even a small amount of effort into Advent this year, I promise that you will be glad of it — that each sunset, as you light a candle (a little earlier each night, week by week) you will note how outside is becoming dimmer and darker, while within you are becoming lighter, maybe even starting to glow.

Advent is miraculous, in that way. But as with everything else, you can only get out of it as much as you put into it. So, work it on out…

Or, as the boys would remind  us, “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make…”

A little more love in Advent will bring a big takeaway.

The blessing I’ve just remembered, thanks to Taylor Swift

Did you know there is within the Catholic Church, a blessing offered to parents who are grieving the loss of a child through miscarriage or stillbirth?

It’s one of those things I think I may have known but forgotten — and I wish I’d known it when my husband and I were experiencing the horror of miscarrying. Our daughter would be 29, now, and no, you never forget the birthdays and school plays and Christmases you didn’t get to have with them.

I was reminded of the blessing after writing a piece for OSV about a new song by Taylor Swift, which many fans believe is about a miscarriage. Certainly her lyrics are evocative of my thoughts and feelings during that terrible time.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
You were bigger than the whole sky
You were more than just a short time
And I’ve got a lot to pine about
I’ve got a lot to live without …”

Women who have suffered a miscarriage will tell you that the loss, usually inexplicable, feels like a promise left unkept, a denial of what seemed a new force of unlimited potential, and a new expression of love, taken away before the world had seen its beauty, rather like a flake of snow, melted before it ever reached the ground.

“I’m never gonna meet
What could’ve been, would’ve been
What should’ve been you
What could’ve been, would’ve been you …”

You can find the lyric video of “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” here.

The crux of my piece is that we don’t talk enough about miscarriages and stillborn children, and that largely because we simply don’t know what to say.  But we should. We should acknowledge the grief that is real, and all the questions that come with it, and reassure mothers who bear the pain of self-doubt and all the questions about what we may or may have done to precipitate our loss, when the answer most often is “nothing… you did nothing and no one is to blame”.  More talking is always good. And perhaps, along with the blessing the Church can impart to a grieve couple, I wonder if annual diocesan Masses of remembrance wouldn’t be an offering of consolation for such parents, in community with the whole Church.

“I’m never gonna meet
What could’ve been, would’ve been
What should’ve been you
What could’ve been, would’ve been you …”

MisImage by George Clausen: Public Domain

BOOKS: A Perfect Gift for Your Favorite Gardener

It feels like those of us who knew it was coming have waited forever for Margaret Rose Realy’s Garden Catechism to finally be published and become available. Boasting the loveliest illustrations you can imagine from the immensely gifted Mary Sprague (and with a foreword by Sherry Weddell) and full of Realy’s commingled (and extensive) knowledge of plants and Christian history, planting times and Catholic myths and legends, seasons and scripture, this book is not merely a guide but a visual, intellectual and spiritual gift.

Isn’t it gorgeous?

 

And so full of fascinating facts, helpful hints…

And spiritual prompts!

Let me put it another way: If you pick this book up and thumb through it you will be immediately “hooked” and want to own it, and that for good reason. Master Gardener and Benedictine Oblate Margaret Rose Realy has brought all of her extensive knowledge on raising and nurturing the abundant delights of color and scent which grace each season, and married it to her deep study of scripture, Catholic devotionals, saintly hagiographies (and even delightful legend), and brought us a book that is almost impossible to put down. I was happy to discover that the Hosta beside which I pray the rosary in my backyard in summer is a kind of lily, and so goes with the rosary! Coupled with the gorgeously wrought illustrations by Mary Sprague, this book is an informative and entertaining treasure. A Garden Catechism: 100 Plants in Christian Tradition and How to Grow Them* will become the classic reference for its topic.

*This blog participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

In Flood, In Disaster, in Human Pain, Where Are Our Angels?

October 2 being a Sunday, the day takes precedence over the memorial on the calendar of the Catholic Church, but as we look at images left by the devastation of Hurricane Ian (and, at this writing, its continued threat), it would not be uncommon to hear some ask, “Well, where were the Guardian Angels? Why weren’t they protecting lives and homes?” Such questions always extrapolates into, “Why do bad things happen at all, if the Guardian Angels are on the job? Why does one person avoid getting sucker-punched on a New York City street while another gets clobbered? Was one person’s angel just more on the job than the others? Is it all a fantasy?”

Guardian angels are not fantasies. They are real, and scriptural.  But the questions we ask are fair and utterly human. As a child I once ran out into the street without looking and a driver jammed on her brakes; I just missed being hit. My mother said, “your guardian angel was protecting you.” Okay. But when a boy threw a rock at me that hit me in the eye, where was my guardian angel, then? For that matter, in moments of abuse, terror and torment, where was my angel, and why was I not protected, then?

Or, taken from the headlines, why did some die from the flooding effects of the hurricane, while others were sometimes miraculously rescued? A few years ago there was a Boy Scout Jamboree, a gathering of tens of thousands. Several boys died of lightning strikes. Why them? Why not others? Why not the whole of them? Why any of them?

Well, it’s a mystery!

I certainly don’t have any answers to those questions. They pop into my head from time to time, but I don’t lose sleep over them. We know that the things that occur all around us and in our lives only occur because they are permitted, and that this permission has something to do with a Divine Plan that is beyond our ken — a mystery of love, grace and divine wisdom that is unsolvable to all of us — save, perhaps, a few saints — and has been pondered since Job’s time, and before.  I do believe it. As I’ve often said, I’m a true daughter of St. Philip Neri and do believe that all of God’s purposes are to the good, and that “although we may not always understand this, we can trust in it.”

I do trust in that, though I don’t profess to understand it. Or, I understand it the only way we ever can — in hindsight — when I look back on a difficult, painful memory even years (sometimes decades) later and discover that the suffering I had borne, bore sweet fruit, or that the Good Friday I’d lived through was necessary in order to permit an Easter of joy. This is the continual lesson of the crucifix, one that commingles with our questions about angels and protection, and why God ever permits bad things to happen, even to himself in the form of Christ Jesus.

Still, it’s understandable when people (especially modern people who want everything explained instantly) scoff at such hopeful-yet-unsure answers and ask us, as it were, “how the hell are we meant to deal with a God who seems to be so cruel and capricious, in all of his mysterious and myriad ways?”

Honest Questions

It’s the question that was put to a priest in a short “script” I wrote for the Cinema issue of  the Evangelization & Culture Journal a while back. In the story, a young man who has endured a brutal assault and comes bearing shame and humiliation asks it of a priest and the discussion turns to the opportunistic nature of evil and how the seemingly random nature of chaos makes so little sense. “Sometimes,” the priest muses, “it seems as though darkness and light are battling it out all around us, and some of it’s just spillin’ on us, willy-nilly. Might explain why it all seems so out-of-balance — saints who suffer and bastards who flourish. Or why sometimes what looks like a blessing ends up being a curse, and what seems the worst possible thing can, with a time’s hindsight, become what has formed us in strong ways, resourceful ways.”

The young man does not receive the priest’s inexact ponderings with anything like gratitude, but I think he silently appreciates that the older man doesn’t have any sort of easy, pat sort of answer, or a go-to platitude on offer. I think we all can appreciate honest questions born of frustrated unknowing, and the fact that none of us really have any answers to these questions. There is actually some comfort to be taken from that.

Sometimes protection looks strange

Still, I do believe in Guardian Angels and like to think I have a fair relationship with my own, asking mine for intercessory prayer for myself or others, or to meet with the Guardian Angel of another before what I suspect will be a difficult or uncomfortable encounter, or for the completion of prayers, when I am sleepy. Over in her Forming Intentional Disciples group, Sherry Weddell  recently pointed to this article on the reality and understanding of angels, which I thought was pretty good. I liked this, especially:

 I like to quote the beautiful film Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, in which we see guardian angels going around the city of Berlin. In a scene taking place in a bus in Berlin, we see a totally desperate man. He thinks he wasted his life; he even considers suicide. At this point, we see a guardian angel appearing (the character doesn’t see him) and putting his arm around his shoulders, without saying anything. We can feel that he is transmitting something. We hear the man’s internal rumination suddenly stop, while, little by little, his thoughts start going in another direction. He starts seeing some positive aspects about his life: He remembers a nice gesture he received from a friend, he remembers the people who care about him, and he finally starts taking new heart.

This scene is, in my view, a very beautiful way to explain the guardian angels’ action that can inspire us with good thoughts and desires. They can also act on external circumstances of our lives to protect us in difficult times, to avoid accidents, favor encounters with other people, and so on. All these actions belong to Providence, which is made concrete through them.

One of my favorite U2 videos takes its cue from that film, if you’re interested in checking it out.

Thanks to Sherry Weddell for including this in her post on angels, from St. Bonaventure (2 Sent. Dist. 11 art. 2 q. 1):

Twelve actions of the guardian angels.
1. To rebuke faults
2. To free from the chains of sin
3. To remove impediments to good
4. To bind demons
5. To teach
6. To reveal mysteries
7. To console
8. To comfort and encourage on the way to God
9. To guide and conduct one on that way
10. To cast down armies
11. To mitigate temptations
12. To pray, and to carry prayers to God.

The “Nones” and the Church: “Sometimes God matters so much they can’t stay in the structure.”

I’ve left the idea that “better catechesis” will end disaffiliation w/the church, or with Christianity in general. I have too many well-catechized pals who KNOW their faith but have still walked away.

This piece does a good job of addressing why, and do read it to the end. What people know of the church is simply not jibing with what, and how, it is being taught.

Maya Angelou once said something like “People will forget what you said, and forget what you did, but people will never forget HOW YOU MADE THEM FEEL.” In recent decades, the Catholic Church (and Christianity in general) has made people feel ashamed, furious, sickened, hopeless, impotent, ignored, unheard… I’m just scratching the surface, here.

They’ve watched “leadership” drop every ball, time and again — bishops defaulting to “duck-and-cover” mode. They’ve seen victims given money and empty platitudes (which is the way of the world, not of God); they’ve seen teachable moments go unaddressed.

They’ve compared it to the Gospels and given up.

The Church should help its members feel like it’s got a moral center (and thus a moral authority) that we can depend upon and want to uphold; it should be addressing realities that people are actually living, problems they are actively encountering, and offering a Christocentric and helpful worldview on how to deal. Rather, people are feeling like they are left to figure it out themselves. One more rant about catechesis (poor as it’s been, these 50 years) won’t stop the bleed-out. Addressing the broken and troubled world as it is has become essential. “Development of doctrine” should not be a frightening idea. Even Aquinas admitted he didn’t know it all, had seen more than he’d ever dreamed or could relate.

When faced, as we are, with unprecedented issues, we must confront them and first ask a few questions to discover why society, why science, why the family, why reason itself all seem to be listing askew in ways we have never seen before, and why these things are happening now. And then we must prayerfully discern how we are to deal, spiritually and sacramentally with these new realities that people are living with, whether some want to acknowledge them as new realities or not.

Because there ARE answers to the new questions, and the answers will always reside in Christ. Which means…

Well, which means we shouldn’t be so damned afraid!

The Church has no business being afraid to talk, to reason, to argue, to develop (as it has ever done!) and to make manifest Christ on Earth, even down to his purposeful suffering. A truly Christocentric church has nothing to fear of the world unless it has become itself too much OF the world (a thing with which all of us wrestle).

We must wrestle together (hey, Jacob wrestled with God) if we are to be what we are called to be, and must be: a deep and abiding spring of consolation, refreshment and conscientious formation and sacramental fervor, in service of the Christ.

Folks go with what they know, how it makes them feel. The Church they know feels… well, be my guest and fill in the blank.

***This piece is a reprint of a little rant on Facebook. If you have time, go to the link and check out some of the comments. When I said that I have too many friends who know the faith and have still left, it’s not an exaggeration. As one commenter, Woodeene Koenig-Bricker, astutely remarked, “Nones don’t necessarily live as if God doesn’t matter. Sometimes God matters so much they can’t stay in the structure.”

And that is exactly what my absent friends are saying to me, as they make their slow, reluctant, but inexorable exits. They’re still loving the saints, prayers and devotions of the Church; they’re still hungry for the Eucharistic Christ, but feeling unable to remain in good conscience.

I know I’ve said it before, but I will keep saying it: absolutely nothing is going to get fixed until we see all of our bishops, including the Bishop of Rome, prostrated, making a public act of contrition for the sins of the Church.

The world needs to see the princes of the Church brought to that low, narrow gate—their splendid robes marred with dirt as they seek it. The whole world needs to hear them praying the Confiteor—begging forgiveness before God and the world for “what we have done; for what we have failed to do, through our faults, through our faults, through our most grievous faults.” Satellites should be bringing us views of a Church on its face in every diocese, every parish, praying in one voice, “Forgive us our sins!”

Just because stories of sexual scandal, fiscal mismanagement and more have not been in the headlines lately doesn’t mean any of us have forgotten, nor forgiven. And repairing broken moral authority begins right there, on the ground, bellies in the dirt, making reparations, promising fidelity to the Gospels before the world, fidelity to the faithful before their own comfort or even their safety.

And then, when they haul themselves back up, perhaps the bishops and all the clergy will be ready to address the world as it is, as Christ Jesus would — compassionately, courageously, directly, willing to sit at the table with the sinners, and willing to teach in a way that gives us Christ before all else.

This, by the way, does not meet the case.

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

A 5 Mile Queue for ERII: Bishops Missing a God-Given Cue

We’ve seen nothing like this since the funeral of John Paul II, but in England, an uncountable crowd is queueing up and patiently waiting to quietly file past Queen Elizabeth’s flag-draped coffin. People are being warned that this may involve standing and creeping along for as much as thirty hours in the autumn dampness and chill.

On one hand, it’s not surprising. Aside from authentic grief, there is always a “be here, now” sort of pull to these once-in-a-lifetime sorts of events that helps us recall Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire,” he wrote, “and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”

We instinctively know this about human nature. There are a thousand zeitgeists going on all over the world at any given time, and every one of them, large or small, owes their energy to human mimetic behavior. It’s why your grandfather may have owned a coonskin cap and your grandmother might have screamed herself hoarse in a movie theater, watching A Hard Day’s Night. It’s why demonstrations routinely exceed participation expectations, and protests propel action ever-forward as like urges on like.

So, I’m watching the crowds continue to gather, and the reports of how volunteers are equipped to help people and how many porta-potties are in place, and I can’t help help but marvel at the lackluster rhetoric we’re seeing from religious leaders on the topic of Elizabeth and her faith, saying little-to-nothing on the state of faith in the world today. I can’t help wondering why Catholic and Anglican Bishops are offering such “beige” pablum on the monarch’s faith and saying nothing of or to the crowds of mourners, action-seekers and true disciples. “She was a good Christian,” they’re writing as they haul out some Elizabethan quotes — and they are very good quotes, indeed — but whether Elizabeth was a good Christian or merely a so-so one, we cannot say, any more than we can absolutely know the state of anyone’s soul or can absolutely define what in fact constitutes a “good Christian.” I know that by the measure of many (and often even myself) I am not a “good” one, and so reading this sort of vague drivel amounts to church leadership doing as little as they must in order to clear the inbox and be counted among the prominent voices. The articles will please those who wish to be pleased and move no one else, either toward a Tabernacle or away from one.

MISSING THE MOMENT

But what a moment this is! What visual cues we are being given! And how hugely the leadership of the mainline churches are missing the largest one —  the God-provided cue to speak to the queues! They’re missing the chance to say something real, something valuable and timely, differently hopeful and dare I say it prophetic about the state of faith in the world — and not just the Christian faith, not just the Abrahamic Big Three Monotheisms of Judaism, Islam and Christianity — and why its continued diminishment is eroding and threatening the very underpinnings of what we call civilization. And how the Churches must take the blame for that.

This is the moment for some bold voice within the churches to gesture to these crowds and make note of the fact that, as ever, people want something to love, and to honor, and that as these lines demonstrate,  when human beings have identified what they treasure, they will greatly inconvenience themselves, will even risk health and well-being, to serve that great pearl. Yes, we see it on a smaller scale with summer rock concerts, and sporting events, but at this moment the message is being writ large:  The people are there, and they are hungering, but Britain is solidly post-Christian, as is Europe, and the Americas are not far behind; other faiths are growing only on the extreme and fundamental ends.

This is not God’s fault. And it’s not the fault of the flock, who are showing us right here, right now, that if you show them something they want to love and serve, they will beat a path to possess it. The diminishment of religions lies directly at the feet of churches who are doing a poor job of introducing the sheep to the richest pastures and guiding them there to feed.

So, where is the bishop, where is the cardinal or the rabbi or the imam who is ready to admit that a five-mile queue endured for the chance to walk past a coffin — not even to view the relics of the monarch — is a strong indicator that people are still looking for something greater than themselves and are ready to sacrifice when they find it. More importantly, who is ready to call for real discussion about the failings of organized religion, ready to talk about WHY the churches, even those churches that are deeply conformed to the times, cannot hold the attention of the masses — can’t even get their feet through the doors.

The most fascinating mysteries — for Christians, the Incarnation to start with — are shrugged off while people are entranced with their four-inch screens and whatever is being served up by what Flip Wilson used to call The Church of What’s Happening Now.  They are putting so much energy into serving modern, deep-faked or otherwise unnatural illusions because they’re not connecting with the old and authentic supernatural realities. And, again, that’s not their fault. The messengers who believe they’ve answered a call to bring the All-Loving-One to the people are doing what my granny would call a sh*t-poor job of it.

I’d love to see someone in Church leadership — really, anyone — say all of that and then add,

“So… let’s admit it: the churches are doing something wrong. The churches are too far into themselves, too closely holding on to themselves, ducking under their desks and protectively clinging to their little territories and ministries (“darning their socks in the night when there’s nobody there,”) while what is housed in all the beautiful structures — that would be the hearts, minds and souls who God created, delights in and who (like the Father of the Prodigal), runs out to meet while we are still a long way off — goes neglected. All the lonely people standing on five-mile-long lines to experience a single, fleeting moment that cannot save, that will not feed, go underserved. The churches are seeing to themselves instead of taking a good hard look at their ways and means and discovering where they have dropped the ball and underserved the souls entrusted to them. Some churches, like the Catholic church have plenty of outreach to the bodies — and hurrah for those efforts! — but they’re still not attracting the soul, or healing the soul, or helping the soul to discover the great treasure of Christ!”

THAT would have been something! A bishop calling on all the churches to stop fiddling about and once more the WITH and FOR the people, meeting them where they are, walking with them as Christ walked and reminding them, again and again, that the Creator is right there, reaching for them with a ring and a robe and joyful feast in their honor.

It would take a prophetic and visionary leadership to admit to so great a ball-dropping. Until then… the falling-away and distracted disinterest will continue.

RELATED:

On Charles II and the Value and Power of Ritual

The Stability of the Queen

Image: Katie Chan, Creative Commons

Polio, again? George and Frassati are 2 great intercessors

The news would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago, but it seems that here we are, in the Year of Our Lord 2022, once more facing the scourge of polio.

Officials have said that it is possible that hundreds of people in the state have gotten polio and don’t know it. Most people infected with polio have no symptoms but can still give the virus to others for days or weeks. The lone confirmed case in New York involved an unidentified young adult who was unvaccinated.

I’m not sure how people are going about not getting their kids vaccinated against polio — a vaccine we know works. How are they getting them into elementary schools without proof of vaccination?

However this new threat has arisen, it occurs to me that we have two excellent intercessors to go to with this news, for the sake of the world and for individuals: Cardinal Francis George, OMI, and Blessed PierGiorgio Frassati.

Cardinal Francis George was afflicted with polio at age 13, suffering partial paralysis of his legs and one arm; he did manage to be able to walk with some difficulty but required a brace to support one leg for the last 30 years of his life. Many Catholics are not even aware of it, because George didn’t focus on his difficulties or permit himself to be waylaid by them.

For Bl. PierGiorgio Frassati, polio struck differently. While this social activist and Dominican Tertiary was performing quiet outreach to the poor he encountered in his own Torino neighborhood and surrounding slums, he picked up a particularly aggressive strain of polio. Thinking he had the flu, and not wishing to burden his family (which was already dealing with the impending death of his grandmother), the 24 year-old PierGiorgio took to his bed and died within a week as polio eventually paralyzed his muscles of respiration.

These two very different but valiant Catholic men should become our go-to intercessors as we watch the (hopefully minimal) progress and disruption caused by this new outbreak.

Blessed Pier Georgio Frassati, and courageous Cardinal Francis George, pray for us.

 

Cardinal George Image source: Adam Bielawski, Creative Commons

On Charles III and the Value and Power of Ritual

Most people now living have never seen the level of pageantry that will be coming out of England over the next two weeks, and again when Charles III is crowned in a year. It surpasses, by far, even the pomp and ceremony of a papal election or pope’s funeral. I’m curious as to whether it will inspire or repulse the young.

Images have power, as do words, and while most of the world lives daily in a bath of distraction (social media and otherwise) just now people are paying attention. They’re taking in unusual images. They’re listening to the words. They are being subjected to rhetoric, and not the sort of bombastic, spittle-flecked, politically-motivated and agenda-driven ranting that has become part of our daily dyspeptic fare but a rhetoric of reassurance, offered in calm tones by well-modulated voices — the rhetoric of continuance that is uniquely British in character and pronouncement. Emotion, the cheap and inefficient fuel that drives so much in the 21st Century, is here capped and tucked away. The trumpeters breathe out a fanfare; the Lord Mayor makes a pronouncement; the Prime Minister signs a form in silence. The new King speaks clearly, directly and with a gravity few have expected from him. While his speech is widely praised as being “note-perfect”, its greatest eloquence comes from his blue, narrow-set eyes, which lower at times with a touching humility that catches us off-guard, exposing a controlled yet naked grief each time they are raised. We are reminded that this new-yet-elderly king (who once referred to himself as an anachronism), is after all a man, and one with faults like all of us. He is a man who had a mother and a father who very likely failed him in many ways (as all parents do), giving him acquaintance with the ache and confusion of a love that comes with lessons, and even with expectations.

It is the love that trips all of us up, whether we are parents or children — the love that gives all of us a soft underbelly of vulnerability to each other and (if we are lucky) keeps us human, and humane. One needn’t be a monarchist in order to be moved by the recognizable signs of grief that are common to all of us. In fact, one shouldn’t be.

But let’s keep thinking about what we are watching. Ritual has power; it is transformative and is meant to be. But it is also restorative. It permits time for deep breath and important reorientation — for people to say, “we have lived one way for a long time, considered things from this long-view, this perspective so ingrained that we no longer really notice or appreciate it. It may be time, now, to consider other things; let us think about it all, but calmly, respectfully and with openness to wisdom as we go about the duties before us. They are only duties, but let us give an example that even when one’s private world has been turned upside down, duty matters.”

Keep calm and carry on, indeed.

Watching these early moments in what will be an ongoing grand spectacle out of this small island of ambitious (sometimes ruinous) rulers only emphasizes for me the sagacity of maintaining our rituals, even as generations raised on deconstruction wonder why they are not dismantled.

One thought consistently intrudes: how is this playing to the younger generations, whose lives have been bereft of formal customs and observances beyond sports championships and presidential elections?

Because what we are seeing is so deeply rare and so fraught with grave intention, beyond anything. Is the drama of death and life and civil concerns, all wrapped within this strange, unemotive silence, touching something within them that has until now untapped? Is it making them feel curious about history, or attracted to a rhetoric of smaller feelings and larger words? Will any of it inspire them toward beauty, or feed an instinct for reliable sameness amid necessary change? Will they be struck by the strange reality we are witnessing, where the actions and affairs of a ruling class family with its own share of dislikeable miscreants are somehow deeply felt and shared by ordinary people (who, in regular circumstances, might not think much of them beyond their entertainment value)? Will they want to see more ritual — prescribed and followed rather than fiddled with and “fixed” to conform to passing times and trends — or will they decide there is no value, here, and thus no worth, no need for it?

There is a moment in Rumer Godden’s fine novel, In this House of Brede where a new Abbess is elected and installed within her Benedictine monastery and afterward discusses how moments of deep emotion (especially when they confer a world’s weight of responsibility upon someone’s heart and soul) are greatly helped by attending to the old rites and forms — how, in the midst of all that is changing, one need not be burdened with thought about what to do next: it’s in the Rule; it’s in the Ritual; it’s in the Liturgy. For the Abbess, submitting to her community’s traditions,  from the death of her predecessor until her own ascension, became a kind of resting place. Everyone had their role to play within the protocols, their responsibilities to meet to keep things going in the every day, but no one had to decide on much of anything, which permitted their own thoughts and feelings to come forth without bubbles or froth and thus without creating turmoil.

“That is the blessing of the liturgy,” her wise second agrees, “it wipes out self.” Yes. And in doing so it, quite paradoxically, permits the self some refuge from the inevitable fear, some freedom from fretful flailing as you simply do the thing that is before you, and then the next thing, and in so doing come to realize that each moment is its own, as is each day, and that it is only the singular and dire urgencies that demand so much of us that we dare not breathe, lest we fall apart.

And perhaps that is why even those of us disinclined toward monarchies are watching and will continue to watch this extraordinary unfolding of processions and gatherings, pronouncements and gallantry that has only happened sixty-one times in history, as one sovereign of a constitutional monarchy buries another and then assumes an ancient throne, for as long as it lasts.

Image source

Science and the Sacred Heart: Hello, Mandelbrot Set!

During this month of June — the Month dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in the Church – I have been each day** posting an image of the Sacred Heart with some little thought, either my own or someone else’s to my Twitter and Facebook feeds. The action feeds my own devotion to and meditations on the Sacred Heart, but the thoughtful responses of others is certainly gratifying and sometimes enlightening, too.

There was one response, however that left me gobsmacked. Yes, gobsmacked — a great word but one I don’t use very often, because I am generally pretty hard to shock. Someone on twitter mentioned that she too had been pondering the Sacred Heart but also something that I (being an unmathmatical sort) had never heard of, called The Mandlebrot Set.

In general, I avoid such videos. I’m all for disproving the notion that science and religion are incompatible, just as all the Catholic scientists over the years have done, but my attention span is not what it once was, and hour-long videos are a genuine challenge for me.

So curious was I, however, about how someone on twitter could ponder both the Sacred Heart and the Mandlebrot Set in tandem, that I decided to take a shot on this one, hosted by astrophysicist and professed Christian Jason Lisle.

Full disclosure: Yeah, I did kind of skip through most of the first fifteen minutes, where Lisle gives his bona fides and makes his witness. But then, as soon as he really got going on his topic, I was hooked. Gobsmacked and slack-jawed, actually. The Mandlebrot Set — the endless and eternal nature of it — was staggering and beautiful, mysterious and mesmerizing. And I had two immediate thoughts (three actually, but one I’ll keep to myself, for now).

The first was that I understood why my Twitter respondent had brought the set up within the context of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It’s because the Sacred Heart, as described in the 15th century by the visionary saint Margaret Mary Alacoque bears more than a passing resemblance to the deeply hidden Mandlebrot Set.

Especially if you turn it vertical.

 

And as you see there, it goes on and on, endlessly, endlessly, knowable and unknowable yet ever-present, just like the love of God the Creator, and the Holy Trinity of mind, body and spirit, of Logos and the ever-expanding universe. When Jesus showed Margaret Mary his Sacred Heart, he was showing her how intimately and eternally near he remains with us. A heart that is absolutely at one with all creation, and therefore, within each of us.

Ecce cor meum; Behold my Heart. And ours? Could such cellular and celestial intimacy and connectedness be that true?

The second thought I had, as I beheld that Heart in All Creation, was that from the very beginning of the bible, just 27 lines into it, we have been shortchanging God. Genesis 1:27 reads, “God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

We read this in light of our humanity and kindly allow “well God is fully spirit and thus has no gender, but each sex contains creative and co-creative aspects of God,” which is fine, as far as it goes. But humankind’s vision — particularly whenever it touches on anything related to itself — tends to be rather limited. “See? We’re like God, so God must be like us, alive with our sensibilities!” And then we assign to God all of our human sensibilities — our willingness to console and to condemn, to love and to loathe, to excuse and to execute. Except we forget a few things…

  • “Nor does the Father judge anyone, but he has given all judgment to his Son,” (John 5:22) We forget that God gave all judgement to Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, because all God wants to do, all God can do, being 100% love, is love us and sustain us and wait for us to turn to him, and then re-turn to him, and then love us some more.
  • We forget that so brilliant a theologian as St. Thomas Aquinas — the Angelic Doctor, composer of timeless hymns and the Summa Theologica — declared after a singular vision that everything he had written was dross — as so much straw — because God had shown him something so vast and incomprehensible that it could not be described. So he put down his pen and wrote no more.
  • We forget that we are only mere creatures whose lives “span 70 years, 80 if we are strong” (Psalm 90:10) and so we ought not waste them doing the things God the Creator would not himself do — the judging, the carping, the refusing of mercy toward the mistakes and weaknesses of others, the failing at love, the policing of each other’s souls, the declaring that we know it all. We forget that we are not as gifted as even Thomas Aquinas, so we should mostly just shut up if we think we’re special and, when challenged, try out something like, “God have mercy on me and bless that guy…”.

I mean, I don’t know about you, but I certainly forget all those things.

The Mandlebrot Set had me thinking about what it really means to be “created in the image and likeness of God,” who is limitless; it made me think that every single day, by our own sins, we limit ourselves, and our potential to love, and to understand more, and to reach out instead of closing in on ourselves.

And then to love more.

And every single day, by our sinfulness, we do precisely the opposite of God the Creator of Limitless Possibility, when we beat down on the potential of others through our malicious spite, our gossip, our soul-crushing, disdainful superiority. We make everything smaller, not enlarged, by the smallness of our spirits. And we try to shrink God down, too, to our own thinking.

Clearly, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the Mandlebrot Set both send us a message that we are so much more than all of our best or worst instincts, that our beings go so much further beyond our insecurities and anxieties and our judgements and our prideful delusions

All of which got me thinking it was finally time for me to read Joseph Ratzinger’s ‘In the Beginning’: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, because I want to rethink that whole “image and likeness” part, and broaden my understanding of it — both so I may better understand and love myself, and so I may better adore and wonder at the Triune God, and be surprised in all the ways and places God may be found. Even within you. And within me.

 

I admit, it’s all strange. But then, God is strange. Do yourself a favor and watch the video. Because my goodness gracious me… it’s good to ponder all we don’t know, amid what we do.

**Not on weekends. Most weekends, I take a break from social media, which I have found to be a very worthwhile thing to do.

Images, Creative Commons and Wolfgang Beyer, Creative Commons

Mary, Mother of the Church, Takes a Walk with Jesus

Today is the Memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church, instituted by the Holy Father, Pope Francis. Here is an excerpt of a short little fiction I wrote for the day, a while back:

She was grinding grains of wheat and barley when he came up from behind, startling her with a quick kiss to the cheek that made her jump and give a little cry out loud.

“Yeshua,” she chided as he laughed. “You wouldn’t find this so funny if I spilled the flour into the dirt and we had no bread.”

He poured out a bit of water and sipped it, still smiling as he watched his mother’s clever hands at work. “I would never be leaving you without bread, Eema.”

Leaving. It was a touchy subject, still. Her son had told her days earlier that he would be traveling away from Nazareth, preaching and teaching like his cousin, John, although “differently,” he had chuckled. “Camel skin itches, and I’ve never been as bombastic as he.”

Miriam had sighed and shaken her head in agreement. She’d never quite known what to make of John. Even as an infant he had been boisterous, loud, and relentlessly energetic. Elizabeth swore he had been the same in the womb, and Miriam remembered how her elder cousin had nearly doubled over from the exuberant kicks he’d delivered just as the two women had greeted each other, all those years ago.

And now, John was out in the desert. He’d left his temple service and his established priesthood behind in order to preach repentance—and he was nearly apocalyptic about it, she’d heard. Full of fire, and bringing people to water to be cleansed both inside and out.

A mikvah, but not a mikvah. Something new, and strange.

The world was changing. She didn’t understand it, but her Yeshua said it was “all good.” John’s harsh condemnations, his ersatz mikvah, his radical prophecies about the Messiah. Her son had visited where John was and when he’d come back he seemed different, somehow—deeply settled in one way, but restless too. He would stop his work for a drink and end up gazing far into the horizon, over-occupied in his thoughts, his tools forgotten.

“Did you get washed by John, then?” she had teased as she’d placed a dish of figs and curds before him.

“I did,” he admitted. “Water was cold.”

“And he is well?”

Yeshua nodded and gave a little shrug. “He is John. As John as he ever was. Powerful and prophetic. And still ear-shatteringly loud.” He offered his mother one of the figs. “He sends his love to you, Eema. His very noisy love.”

Interestingly, Jesus wheedles Mary in away very similar to my own sons. And she doesn’t think much of Peter and that motely crew her son runs with. You can read the rest here.

Mary, Mother of the Church, pray for us!

WEB BARLEY BREAD EZEKIEL BREAD WHAT JESUS ATE Lucyin CC BY-SA 4.0

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