Death, sin, and grace

Readings: Jer 20:10-13; Ps 69:8-10.14.17.33-35; Rom 5:12-15; Matt 10:26-33

"And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul" (Matt 10:28). This is the Christian message in a nutshell. Christian faith is faith, which is more than mere belief, that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. One must resist the temptation to use the past tense "rose" in this regard. Christ is risen- active present tense.

Fear of death is perhaps the ultimate enslavement. Yet, it's a safe bet that the vast majority fear death more than we fear anything else. Hope is the flower of faith and love is its fruit. Hence, "perfect love casts out fear." (1 John 4:18). A fear-driven life cannot be a happy life and it cannot be a Christian's life. This is why the Lord often, as in today's Gospel reading, urges his followers not to be afraid (Matt 10:31).

Not fearing death does not entail living recklessly and taking stupid risks. But it does imply taking some risks by acknowledging Jesus Christ before others. Just as not fearing death does not require one to take dumb risks, acknowledging Christ before others does not mean being an obnoxious twit. It does mean being attuned to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and being bold enough not just to acknowledge that Jesus is Lord (this is the fundamental Christian confession) but, when prompted, to boldly proclaim him as such.

What this means above all is striving to live according to Jesus' teachings, particularly those that are most difficult. Because some of his teachings are so contrary to our normal way of living, adhering to them is always countercultural. What Jeremiah says about witnessing "the vengeance" he wants God to take on his enemies for his sake tends to be our human default setting. This reading is chosen at least in part, I think, to stand in contrast to the teaching of Jesus. The Lord doesn't only teach his followers to forgive their enemies, those who hate them, oppress them, and badly mistreat them, he practiced this himself.

As recipients of God's grace through Jesus Christ (by the power of the Holy Spirit), we are to be boldly gracious. Grace builds on nature, which in turn, is built on grace. In Paul's telling, before the Law, there was no sin because to break a law, there has to be a law. Nonetheless, the advent of death brought sin into the world. While there was no Law, death reigned from Adam to Moses.

According to Paul, the Law was given precisely to show us that we cannot keep it. To keep the Law, it bears reminding, is to love God with your whole being by loving your neighbor as you love yourself. It's easy, therefore, to see how a lot of "soul-killing" is suicidal as opposed to being homicidal. It also bears noting, again, that Jesus is not a new Moses.

Most everyone is familiar with these words from the Thirteenth of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love: "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." According to the anchoress and mystic, these words were spoken to her by Jesus. What is usually left out is the beginning of this part of the revelation: "It was necessary that there should be sin..."

As with a number of her revelations, this was an answer she received to a question she asked (she asked a lot of hard questions, the same hard questions many people still ask today). Her question? Why did God allow sin in the first place? The answer she received, as you can see, had nothing to do with human freedom.

A few chapters on in Paul's Letter to the Romans, the apostle wrote: "for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God" (Rom 8:20-21).

This gets to something fundamental: the gratuitousness of grace. As the apostle wrote in the passage that is our second reading, grace is a gift. Gifts aren't earned. Gifts are given freely and have to be freely received. To give a gift and expect a gift in return, or to feel that by accepting a gift you owe the giver, is to participate in an exchange.

God's economy of grace is not an exchange economy. It is through God's grace that we are set free from death (and fear of death) "and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God." Sin is necessary and (not "but") "all manner of thing shall be well."

"I don't wanna hurt her, I only wanna help her"

Is it weird to admit that for me Friday to Friday seems to go faster than Sunday to Sunday? Think back over the history of the Καθολικός διάκονος traditio, I think I've mentioned the rapidity of time's passing quite frequently. In any case, here we are. It's Friday!

Another feature of the Friday traditio is that I often post about something that's been on my mind. Sometimes these thoughts prompt a song and sometimes the chosen song prompts a thought or two. Like today, the thought and the song aren't always so integrally related. But a relation can almost always be found.

As long as the mystery of iniquity is at work in the world, the shadow of the cross will hover over it. More than a poetic image, those words express a reality about suffering and God's response to it. Considering the mystery of suffering, I was heartened that Pope Francis, recognizing her heroic virtues, elevated Sister Lucia dos Santos to the status of Venerable. Her two cousins, Jacinta and Francisco de Jesus Marto, who shared in her experiences with the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima a little more than a century ago, both of whom died young, were declared saints by Pope Francis in 2017, the centenary of their visions.

In the decree, promulgated this week, recognizing Sr. Lucia's heroic virtues, the Holy Father wrote something deeply moving. Discussing the difficulty of cleanly distinguishing her 90 years of subsequent life from her experiences with Our Lady as a child, the Decree states, “is also difficult because much of her suffering was due to them: she was always kept hidden, protected, guarded. One can see in her all the difficulty of keeping together the exceptionality of the events of which she was a spectator and the ordinariness of a monastic life like that of Carmel.” Most of her subsequent life was lived as a Carmelite nun.

Some theologians take issue with some of the horrors the children claimed our Blessed Mother showed them and also with some of the resulting penances these children performed. Such concerns are understandable both from a human and a theological perspective. Mysteries remain mysterious because we cannot explain them, though this does not stop us from attempting to neatly sort, categorize, and clearly explain them, or even to try explaining them away.

There is perhaps no more dangerous idea to the spiritual life of a Christian than the idea of I'm going to call here reciprocity. What I mean by "reciprocity" is the belief that if I pray, fast, give alms, and receive the sacraments, no evil, or at least no serious evil, will befall me. But "Take up your cross and follow me," too, is more than just a poetic expression. Make no mistake, there is also no reciprocity between sinful behavior and obvious divine punishment. After all, the psalmist complained a long time ago about the affliction of the righteous and the seeming flourishing of the unrighteous.

Practicing the spiritual disciplines does not put God in your debt, does not "placate" God in some magical (pagan) way, or any such thing. Nonetheless, God always seeks to bring about your good. But since God's ways are not your ways (or my ways), his ways and means are not easy or often even possible to understand. In the spiritual life, for any given X, X being something good you do, there is no automatic Y, Y being the realization of some desired end, even if the end you seek is a demonstrably "good" one.

Venerable Lucia dos Santos

As far as music goes, in the run-up to this year's festival, Alexis Petridis, writing in The Guardian, seeks to identify the Top Twenty sets ever played at this legendary music festival (see Glastonbury headline sets – ranked!). Of those Petridis identifies, the ones I wish I had there to experience are:

1971- David Bowie
1985- Echo and the Bunnymen
"The kind of intriguing, slightly off-beam set you probably couldn’t get away with in the headline spot these days: Echo and the Bunnymen unexpectedly interspersed their own material with covers of the songs that inspired them, by the Modern Lovers, Television, the Doors and the Rolling Stones"
1987- New Order
1990- The Cure
1997- The Prodigy & Radiohead
1999- REM

Thanks to YouTube, I can at least listen to all or some of these sets. Since yesterday, I have made my way through a lot of these sets and songs. As indicated above, I was most intrigued by Echo and the Bunnymen's 1985 set. The entire performance is available on YouTube. The sound quality isn't the best, but it's good enough. There is also a remastered track of The Cure's 1990 Glaston bury set.

Of the bands mentioned above, the most obscure remain Echo and The Prodigy. Despite not being able to find an isolated video of "She Cracked" from their 1985 Glastonbury set, I am going with it as this week's traditio. Hey, it's still a 1985 live recording. Some weeks it's just about the music. This is one of those weeks.

Eucharist and Evangelization both begin with "E"

Readings: Exodus 19:2-6a; Psalm 100:1-2.3.5; Romans 5:6-11; Matthew 9:36-10:8

Due to traveling, arriving home, and everything that goes along with that, I didn't really have time to compose a reflection on yesterday's readings. This is more of a sketch than a fully developed reflection. I think an interpretive key to the readings can be found at the end of our reading from Exodus: "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation" (Exodus 19:6). This resonates with these words, referring to the enthroned Lamb, found in Revelation: "You made them a kingdom and priests for our God" (Revelation 5:10).

Indeed, as Christians and by virtue of baptism, we all share in the common priesthood of Jesus Christ. As it is stated in 1 Peter, we are "a royal priesthood" (1 Peter 2:9). It's weird to me that after the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, which went to great lengths to reemphasize this reality, we seem bent on attenuating instead of amplifying it or even seeking to reverse it instead of moving it forward.

The highly revered Saint Oscar Romero, in one of his radio addresses, once insisted:

How beautiful will be the day when all the baptized understand that their work, their job, is a priestly work; that just as I celebrate Mass at this altar, so each carpenter celebrates Mass at his workbench, and each metalworker, each professional, each doctor with a scalpel, the market woman at her stand, is performing priestly office! How many cabdrivers, I know, listen to this message there in their cabs; you are a priest at the wheel, my friend, if you work with honesty, consecrating that taxi of yours to God, bearing a message of peace and love to the passengers who ride in your cab

This has bearing on the Gospel vis-à-vis our engagement with "the world." This also has to do with what it means to confess the Church as "apostolic." My guess is that when most Catholics are asked about what it means for the Church to be apostolic the answer would most likely have to do with Apostolic Succession. While this answer is accurate, at least to a certain degree, it is far from complete. An "apostle" is one who is sent. At the end of Mass we are sent, missa, meaning something like to be sent. We are sent on mission (i.e., missio). This is what the Church's apostolicity more than a historical claim.

Isn't this what Jesus, being moved with compassion, does in our Gospel for the Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time Year A of the Sunday Lectionary? He calls and sends apostles to proclaim the Gospel, the Good News, to proclaim Him in word and in deed. The mission in which we (i.e., all of us) are sent to engage at the end of Mass is to evangelize.

Addressing the bishops of the United States last week, Papal Nuncio Archbishop Christoph Pierre highlighted a dimension that often seems to be missing from our Eucharistic Revival, which seems in many ways in competition rather than in concert with the Synodal Path Pope Francis has asked the Church to walk. He spoke about the internal contradiction of Eucharist without a mission, the danger of Eucharist as a self-referential end in itself instead of empowerment for the mission of proclaiming the Gospel to the ends of the earth, of evangelizing.

Christian leadership is not about establishing and then exerting power. Merely telling someone that Jesus is the answer to their deepest questions and longings is pretty thin gruel. Besides, our reading from Romans shows that as Christ's priestly people, our power lies in weakness, not strength. Engagement, what Pope Francis calls a "culture of encounter," is the way of Jesus. So, like Jesus, we engage, we relate, we have compassion.

Archbishop Pierre opened his speech by talking about Synodality. He tells the bishops, "If we have followed the Pope’s lead, then after two years, we should already know some answers to the questions that you are accustomed to hearing from me: Where are we? and Where are we going?" Continuing, he said,

Have we discovered answers to those questions? Do we know what are the true needs of our people? Through our encounters with others, how have we been changed? What have we discerned? What old ways need to be abandoned, and what new ways must we adopt in going forward? Are we prepared to give our people the insights we have gained?" In short, are we moved with compassion by the plight of so many people?

I suppose I could develop this more, but I am going to leave it as is. Especially after my rather odd experience at an evening Mass last night, the Mass I could attend after traveling all day, I really felt the need to address what I think the takeaway from yesterday's readings is for us now. You can read Archbishop Christoph's entire address here.

Chillin' in the Red Rocks

This week finds me in Torrey, Utah. Torrey sits just to the west of Capitol Reef National Park. Last Monday, my wife and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. We had a nice evening going to Mass and then to dinner. But this short trip to one of our favorite places is our main celebration

It's nice to get away. I need to do it more. It takes me a whole day just to relax. I feel quite chill on this rainy afternoon. Sounds blah. While usually I am a lot of things, chill is not one of them.

Every time Holly and I get away, we agree that we need to do so every six months. Then, three years later, we get away again. It's not a complaint as much as a joke. I have a good life, even if I am too busy most of the time.

We drove down late yesterday afternoon and arrived at our destination, a bed and breakfast, at about supper time. It's become our tradition to listen to a Tony Hillerman novel as drive through the wonderfully vast spaces of central, eastern, and southern Utah. Wailing Wind, which features both Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Cree is the book we're enjoying this trip.

Photo I took this morning from the Chimney Rock Overlook, Capitol Reef National Park

As far as today's traditio, I am posting a Navajo Poem- "Naanídeeshdááł" ("I Will Return to You"):

According to the poet who composed it, "Naanídeeshdááł" "examines the love one has for home, The Land - speaking of it as a lost love, a friend, waiting to return to the arms of this birth-land, this culture - home sweet home."

Year I Tenth Monday in Ordinary Time

Readings: 2 Corinthians 1:1-7; Ps 32:2-9; Matthew 5:1-12

Today, the day after the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, we enter Ordinary Time truly and fully. Falling as they do on successive Sundays after Pentecost, which celebration formally brings the season of Easter to an end, the Solemnities of the Most Holy Trinity and the Body and Blood of Christ are a testament to the understandably great pull of Christ’s Resurrection. It is the magnetic attraction of Easter that makes us, as Saint Augustine observed, an Easter people with Alleulia! as our song.¹

Oriented as it is to Sundays, Sundays are always, even during Lent, “little Easters,” Ordinary Time, too, is about the Paschal Mystery of Christ. Our readings today demonstrate that Jesus’ death and resurrection are not merely past events that we come together to remember, but a way of life. Because in baptism we died, were buried, and rose with Christ to new life, post-baptismal life is, or is supposed to be, resurrected life.

In our Gospel reading we heard the magna carta of Christian life: the Beatitudes. Author Kurt Vonnegut, who was not a Christian, once observed:

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. 'Blessed are the merciful' in a courtroom? 'Blessed are the peacemakers' in the Pentagon?²

As the reformer Martin Luther correctly noted in his commentary on Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: “Christ is no Moses.”³ This simply of echo of what is written in the Gospel of Saint John: “because while the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”⁴ Instead of giving the Law, Christ gives grace. It was Christ and Christ alone who satisfied, the only one who could ever satisfy, the Law in both its letter and its spirit.

On this account, it is important to note that in the Beatitudes Jesus does not teach by saying “Thou shalt” and “Thou shall not.” Rather, he teaches in a positive, gracious way: “blessed” are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, those with clean hearts, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted for seeking to live in this always countercultural way.

Living as a Christian is not easy because it almost always goes against our natural human tendencies. I remember bumper stickers that said “To err is human. To forgive is out of the question.” It is easier to hold a grudge than to let one go. As a Christian, which means, among other things, recognizing my own need for God’s mercy, I’ll take grace over karma every time.

It should not be lost on us that being materially rich often makes one puffed up, more assured that s/he has control of this thing called life. Making peace is harder than being indifferent or joining a melee, especially in this era of so-called “culture wars.” Peace is not merely the absence of conflict. While making peace is not a passive endeavor, it certainly isn’t the Orwellian slogan “war is peace.”⁵ There is an inescapable paradoxical aspect to Christian life.

This brings us to the issue of just how to live in this most unusual way. Saint Paul, in our reading from 2 Corinthians, far from teaching the highly popular and detestable heresy that being a Christian means not having to suffer, takes for granted that believers will suffer “affliction.” He is so bold as to state that Christ’s sufferings overflow to us. It is by means of this that God’s “encouragement” and support overflow to us through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

What Paul writes about here is something that must be experienced to be understood. But dying and rising is the mode of Christian life. This is the Paschal Mystery in which, by virtue of our baptism, Christ allows us to share. The Paschal Mystery is the mystery of human existence.

As many of us know experientially, God is never nearer to us than when we suffer, if we let him, even when our suffering is self-inflicted. Resurrected life is sustained by the sacraments, particularly the Sacraments of Penance and Eucharist.

Training prospective deacons in the art of preaching, I am quick to warn against the overuse of personal experience. But it would be a little odd if, preaching on the thirtieth anniversary of my marriage to Holly during a Mass offered for that intention, not to mention it. But marriage, as Pope Saint Paul II insisted, is an intense school of Christian life. To use his phrase, it is a “school of love.”

Moreover, along with the Sacrament of Holy Orders, Holy Matrimony, as Deacon Owen Cummings insists, is a diaconal sacrament, a sacrament of service.⁶ Stated more conventionally, with the Sacrament of Orders, Matrimony is a sacrament at the service of communion. Service to the Church has been part of Holly’s life and my life since before we were married. We met at Church. So, it seems fitting that the occasion of our pearl anniversary finds us at Church serving. This makes us sound way more perfect than we are. We are far from perfect. I can think of no better way to observe this occasion than to participate in Eucharist, in thanksgiving.

What Papa Wojtyla meant by identifying marriage and family life as a school of love, is that this manner of life, being a path to holiness, presents you daily with opportunities to grow in virtue, to practice the Beatitudes. Practicing the Beatitudes through life’s ups and downs is how you taste and see the Lord’s goodness now and is an act of hope for the future.

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1 Saint Augustine. Exposition on Psalm 148.^↩
2 Kurt Vonnegut. “Do Unto Others.” In A Man Without a Country. New York: Seven Stories. 98.^↩
3 Martin Luther. Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, written in 1535..^↩
4 John 1:16.^↩
5 George Orwell. 1984.^↩
6 Owen F. Cummings. "Images of the Diaconate," sec. 2.^↩

Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ

Readings: Deut 8:2-3.14b-16a; Ps 147:12-15.19-20; 1 Cor 10:16-17; John 6:51-58

As with last week’s Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, our celebration today of the Body and Blood of Christ should not prompt a scientific investigation. While what the Church teaches about Christ’s real presence in the consecrated bread and wine is consonant with reason, we tend to get too hung up on how this happens- the physics or, in this case, the metaphysics involved in this mysterious transformation.

In theology, it was noted last week, a mystery isn’t something utterly unknowable. Theologically, a mystery is something we know because God has revealed it. While we can, do, and should employ reason to make sense of these mysteries- theology is still best described as "faith seeking understanding"- reason cannot fully comprehend divine mysteries. In fact, reason only barely scratches the surface of divinely revealed realities.

Not only everything we do but everything we are flows out from and back to the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the intersection in space and time “of Jesus' life as the Son of God who lived a fully human life, died, rose and is present in the church today.”¹ In our day, what we need to focus on is not scientific explanations for the transformation we believe occurs but what this transformation is supposed to effect.

The effect I am talking about can be expressed in one word: koinonia. As you probably guessed, koinonia is a Greek word. It is the word Saint Paul used in our second reading last Sunday. If you remember, our so-called “epistle” reading last week was from the salutation found at the end of the apostle’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. Its ending is Trinitarian: “The grace of our Lord Jesus and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”²

“Fellowship” in that sentence by Paul is a very weak translation of koinonia. A better translation is easy to make: communion. It is koinonia, communion, that not only makes three divine persons one God, living and true, or that links today’s solemnity to last week’s, communion, koinonia, is what makes us the Body of Christ, his verum corpus, the one with hands, feet, eyes, and a heart.

This week, too, it is our reading by Saint Paul that comes to the fore: “Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body, for all we all partake of the one loaf.”³ My dear sisters and brothers, we are the Body of Christ. Our partaking of the one bread and the one cup makes us what we are and is continually transforming us into what we are to become.

Through the Eucharist, Jesus is not just present to us, or even merely here among us- though both are true.⁴ What the Lord seeks to accomplish through the ordinary acts of eating bread and drinking wine, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is to be present in and through you wherever you are. It is through the Eucharist that, again, by the Holy Spirit, he wants to make us one as he is one with Father so that the world may believe that he was sent by the Father.⁵

You are to take the communion you experience here with you and make it, make him, present everywhere you go: home, work, school, hiking, etc. This is your missio, your mission. As Pope Benedict XVI insisted: “The Church exists to evangelize.”⁶ Without the Eucharist, there is no true evangelization.

Jesus’ statement to his disciples during the Last Supper Discourse in Saint John’s Gospel is a complete ecclesiology, a comprehensive explanation of the Church: “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”⁷ Love here is a translation of another Greek word: agape. Love is the essence of communion. For a lot of people, this is not their experience of Church.

Just as agape is the essence of koinonia, kenosis, or self-emptying, is the essence of agape. God’s very nature is kenotic, that is, self-emptying, other-directed love.⁸ Creation is kenosis. Incarnation is kenosis. Eucharist is kenosis. It is this essence, this being (in Greek ousios), with which Christ seeks to imbue his Church. Because the Eucharist makes the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist, divine being is communicated through the Church to all her members.

As the Bread of Life, the Eucharist is meant to be shared. For Christians, what is sacred cannot be secret. Christianity is not a mystery cult, like those that proliferated in the ancient Mediterranean world and that once again flourish in our day. Such cults are inherently elitist, separating the insiders from the outsiders, the initiated from the hoi polloi. To God, no one, no person, belongs to the undifferentiated many, the “them.” Rooted as it is in the Eucharist, being Catholic is the opposite of being sectarian.

Elitism and sectarianism have no place in Christian life, the essence of which is koinonia. For a Christian there is no us and them, only us- those loved so much by God that for their sake “he gave his only Son.”⁹ On this Solemnity, let us take to heart the reality that the only convincing proof, or disproof, that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ are the lives of those of us who partake of it. Then, let us take up our mission to “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.”¹⁰

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1 Andrew Hamilton, S.J. “Corpus Christi in a world where the bodies are hidden.” La Croix International. 10 June 2023.^↩
2 2 Corinthians 13:13.^↩
3 1 Corinthians 10:17.^↩
4 Second Vatican Council. Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy [Sacrosanctum Concilium], sec. 7.^↩
5 John 17:21.^↩
6 Pope Benedict XVI. Homily for Mass for the Opening of the Synod of Bishops. 7 October 2012.^↩
7 John 13:35.^↩
8 See Philippians 2:1-11.^↩
9 John 3:16.^↩
10 Roman Missal. The Order of Mass, sec. 144.^↩

Retro-itinerary: reading, a movie, plus a song

Friday to Friday goes pretty fast. It's been pretty quiet, fairly routine for me this week. Of course, the routine for me is quite busy. I've been enjoying the very mild and not hot weather we've been having here along the Wasatch Front.

Two weeks ago, on Hulu, I stumbled across the series Hitler: The Lost Tapes of the Third Reich. The series is based on audio recordings made in the 1970s with those who knew Hitler. As shows go, it was pretty thin gruel, but interesting enough for me to watch all the episodes. Watching this series did lead me to check out and read German historian Heike Görtemaker's 2011 book Eve Braun: Life With Hitler, which I finished last night. I found her book fascinating.

Just as I was finishing Görtemaker's book, I received D.J. Taylor's updated biography of George Orwell- Orwell: A New Life. This is an update of his award-winning 2003 bio Orwell: A Life. Taylor's biography of Orwell is widely considered to be, at least for now, the definitive biography. According to Blake Morrison, who reviewed Taylor's new book for The Guardian, the updated bio is

eight chapters and 100 pages longer, draws on various new caches of material, mostly letters. It doesn’t offer shocking revelations. But nor is it a reprise of the first book, except for the short thematic interludes between the main chapters

The first thing I ever read by Orwell was his short story A Hanging. I was a junior in high school and read it as an assignment for English class. My opposition to the death penalty started with reading this powerful work. To this day, my personal politics have been shaped by George Orwell. One book on Orwell that I have to mention is the late Christopher Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters.

John Hurt as "Winston" and Suzanna Hamilton as "Julia" in 1984

During the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, 1983 (40 years ago), I went on to read Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, 1984, and A Brave New World. Suffice it to say, I was never the same after that summer.

As you may or may not know, George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Blair. I've long thought that using Eric Blair as a pen name would be quite clever. I have to remark that when the Michael Radford-directed movie 1984 came out, it matched up pretty well with my imagining of the book when I read it the previous year. I am also starting Moisés Naím's The Revenge of Power.

The Eurythmics recorded the soundtrack for the movie 1984. Our traditio for this summer Friday is an extended mix off the 1984 soundtrack: "Julia"-

Koinonia: One God, three persons

The end of our second reading is from the conclusion of Saint Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians. Koinonia is the Greek word translated in the New American Bible as "fellowship." Fellowship is a very weak translation of koinonia. What word would work better, you might ask? Easy. "Communion" is a much better translation.

This word can serve as a link between today's Solemnity and our observance next week of Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ. You see, all this talk of being transformed, of sharing in the divine nature, of being reborn in baptism as children of Father, through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit matters. It isn't, or at least shouldn't be, just a bunch of abstract twaddle. God, who is a tri-unity of persons, is koinonia. The Church, then too, is to be koinonia.

I'll be really honest. I don't think many people, at least in so-called "advanced" countries, experience the Church as kononia. This isn't just sad. It is catastrophic when the Church fails to be what she is meant to be. Because most Catholics tend to prioritize divine unity over God's revealed tri-unity, which really amounts to a kind of material modalism, most Christians remain, in the words of Karl Rahner, "mere monotheists." Mere monotheism has practical consequences. It tends to result in mistaking strict doctrinal conformity with unity. Conformity can't tolerate diversity.

Strictly policed conformity is not unity. Genuine communion, genuine community, real koinonia doesn't just tolerate or accept diversity, it positively requires it! Just look at the filoque, the phrase inserted very late into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed that asserts that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father "and the Son" (filoque means "and the Son"). At least for Roman Catholics, acceptance of the filoque is not grounds for not being communion.

Because whether one believes the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or from the Father only is very fundamental, it usually results in quite different doctrinal and even practical differences. Both are Trinitarian. This is the signicance of hearing what the apostle wrote a few decades after Jesus' resurrection concerning even an very early Christian understanding of God and of the Church.

The essence of koinonia, as our Gospel reading shows is self-sacrificing love. In the New Testament, especially in the Johannine corpus (i.e., the Gospel According to Saint John along with the first, second, and third letters of John), including our Gospel for today, the Greek word agape is used. Just as the essence of koinonia is agape, the essence of agape is kenosis. Kenosis is the ordinary Greek verb for emptying. In this context, it means emptying yourself out of love.

I realize this is a quite dense reflection. But I hope it is not abstract. On the contrary, I hope it is very concrete.

Next Sunday's Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ is not a celebration of the consecrated species. It is a celebration of what our communion makes us: the Body of Christ. Theologically, I am going with the late Jesuit theologian Henri DeLubac. In some of his work in historical theology, DeLubac noted that over several centuries there was a slow reversal in what was meant by Christ's "mystical" body (i.e., corpus mysticum) and his "true" body (i.e., verum Corpus). On this view, the Church in her members is the verum corpus and the mystically transformed bread and wine are the Lord's mystical Body.

Either way, koinonia created by agape made real by kenosis is what it's all about. If not this, then you must content yourself with abstract twaddle.

What I am trying to get across is stated well in our scripture reading for Evening Prayer on this Solemnity:

Strive to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, as you were called to one hope of your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all (Ephesians 4:3-6- New American Bible translation differs slightly from the one in the Liturgy of the Hours)

Life's dialectic: love, hate, and indifference

Today is the day, I guess. As noted a few Sundays ago, I have felt the need to re-dedicate myself to this small patch of cyberspace. One of the things I want to get back to is posting a Friday traditio. Because it's been a while since I have posted them regularly, the Καθολικός διάκονος Friday traditio consists of a song or a piece of music that is worth handing on. In Latin traditio is a noun that refers to what is handed on. By contrast, tradere is a verb that indicates the act of handing on.

In addition to a song, I usually post some thoughts from the preceding week. Sometimes it is a coherent observation and sometimes my commentary is multifaceted, one thought not necessarily flowing out from or into others. Oftentimes, my thought is related to the song I am posting.

Ian Curtis, by Zoa Studio

Today's traditio is a live version of U2's "With or Without You." Released as the lead single the band's 1987 album The Joshua Tree, "With or Without You" was ranked 131st on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of the top 500 songs of all-time. In 2017 the band a live performance at Abbey Road Studios. The program was "U2 at the BBC."

It's a nice, lightly orchestrated version of the song with the band front and center. You can hear Adam Clayton's nice bass work. Like most bassists, Clayton is the least heralded member of the band. Another nice aspect of this delicious live performance is Bono's evocation of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" toward the end of the song. This is a nice video with Bono talking about Joy Division's Ian Curtis, who left us far too soon.

Especially now, we seem to forget that to love someone, to really love an other, is to make yourself vulnerable. Love is always a risk. There is no hurt the rivals a broken heart. As Leonard Cohen sang, it's the cracks that let in the light. These things, until very recently, were common wisdom. Hate is not the opposite of love. The opposite of love is indifference.

Pope Francis speaks often of indifference. In a video message to the Fifth Festival of the Social Doctrine of the Church, delivered on 29 November 2015, the Holy Father said

Our life is made up of many things, a torrent of news, of many problems: all this leads us not to see, not to be aware of the problems of the people who are near us. Indifference seems to be a medicine that protects us from involvement and becomes a way of being more relaxed. This is indifference. But this non-involvement is a way of defending our selfishness, and saddens us

You don't play life not to lose. You play to win. In life, love is victory, the ultimate victory. Christ's resurrection shows us that love conquers even death. So, love can tear us apart or love can hold us together. There is a dialectic of love.

Like it or hate it, this is the music of my people. It's nice to resume the tradition of the traditio: