We need God's mercy because only God satisfies us

For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. Just as you once disobeyed God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now disobeyed in order that, by virtue of the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. For God delivered all to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all (Rom 11:29-32)

Continuing my series on scriptural reflections for Sundays using, for the time being, our second readings, currently taken from St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, which this week as last deal with the Jews in light of Jesus Christ, I wonder how many homilies this Sunday will deal with this issue at all. It is safe to say, not many. The gifts of God are, indeed, "irrevocable," as St. Paul indicates. This means that when we use the term "Old Testament" to refer to the Hebrew Scriptures, we must be conscious of doing so only in a chronological way, denoting merely the fact that these writings not only came before our uniquely Christian Scriptures, which we refer to as the "New Testament," but are necessary to even make sense of our own Scriptures and, more importantly, the One they proclaim, Jesus Christ. The Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum), makes this very clear: "God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New" (par. 16).

God is not deterred by our disobedience, as the whole divine plan of salvation, set in motion at the fall of our first parents, demonstrates. This is why in the great Exsultet, sung each year at the Easter Vigil, we proclaim: O felix culpa, quæ talem ac tantum méruit habére Redemptórem." (literally translated- "O happy fault that merited to have such and so great a Redeemer" diaconal bow to WDTPRS). To us, who are, at least materially speaking, semi-Pelagians a good deal of the time, Paul's stark statement can seem disturbing instead of comforting, speaking as he does of both Christians and Jews: "For God delivered all to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all."

Being a Christian, contra ideas about holiness being gauged by meticulously observing the 613 mitzvot, is recognizing our constant need for God's mercy, which is given us in Christ and realized, that is, appropriated, through the sacraments, which is why we have a Sacrament of Penance.

In French, the word for thank you is merci. Merci is only a bit of what is called faux ami, that is, "a false friend." False friends are false cognates, words that are phonetically similar or identical to English words, but mean something different. In the case of merci, the origins of this word are the same as our English word "mercy." However, it is unusual for it be used in French to mean something like to show forbearance for or to take pity on another. But our need for God's mercy given in Christ and made available to us by the power of the Holy Spirit certainly constitutes part of our thanksgiving, our Eucharist.

Ministry is charity, that is, becoming myself

It's hard to believe that summer is almost over. Nonetheless, it has been a good and mostly restful summer for me this far, by the mercy of God. I am grateful for this because I sorely needed it. Not being so busy has given me time to pray and reflect more, to do some recalibration, especially concerning my ministry, which was demanding way too much of my time and energy. Things are pretty well set for the current year, but beyond that I think more discernment will be required, a judgment that seeks to take all the factors of reality into account, hopefully resulting in an intelligent judgment.

I think anyone in Christian ministry, at least someone who belongs in ministry, wonders from time-to-time whether anything they do makes a difference, only be reminded over and again that faith, hope, and love are not something we generate ourselves. Hence, there really are no metrics for measuring the success of one's ministry, at least not any the really that matter, that tell you anything meaningful. Very often we work hard to apply instrumental reasoning to our endeavors, thereby seeking to reduce the Mystery to our measure.

Msgr. Giussani wrote a pamphlet entitled The Meaning of Charitable Work. While performing charitable works certainly requires us to move beyond ourselves, there is nothing wrong with pointing out, as Giussani does, that we perform works of charity "so that we may learn to fulfill the task of becoming ourselves."

Charity personified as a mother with three infants, by Anthony Van Dyck, ca. 1627-1628

Of course, all ministry is charitable work, that is, caritas, or agapé. Charity should never be reduced in the way we are prone to reduce it, using it the restricted modern way, to simply mean benevolent giving, with its implied condescension.

Because it is part of being human to be interested in others, charitable work satisfies a need of mine. Don Gius observed that "it is Christ who has enabled us to understand the ultimate reason for this, revealing the ultimate law of being and of life: charity." Hence, the most elemental part of being human, the supreme way we can see that the Mystery is our origin and destiny, is our need "to share in the being of others, to live in communion." According to Gius, "Only Jesus Christ reveals this to us, because He knows what everything truly is, who God, from whom we are born truly is, what Being truly is." So, he continues, "I am able to understand the word 'charity' when I remember that the Son of God, loving us did not send us His riches (as He was able to do) and revolutionize our situation; instead He became poor like one of us: He 'shared' our nothingness." Hence, we perform charitable works "in order to live like Christ," which means nothing other than fulfilling "the task of becoming" myself.

A deep diaconal bow to my friend Maria Elena for bringing this pamphlet by Msgr. Giussani to my attention yesterday.

Essence precedes existence, not the other way 'round

It seems to me that, at root, the riots in the U.K. have an existential cause that has to be considered by Christians before we start in about the decline of civilization, for which I agree these riots do not bode well, or blather on about race, economic policies, politics, etc. After all, civilization, especially Western civilization, did not arise in a vacuum, but was built on a solidly Christian foundation, which is a rather petrified way stating what I want to say. It does bring up the questions that I very much look forward to Peter Hitchens addressing in his Mail on Sunday column. As with the events in Norway, these riots bring up the question, once again, of civilizational suicide rooted in an existential cause, namely the loss of the transcendent aspect of being human ("Yet you have made them little less than a god, crowned them with glory and honor" Psalm 8:6), not grasping the mystery of our I.

I know Morrissey stepped in it when in Poland he linked the killings in Norway with KFC (remember Meat is Murder? He was serious then and is now), but this old, lovely Smith's song gets at it. I ask, when will the Church stop its collaboration with government, schools, business in flattening desire? This can be overcome in no other way than by the Church being the Church, not another bureaucracy, or social welfare agency, which are what I think people refer to when they express disdain for "organized religion," but truly Christ's Body, which means living in fidelity to the truth (the journey to which is experience), giving witness and telling others what we have seen, heard, touched and tasted.

With Von Balthasar, I believe the center of the Church is Marian. So, it is to her we turn, poor banished children of Eve that we are, asking her to help us understand that "the nature of the Christian experience is seen by the fact that it is able to awaken the sense of mystery in the 'I'" helping us ask the human question ("Whoever Is In Christ Is A New Creation", pg. 6).

And, startlingly, the voice of Jesus also says to you: 'what are you looking for?' [John 1:35-39] Jesus speaks to you today, through the Gospel and his Holy Spirit. He is your contemporary! He seeks you even before you seek him! While fully respecting your freedom, he approaches each one of you and offers himself as the authentic and decisive response to the longing deep within your hearts, to your desire for a life worth living- PP Benedictus from his Apostolic Vistit to Croatia in June

Noted fragments from a few years past

I keep a reading notebook in which I jot down both long and short passages from books that simply strike me, move me, provoke me, or, stated simply, correspond with my heart. This afternoon I came across one from 5 or 6 years ago, I don't believe I used any of the quotes I recorded in this particular notebook for anything. Among the books from which I gathered quote are books I read from were Austerlitz, a book by one of my all-time favorite authors, the late W.G. Seabald, Father Joe, by Tony Hendra, which remains one of the best I've read over the past ten years or so, and Ignorance, by another author whose works my life would be poorer without, Milan Kundera. Also included are bits by Susan Howatch, whose Starbridge series of novels are marvelous expositions on the spiritual life and a bit by the Dane, Kierkegaard- not necessarily in that order.

From Austerlitz:

I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is instantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on

Seabald writing about the Palace of Justice in Brussels

the largest accumulation of stone blocks anywhere in Europe...this huge pile of seven hundred thousand cubic meters contains corridors and stairways leading nowhere and doorless rooms and halls where no one would ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and representing the innermost secret of all sanctioned authority

Palace of Justice- Brussels, Belgium

From Ignorance

"The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering". So nostalgia is the suffering caused by and unappeased yearning to return"

Also by Kundera from Ignorance

All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind. But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment

From Søren Kierkegaard's journal for May 1843 "Faith has hope of this life...but only by virtue of the absurd, not because of human reason; otherwise it would be mere worldly wisdom."

From Susan Howatch's The High Flyer said by Anglican priest, Fr. Lewis Hall:

...since we see through a glass darkly there are inevitably going to be times when we're obliged to live with uncertainty. Only the narrow-minded think they know the truth about everything, and their certainty is usually a response born of fear

Tony Hendra from Father Joe

A saint is a person who practices humility. Humility in the face of wealth and plenty, humility in the face of hatred and violence, humility in the face of strength, humility in the face of your own genius or lack of it, humility in the face of pain and death. Saints are driven to humbling themselves before all the splendor and horror of the world because they perceive there to be something divine in it, something pulsing and alive beneath the hard dead surface of material things, something inconceivably greater and purer than they...

"I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered..."

For our traditio today we're staying to close to the ground, stripped down, from the heart, none of which is to say hopeless, just the opposite: hope-full. So, In a Big Country live fits the bill, pays the bill, for me today.

"So take that look out of here, it doesn't fit you/Because it's happened doesn't mean you've been discarded/Pull up your head off the floor, come up screaming/Cry out for everything you ever might have wanted/I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered/But you can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered"

This is one of those songs that indisputably has the requisite Celtic spirit, which is explains why it has always been a spirtual song to me.

St. Lawrence, deacon and martyr

St. Lawrence, deacon of Rome and martyr, distributing alms to the poor

In this age of short attention spans and even shorter memory, it is difficult for us to communally maintain the remembrance of someone over a long period of time. This is just where the Church comes to our aid. Over the course of each liturgical year we remember holy women and men from all the ages of the Church. Some saints were venerated very early on, their cult (not used in the contemporary sociological sense, but in the sense of those who venerated saints, fervently seeking their heavenly intercession) being very large. The cult of a given saint was typically most deeply rooted in the local community to which s/he belonged. So, it is in Rome to this day with the holy deacon, St. Lawrence of Rome.

Today we remember St. Lawrence, a deacon of Rome, who was a martyr. Deacon Lawrence lived in the third century, his life spanning the years roughly from 225-258. In those early centuries, during which the Church was persecuted, Rome had only seven deacons who served the Roman Church and who worked side-by-side with the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. After Pope Sixtus himself was made a martyr for the faith, the prefect of Rome arrested Lawrence, who, along with the other deacons administered the temporal affairs of the Church. The prefect demanded that Lawrence hand over to him the Church's wealth. St Ambrose, the great bishop of Milan, is the earliest source we have about these events and tells us that Lawrence was given three days by the civil authorities to round up the Church's wealth so that he could turn it over.

Over the course of the three days, Lawrence worked feverishly to give all that belonged to the the Church to the poor so that there would be nothing left to hand over to the Roman prefect. On the third and final day, Lawrence, heading up a small Christian delegation, went before the prefect and when told one final to time to hand the Church's treasures over, Lawrence did so by presenting the prefect with the Church's poor, crippled, blind, and suffering, saying that these were the Church's true treasures. He is reported to have said, "The Church is truly rich, far richer than your emperor."

For this act of defiance he was martyred by being grilled on a gridiron.

St. Lawrence truly demonstrated diakonia, which is nothing other than self-sacrificing service for others, self-emptying service, in imitation of the Deacon par excellence, our Lord Jesus Christ.

St. Lawrence, holy martyr, you set an example for deacons throughout the ages, pray for us. As a deacon, I feel quite comfortable asking on my own behalf and that of my brother deacons for your prayers this day, that we, too, might render faithful service to and for God's People, like St. Lawrence.

I also draw your attention, dear reader, to Dr. Ditewig's post this morning in which he helps us to grasp the contemporary significance of what we learn from the story of the martyrdom of the holy deacon Lawrence: Happy Feast Day to My Hero!

Edith Stein: Christian witness

Today is the Memorial of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, perhaps better known by her given name, Edith Stein. She was Jewish by birth and converted to Christianity as an adult. She was a student of Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, a school of philosophy that also included Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and several luminaries. She was a brilliant philosopher. In 2007 philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a very good on her philosophy, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue: 1913-1922, which is a good, albeit very serious introduction to her writings and her phenomenological method.

I have what might be called my own constellation of saints, my own heavenly calling circle. St. Teresa Benedicta belongs to this group, along with St. Gianna Molla, St. Stephen, St. Martin of Tours, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Joseph, Bl. Pope John Paul II, along with few others who occupy the periphery.

As with most saints, we are all too eager to reduce the witness of Edith Stein, to make her story something sad and sentimental, when, in fact, hers is a story of glorious triumph! Because she was and remains Christ's, she overcame the world in the way all Christians are called to overcome it. This explains our eagerness to reduce her: it alleviates our call to experience the paradox so central to being a Christian disciple- dying in order to live.

I'll end with this injunction by St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross:

"Every true prayer is a prayer of the Church; by means of that prayer the Church prays, since it is the Holy Spirit living in the Church, Who in every single soul 'prays in us with unspeakable groanings'."