Christe eleison

Yesterday, preparing for a retreat I am leading next weekend, which will be the occasion of a social media absence (I will pre-load my Friday traditio), I was preparing my presider's book for Stations of the Cross, which will be the first event of the retreat. The retreat will be at The National Shrine of Divine Mercy, located just North of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

The Stations of the Cross I am using are those composed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger back in 2005. While it is always opportune to pray for Christ's Bride, the Church, it seems especially appropriate given that next week the Conclave to select the next Pope will begin. Either the Conclave will be still being happening when we begin our retreat, or we will have a brand new Roman Pontiff. In either case, given the wounds the Church has inflicted on Herself, as the not-so-faithful Bride, we need to pray to the ever-faithful Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, to purify and bless His Church and all of us who comprise Her.

This morning I offer the Ninth Station of the Stations of the Cross- Jesus falls for the third time- for some consideration in these days leading up the Conclave:

V/. Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi.
R/. Quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum.

It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone in silence when he has laid it on him; let him put his mouth in the dust - there may yet be hope; let him give his cheek to the smiter, and be filled with insults. For the Lord will not cast off for ever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion, according to the abundance of his steadfast love (Lam. 3:27-32).

Meditation: What can the third fall of Jesus under the Cross say to us? We have considered the fall of man in general, and the falling of many Christians away from Christ and into a godless secularism. Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in his own Church? How often is the holy sacrament of his Presence abused, how often must he enter empty and evil hearts! How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that he is there! How often is his Word twisted and misused! What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words! How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him! How much pride, how much self-complacency! What little respect we pay to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where he waits for us, ready to raise us up whenever we fall! All this is present in his Passion. His betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart. We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison ­ Lord, save us (cf. Mt 8: 25).

Prayer: Lord, your Church often seems like a boat about to sink, a boat taking in water on every side. In your field we see more weeds than wheat. The soiled garments and face of your Church throw us into confusion. Yet it is we ourselves who have soiled them! It is we who betray you time and time again, after all our lofty words and grand gestures. Have mercy on your Church; within her too, Adam continues to fall. When we fall, we drag you down to earth, and Satan laughs, for he hopes that you will not be able to rise from that fall; he hopes that being dragged down in the fall of your Church, you will remain prostrate and overpowered. But you will rise again. You stood up, you arose and you can also raise us up. Save and sanctify your Church. Save and sanctify us all.

Pater noster, qui es in cælis:
sanctificetur nomen tuum;
adveniat regnum tuum;

"I went on search for something real"

Due to the overwhelming busyness of my life some weeks deciding on a traditio is very difficult. I like to post something that arises from my experience, or is expressive of my experience, over the preceding week. The fact of the matter is, uncharacteristically, I did not listen to much music this week. Just as I was pondering this post and having a little bit of a sinking feeling, a friend came to my rescue (don't worry it's not Joe Cocker singing "With A Little Help From My Friends," though I love that version of the song). I am terribly sad that I wasn't able to post yesterday, which was the liturgical Memorial of the glorious martyrs Sts. Perpetua and Felicity, c'est la vie!

The friend who helped me is one of my most helpful friends, Fred Kaffenberger. The song is "February Seven" by the Avett Brothers. I want include Fred's "take" on this song (the only alteration I made to his original was to embed the link to the story about bassist Bob Crawford's daughter in the text):

_________________________________________________________________________________

During my commute, I was listening to this song, and I asked myself how it is possible for these guys to have such an awareness and intelligence— what is the origin of this intelligence?

"There's no fortune at the end of the road that has no end. / There's no returning to the spoils / Once you've spoiled the thought of them. / There's no falling back asleep / Once you've wakened from the dream / Now I'm rested and I'm ready, / I'm rested and I'm ready to begin. / I'm ready to begin."

and then the DJ told the story of what happened when Bassist Bob Crawford's daughter started having seizures from brain cancer.

The DJ mentioned that the band could've replaced Crawford, but instead supported him as he took time off to take care of her, and the DJ thought that it was really nice of them not to drop him and move on. Instead, it's evident to me that it's precisely taking the events of life seriously that is critical to their music. That is, the crisis is educating them about life. It's not something extra or nice to embrace reality in all its aspects, but instead it's a critical tool for living…

The date for the Conclave is set

Just moments ago it was announced that during the eighth General Congregation of the College of Cardinals during this interregnum it was decided that the Conclave will begin on Tuesday, 12 March 2013. This means that Mass pro eligendo Romano Pontifice will be celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica that morning. After the Mass the Cardinal electors will enter into Conclave.

Let's not forget that St. Joseph, the most chaste spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is the Patron of the Universal Church. His Solemnity, which in the United States, oddly, is not a holy day of obligation, is 19 March. It is customary to pray a Novena in the days leading up to 19 March. Since Novenas, as the name indicates, are 9 days, we begin on 11 March, which is perfect for the Conclave.

Here is the Novena prayer, the prayer we pray each day of the 9 days:

Saint Joseph, you are the faithful protector and intercessor of all who love and venerate you. I have special confidence in you. You are powerful with God and will never abandon your faithful servants. I humbly invoke you and commend myself, with all who are dear to me, to your intercession. By the love you have for Jesus and Mary, do not abandon me during life, and assist me at the hour of my death.

Glorious Saint Joseph, spouse of the immaculate Virgin, Foster-father of Jesus Christ, obtain for me a pure, humble, and charitable mind, and perfect resignation to the Divine Will. Be my guide, my father, and my model through life that I may merit to die as you did in the arms of Jesus and Mary.

Loving Saint Joseph, faithful follower of Jesus Christ, I raise my heart to you to implore your powerful intercession in obtaining from the Heart of Jesus all the graces necessary for my spiritual and temporal welfare, particularly the grace of a happy death, and the special grace I now implore: (Mention your request). Guardian of the Word Incarnate, I am confident that your prayers on my behalf will be graciously heard before the throne of God

Let us place first among our intentions we entrust to St. Joseph's intercession the Cardinal electors as they seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit in selecting a new Roman Pontiff.

Patriarch Kirill to his friend Pope Benedict

Last Thursday, at the invitation of the Ironic Catholic, I posted something by His Holiness, Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus (I just had to take his new title out for a test-drive), which I took from Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, about the importance of bearing witness to the truth (see Pope Benedict XVI: a fond farewell). Yesterday I became aware of a letter written by His Beatitude, Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, to Pope Benedict on his retirement. The friendship between these two men of God goes back many years, pre-dating the papacy of Josef Ratzinger's and Vladimir Gundyayev's patriarchy. They hold one another in high esteem and great affection.

I was gratified that Patriarch Kirill also focused on Pope Benedict's commitment to bearing witness to the truth in a relativistic age:

Your Holiness:

In these exceptional days for you, I would like to express the feelings of brotherly love in Christ and respect.

The decision to leave the position of Bishop of Rome, which you, with humility and simplicity, announced on February 11 this year, has found a ready response in the hearts of millions of Catholics.

We have always been close to your consistent ministry, marked by uncompromisingness in matters of faith and unswerving adherence to the living Tradition of the Church. At a time when the ideology of permissiveness and moral relativism tries to dislodge the moral values of life, you boldly raised your voice in defence of the ideals of the Gospel, the high dignity of man and his vocation to freedom from sin.

I have warm memories of our meeting when you were elected to the Roman See. During your ministry we received a positive impetus in the relations between our Churches, responding to the modern world as a witness to Christ crucified and risen. I sincerely hope what developed during your active participation, a good trusting relationship between the Orthodox and the Catholics, will continue to grow with your successor.

Please accept my sincere wishes for good health, long life and help from above in prayer and in your theological writings.

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace" (Romans 15:13).

With love in the Lord,

+ Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia

Security in acknowledging my insecurity

On Sundays I often like to offer a reflection on the readings for Mass. This week it's a little tricky because many parishes will use the readings for Year A because of the Scrutinies they celebrate for the Elect (i.e., those who will be baptized at the Paschal Vigil this year), even though we are in Year C of the lectionary cycle. Since my parish is using the Year C readings, I want to offer a reflection on the second reading, taken from St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, in which he reflects on the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. It should seem a little odd the he is doing so in a letter to a Church largely made up of Gentile Christians. Unpacking that would require more work than I want to attempt today.

These things happened as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil things, as they did. Do not grumble as some of them did, and suffered death by the destroyer. These things happened to them as an example, and they have been written down as a warning to us, upon whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore, whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall (1 Cor. 10:10-12)

I have to say that this is one of those verses that makes me wonder how anybody can subscribe to "once saved, always saved."

How do we stand secure, or more secure, as opposed to thinking ourselves standing more securely than we actually are? Oh sure, we stand secure on Christ, our Rock, our Savior, etc. But how does this look in the reality we experience each day? At least part of the answer must lie in what Giussani called the recovery, or rediscovery of our I. This was grasped by the Protestant reformer John Calvin: "Well nigh the sum of sacred doctrine consists in these two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves." I don't think this means having a deep, detailed understanding of ourselves, our motives, our emotions, etc. As I understand it, it means grasping my transcendence by way of my desire, my longings, my frequent dissatisfaction, and my recognition of life's weirdness, even its absurdity, which is not obliterated by Christian faith- in some ways faith brings it into clearer relief as it unfolds before my eyes.

Once in awhile, but probably more often than we realize, reality offers us a chance to recover ourselves through circumstances. If something cannot be realized, that is, made real through experience, then it remains an abstraction. I would submit that faith that remains an abstraction is not real faith. For example, betting on God's existence via Paschal's wager is not faith. While esti Deus daretur (i.e., living as though God exists) gives coherence to human life and yields better results than the alternative (i.e., etsi Deus non daretur), it falls short of faith. Yet faith is not absolute certainty, or it would not be faith.

Who didn't find Luna Lovegood one of J.K. Rowling's most endearing characters?

Just today I read a brilliant piece by my friend Max Lindenman- My Real Career: Fool in Christ. In which he wrote:

It now occurs to me that this sense of myself as an iredeemable [sic], largely indigestible kook is what’s really keeping me Catholic. Catholic culture is varied and intricate, and my experience of it is still too limited to admit of any bold pronouncements. Still, it should be obvious that the Church attracts people who are willing to devote their spare time, perhaps their careers, to pursuits that will never get them rich or laid. Normal this ain’t

Lest you think this is an exercise if self-pity instead of engagement with reality, consider how he ended his post-

Anyway, one thing the Church definitely does offer us flakes is material with which to construct a rich inner life — about as good a substitute for upward mobility as any. Arriving at the office for my interview, I was greeted by one of the veteran writers, a pale blonde wearing Spanx either despite or because of the advanced state of her pregnancy. Straight off, in my head, I painted her in red, flanked by Magi. As associations go, I’d rank that a notch above “Hey, it’s Gwynneth Paltrow!”

"Doesn't sound very secure," you might say. Well, reality isn't well served by pretending to a certainly we don't- and possibly can't- obtain. Such pretension makes betting on Paschal's wager the better bet. I'll take the real illuminated by faith, if only by a narrow flashlight beam, any day. As the apostle wrote a few chapters later in this same missive: "At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known" (1 Cor. 13:12).

As the title of this post indicates, paradox is an inescapable part of the Christian life, which is why it is an adventure.

Jesus Christ: "filling fallen death with his risen eternity"

For Roman Catholics Lent begins with receiving ashes on our heads or foreheads. As he imposes the ashes, the one doing so usually says, Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem revertis (i.e., "Remember [O man] that you are dust and to dust you will return"). In his magnum opus, the Apologeticus, sometimes referred to as the Apologeticum, Tertullian wrote: Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!- "Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you'll die!"

Over the past few days, I have been very struck by an article in the current issue of Communio: "Singulariter in spe constituisti me: On the Christian Attitude Towards Death," by Adrian Walker. In the article he writes about how the Christian takes the pagan view of death and has it illuminated by the light of the real event of Christ's resurrection- "In a sense, the Christian must be a fierce critic of the regnant bourgeois utopianism, a thoroughly unpagan monster incapable of giving life (cf. contraception) - because it cannot or will not acknowledge how deeply the fruitfulness of our existence is bound up with a certain (sacrificial) acceptance of death." In this context it does not seem inappropriate to mention that a popular French euphemism for the human orgasm is la petite mort (i.e., "the little death").

Walker ends his article with what I can only describe as a crescendo:

How, then, does the Christian attitude towards death, his "singular hope," fulfill pagan wisdom about death? In De Bono Conjugali, Augustine entertains the hypothesis that even an unfallen Adam would eventually have had to exchange the "animal" condition for the "spiritual." Had man not fallen, this hypothesis holds, he would still have had to undergo an earthly end, though he would have known it as a purely joyous transition into the eschatological state without any stain of constraint or privation, or corruption

Dormition of the Virgin La Martorana Palermo, 12th century

Here Walker takes what I found to be an utterly breathtaking Balthasarian/Ratzingerian move: "If we adopt this hypothesis - which Augustine regards as at least tenable- then we can say that only the Dormition [bodily Assumption] of Our Lady fully reveals what a 'natural death' would have to look like." To this he appends a footnote that addresses the divisive issue concerning whether the Blessed Virgin Mary actually died or not: "This intuition contains the seed of a demonstration that Mary's Assumption could involve her death without prejudice to her Immaculate Conception."

For the same reason, the believer who recognizes the Theotokos as "our life, our sweetness, and our hope" would be charged with the task of keeping alive, and even intensifying, the pagan's wonderment over the strange interweaving of life and death in the conditio humana. For this wonderment would itself be an internal requirement of the believer's confidence that, in filling fallen death with his risen eternity, Christ also quickens it with a breath of Eden's morning freshness, a hint of the radiantly beautiful form in which unfallen Adam would have gathered his earthly existence into the beginning of incorruption: "pure nature" as the ripe fruit of the Tree of Life

Walker ends his article by quoting a prayer after the third Old Testament reading in the Easter Vigil in the Extraordinary Form: "All things return to their integrity through Him from whom they took their origin, Our Lord Jesus Christ."

Chopin: music for the interregnum

Today is Day 1 of the interregnum. Since His Holiness, Benedict XVI, Pope emeritus, enjoys playing the piano, because pianist Van Cliburn passed away this week (an event that was lost in all the noise), and because my lovely wife is a pianist, our Friday traditio is Cliburn, as a young man, playing a part of Chopin's Ballade 3, a beautiful composition:

This seems fitting for 1 March 2013, n'est ce pas?