Divine Mercy Sunday

"And you, Faustina, a gift of God to our time, a gift from the land of Poland to the whole Church, obtain for us an awareness of the depth of divine mercy; help us to have a living experience of it and to bear witness to it among our brothers and sisters. May your message of light and hope spread throughout the world, spurring sinners to conversion, calming rivalries and hatred and opening individuals and nations to the practice of brotherhood. Today, fixing our gaze with you on the face of the risen Christ, let us make our own your prayer of trusting abandonment and say with firm hope: Christ Jesus, I trust in you! Jezu, ufam tobie!" Blessed Pope John Paul II in his homily for the canonization of St. Faustina Kowalska- 30 April 2000.

In this same homily, Bl. John Paul II also proclaimed, "It is important then that we accept the whole message that comes to us from the word of God on this Second Sunday of Easter, which from now on throughout the Church will be called "Divine Mercy Sunday".

Cultural bias is a funny thing: All gringos (myself included) love Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, even though her feast is in Advent and falls near the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception and often, even usually, overshadows our celebration of this major Marian dogma, revealed so powerfully to the French peasant girl, St. Bernadette Soubrious. Yet people gripe incessantly about the Polish-derived Divine Mercy devotion, which was given to a Polish peasant girl, St. Faustina Kowalska, with its straightforward "Jesus, I trust in You."

I even saw one Catholic argue yesterday that Divine Mercy should be limited to Good Friday. Writing only for myself, I would be hard-pressed to think of the last time an entire day passed that I was not in need of God's mercy. The fact that we need and receive Divine Mercy is not a lamentable, sad reality, but a joyful one, unless we are content to persist in the all-too pervasive post-modern Pelagianism in which we are so steeped. Acknowledging my need to receive and give mercy interferes with my idea that following Jesus is nothing but a self-help program to make me healthier and wealthier by bringing proven time management principles to bear on my daily routine. Sadly, for many Christians today, this is the Gospel.

In no way was Divine Mercy made more manifest than in Jesus' Resurrection. Receiving God's mercy is the way we experience for ourselves what we hear about Thomas experiencing in today's Gospel, lest we remain content to only hear, or read, about what happened to him and say, "Wow, having an experience like that would be cool."

C'est la vie dans l'église, n'est ce pas?

"For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world."

For Thomas, an encounter that changes everything

This Sunday is the Second Sunday of Easter, which, since Bl. Pope John Paul II declared it such in 2000, is also Divine Mercy Sunday. Our Gospel reading for this day, the day that brings the Easter Octave to its end, is from the Gospel According to St. John and features the encounter of St. Thomas the apostle, who famously refused to believe the Lord was risen from the dead unless he saw Him with his own eyes and felt the wounds for himself. Without a doubt and rightly so, most homilies will deal with belief and faith, taking the words of our Resurrected Lord, "Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed" (v. 29b), as the key phrase and working from there. In our relativistic, skeptical, even cynical age, this remains an important exposition.

In light of it also being Divine Mercy Sunday, I want to focus on the great mercy, even tenderness, Jesus shows to His doubting follower. Even in saying to Thomas that he has believed because he saw and going on to note that blessed are those who believe without seeing, Jesus does not rebuke Thomas. Rather, along with the other disciples, the Lord sends him. In fact, the best definition of the word "apostle" is "one who is sent." This is why Tradition calls St. Mary Magdalene apostula apostulorum (i.e., "apostle to the apostles") because after encountering the Risen Jesus, He sends her to tell the others what she has seen.

Earlier in this same chapter, specifically in the verse just prior to the one that begins today's Gospel, we read: "Mary of Magdala went and announced to the disciples, 'I have seen the Lord'" (v. 18). This proclamation constitutes the apostolic message that St. Thomas (yes, we venerate him as a saint!) will bear. Tradition hands on to us (traditio and tradere, deriving as they do from the same Latin root, can refer both to what is handed on, as well as to the act of handing on - think of the beginning of the fifteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, where he writes, "For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received" [v. 3]). Tradition hands on to us that St. Thomas went far afield, outside of the Roman Empire, and preached the Gospel and established the Church as far away as India, where he is highly revered to this very day.

Thomas, the twin (i.e., Didymus), was struck, even wounded, by his encounter with the Risen Lord. I think Thomas was struck more by what he felt, when he put his finger into the wounded flesh of Jesus Christ, than by what he saw. This is how, at least to my mind, St. Thomas becomes something like the patron saint of post-modernity: he can conceive of reality in nothing but a reductive way, by reducing reality to his measure. He cannot conceive that the One he followed, who was crucified and who died, is now risen from the dead. But Jesus' wounds are what make it real to the one who doubted. Why? Because Jesus' wounds correspond to Thomas' need. Comprehending for the first time this correspondence caused Thomas to exclaim: "My Lord and my God!" A similar encounter, more than two millennia later, caused another to exclaim, which exclamation, like Thomas' has resonated, "Jesus, I trust in You."

In the end, St. Thomas is not the post-enlightenment Humean empiricist we often mistake him for, but a man with a need, a person, like of all of us, whose great need constitutes his very person-hood. Was it not his felt need that impelled him to follow Jesus in the first place? When he (finally) experienced the encounter in which he (finally) recognized that Jesus is the One, the only One, who corresponds to his need, it changed everything! As Benedict XVI wrote at the beginning of his first encyclical Deus caritas est: "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction" (par. 1).

"He has called us here, you and me"

Reflecting today on my own journey, on the personae I tend assume, on my nearly constant need to re-discover, or recover my I, who I am, who God created me and redeemed at great cost to be, for which I need the Lumen Christi, I am reminded of this beautiful song "Peace" by Rich Mullins, whose loss I still mourn after all these years.

The beginning of this song always chokes me up:

"Though we're strangers, still I love you/I love you more than your mask/And you know you have to trust this to be true/And I know that's much to ask/But lay down your fears, come and join this feast"

The world seeks to reduce us in so many ways, to our wealth or poverty, our education, or lack of it, our race, nationality, the power we have, or lack, our success, or our failure, our sexuality, our thinness, or thickness, our fitness, or illness, etc., etc., etc. It is safe to say that the world sets about reducing us every day in nearly every way, that's just reality, the "real world" our Dads warned us about. The Good News is, we need not reduce reality to our measure, but engage it according to the totality of all the factors that constitute it. When we perceive and engage reality in its totality, we experience that it is something positive and is on our side because Christ is on our side. At least for me, this is the great witness of St. Paul.

Christ gives us the strength to resist these many reductions by not caring about them one whit. You are beautiful to Him who knows everything about you, including those things you hate about yourself, and loves you, not despite all that, but because your weakness activates His tenderness, your need draws Him like a magnet. To Him your wounds are what make you beautiful, lovable, which is why He answered Paul, who inquired as to why he was afflicted in an unnamed way, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor. 12:9), just as His wounds, as we will see again this Sunday, are His most lovely and lovable feature.

He also loves you too much not to confront you with and provoke you concerning what needs to change, but neither does he deprive you of His indispensable assistance, which we call grace, given you in an irreplaceable way in the Holy Eucharist and also in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, "where he waits for us," as then-Cardinal Ratzinger observed in Stations of the Cross he composed back in 2005, "ready to raise us up whenever we fall!"

How to "esteem" myself: a pilgrim reflects

Earlier today on Facebook my friend Max Lindenman brought yet another piece of his wonderful writing to my attention, a post he composed last June for his blog Diary of a Wimpy Catholic: A Hedonist Contemplates Heaven, which is always well-worth your attention. "The Perils of Self-Esteem" was certainly worth my time and attention today. Max applies his light, but not lightweight, touch to what I think are some important aspects of our fallen human nature, deprived as we are, not of the divine image, but of divine likeness. I think low self-esteem can and often does lead to overweening pride. Max's post also caused me to reflect on why so many find Pope Francis to be such an attractive person. I can only weigh on this for myself, as opposed to the many, but it is obvious to me that he is cool being Jorgé Bergoglio. He knows who Jorgé Bergoglio is only because Christ has shown Him this, which is why he can be Pope Francis in such a fascinating way.

This reflection on the Holy Father, in turn, caused me to reflect on something else: knowing who I am because Christ reveals me to myself; the recovery of my I, as it were, which can only be done by engaging reality according to all the factors that make it up. Over on Mystagogy, John Sanidopoulos shared something written by Elder Ephraim of Vatopaidi about person versus persona:

"Today’s post-modern people do not know what a person is. They live, and project, the mask of a persona. What is a mask? It’s a guise which was used in Ancient Greece by actors to take on a variety of roles- personae- on stage in the theater So this mask is not something real, it’s artificial, it’s a virtual reality, to use modern IT terminology. We need to remove this false object and replace it with the real one, which, in this case is the person

Exodus from Egypt, by Marc Chagall

Here's the reflection Max prompted, or provoked (a hallmark of true friendship): Every year as I participate in the utterly stunning Paschal Vigil at the Cathedral of the Madeleine, in which I am privileged to have a leading role, the Lord grants me the grace of bringing to my mind my own, much humbler reception, into the Church. The twenty-third anniversary of this event, which is part of salvation history,  is 14 April.

I was not baptized in an elaborate font, rich with ancient Christian symbolism. I was baptized with the use of two bowls and a pitcher from the kitchen of the University of Utah Newman Center. So, the only quandary was which bowl to pour from and which bowl to pour into. If memory serves me correctly, Fr. Tom used the nicer (i.e., glass) bowl, over which we held our heads, to pour the holy water into. The Paschal fire was lit in an old charcoal barbecue grill standing on aluminum legs that featured plastic wheels and plenty of rust. The very same barbecue grill that was usually found under the lone pine tree in the front yard of the Center, the same one we used to grill hot dogs and hamburgers. I was baptized and confirmed by a Dominican friar, not a bishop. Today, even this same place, is much grander, much more upscale, having been expanded and thoroughly renovated in the intervening years.

I call this calling-to-mind a grace because, in addition to taking me down a notch or two, reflecting on this helps me gaze on myself the way Christ's gazes on me and to be grateful all over again, not only for what He has done for me and continues to do for me, but how He has done it and keeps on doing it.

"The Sound of Sinners": sweet to the ears of Jesus

Beginning last Friday, which was Good Friday, I started the annual novena of Divine Mercy. My hymn for my daily devotion is The Clash's The Sound of Sinners. During one live performance of this song, in Wichita Fall, Texas, back in May 1983, the late and still badly missed Joe Strummer prefaced the band's performance of this song with these words: "I want all you bona fidey punks out there to cover your ears for this one, just in case it gets through to you that I'm singin' about Jesus right here and now"

After all this time/
To believe in Jesus/
After all those drugs/
I thought I was Him/
After all my lying/
And a-crying/
And my suffering/
I ain't good enough/
I ain't clean enough/
To be Him

For most of my readers this needs a little Catholic tint. So, let's turn to Balthasar, who I am currently engrossed in re-reading:

For the fact that we are children of God is attested to by the Spirit in us only at the same time that he shows us the condition from which we have come: we have been delivered from slavery to sin and to the devil, from a state of decay induced by a world which is itself decayed, a world out of which (and this is the evident thing!) we could never have delivered ourselves (Glory of the Lord, Vol. I, Seeing the Form, pg. 231)

His Mercy bids me, come as you are. Jesus, I trust in You.

A personal note, or taking it down a notch

I don't write too many personal update posts these days, unlike in the old days here on Καθολικός διάκονος. Facebook provides a better venue for those kinds of things. It's hard to believe that this July will mark my seventh year as a (semi-)serious blogger and the re-naming of this blog as the very non-marketable Καθολικός διάκονος. I actually started my blog in August 2005 and posted 6 times before going on a hiatus, starting to blog in earnest almost a year later. This is my 2473rd post, a number that includes those 6 early posts. My genre very much remains un-creative Catholic non-fiction.

It was last Lent that I felt the need to break my compulsion to post something everyday. This resulted in "only" 280 posts for 2012. This healthier and far less time-consuming (healthier precisely because it is less time-consuming) manner of blogging spilled over into this year. Well, it spilled over until I awoke on the morning of 11 February, my lovely wife's birthday, and the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, to the shocking news that Benedict XVI was renouncing the papacy at the end of the month. Since then, especially in March, which saw the Conclave, the election of Pope Francis, the early days of the papacy of this pope about whom not many of us knew much about, not to mention Lent, Holy Week, the just-concluded Paschal Triduum, I have been typing up a storm.

It's April now, which is a lovely month, usually one of stark contrasts when it comes to weather, at least here along the Wasatch Front. During the 30 days of April, it is not unusual for us to experience rain, snow, and temperatures that reach sometimes into the 80s. Barring any unforeseen events, I plan to once again scale back. For example, after this post, I plan to put up a Friday traditio this week, something on Divine Mercy probably on Saturday, and a short reflection on one of the Sunday readings.

Since I am re-reading Von Balthasar's Glory of the Lord for my own Year of Faith endeavor, look for a lot from him, or reflections that start there. I am also reading Canon Law again, preparing for my Spring Semester class in the subject from the Pontifical Josphinum. Given how intricate Canon Law is, which intricacy arises from it being the oldest continually functioning legal code in the world, I am always a little hesitant to wax too canonical. Canon Law is one of those things that the more I know about it, which still doesn't amount to much, the more reticent I become when writing or speaking about it.

In any case a happy and joyous Pascha to one and all. A holy Lent to my all my Orthodox friends. I am praying the Divine Mercy novena in the days leading up to Divine Mercy Sunday, which is this Sunday, the Second Sunday of Easter.

Jesus, I trust in You.

"Caro cardis salutis"- Tertullian

In his wonderful book, God Sent His Son: A Contemporary Christology, Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, who is the archbishop of Vienna, Austria, begins his section on the second part of the fifth article of the Apostles Creed, "Risen from the dead on the third day," by noting, "There is no subject about which the early Christian writers wrote more than about the bodily Resurrection of Christ."

Cardinal Schönborn then proceeds to summarize how this insistence on Jesus' bodily resurrection, which is summed in the most straight forward manner by St. Paul, who, in the fifteenth chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, seeking to correct an erroneous teaching that had been introduced in this early Christian community (many New Testament scholars hold that the likely source of the doctrinal error was Apollos, a Greek convert to Christianity, who was teaching a "Hellenistic" doctrine of resurrection, one that held that Christ was not bodily resurrected): "For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins" (1 Cor. 15:16-17), offends Jews and Greeks equally, albeit for different reasons. His Eminence, summarizing St. Paul writes that if Christ was not raised, then our devotion, "Our love would be directed toward a dead man, a corpse, and our faith would be a remembrance of a man from the past, and not of him who said, 'I am with you always, to the close of the age' (Mt 28:20)."

The Resurrection of Christ, by Tintoretto- 1565

Without Christ's bodily resurrection, Christian faith is worse than pointless, it is delusional. As St. Paul wrote, "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all" (1 Cor. 15:19). "This article of faith," Cardinal Schönborn continues, "is so scandalous that the Christian writers made every effort to make it understandable for pagans."

His Eminence then proceeds to note the many connections made by the Church Fathers between Christ's bodily Resurrection and many other aspects of the faith. While Cardinal Schönborn writes in a kind of understated way, he succinctly demonstrates that the entire Christian faith rises or falls, hinges on, is rooted in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. In the first instance, Christ's Resurrection demonstrates the inherent goodness of God's creation, of nature, our bodies, etc.: "In the Resurrection of Christ, body and soul are glorified and God makes all things new." In this, His Eminence insists, "lies the soteriological significance of the Resurrection." Because Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of the Father, Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, True God from True God, "for us men and for our salvation," was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Blessed Virgin Mary, thus becoming fully human, while at the same time remaining divine, His bodily Resurrection, according to Cardinal Schönborn, "has become the central point of salvation."

He then cites Tertullian, who lived and wrote in the early 3rd century: "Caro cardis salutis," meaning something like, "the flesh is the hinge of salvation." This is the Euangelion, the Gospel, the Good News. In it lies not only our hope, or even the hope of the world, but that of the cosmos. To "evangelize," then, is to bring or announce the Gospel, which is the Good News!"

Once we see beyond the reductive, empirical myopia that is so prevalent in our day and grasp what Msgr. Giussani asserted, namely that humanity is the level of nature at which nature becomes conscious of itself, we will see that Jesus Christ's Resurrection, while amazing, is not so incredible as it we sometimes try to make it- even in this the divine Logos is at work.

As the Holy Father said in his first Urbi et Orbi address yesterday: "Christ died and rose once for all, and for everyone, but the power of the Resurrection, this passover from slavery to evil to the freedom of goodness, must be accomplished in every age, in our concrete existence, in our everyday lives."