Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin

"In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, 'Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord'" (Luke 1:39-45 ESV).

Of course, the Blessed Mother's visit to Elizabeth is the second of the Joyful Mysteries of her Most Holy Rosary, the fruit of which is love of neighbor.

This reading and this feast also show us how precious life is, which should make us all the more grateful for those who laid their lives down in service to our country, often standing up against evil and tyranny in the service of the common good of humanity.

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Year C

Readings: Prov. 8:22-31; Ps. 8:4-9; Rom. 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

Like our patroness, St. Mary Magdalene, to whom the resurrected Lord said, "Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father,'" we have a hard time letting go of Easter, which season ended last Sunday with our celebration of Pentecost (John 20:17). It is certainly understandable that we want to continue to bask in the immediate glow of our celebration of Christ’s resurrection. Liturgically, we don’t immediately let go, but neither do we cling. For instance, today we observe the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity and next week we will celebrate the great solemnity of Corpus Christi. As our reading of Scripture today shows us, there is continuity, not abrupt discontinuity in our practice. A few verses earlier in the same chapter from which our Gospel today is taken that occurs during Jesus’ Last Supper discourse, the Lord says, "if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you" (John 16:7). In this we see that Jesus’ glorious ascension into heaven has to happen for the Holy Spirit to come.

All of this should draw our attention to the fact that too often we engage the Trinity, which is most concisely expressed as one God in three divine persons, in a wholly abstract manner, like solving a differential equation, making it an endeavor that bears no fruit in our lives. Our departure point for any meaningful engagement about God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the person of Jesus Christ. St. Paul captures this quite well in our second reading taken from his Letter to the Romans: we are justified by faith and have made "peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5:1). It is through Christ Jesus that we gain access "to this grace in which we stand" (Rom. 5:2). The key word here is grace. It is a word that often passes in one ear and out the other because we hear it so often. So, let’s take a look at this all important word. Grace is our English translation of the Greek word charin, which means, according to the great Protestant exegete, Ernst Käsemann, "the power of salvation which finds expression in specific gifts, acts, and spheres and which is even individualized in the charismata" (Commentary on Romans, pg. 14). Stated a bit more clearly, grace is God’s sharing divine life with us here and now, as the Catechism teaches us, the Father, through his Word, Jesus Christ, "pours into our hearts the Gift that contains all other gifts, the Holy Spirit" (par. 1082).

Charismata, the gifts that are the concrete manifestations of living our grace-filled life together, the new life given us through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, brings us to the relationship between faith and hope. Hope is the flower of faith. Without faith, which is faith in Jesus Christ, it is impossible to have hope. The Greek word we translate as hope from this passage is elpida, when translated a bit more literally, means expectation. It is important to note that Paul means expectation in the reasonable sense, like the expectation that in a few minutes we will come forward and receive communion, not an unrealistic expectation, like my Suzuki station wagon will be turned into a Ferrari when I leave Mass, which is why Paul writes that "hope does not disappoint" (Rom. 5:5a). Hence, we distinguish between hoping and wishing, the difference between childish and mature faith. According to Paul, what is it that produces hope, which is certainty about what will happen to us? In a word, experience, especially the experience of affliction, of which Paul experienced plenty for the sake of the Gospel.

Rublev's Trinity icon

Jesus ascends to the Father and then sends forth His Holy Spirit upon the disciples, who, in turn, pass it along by their witness. By our participation in this liturgy, we, too, are witnesses of this, being both recipients and ones charged with passing it along. Turning now to today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples that the Holy Spirit is given them to guide them "to all truth" (John 16:13). Since the Father revealed everything there was to reveal in His Son, the Holy Spirit helps us over time to unpack the revelation of God in Christ. St. Vincent of Lérins, all the way back in the fifth century, demonstrated that not only is progress in our understanding of what God has revealed in Christ possible, it is necessary, a true hallmark of the Church.

More concretely, as Scripture scholar Luke Timothy Johnson stated so succinctly, the Holy Spirit is the mode of Christ’s resurrection presence in us and among us. In other words, the Holy Spirit is the way Christ stays with us. While, as Gerard Manley Hopkins pointed out, "Christ plays in ten thousand places," there are seven specific ways the Holy Spirit makes Christ really and truly present to us, we call these sacraments. It is through our participation in the sacraments, beginning with our baptism, that we are drawn into the divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Like St. Mary Magdalene, whose people we are and to whom the Lord also said, "go to my brothers and tell them, 'I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God'" we, too, are called to give witness to our new life in Christ, the life of grace, which is life in the Spirit, and nothing less than our participation in the divine life of the Most Holy Trinity (John 20:17). So, dear friends, as we move forward to next Sunday’s celebration of Corpus Christi, our annual celebration of the primary way that our Lord remains present to us, a mode of presence that would not be possible had He not ascended to the Father and sent their Holy Spirit, let us go forth and give witness to the fact that He is risen, bringing new life to a world that is in such desperate need of good news.

"the horizon of existence is God’s love"

Available now on the Traces website: What Kind of Life Gives Birth to Communion and Liberation? This is a lengthy interview given by Msgr. Giussani to Giorgio Sarco in 1979. I can't wait to begin reading it. To download it, go to the Traces website, given above, and you will see the link with the title of the interview, just "click" on that, it will begin downloading the .pdf.

From the beginning:

Sarco: "What is Communion and Liberation, really—a social project, a culture, an educational strategy, or something else entirely?"

Giussani: "Communion and Liberation is only an insight of Christianity as an event of life, and so as a history. From the beginnings of the Movement, it was always stressed that an idea, something valuable that is intuited, develops in a method of facing reality, which in its turn effects a change in all the relationships that one lives. In the same way, the Christian insight develops in a method of judgment and of living.

"I believe that the history and the development that the Movement has had [to] depend more than anything else on the focused authenticity of the original insight, that is, on the point of view that we started from in order to commit ourselves to the Christian fact. Remembering how this insight began in me awakens one of the most beautiful memories of my life. To be sure, the first insight that the horizon of existence is God’s love began to shine in a spiritual situation that had been prepared by a family education and was then deepened in seminary life; but it really blossomed and reached awareness when I read and understood with real intelligence for the first time the beginning of the Gospel of John: 'The Word was made flesh.' I remember how my seminary professor, Father Gaetano Corti (who I think is now teaching the history of Christianity at the University of Trieste), used to explain this passage to us boys, saying that the cornerstone of reality and the center of the life of the person and of the world had become in Christ a presence that could be met by each one of us."

Thanks to Fred for pointing this out to me during our telephonic SofC this afternoon.

"so that you may belong to another..."

One of the most perennial and difficult philosophical questions is the nature of morality. I have no intent to try to resolve this is in a blog post. For me, as a Catholic, morality for the most part is objective, which renders it no less complex. Like everything else, morality has to have content, these amount to prescriptions and proscriptions (i.e., things I must do and things I must avoid doing). For example, there are actions that are always and everywhere wrong, regardless of circumstances or intent, like murder, like engaging in sexual relations with someone other than my wife, etc. But I recognize that there is a difference between sin and wrong-doing.

Intention and circumstance cannot turn something that is intrinsically evil into something good, but they can mitigate culpability and be the difference between sin and mere wrong-doing. Something can only be truly sinful if I know it to be wrong and freely choose to engage in it anyway. So, truth and freedom are the most important components in living a moral life. Because it is necessary not only to know what is good and what is evil, but to know why, formation and education are necessary. It is important to know why something is required or forbidden so that I understand that morality is not arbitrary or capricious. All of the above can be summarized in the injunction to do good and avoid evil.

Another important moral axiom, one that is frequently ignored under the guise of pragmatism, is that I may never do evil that good may come of it, which is just an opaque way of saying that ends do not justify means. To believe and to act otherwise is simply dangerous. If I am to live with any integrity at all I must try to live in this way. Yet, it can never be a matter of mere rule-keeping. Why can morality never be a matter a rule-keeping? Because my experience has shown time and again that I am incapable of keeping the rules!

St. Paul writes powerfully about this, especially in his Letter to the Romans: "For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good" (7:15-16). We see that for Paul there is a standard of holiness, the Law given through Moses; "the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good" (7:12).

Carravaggio, Christ showing His wounds

So, what is the remedy, you might well ask? The what is a who and the who is Jesus Christ. In the same chapter of Romans, St. Paul gives a brilliant analogy of what it means to live in Christ, which requires death and resurrection (i.e., baptism):

"Or do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.

"Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code" (7:1-6).

It is kind of a complicated analogy, one that can be reasonably understood in more than one way. The understanding I prefer because I think it most accurately captures what Paul is trying to communicate, is that we are not the widowed wife, with the law being the dead husband. Rather, we are ones who die in order to "belong to another"!

Photograph of Nietzsche, taken the last year of his life- 1899

In the previous chapter, Paul is more explicit about this:

"For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." (Rom. 6:5-11)

Nietzsche, in The Antichrist, called for the "transvaluation of values." In his mind, the revaluation of all values had to occur first, which meant overcoming Christianity:

"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty -- I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind… And one calculates time from the dies nefastus on which this fatality arose -- from the first day of Christianity! Why not rather from its last? From today? Revaluation of all values!"

I can't help but think that Paul is suggesting something similar here with regards to the law. At the end of the day, what Nietzsche proposes isn't much different from Freud's pain/pleasure principal: what brings pleasure is good and what brings pain is bad. This is a big reason why purveyors of porn frequently allude to Nietzsche, though they rarely quote him. At least in the Antichrist, where he counter-poses Buddhism, Nietzsche puts the premium on pain avoidance and overcoming suffering. As another great musico-philosopher, Gram Parsons, put it "love hurts, love scars, it wounds, and mars." How else could love overcome death? Love, which, if true, always seeks the good of the other and requires sacrifice given freely and without complaint, is what makes any act truly good, that is, moral.

Of course, it all comes to down how one views the human person, whether you see the purpose of existence as striving for autonomy and independence, choosing for yourself what is right and wrong in god-like fashion, which was the original sin, or whether you see that you belong to Another, who loves you and wants you to be happy, not just in eternity, but right now. It also turns on the question, in what does happiness consist, living for yourself, or living for Another? You belong to Another because you were made by Another and begotten as a child through your baptism.

To allude to the overused and often misused line by St. Augustine, our hearts are restless until they rest in the One who made us because He made us for Himself and we are not complete until this is fully realized, that is, made real, objective. Christ is not the Alpha and Omega only in some cosmic sense, He is your origin and your destiny, too! In my opinion, hell is nothing other than the full realization of living for yourself, striving for independence and autonomy. Was it not Jesus who said, "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matt. 6:21)?

I have a holy card with a big color picture of Don Gius on it, which Holly insists we keep on our fridge door, underneath his picture is this quote from St. Gregory Nazianzen, one of the three great Cappadocian fathers: "Were I not yours, my Christ, I would feel a finite creature."

"Now it's all or nothing..."

It's been a musical week here at Καθολικός διάκονος. Nonetheless, a Friday traditio is still very much in order. I deliberately chose not to feature the 2003 digitally re-mastered version of Simple Minds' Alive and Kicking, due in no small part to the fact that embedding has been disabled. This is more authentic, anyway (he wrote in a half-hearted attempt to be content). Alive and Kicking is the second traditio of our '80s retrospective summer.

What you gonna do when things go wrong?
What you gonna do when it all cracks up?
What you gonna do when the Love burns down?
What you gonna do when the flames go up?
Who is gonna come and turn the tide?
What's it gonna take to make a dream survive?
Who's got the touch to calm the storm inside?
Who's gonna save you?

"unearth this holiness I can't earn..."

Without a doubt one of my favorite contemporary Christian albums is Jennifer Knapp's 2000 release Lay It Down. I love the entire album. It is one of two albums, the other being Glenn Kaiser's All My Days, I put on my headphones and listen to when I am having a hard time praying. Her music has a way of opening me up. This is the kind of insight into my personal spirituality I don't usually share, just as I don't blog about my marital relationship. Like almost everybody else, I think most contemporary Christian music is an affront both to Christians and to music, but there are a few great artists in the genre.

After experiencing a great deal of success with Kansas, her first album, and Lay It Down, Knapp was burned out and just quit music back in 2003, that is until recently when she recorded and released Letting Go. Knapp was something of a darling of Christian music for a few years. She was born and raised in Kansas in what she describes as an irreligious home. She became a Christian in college, before starting her music career. But back then, there were rumors that she was a lesbian.

Last month she sat for an interview with Mark Moring of Christianity Today. I came away from reading it loving Jennifer Knapp more than before. When asked directly about being gay and having a woman partner, she responded, "For whatever reason the rumor mill [about me being gay] has persisted for so long, I wanted to acknowledge; I don't want to come off as somebody who's shirking the truth in my life. At the same time, I'm intensely private. Even if I were married to a man and had six children, it would be my personal choice to not get that kind of conversation rolling."

The thing I find most disheartening about the way we deal with homosexuality in the church, even as one who believes deeply that the church speaks the truth about sexuality across-the-board, is both that very often we reduce people to their sexuality and allow them to reduce themselves. For example, I am not wholly defined by my attraction to women, this does not constitute who I am at my deepest level. Like everybody, I need grace and mercy in this aspect of life, an area where, like most of us, I am very vulnerable because I am broken. As Dr. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury pointed out in his essay many years ago, The Body's Grace:

"in a church which accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts, or on a problematic and non-scriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures."

Knapp is very honest and authentic about herself. It is refreshing that she chooses not to be defensive or militant, for example when she says: "The struggle I've had has been with the church, acknowledging me as a human being, trying to live the spiritual life that I've been called to, in whatever ramshackled, broken, frustrated way that I've always approached my faith. I still consider my hope to be a whole human being, to be a person of love and grace. So it's difficult for me to say that I've struggled within myself, because I haven't. I've struggled with other people. I've struggled with what that means in my own faith. I have struggled with how that perception of me will affect the way I feel about myself" (underlining emphasis mine).

Finally, I think she speaks the truth for many Christians when she says, "I've always struggled as a Christian with various forms of external evidence that we are obligated to show that we are Christians. I've found no law that commands me in any way other than to love my neighbor as myself, and that love is the greatest commandment. At a certain point I find myself so handcuffed in my own faith by trying to get it right—to try and look like a Christian, to try to do the things that Christians should do, to be all of these things externally—to fake it until I get myself all handcuffed and tied up in knots as to what I was supposed to be doing there in the first place." I write from my own experience when I state it feels pretty damn good to stop faking. Don't get me wrong, I catch myself every now and again and it is something I am all too eager to correct. Actually, blogging is one of the things that keeps me grounded, which is the primary reason I continue doing it.

I encourage you to read Jennifer Knapp Comes Out. In her words and in her attitude she seems to be grasping the fundamental truth, which is that first and foremost she is loved by that person of grace, Who is grace itself, the One she correctly identifies as her hope. On my reading it seems that her experience has taught her that reducing faith to morality is the dead end Jesus teaches us it is. I find it very sad that she doesn't go to church, but I certainly understand why she doesn't and that makes me even sadder. As the old Russian proverb puts it, "Life is not a walk across an open field," the truth of this is intensified when it comes to living a Christian life. To pretend it is otherwise is simply to ignore reality.

While my favorite song off Lay It Down is When Nothing Satisfies, it is not available on YouTube, at least not a version that is sung by Jennifer. Just in case you have never heard her, here is my next favorite song off her album, A Little More, which I also posted back in 2007. It is a song that reminds me of the great pity with which God looks upon me, which moves Him to save me, not once, but over and again, usually from myself, and at great cost.

"that you don't want to give up... and that you need to give up"

Giving up in order to possess is one of the paradoxes of Christian existence. It is perhaps best set forth by the Lord, when he says, "whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it" (Mark 8:35). I don't mind saying, without divulging more than one anyone would care to read, that I am presently passing through something of a difficult time, which is not the result of some tragic event, or unexpected setback in my life, but arises from desire. Desire always has an object, it matters a great deal what the object of my desire is because often it is imaginary and something about which I am easily deceived.

Reading, again, from Is It Possible to Live This Way, volume three, which is on charity, I came across something that struck me, hard, like a rock, or a board: When asked why, if "truth in a relationship coincides with maintaining the attractiveness of the relationship," be the relationship with a person, with your job, or, in my case, with pastoral ministry, and that renunciation, or detachment, is also required, does the relationship seem to lose some attractiveness as a result of the detachment, making one's renunciation seem false, like a betrayal, Giussani says to the inquiring person:

"Because you think about a relationship with an inflection that you don't want to give up (who among us hasn't experienced this?) and that you need to give up- and it's a dramatic moment - in order to possess. Because esteem and love are maintained only if you detach yourself from your immediate and usual way of feeling about things. If you want to go on according to the immediate and usual way you feel about things, you'll lose them" (pg. 113- underlining emphasis mine).

It is necessary, at least for me, that Don Gius goes on to say that "It's not my fault" that this is how life works- "that's the way it is." In the first instance, it is important that I see my desire to hold on as normal and very human, which is why letting go feels like a betrayal, but let go I must, lest I want to lose that to which I cling so tightly. I have to let it all go until I realize, yet again, that I am beggar because it is the beggar who is the protagonist of history.

This puts me in mind of what is probably my favorite U2 song, Walk On, especially the end of the song, which is a litany of sorts:

Leave it behind
You've got to leave it behind

All that you fashion
All that you make
All that you build
All that you break
All that you measure
All that you steal
All this you can leave behind
All that you reason
All that you care
It's only time...

All that you sense
All that you speak
All you dress up
And all that you scheme
All you create
All that you wreck
All that you hate...

This is the 1,500th post on Καθολικός διάκονος.