Feast Days – The Catholic Spiritual Life

The Heavenly Mysteries of August

August 15, 2016 3 Comments

The months of July and August were renamed in the last century before Christ. They had been called “fifth month” and “sixth month” (like September, October, November, December; the year used to begin in March) but they were renamed for Julius Caesar and his adopted son Octavian, who was called Augustus. Augustus is related to augment; Octavian expanded the Roman Empire, so he received that name as his honorific.

(March, May, and June were named for the Roman gods Mars, Maia, and Juno; January means doorway, or beginning; February is from a word for purification, or Spring cleaning; and I can’t find why it’s called April.)

So August is a month named for Empire. And in this month the Church celebrates a kind of third set of high holy days. There is the season of the Nativity in winter, the season of the Paschal mystery in spring – and the heavenly mysteries of August. August reveals the awesome Empire of God.

We talk about a kind of tension about how you define Christianity. We can call it the religion of the Incarnation: God has become man so that man can become God – and everything follows from that. Or we can call it the religion of the Cross and Resurrection: by the divine power we pass through death to life. Each of these is an almost complete way of thinking about Christianity – and each needs some help from the other, to keep its balance.

But we can also think of Christianity in terms of the heavenly mysteries of August – and indeed, a large part of the tradition does so. We can think about Christ – but we can also think about the Empire he builds.

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Earlier this month, we pondered the Transfiguration. It is a kind of manifestation of the Incarnation. But where divinity is hidden in weakness at Christmas, at the Transfiguration the divine light pours through Christ’s humanity. The Incarnation is revealed. The Transfiguration is a preparation for the Cross – a reminder that the one who goes to die is glorious in his divinity. The Transfiguration is a kind of summary of the Christian faith, a promise of the greatness of Christ.

So too are the two Marian feasts that follow, the Assumption, which we celebrate today, and the Coronation, next week.

The Assumption reveals the true Empire of God. I heard a fine homily today from a young priest about how the Assumption was “necessary.” (Friends, Thomists will remind you that our piety gets a little ahead of itself when we talk about divine “necessities.” God’s pretty powerful, and doesn’t have to do many things. But it’s okay, amongst ourselves, with several grains of salt, to think about how there’s a kind of connection among the mysteries that makes things sort of seem “necessary.”) The homilist said it was necessary that she whom God had preserved incorrupt through her life would be uncorrupted by death. It was necessary that she who had shared so personally in the Crucifixion should share in the Resurrection. It was necessary that she whose body was united to Christ should share bodily in his triumph. This is nice.

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But it’s worth turning around the other way (and taking away the “necessity”). You could say that God “had to” bring her body to heaven if he had involved it in the Incarnation. But it’s more true to say the opposite: God wanted to bring her body to heaven, and so he involved it in the Incarnation. Etc.

The Assumption isn’t an afterthought. It’s more like God’s main thought: he wants to bring Mary – and all of us – body and soul to heaven. He wants his Empire to extend that far, to save us in our entirety. And that’s why he did all those other things. That’s why he did the Incarnation and the Cross – so that we could reach the heavenly mysteries of August. We mustn’t forget those other mysteries – but we understand all of them better if we know that this is the final destination, and Mary is the firstfruits.

The Transfiguration, the Assumption, and the Coronation are our Christian destiny. They are what it’s all about. They are the glory God has in mind when he enters into all those other mysteries of our faith.

We should ponder these heavenly mysteries of August, dig deeper into them. Each of them has a surface layer: Jesus is shiny, Mary’s body went up in the air, she gets a crown. But each of these surfaces reveals the depths of the faith: Jesus’s humanity is filled with divinity; Mary participates fully, in every aspect of her person, in the glorious joys of heaven; everything is at the service of this mystery, everything comes together in the fulfillment prefigured in Mary’s coronation.

Let us renew our dedication to these heavenly mysteries of August – to the uttermost glory of the Empire of God.

How could you focus your mind better on the August mysteries? What do we lose when we forget them?

The Transfiguration

August 6, 2016 Leave a Comment

Two points about the Transfiguration, our feast today – which in the East and the older tradition was viewed as in some ways the greatest feast of all, the feast of the true identity of Jesus.

First: His face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white.

At the Transfiguration, Jesus appears for a moment as who he truly is. “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Rev 21:3). “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). “The Word was made flesh and dwelt within us” (John 1:14).

Jesus is true God and true man, the presence of God within man. What does that look like? The Transfiguration is a glimpse. A magnificent glimpse, because God is portrayed as pure light, and Jesus as a man full of that light.

Like the burning bush, his humanity is not destroyed by the all-consuming fire of God’s presence. God’s presence shines out in his humanity.

The word comes to confirm it: “This is my chosen Son.” And yet the Transfiguration itself shows forth what that word means: true God and true man.

***

As the great simple hymn says, “we hail your body glorified and our redemption see.” One of the desert fathers said, “If you would, you could become all flame.” This is our redemption, this is the promise. Our humanity too will shine forth with the light of God. We will be the temple, the dwelling place of God.

Here on Mount Tabor, for a moment, we get a glimpse.

Praying Morning Prayer for the feast, my children pointed out the parallel to the reading from Revelation in Sunday night prayer: “They shall see the Lord face to face, and bear his name on their foreheads. The night shall be no more. They shall need no light from lamps or the sun, for the Lord God shall give them light, and they shall reign forever.” We hail your body glorified, and our redemption see. This is the gospel. This is heaven. This what shall be written on our own foreheads.

***

Second: And when the voice came, Jesus was found alone.

That’s how Luke says it, and that’s our reading this year. It makes even more simple the delicious simplicity of Matthew and Mark: and lifting up their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus alone.

St. John Paul II wrote, in his testament for the new millennium, Novo millennio ineunte,

“It is not therefore a matter of inventing a ‘new programme’. The programme already exists: it is the plan found in the Gospel and in the living Tradition, it is the same as ever. Ultimately, it has its centre in Christ himself, who is to be known, loved and imitated, so that in him we may live the life of the Trinity, and with him transform history until its fulfilment in the heavenly Jerusalem. This is a programme which does not change with shifts of times and cultures, even though it takes account of time and culture for the sake of true dialogue and effective communication. This programme for all times is our programme for the Third Millennium.”

Because all our hope is in Christ, because Christ transfigured is our hope – what we hope to be and the way we hope to reach that hope, the way the truth the life – the heart of the program must be, as John Paul II says, “contemplate the face of Christ.”

That means, too, “Listen to him.” We must let his words, his Word, penetrate us, because no other words, no imaginings, can do anything like justice to the enormous truth of the transfigured Christ. All our ideas fall short of his, of him. We immerse ourselves in his Word because no other words express the wild reality of the Transfiguration. We immerse ourselves in his Word because our whole redemption is to immerse ourselves in the transfigured Christ, the consuming fire and the burning bush.

How do your ideals fall short of the Transfiguration?

Feast of the Precious Blood

July 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

July 1 used to be the Feast of the Most Precious Blood. It’s a good day for us to think about the Blood of Christ.

First, a word about liturgical reform. This feast was extended to the universal Church only in 1849. Until sometime in the twentieth century, it was the first Sunday of July; by 1920 it was July 1. It had also sometimes been celebrated on Friday of the fourth week of Lent. In other words, though July 1 is nice – I like to make it a special day of remembrance – it’s not hallowed by any long universal tradition.

From time to time in her history, the Church has pruned the liturgical calendar. Over the years, more and more feasts get added – and from time to time, you have to pare them back. Today, for example, the readings at Mass were a rousing call from Amos and the calling of Matthew. When you have too many feasts, you miss your chance for “ordinary” readings like these.

If it were up to me, maybe I’d take some of the Italian saints out of the calendar and put this one back in. But it’s not up to me. And one of the splendors of being Catholic is participating in a life that transcends our personal preference.

So let’s remember the Precious Blood, but not get too worried about the prudential judgments that, for the time being, have supressed this fairly recent feast.

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We can appreciate the Precious Blood by considering some ways it is distinct from the Body of Christ.

First, it brings out his suffering. When Christ says, “this is my body,” he says something marital. Every spouse gives his body to his bride, and vice versa. That’s nice and happy.

But when he says, “this is my blood,” things take a more frightening turn. We don’t want to see our spouse bleed. I like to imagine how wonder turned to shock when, after Christ gave them his body, he then began to speak of his blood – parallel to when Peter professes Jesus as Christ, and then Jesus starts talking about the Cross.

Devotion to Christ’s blood is devotion to his suffering.

***

Second, the blood is the completion of the Eucharist. In the consecration, the prayers are unequal. First he says just, “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body” – after Vatican II, they added a stronger sacrificial angle, “which will be given up for you,” but the prayer remains simple.

The consecration of the Blood is not simple. “For this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

The post-Conciliar reform restored the Scriptural order of the prayer, so it next says, “Do this in memory of me,” and only after the elevation and genuflection does the priest add, “the mystery of faith” – but in the traditional order of the prayer, even those words were in the middle of the consecration of the Blood: “the blood of the new and eternal covenant, the mystery of faith, which will be poured out.”

There’s a sense, in these prayers, in which the Body is only a prologue for the Blood. The prayers suggest that the Blood is the exciting part: the new and eternal covenant, the mystery of faith, for the forgiveness of sins.

***

We can only begin to unpack these words here – we’ll have to leave the rest to our devotion and meditation. But we could start with two senses of “covenant.”

The Greek word can be translated two different ways, yielding two complementary theologies. These days, it’s popular to talk about a “covenant,” which is a two-way agreement. In this angle, attention is brought to the Chalice – and the prayers of the Mass do emphasize the container as well as what it contains, down to the mysterious words in the institution narrative of the Roman Canon, “he took this precious chalice in his holy and venerable hands.” This one?

The sharing of the chalice is a sign of union, concord, like a peace pipe. It is the reverse of the traditional poison cup: we share the cup, acknowledging that what happens to you (in this case, down to the Cross) happens to me, too. He drinks our cup, we drink his.

The Precious Blood is a covenant. This covenantal cup-sharing is “the mystery of faith.”

***

But another translation of that covenant word, with a lot of Scripture to support it, is “testament.” A testament is a one-way decision: a decision that when I die, you will get what I leave behind.

And the Precious Blood is that, too. It is a pointer to his death. And it is a promise of inheritance, an inheritance of life. In Scripture, wine and blood are both double signs: signs of disorientation and death, but also signs of joy and life. With the Blood, he also says, I die, and I give you life: I pour out my blood for you.

How do you reverence the Blood of Christ?

The Two Hearts and the Rosary

June 5, 2016 3 Comments

This past Friday and Saturday we celebrated the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. These feasts go together: the fruit of the Heart of Jesus is the Heart of Mary, the source of Mary’s heart is Jesus’.

But before we speak of these two hearts, we should speak of Jesus’ own two hearts. The Sacred Heart itself is a celebration of the union of God’s heart with man’s. The Sacred Heart is God’s heart beating in man’s, or man’s heart beating in God’s.

This is the mystery of grace: the love of God poured into our hearts (Romans 5:5). St. Thomas makes a kind of analogy of grace. He speaks of the Incarnation as “the grace of union,” distinct from but analogous with sanctifying grace. Sanctifying grace enters our hearts to unite us to God. The grace of union is the deepest reality of Jesus.

They are different, as the difference of being Son of God by nature and son by adoption. In the case of Jesus, it is inseparable from who he is; in our case, a change must come about, and it can be undone.

But they are similar, for in each case it is the union of God and man. What happens in the heart of Jesus is what Jesus desires for us. What happens in the heart of Jesus is what happens in the heart of Mary: God’s love poured into our hearts, total union of God and man.

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The rosary is a kind of meditation on this union of the two hearts. It is a meditation, first, on the life of Jesus, of God’s love in the human life of Jesus — and most deeply, in his human heart. But it is a meditation, second, on Mary’s participation in these mysteries. What happens in the heart of Jesus is what happens in the heart of Mary.

In the Eastern Church, they constantly rediscover the icon of the face of Christ, even tracing its outline with their fingers. In the rosary, we retrace the face of Jesus, the heart of Jesus, rediscovering over and over again his mystery, which is the mystery that he recreates in us.

***

The Hail Mary is a meditation on the mystery of the two hearts. It has three acts, tracing three directions in the relation between these two hearts.

The first act commemorates the action of Jesus’s divine heart on Mary: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” What does it mean to say Mary is full of grace? It means that the Lord is with her. Praying this prayer alongside the mysteries of the rosary, we see the heart of the Lord who is with her. The Lord – the Lord whose heart is on the cross, or in agony in the garden, or rising to heaven, or making wine at Cana, etc. – that Lord, is with Mary.

The fruit of his presence is that his heart is impressed on hers. That is what “full of grace” means: he is with her, and acts on her. And what he brings about is a re-creation of his heart in hers.

***

The second act commemorates the similarity of the two hearts: “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” His blessing is her blessing. And she is truly blessed. She has all the riches that humanity can receive, the riches that set her above all her kind. And that is the blessing of the one who, as fruit of her womb, shares in her nature. He too, her child, has all the riches of humanity. The two hearts are alike.

(Again and again, as we trace the faces of Jesus and Mary, we turn to their hearts, their innermost depths: that is where they are truly similar.)

***

Finally, the third act commemorates Mary asking Jesus to share this favor with us: “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the heart of our death.” She prays for us, asks God’s blessing on us.

But what blessings does she ask for? Well, she is holy – conformed to Jesus. Because her heart is like his, she asks for the blessings that he considers blessings, the blessings of the heart of Jesus.

That is why we, who are sinners, so close to death, ask her to pray – because as sinners, we tend to ask for the wrong blessings, so forgetful of the hour of our death and focused on things that do not endure. She who is holy asks for the blessings of the heart of Jesus.

And as his mother, mother of God, she has, not power over him, but influence – the influence he chose to give her, in uniting his divine heart to a human heart, becoming her child.

In the mysteries of the rosary, we trace over and over the face of Jesus, the heart of Jesus – the heart he gives to Mary, giving her true likeness to his heart, so that she can beg the same blessing for us.

What do the two hearts mean to you?

Corpus Christi Sunday: Thanksgiving

May 27, 2016 Leave a Comment

GEN 14:18-20; PS 110:1,2,3,4; 1 COR 11:23-26; LK 9:11b-17

This Sunday we celebrate the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. Now, the real day for Corpus Christi is the Thursday after the octave of Pentecost, that is, the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. Last week we were talking about octaves, and how a single feast is drawn out over a long time. The reason we celebrate Corpus Christi on this Thursday is that it is the very next Thursday (not counting the weeks-long celebration of Easter) after Holy Thursday. Holy Thursday contains so much. On this “next” Thursday, we separate out just the element of the Eucharist.

(Of course, in the United States we transfer the feast to Sunday. This is because of the challenges of coordinating Masses in far-flung dioceses. I used to get annoyed about transferring feasts. But hey, it’s the priests’ and bishops’ job to figure out these details, not mine. My job is to enjoy the liturgy. Kvetching doesn’t help.)

***

In the three-year cycle of the post-Vatican II liturgy, we get different angles on this liturgy. This year, we focus on thanksgiving.

The first reading is Abraham’s mysterious encounter with the priest Melchizedek. Melchizedek, of course, gets a lot of play in Hebrews as a precursor of Christ. Psalm 110, “The Lord said to my Lord,” which we pray in this Mass, identifies the Messiah as a priest “in the order of Melchizedek.”

But a nice place to go to appreciate Melchizedek is in the Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer One, where after the consecration, the priest prays:

“accept [these offerings], as once you were pleased to accept

the gifts of your servant Abel the just,

the sacrifice of Abraham, our father in faith,

and the offering of your high priest Melchizedek,

a holy sacrifice, a spotless victim.”

Melchizedek is portrayed as one of the models of offering perfect sacrifice – and a model that helps explain the others.

Now, that’s surprising, because in our reading this Sunday, we see that his sacrifice hardly fits our definition of sacrifice. “Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine, and being a priest of God Most High, he blessed Abram.” He invokes God as “creator of heaven and earth . . . who delivered your foes into your hand” – but he doesn’t destroy anything. Doesn’t sacrifice mean death and destruction?

The tradition’s answer is, no it doesn’t. Sacrifice is an act of thanksgiving and worship, manifested with material things. We have a fine model of sacrifice in the American holiday of Thanksgiving. The turkey (one hopes) does not get burned, it gets eaten. And yet that sacred banquet is itself an act of giving thanks to God most high, creator of heaven and earth, who provides and protects and gives us a place of rest.

Melchizedek gives thanks and praise, as we do in the Eucharist – it is right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give thanks and praise, which is why it is called Eucharist, thanksgiving.

***

The Gospel reading this Sunday is also surprising. It is not the Last Supper – we hear about that only in the Epistle. It is the feeding of the five thousand. Now of course, in John 6, that apostle takes the occasion of the multiplication of loaves to give us Jesus’ central discourse on the Eucharist. But this year we read Luke.

All we have is Jesus: “looking up to heaven, he said the blessing over them, broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd.” But the language is surprisingly reminiscent of the Mass: “and with eyes raised to heaven to you, O God, his almighty Father, giving you thanks, he said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples.” That line, “with eyes raised to heaven” isn’t in any of the accounts of the Last Supper – the Roman Canon takes it from the multiplication of the loaves.

What are we to make of this? Again, the deeper point is Eucharist, thanksgiving, not destruction. Jesus gives them (as John tells us he said over and over at the multiplication of the loaves) not the bread of death, but the bread of life. He feeds them with finest wheat – his very life – and they are filled with praise and joy and thanksgiving.

***

Our epistle is 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul gives his own account of the Last Supper. He tells us the Eucharist was established “on the night he was handed over,” and “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.” Yes, it does call to mind his death – but as we await his coming. This eschatological aspect of the Eucharist reminds us that he is not dead, he is victorious. His death is the mystery we pass through on the way to his life and triumph.

And so “this cup is the new covenant in my blood,” the chalice, as the Roman Canon says, “of everlasting salvation.” We are filled not with death, but with “every grace and heavenly blessing.” We celebrate his triumph with hymns of praise and not with destruction, but with a festal banquet. The Eucharist is joy.

How could you express greater thankfulness to God?

Trinity Sunday

May 20, 2016 Leave a Comment

Holy Trinity, Rublev

PRV 8:22-31; PS 8:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; ROM 5:1-5; JN 16:12-15

This Sunday we celebrate the Trinity, the most obscure but also most glorious mystery of our faith.

Historically, this feast has two origins. First, it is the Octave of Pentecost. In the early middle ages, there grew a practice of recelebrating a feast one week afterwards, and every day in between. Divine Mercy Sunday is the Octave of Easter: it is like the whole week repeats the glory of Easter, and the liturgy even says that “today” is Easter throughout. One day cannot contain its glories. Christmas, too, has an octave. Pentecost was the third to get an octave – and after that, they started giving octaves to all sorts of lesser feasts.

Now, Easter season is the octave of octaves. Pentecost, the Sunday after seven weeks of seven, is the final day of this super-octave. It seems to be in for this reason that they dropped the Pentecost octave in the reform of the liturgy after Vatican II – we should think of Pentecost as part of Easter, not a separate season. But we retain Trinity Sunday as kind of a reduplication of Pentecost – that is, as a celebration that Jesus the Son of God, the victor of Easter, and the Holy Spirit, whom he pours into our hearts, are truly God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

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There was also an independent tradition that at some places had a Trinity Sunday as the final Sunday before Advent, as the culminating feast of the Church year. The readings at the end of the year point to the end of time, and the readings of Advent to the second coming of Christ. Thus a feast was added to ponder the final mystery, the mystery in which all things culminate, the life of God.

And in fact, before Vatican II the liturgy for the feast focused less on the mystery of the Trinity than on the mystery of God. The first reading (they didn’t used to have an Old Testament reading) was from Romans: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor?”

The Gospel had the Baptismal formula from the Great Commission, but juxtaposed with Romans and the other prayers of the day, the point seemed only to be that we are baptized into the mystery of God. That is part of what Trinity Sunday does: it just leads us to think about God. It is the feast of God – and the feast of the mysteriousness, the unthinkability of God.

Preachers are sometimes scared of Trinity Sunday. But we should dwell on that: that we cannot understand God is precisely the point.

***

And yet the readings of the reformed liturgy do lead us into a meditation on the three persons. The first reading, from Wisdom, talks about the wisdom, the Logos, who was in the beginning with God, through whom all things were made (as John says in his prologue). Although the tradition would probably focus on the Son, you can think of it speaking of the Spirit, too: “When the Lord established the heavens I was there, when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep,” etc.

We ponder, at the end of this Easter season, the true identity of the Son and the Spirit. True God, in the beginning with God.

***

The first reading from the New Testament, from Romans, is more specific.

“We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access.” The whole point of the original controversies about the Trinity, in the fourth century, was that Jesus can only give us access to God because he is God – and man. A bridge must reach to both sides: if he is less than God, he cannot connect us to God. But he is that great, that awesome – and our redemption is that great.

So too the Spirit: “the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Not something less than God, but God himself, as love. How great is our dignity!

And this is our hope even in “afflictions”: through the trials of life, we are in union with God himself, nothing less.

***

Most specific of all, of course, are the words of Jesus, from the prayer at the Last Supper in John’s Gospel. The Spirit “will take from what is mine and declare it to you,” and “everything that the Father has is mine.” Jesus can lead us to the Father because he is true God, nothing less. The Holy Spirit, poured into our hearts, unites us to Jesus because he is true God, nothing less.

How great is the mystery of God! And how great is our Redemption! Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit!

How would your day be different if you really believed that God himself was at work in your heart?

What did de Montfort Mean By “True Devotion to Mary”?

April 29, 2016 Leave a Comment

Yesterday the Church celebrated St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716), a French priest and author of the important treatise “True Devotion to Mary.” Mother Teresa thought this book was important enough that he should be named a Doctor of the Church. St. John Paul II chose his papal motto to refer to it: Totus tuus, “totally yours,” was one of de Montfort’s formulations of Marian devotion.

But what did de Montfort mean by “true devotion”?

***

The book is perhaps best known for its reference to “consecration” to Mary. Many Catholics, at some point in their lives, make a consecration, often with some reference to de Montfort. This is indeed something de Montfort recommends:

“Those who desire to take up this special devotion, (which has not been erected into a confraternity, although this would be desirable [it now has]), should spend at least twelve days in emptying themselves of the spirit of the world, which is opposed to the spirit of Jesus, as I have recommended in the first part of this preparation for the reign of Jesus Christ. They should then spend three weeks imbuing themselves with the spirit of Jesus through the most Blessed Virgin. Here is a programme they might follow. . . .”

Based on the six paragraphs that follow, someone put together a series of meditations and many prayers to be said. Someone else recently came out with a book that shortens the time and tries to make it easier. Many Catholics go through this process, say the prayer at the end, and consider themselves “consecrated.”

But in the paragraph before he explains “preparation and consecration,” de Montfort says, “Although this devotion is essentially an interior one, this does not prevent it from having exterior practices which should not be neglected. ‘These must be done but those not omitted.’ If properly performed, exterior acts help to foster interior ones.”

This section of the book suggests six other “exterior practices,” from wearing little chains to praying the rosary and the Magnificat, to “contempt of the world,” as exterior ways to nurture interior devotion. Consecration is parallel to these other devotions – and all of them are secondary to de Montfort’s real concern.

***

De Montfort is at pains to prevent us from “false devotion.” His section on false devotion is more than twice as long as his section on consecration.

False devotion is insufficient devotion – but there are different kinds of insufficient devotion. “Scrupulous devotion” is afraid that if we think about Mary too much, we will forget Jesus. Much of de Montfort’s book tries to explain why this is not true: true devotion to Mary always leads us closer to Jesus.

But other kinds of false devotion are, in an interesting way, different but similar to this insufficient devotion. “Presumptuous devotion,” for example, thinks that just a few prayers (or, perhaps, a few external devotions, whether scapulars and chains or thoughtless rosaries and consecrations) absolves us of the need for a real spiritual life. “Presumptuous” false devotion is different from “scrupulous” false devotion in the sense that one thinks devotion to Mary is too powerful, and the other thinks it’s too weak. But they are the same in that neither one is truly devoted.

“True devotion” doesn’t mean saying a couple prayers, or a consecration, and thinking you have your bases covered. True devotion, he says, is “interior, trustful, holy, constant, and disinterested.” True devotion is a “slavery of love” – slavery in the sense that we give our whole selves for love, instead of maintaining our “right” to think more of ourselves than of God. Presumptous devotion might think that consecrating ourselves to Mary is really valuable – but it fails by failing to be in love.

(The first part of being truly in love, he says, is that “Christ must be the ultimate end of all devotions.” If Marian devotion is an excuse for being lukewarm about Jesus, it isn’t real Marian devotion at all.)

***

At the end of the book, he says true devotion means living our whole life “through Mary, with Mary, in Mary, and for Mary.” Perhaps another time, we can dig into what these formulas mean.

For now, the point is that true devotion means transformation. It means taking Jesus as our all – de Montfort’s personal motto was “God Alone!” And it means taking Mary as a means of focusing our lives more totally on Jesus.

True devotion is not a consecration formula that we follow once and then forget. True devotion is a life transformed.

How could you make Jesus a bigger part of your day?

Second Sunday of Easter: The Mediation of Mercy and the Sacred Heart of Jesus

April 5, 2016 Leave a Comment

ACTS 5:12-16; PS 118: 2-4, 13-15, 22-24; REV 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19; JN 20:19-31

The Sunday after Easter is Divine Mercy Sunday, a new feast created by St. John Paul II, in response to a call by St. Faustina Kowalska. It is a wonderful feast – but it takes some unpacking.

It should be said, first, that feasts do not come from one visionary alone. Take the Sacred Heart. People associate devotion to the Sacred Heart with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a nun in France in the seventeenth century. She did indeed call for such a feast.

But she didn’t make it up. Devotion to the Sacred Heart was already important in the Middle Ages. And the Church didn’t accept it merely because Margaret Mary said so. It was providing insight into the needs of the time – more on that in a minute. This doesn’t mean Margaret Mary is bad or unimportant – in fact, it points out that Margaret Mary had both a great grasp of the Tradition and an inspired eye for the needs of her time. She is a great saint – but she is a great saint because she was not suggesting wild ideas.

Similarly, St. Faustina has important insights that we should hear. But those insights are important not because she made them up, but because she didn’t. And the Church’s articulation of those insights take them beyond St. Faustina, into the teaching of the Church. Divine Mercy is the Church’s feast, not just St. Faustina’s. That’s why St. Faustina is a saint: because she preaches the Catholic truth.

***

Now, there is reason to be hesitant about the Divine Mercy devotion, if not rightly understood.

The key problem is abstraction. Divine Mercy has in many ways supplanted devotion to the Sacred Heart. But the Sacred Heart focused on the person of Jesus, particularly the union between his divinity and humanity. Devotion to the Sacred Heart is not abstract, it is personal and it is intensely incarnational.

Divine Mercy, by itself, runs the risk of becoming an abstraction. To be specific, the danger is that “mercy,” apart from Christ, can lead us to think that our conversion doesn’t matter. People tend to think that mercy means God overlooks our sins. To the contrary, God’s mercy is in healing us and converting us.

The Sacred Heart, being so intensely human, reminds us that God’s mercy restores our humanity. It reminds us of the need to love. It reminds us of the humanity of Jesus, and of his virtues. We pray, “make our hearts like unto thine” – which is the right understanding of mercy, the opposite of God just overlooking our sin.

It is important that our devotion to Divine Mercy maintain this incarnational, human element.

***

St. Faustina, of course, helps us. Her image of Divine Mercy (above) shows that Divine Mercy is a commentary on the Sacred Heart, and on the sacraments – not a replacement for them. In the image, Jesus does not overlook us, he looks intently on us – and the sacraments pour forth from his Sacred Heart to heal our sins and unite us to his glory.

St. Faustina also gives us the Divine Mercy chaplet, which reminds us of “his sorrowful passion,” the pouring out of his Heart on the Cross, and of the Eucharist, “the body and blood, soul and divinity of your dearly beloved Son.”

And underlining it all are the words, “Jesus I trust in you.” St. Faustina does not let us turn Divine Mercy into an abstraction. It is another insight into the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

***

So too the Mass that the Church gives us. The Feast is placed on the octave of Easter Sunday. As Pope Francis has said, it is thereby “dedicated to the glorious wounds of the risen Jesus.” Like the image, it points us not into abstraction but into Easter.

The reading from Acts tells us of grace mediated by the apostles, as Peter’s shadow brings healing to the humanity of the sick. The second reading, from Revelation, has us falling before the feet of him who “was dead, but now [is] alive forever and ever” – embracing the feet of the Risen Lord. And the Gospel has Doubting Thomas probing the wounds of the Risen Christ and the Apostles given the ministry of Confession: “whose sins you forgive are forgiven them,” “Peace be with you.”

The Divine Mercy comes to us through the sacraments of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Mercy is no abstraction, it is union with Christ, crucified and alive.

What does the Heart of Christ teach you about Divine Mercy?

The Juxtapositions of Easter

March 26, 2016 Leave a Comment

I have had a busy Holy Week. It’s overwhelming how so many very different things happen at once. That’s true of our spiritual life in general: work, and friends, and medical issues, and liturgy, and all the rest, all at the same messy time. It’s true, too, of the liturgies of Holy Week.

Holy Week begins with a strange juxtaposition. More than one person asked me about it this week: what’s going on with Palm Sunday? Even the name is confusing: “Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion.” Which one is it?

On the one hand, the Mass begins with Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. We sing Hosanna. (Hosanna, it turns out, is a Greek twist on a couple Hebrew words: it appears in the Bible only here, as the acclamation when Jesus enters Jerusalem.) We wave our palms. We acclaim the king.

And then, by the time the ordinary Mass begins, our Hosannas are forgotten. In the first reading, his beard is being plucked. In the second, he is emptying himself, taking the form a slave. The Psalm cries “why have you abandoned me.” And in the Gospel, we read the Passion in its entirety – already, right at the beginning of Holy Week.

Our palms remain awkwardly in our hands, while we are given the voice of a different crowd, crying not Hosanna but Crucify.

But that awkwardness, that strange juxtaposition, is just the point. We who wave the palms are the ones who betray him. And he who is crucified is also the king. This is the triumphal entry that he has eagerly expected. It’s all about that juxtaposition – the palms hanging limply in our hands.

***

This year we have another, but paradigmatic, juxtaposition. March 25 is ordinarily the Annunciation, the moment of great joy, when Christ comes into the world. This year it also happened to be Good Friday, dated according to the changing moon. Our celebration of the Annunciation is deferred till after Easter Week – but the juxtapostion is normal.

For March 25 is not just nine months before Christmas. We know Christmas is at the solstice, in the bleak midwinter. And it seems just an accident that the Annunciation awkwardly falls so close to Holy Week. But it is not awkward. It is the plan.

In fact, the Church settled on March 25 before it settled on December 25. Though we celebrate Easter following the old, lunar calculations for Passover, the traditional date of the Crucifixion was March 25. It is also the traditional date for the creation of Adam, the fall of Lucifer, the sacrifice of Isaac, and the crossing of the Red Sea.

These things go together. They are all one. Just as Christ is both king and crucified, and we are the crowd that both acclaims him and betrays him, so this is the time of when Adam is re-created, Satan is defeated, the first-born is sacrified, and the seas of death are conquered.

These are not just awkward, accidental juxtapositions. It all goes together. That’s the point.

***

Many years ago, some half-Christian family bought us a strange cross. Though it is the shape of the instrument of torture, on it are happy scenes from the life of Christ. Another awkward juxtaposition. Is he the Lord of happiness or the Lord of the Cross?

Here, the liturgical calendar has to de-juxtapose. On one level, the liturgical year simply comes down to the problem of reading the long Bible. It would be nice to read the whole Bible everyday. It all goes together. And it’s all important – we are not a religion of the 3×5 notecard, where everything can be said in a few words. The Bible is long, because there is a lot to say.

On some level, Holy Week is simply the time when we read this central passage. In fact, we read it a few ways. On Palm Sunday we read from the Synoptic Gospels, whichever Gospel we are reading that year. On Good Friday, we read from St. John. And we need those two accounts; they are different; they are richer in juxtaposition. John is like a commentary on the other Gospels – they tell us of the Eucharist, he tells us of the feet washing, etc.

Liturgically, we can’t read it all every day, so we break it up. But that crucifix we were given has sort of the right idea: the one who dies on Good Friday – yes and the one who rises again early on the morning of the third day – is the one, too, who healed the lepers, taught with parables, came to Cana in Galilee; the one who oversaw Noah and Abraham, David and Solomon, Ezra, the Maccabees, and the prophets of the exile.

In the thickness of the Bible, and the complexities of the liturgical year, we see the rich juxtaposition that makes up the whole of the Christian faith.

What parts of the faith do you find most hard to reconcile with one another? Can you learn anything by thinking about that juxtaposition?

Joseph and the Rediscovery of Love

March 19, 2016 Leave a Comment

“Man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes 24). “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it” (Luke 17:33).

The Bible tells us little about St. Joseph, but what it does tell us is a magnificent example of this principle.

***

Joseph was betrothed to Mary. The Jewish betrothal ceremony had more weight than our engagement; they were effectively married, just awaiting the moving-in ceremony. Yet when he found her “with child through the Holy Spirit,” Joseph decided to send her away. (Our imprecise modern translations say, “divorce,” but the Greek is more like, “set her loose.”) The first thing we can see is that the coming of Jesus confused Joseph’s plans.

Reading quickly, we sometimes mistake Joseph’s motives – and in the process, we mistake the strength of their relationship. Perhaps he thought Mary had been with another man. But surely no one who knew Mary would think that.

Rather, it says that he found her with child through the Holy Spirit. The text allows us – and the context compels us – to think he knew the child was divine. He sent her away not because he thought she was bad, but because he thought she was too good for him. It says he wanted to send her away because he was righteous; like any righteous Jew, he did not dare step into the sanctuary, knowing he was unworthy to see the face of God.

Indeed, the scandal of Mary is that God has come far too close. It doesn’t seem appropriate. It doesn’t seem possible. So we pretend that Jesus is either less than God or less than truly human. To recognize that Mary is truly the mother of God is to explode our minds. Joseph, being holy, didn’t deny the truth – but he stepped away from it.

Thus the angel has to say, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.” (And we must be told, as well, not to be afraid to welcome Mary into our homes.) Joseph is afraid – but the angel reminds him of his own messianic dignity.

***

The angel tells Joseph of the role he must play: “You are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Joseph is the namer. He did not conceive the child, but he is to act as the father.

And he is to name Jesus savior – not destroyer. On the one hand, Jesus seems to upend Joseph’s plans. Like Abraham, Joseph must set off on a trajectory he never expected.

But in losing his life, Joseph rediscovers it. Naming Jesus points to how personal Joseph’s vocation will be. Children need parents – not just institutions – because they need to be known personally, to be known by name (not just by number). Joseph’s fatherly role is beautifully outlined in the naming of Jesus.

And Joseph is to be husband of Mary. We have a strange idea of ancient marriage, as if they didn’t even know their spouses. But though sin has always gotten in the way, marriage has always been about love and relationship. Children need marriage because they need to experience those personal relationships, to grow up in a context of inter-personal love.

The Bible portrays the first marriage, the marriage of Adam and Eve, as a delight, a discovery of another self and an end to the loneliness of being surrounded by mere animals. The Old Testament portrays marriage as the ultimate image of the love of God for his people, a love which is the opposite of betrayal and infidelity. I agree with the tradition that says the Song of Songs is about God and his people, not about human marriage – but regardless, it portrays marriage as profound being-in-love.

And when Jesus gives the grace to restore marriage – a grace given preeminently to his mother – it results in a love like his own. The only commandment to the Bride is to love.

Joseph wasn’t ignorant of Mary. She wasn’t some stranger that he suspected of adultery. She was his best friend. In the story of the Finding in the Temple, Mary can speak for Joseph’s heart: “your father and I have looked for you, greatly distressed” (Luke 2:48).

***

Jesus is savior. He comes to restore, not to destroy. He calls Joseph, yes, to give up his life. Like any marriage, he must give himself unreservedly to his wife, to his child, and to God. In this marriage, he will have to give himself even more radically, as evidenced in his fear to go forward.

But the angel tells him not to be afraid. In giving his life, he finds it again, in laying it down he rediscovers all the riches of love: the love of husband and wife, the love of father and son, the love of friendship, the love of God.

Where is St. Joseph in your devotional life?

(For more meditations like the above, check out Fr. Mary-Dominique Philippe’s exquisite The Mystery of Joseph. (aff))

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