Dwelling Richly

(Reflection prepared for our vocation department's social media)

In the first reading for the Mass of Christmas Eve morning we hear how God takes the opportunity of David’s plans to build the house of God, the Temple, to turn the discernment around: it is God, rather, who will establish a house for David. (2 Samuel 7:11)

At Christmas we see this prophecy begin to come to its final fulfillment. Mary, in bearing the Lord in her womb, becomes the first tabernacle and the exemplar of the Church to come. She is, as St. Francis of Assisi puts it, the Virgin made Church. (A Salutation of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

Jesus Christ, who was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, invites us into Holy Communion with him, that we, as the Church, might become a dwelling place for God in the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:22) In this way, the great feast of Pentecost, at which we recall and celebrate the Spirit as the abiding presence of Christ in his Church, peeks out even now at Christmas. Indeed, Pentecost is the fulfillment of the prophecy given to David; God builds for us a house in which he himself will dwell among us, our home and mother the Church.

As Blessed Isaac of Stella writes: “Christ dwelt for nine months in the tabernacle of Mary’s womb. He dwells until the end of the ages in the tabernacle of the Church’s faith. He will dwell for ever in the knowledge and love of each faithful soul.” (Office of Readings for Saturday of the 2nd week of Advent)

When you, faithful soul, discover the unique and unrepeatable way that Christ desires to dwell in you richly (Colossians 3:16), you have discerned your vocation.

Command That I Come To You On The Water

 Matthew 14:22-33

“Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” 

That's how our consent to the journey begins; we wish to recognize God as truly God, we invite him into our lives, offering our wills, offering ourselves and asking to be commanded.

He said, “Come.” Peter got out of the boat and began to walk on the water toward Jesus.

And so our journey to the Lord begins. There is the joy and energy of a first fervor and we set out, walking on the unsure foundation of all our mixed motivations, past traumas, and disordered attachments.

But when he saw how [strong] the wind was he became frightened; and, beginning to sink.

Soon we realize that it is beyond us to approach and much less arrive at the presence of God. We sink in our sins, confusions, wrong ideas about religion and God, and much else besides.

he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand and caught him, and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?

What happens next, if we persevere at this point, becomes the real beginning of a spiritual life. We let our experience of our misery, our inability to even approach God, become compunction. Pierced to the heart, sinking and afraid, looking at our own death by drowning squarely in the face, we cry out in desperation. "Lord, save me!" 

We have realized that even to take a single step in our journey to the Lord, we need him to stretch out his hand and catch us. That outstretched hand is the Holy Spirit. And just as that Spirit stretched forth from the Godhead to conceive the Word of God as the human life of Jesus Christ, so now the same Spirit (if we allow it!) conceives us as Christ-ians.

With that new experience of faith comes the final realization, that the issues and difficulties in our spiritual journey arise from failing to see clearly that it isn't our journey at all, but the journey of the Son of God in and through our humanity, folding us, gently and mercifully, into the infinitely blessed, happy, and creative reality we call the Holy Trinity.

So let us invite the Lord, again for the first time, to command that we come to him on the water.

God's Dwelling

I think I have about six more posts on Amoris laetitia still to come, but for today a break from it.

Here in my Roman life I only preach on Sundays once in a while, but yesterday was one of those days. I focused on John 14:23.

Jesus said to his disciples: “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him."

This 'making of a dwelling' is the fruit of the Easter mystery and the whole good news of our faith.

Begotten in the Only Begotten

I always appreciate when St. Irenaeus's Against Heresies comes up in the Office of Readings; it's one of a handful of books given me to read in theology that I think improved my understanding of Christianity in a basic way. The passage given for Pentecost begins this way:

When the Lord told his disciples to go and teach all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, he conferred on them the power of giving men new life in God.

Reflecting on that, I found myself, as I do sometimes, praying for all of those who have been my spiritual parents along the way.

The Holy Spirit

I got caught up in the readings on the way up to Pentecost, especially Jesus' prayer at the Last Supper as it comes to us in John.

"I made known to them your name, and I will make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." (John 17:26)

To me this is the heart of Christianity; that the love with which you have loved me may be in them. Our communion with the humanity of Jesus Christ draws us into the love of the Father and the Son. And this is what we call the Holy Spirit.

Jesus Christ reveals that 'God' is not a static 'supreme being' nor a philosopher's abstraction, but a relationship, a Lover and Beloved in the perfect unity of Love. That Love conceives the Beloved in time, within the creation, so that the human creature may also enjoy and be renovated by the creative relationship that is the Father and the Son. This historical event we call Jesus Christ.

As the Spirit conceives Jesus Christ through the loving consent of Mary, so the same Spirit conceives each Christian soul, made Christ-ian by communion with the humanity of Christ, empowered to confess that "Jesus is Lord." (1 Cor 12:3) Just as Christ is raised from the dead, so the Christian gains new life from the Spirit dwelling within, (Rom 8:11) enabling him or her to leave behind selfishness and fear and to "seek the things that are above." (Col 3:1)

The Spirit does all this precisely as the Love of the Father and the Son, drawing the person who consents into the very life of the Blessed Trinity, into the overflowingly creative love from which everything that has being has come.

Each of us is a unique and unrepeatable creation. Since, as we say, 'grace builds on nature,' this means that each of us has the potential of being the bearer of a unique and unrepeatable grace for the world. Indeed, God wills it. St. Paul says as much to the Corinthians: "To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good." (1 Cor 12:7) Let us then let go of anything that holds us back, and consent to be conceived as Christians, as members of the mystical Body of Christ, that we might become the particular grace God wills and delights for us to be for each other.

The Holy Mother of God

We celebrate today Mary, the Holy Mother of God. We celebrate the maternity of Mary not only as one of the mysteries of Christmas, but also because her vocation is ours as well.

Like Mary, we are are called to welcome the Word of God, Jesus Christ, and to "protect Christ in our lives"--as Pope Francis said during the Mass for the beginning of his Petrine ministry--in order to be able to bear him and his mission into the world and into history.

In this sense Mary is the prototype of the Church; what she has done historically we are called to do spiritually. In the words of Lumen gentium, Mary "is the image and beginning of the Church as it is to be perfected in the world to come." (68)

It is the task of the Church, and of each of us as her members, to welcome the Word, to nourish and protect it, and to bear it and give witness to it in our relationships, in our projects, and in our world.

In this sense, God seeks our maternity. It is a virginal maternity because there is no earthly father, but only the Holy Spirit who conceives the Christian vocation within us as the presence of Christ.

God seeks us, as St. Francis greeted the Blessed Virgin Mary, as virgo ecclesia facta, 'the virgin made Church,' as a virginity ready to keep and hold the presence of Christ such that his presence might be born throughout the world.

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!

The Temptations

It being the first Sunday of Lent, I was thinking about the temptations. More specifically, I was thinking about the Holy Spirit. In Luke's account, which we read this year, Jesus goes into the desert 'full of the Holy Spirit.' As also in Matthew, it is the Spirit who leads him there. In Mark, the Spirit pushes Jesus into the wilderness.

I think it's easy to look at the temptations as a sort of initiation for Jesus, a test by which he becomes fully the Jesus Christ of the 'public ministry.' But Jesus is already full of the Holy Spirit when he goes into the desert; as the Word made flesh through conception by the Holy Spirit, to be full of the Spirit is to be already who he is and is going to be, fully and completely.

Mutual Enrichment Dubium: Pentecost Octave

In the cover letter to Summorum Pontificum, Benedict XVI expressed hope for a "mutual enrichment" of the newly-named Ordinary and Extraordinary forms of the Roman rite. How such a thing plays out will continue to be a matter of discernment and debate, a work of local custom and of the sensus fidelium.

In that spirit, here's a practical question. I'm curious to see what people think.

When I first acquainted myself with the older form of the liturgy, I became sensitized, like many, to the absence of the Pentecost Octave in the reformed calendar. Indeed, the relationship of Pentecost to the whole of the liturgy between Pentecost Sunday and the new beginning of Advent was transformed; where there used to be Sundays 'after Pentecost' we now have the second round of the time per annum, or as we call it in English, 'Ordinary Time'--which doesn't mean that it's ordinary in the sense of plain, but that we keep track of it with ordinal numbers.

So when I first was learning the Extraordinary Form, I began to 'enrich' my celebration of the Ordinary Form with certain elements from the older tradition. For instance, on the first of July, if nothing else were going on, I would celebrate the votive Mass of the Precious Blood, in recognition of the feast of the Precious Blood assigned to that day in the Extraordinary Form. (In the Ordinary Form, what we sloppily still call "Corpus Christi" is now the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, obviating the second observance.)

On the weekdays after Pentecost, as Ordinary Time resumed, I would sneak in a votive Mass of the Holy Spirit or two, so long as the day was free for such a thing. I thought I was recognizing the older observance of the Pentecost Octave by doing so. And I will admit that there was a little feeling in me, as many have felt, that the suppression of the Octave was one of the misfortunes of the reform.

So, is this a legitimate and sensible choice toward 'mutual enrichment,' or is it contrary to the form and flow of the Ordinary Form? Were my votive Masses of the Holy Spirit an enriching strategy for recognizing the tradition that used to be there--and now continues to be in the Extraordinary Form--or are they a distracting act of pretending that does violence to the change of season that the Ordinary Form supposes?

I was just thinking on this as I look forward to Monday, which will be a very odd liturgical day for me. It will begin in Boston as Monday of the eighth week in Ordinary Time, so my votive Mass of the Holy Spirit would be an option for the morning. God willing, however, I will conclude the day by transitioning into the Roman-Franciscan calendar in Italy, where Monday is the obligatory memorial of St. Mariana de Jesús de Paredes.

So, what do you think? Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit or not?

Near and Far

I have been fortunate in my Christian life to have lived most of it--so far--in regions that have preserved the Ascension on its proper day. In most places, today is Thursday of the sixth week of Easter, a novelty of a liturgical day unknown to our ancestors in the faith.

I remember that it was the vigil of Ascension in 1992 when I first walked down to the church where I would be baptized and introduced myself to the pastor and the permanent deacon. My 'convert instructions' proceeded quickly from there--I had already journeyed through a sort of pre-catechumenate with the priest on campus--and I would be baptized on the other side of that summer on the feast that was then called the Beheading of John the Baptist.

I have always loved Ascension day. It seems to hold within itself the coincidences of opposites that make up the fruitfulness of the Christian mystery. In its curious mash-up of the chronologies and pneumatologies of the gospel traditions surrounding the Resurrection, we pray through the good news that Jesus' departure assures his abiding Presence among us, and are reminded that his descent into our humanity is the occasion of our ascent from the misery and frustration of selfishness and sin. A period marked by the apostles' privileged experience of the Risen Lord in little Galilee ends so that the Spirit who is his Presence may begin to be handed on to the whole world.

In prayer we experience a reflection of these mysteries in the little mirror of our soul. Who is this God to whom we pray, or this Spirit who prays in us? As no-thing, he seems to be more of an absence than a presence, he who is the Light so bright that our minds and hearts only see him as darkness. Indeed, it is the apparent inaccessibility of God that continues to draw us into the mystery. And so we continue in our interior striving after the adorable Mystery that is God Most High, with the striving that is the only true rest. The opposites that frame and enable our rational thought begin to coincide, a sign of our own ascension above ourselves, of our new freedom in Christ.

Nox Clara

Judas goes off to betray Jesus. 'And it was night,' adds St. John.

But as soon as the evangelist makes this note, Jesus announces his imminent glorification, and the glorification of God in him. Nunc clarificatus est Filius hominis et Deus clarificatus est in eo.

Night becomes glory. Judas's handing over of Jesus to the Cross leads to Jesus' handing over the Spirit from the Cross, as shall hear in John's Passion on Friday.

That's the sacred tradition by which the Blessed Trinity foils the senseless stupidity of sin and death. The Father hands over the Son. The Son is handed over by the betrayer. But the betrayal is turned into the handing on of the Spirit to us.

So let us go into the night. Let us receive in prayer the rayos de oscuridad that, as John of the Cross teaches us, are actually the Light.

The Ascent of the Holy Spirit

This is a little window at one of the places where I celebrate Mass regularly. I find it fascinating and like it very much.

The dove rises from the fire, a double image of the Holy Spirit. It's almost phoenix-like, isn't it? (Does one say, 'phoenician'?) Beneath the fire is the Holy Name 'IHS' and then the label: "Resurrection."

And yet, it's not an image of the Resurrection, but of the Holy Spirit. It reminds me that when we talk about, pray on, and find ourselves invited into the mysteries of the Resurrection, the accounts of the appearances of the Risen Lord to the apostolic generation, the various handings over of the Holy Spirit as they are recorded in the New Testament, it is actually quite difficult to know just how it is we are talking about different things.

The sacrifice of the Cross, the Lord's death and descent to the dead, the passing of his divine humanity into the new life beyond history but now erupted backwards into it, and the handing over of the Spirit who is the abiding presence of this Event among us and the animating principle of the Church, all of this is the one Paschal Mystery of Christ.

The Spirituality of Christmas

I opted out of celebrating the memorial of Brother André for Mass this morning, not because I have anything against French-Canadians (God help me in this friary if I did) but because I just love the Collect for the weekday of Christmas:

Cast your kindly light upon your faithful, Lord, we pray,
and with the splendor of your glory
set their hearts ever aflame,
that they may never cease to acknowledge their Savior
and may truly hold fast to him.
Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.


There's so much beautiful Christmas doctrine in that prayer.

How is that we are inspired to acknowledge the Savior? Exactly. We are inspired. Just as the Holy Spirit conceives the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, in the womb of Mary, so--by the same movement--the Spirit conceives the life of Christ in us. This is what faith is: the divine life of Christ at work in our humanity.

To acknowledge the Savior is to hold fast to him. The sequence of verbs is even better in the untranslated Latin: agnoscant...apprehendant. To know God is to love him; acknowledging him is holding fast to him, and it is by holding fast to him that we know and recognize him.

To know God is to love him. But in some sense it's more important to notice this the other way around: to love God is to know him, because God is love, and the only real knowledge of love is being in love.

When we surrender to the burning Love of the Spirit conceiving the knowledge of God in us, our spiritual life becomes the mystery of Christmas.

The Answer to Prayer

Jesus assures us that by our confidence and persistence we will receive a favorable answer to our prayer. In fact, we receive the greatest gift of all. Follow this link for my homily for this weekend.

Creation

Pentecost marks our invitation into the new creation, the continuing, renovating work of the Creator. Follow this link for my homily for Sunday.

The Spirit of Unity

The Holy Spirit, Who is the divine Unity of Father and Son, stretches that unity into the creation to offer us unity with God. The Spirit fulfills Jesus' great prayer, that "they may all be one." Follow this link for my homily for this weekend.

Begotten and Re-Made

From the first reading for Mass today: "Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten by God." (1 John 5:1)

To me this is the good news of Christmas. The Son is begotten of the Father from all eternity, "begotten, not made" as we say in the Creed. By his Incarnation, we are given access to that same relationship to the Father. The Holy Spirit conceives the Word in the womb of Mary and thus bends the perfect love and mutuality of Father and Son into the world. This bending out of the relationship of the Son to the Father allows us to come in. (This, not incidentally, is why we call Mary the Mediatrix of grace.)

By the birth of Christ, the Life of the Blessed Trinity Himself is opened to us, that we might become new creatures begotten of God, enjoying the same relationship that Jesus has with the Father, as daughters and sons in the Son.

From Visitation to Pentecost Via Baptism

One of my favorite things about the church where I work is the depiction of the mysteries of the rosary in the windows. The Joyful Mysteries begin to the left of the sanctuary and progress to the back of the church. Then, on the other side, the Glorious Mysteries begin and proceed back to the sanctuary, so that the Coronation of Mary ends up opposite the Annunciation. The Sorrowful Mysteries appear as paintings on the ceiling, also proceeding to the sanctuary.

When the light is good, one can use the windows as meditations in praying the rosary in the same manner that one would make the Stations of the Cross.

Before Mass today, as my final preparation to preach on today's Gospel, I spent some time with the window of the Visitation:


Elizabeth's posture proclaims her words from St. Luke: how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Mary reaches out one hand in greeting, while the other is over her heart, where she kept all these things, reflecting on them. Poor Zechariah gestures in his muteness, and St. Joseph hangs back with his green halo. Anybody know why it's green?

One of my little dreams for the church is to tear up the awful carpeting and have the Luminous Mysteries put into the floor of the main aisle, opposite the Sorrowful Mysteries on the ceiling. It could be a nice mosaic or something. Because St. Anthony's altar and the old baptistery break up perfect evenness in the Joyful-Glorious layout, the Baptism of the Lord would end up in the floor right in between the Visitation pictured above and Pentecost:



Now this would be quite a lovely accident, because Jesus and John in the Baptism could parallel the postures of each other's mother in the Visitation window. John and Jesus would recapitulate their previous meeting in utero, except the other way around, accentuating the humility of the scene and the objection of John.

Then, the Holy Spirit that appears in the Baptism could parallel the radiant Dove in the Pentecost window. As you can see, I'm full of ideas on this fourth Sunday of Advent.

Should I Fire My Spiritual Director?

Before we can speak of how to go about terminating a spiritual direction relationship, we must ask the prior question: should I fire my spiritual director?

The interior inspiration to get rid of one's spiritual director must be discerned closely. It can be an entirely legitimate invitation from the Holy Spirit; there are, after all, many demagogues, madmen, and creepy weirdos out there claiming to have good spiritual advice. On the other hand, we should not fire our spiritual director just because he or she makes suggestions that we don't want to hear or invites us into difficult but salutary discernments.

So, if we feel like ending a relationship with a particular spiritual director for any of the following reasons, we should treat this thought as a temptation against our spiritual progress:

• Our denial about certain sins, attachments, or addictions is confronted, and we don't want to hear it.
  
• We are invited to discern attachments to cherished religious practices, and we don't want to risk growth because we are comfortable with our current practice.
• Our operative images of God are challenged, and we want to run from the interior panic and spiritual vertigo that necessarily ensues.
• We are told that what we really need is not spiritual direction, but to see a doctor or psychologist.

On the other hand, there can be legitimate signs that the inspiration to fire our spiritual director is from the Holy Spirit:

• He goes to sleep while you are speaking.
• He does not remember your name.
• He talks about fairies, imps, harpies, necromancy, or the city of Atlantis. Yes, these are all things I have either experienced or have been reported to me.
  
• He spends more than a minimal amount of time talking about his own experience, or seems to relish talking about himself.
• He is not at least as conversant with the spiritual tradition as you are. The director should be at least as well read in the tradition as the disciple.
• He does not seem to take you seriously; e.g. 'that's not a (serious) sin, get over it,''That's not real prayer, get over it,' etc.
• He has an observable negative emotional reaction to something you say. A spiritual director should be past the point when people can 'press our buttons' so easily.
• He seems overly attached to certain patterns of practice, and wants to impose them on everyone; e.g. 'You must say three rosaries every day,' 'The first Saturdays devotion will fix you,' etc.
• He makes suggestions that increase your dependence on him alone, especially if he is a priest; e.g. 'You should only go to confession to me,' 'I want you to attend my Sunday Mass each week,' etc. Some people want disciples for themselves, rather than for the Lord.
• He does or suggests anything at all that is sexually suggestive or creepy. Yes, it happens. Trust your instincts.

Fulfilling the Law

Jesus' words in today's gospel have always fascinated me:

Jesus said to his disciples:
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,
not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter
will pass from the law,
until all things have taken place.

Matthew 5: 17-18

But what does this mean for us, the latest in a long line of gentile converts to Christianity, grafted onto the faith of Abraham by our baptism? Surely we have not followed the Law that God gave to his people through Moses! So what does it mean when Jesus says that he has not abolished, but fulfilled the Law, and that none of it will pass away?

There are lots of angles on this, but here's the one that works for me: the Law was a gift to the people, that they might imitate the holiness of God. "Be holy as I am holy." Now everyone who has tried to live a holy life knows the experience of mixed results. Our attachments, sins, and unconscious motivations often make a mockery of our desire for holiness and devotion, and we find ourselves in the discouragement of desiring God but being stymied by our own inability to seek Him devoutly.

The gift of the Incarnation is a remedy for this sorry condition. Jesus, in his divine humanity, mirrors the holiness of God from within our human condition, and offers the perfect sacrifice of obedience to the Father, thereby justifying our humanity before God. Thus the holiness we could not attain on our own has been accomplished on our behalf by one like us in all things but sin.

At this point we must be careful not to make the protestant error which sometimes seems to say that we remain in our miserable state of utter failure even though we are justified before God in Christ. Not necessarily! We in the apostolic churches--and in some ways the Orthodox even more than us Catholics--have what one of my teachers called a "maximalist anthropology." We believe that the human person can be redeemed and lifted up to sanctity in Christ. This is because Jesus has allowed the blessing and grace of his perfect sacrifice and holiness to pass over into us through the Resurrection. This is exactly what we mean by the coming of the Holy Spirit as the animator of the Church, and by the Eucharist as the living memorial of the Passion. Jesus has handed over the fruits of his own perfect sacrifice into our hands, that we too might fulfill the Law through him, and become holy as God alone is holy.

How Much Should I Pray?

One of my first spiritual directors gave me some advice that I have always struggled with, but in a good and productive way. I asked him how much time I ought to devote to prayer in a day or a week. He said, "More than you want, but less than you think you should."

We should pray more than we want to.

If you're anything like me, you protest right away. But I want to pray all the time! I want to pray always as the Scriptures command! So how could I pray more than I want to? This apparent problem is important for our spiritual self-awareness. Do we want to pray always, or do we want to want to pray always? There's a big difference. To take a simpler example, we may say that we want to eat apples instead of candy, or drink water instead of gin, but it's really that we wish we wanted to change, not that we want to.

Any person who tries to get serious about a prayerful life knows this conflict. We want to be the sort of person who is utterly committed to prayer, but we soon find that this isn't who we really are. Sometimes we feel like praying and sometimes we don't. To keep our rule of prayer and to pray earnestly and intentionally precisely when we don't feel like it is critical to our spiritual growth. This our invitation into the "night of sense." To pray through our dryness of lack of delight in prayer purifies our motivation and offers us the great gift of not becoming attached to the consolations that are meant to help beginners get going.

We should pray less than we think we should

Every serious religious person has a kind of image of herself as the saint she wants to be. This is a good and holy desire, and helps us to strive to go beyond ourselves as we are. Sometimes, though, this gets to be an obstacle when what we really want to worship is the idea of ourselves as a holy person rather than the living God. When this gets really bad someone walks about, missal or breviary bulging with holy cards, in a self-satisfied stupor covered by a kind of affected humility that even a child can tell is fake. He is not in love with God, but with religion and the idea of himself as a servant of God. The religious self can be a powerful idol, and one the devil is happy to encourage.

If we are honest, we will hardly have to try at praying less than we think we should; anyone with even meager self-awareness will realize that he is not living up to his own expectations for devout prayer and religious practice. Instead of letting this produce a self-involved discouragement, this experience of not be able to pray as we ought should invite us to the humility that depends only on God. "The Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings." (Romans 8:26)

This is the big "Aha! moment" with prayer, but also one of its hardest challenges: it is not something we do at all. It is not our activity or project. It is the life of the Blessed Trinity come to live within us, the prayer of the Spirit that has made a home in our spirit through our communion with the humanity of Christ. To realize this is a great liberation, for we only have to consent rather than do anything, and we have no credit in it, and thus no occasion for vanity.