The Resurrection and the Life

Jesus said to her,
“Your brother will rise.” 

Martha said to him,
“I know he will rise,
in the resurrection on the last day.” 

Jesus told her,
“I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die." 

(John 11: 23-25)

I am the resurrection and the life. A final hope, a theological concept, is revealed in person. Eschaton made flesh.

That's the sacramental mystery at the heart of Christianity.

Catholicity

The feast of All Saints today and the commemoration of All Souls tomorrow are perfect opportunities to recall to ourselves the catholicity of the Church. We are members of the Catholic Church, practitioners of Catholic Christianity. Catholic is a Greek word that simply means general or universal. The Church is ‘universal’ or ‘general’ in many ways. In one sense the Church is universal because it extends over the whole earth. There’s even a Catholic chapel in Antarctica; it’s dedicated to St. Francis by the way. The moon, it’s already been decided, is part of the diocese of Rome, in case you were thinking of making a visit and were wondering who your bishop might be. The Church is also universal because it extends until the end of time. But most of all, the Church is universal and catholic because it passes beyond the boundaries of time and space to include both heaven and earth.

This teaching on the catholicity of the church comes to us in the classic language of the Church Triumphant, the Church Militant, and the Church Suffering or Expectant. The Church Triumphant is the Church we honor today on All Saints’ Day: those Christians who have completed their journey and enjoy the vision of God in heaven. We who make up the Church on earth are classically called the Church Militant; “militant” in the sense that we are in the midst of the struggle with sin and the work of ushering in the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

All Souls

The first entry in the Martyrology today:

The commemoration of all the deceased faithful, wherein devout Mother Church--having just encouraged the fitting celebration of all her children rejoicing in heaven-- busies herself interceding before God for all souls who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith and who sleep in the hope of resurrection, and also for all those from the beginning of the world whose faith is known to God alone, that, purged of the contagion of sin, they may merit to enjoy the eternal beatific vision.

For the first time in my priesthood, I celebrated today all three Masses of All Souls, according to the privilege granted to all priests by the bull Incruentum altaris of Benedict XVI. The first, concelebrating at the regular conventual Mass, I offered for the deceased of my family. The second and third I offered alone (according to the directions of Fr. McNamara, whom I tend to trust on liturgical questions) for all the faithful departed and for the intention of the Holy Father, as is prescribed. (I still feel scruples about celebrating Mass alone, and wonder if simply desiring to offer the sacrifice is a 'just and reasonable cause,' but priests seem to do it. It's not something I do often.)

All of these things--prayers for the dead, Masses offered for them--speak to me of hope and of a merciful God. A God whose desire for our salvation goes beyond the limits of our earthly life, providing even a means to be purified of our sins after our bodily death. That means we call purgatory, without affirming much else about it.

May all the faithful departed, as well as all the holy souls from the beginning of time whose faith is known to God alone, by his mercy, rest in peace. Amen.

Immaculate Conception

The new creation was growing and gathering strength within the old creation long before it was definitively inaugurated at the beginning of these last days in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It was the power of this new creation that brought forth the patriarch Isaac from Abraham and Sarah, even though Abraham's body was "as good as dead" and Sarah was barren. (Romans 4:19) In them we begin to see the first light of the Resurrection.

That first light of the dawn that will be the Resurrection of Christ on the first day of the new creation is fully revealed in the conception of Mary. Her conception without original sin is a break with the past, a blessed discontinuity with the heritage of selfishness and sin in which we are all born and know all too well. As the Immaculate Conception she is prepared to be the mother of the new human being and the new creation, a creation far more glorious even than that of the first in the state of original blessing. "The gift is not like the trespass." (Romans 5:15)

Advent

I've come to love Advent more and more. Especially the beginning when the readings and prayers make it clear that we're not yet 'preparing for Christmas' but looking forward in hope to the coming of the Lord in glory. Advent invites us to contemplate the in-between-ness of our existence, living as we do after the first coming of Jesus Christ and before the second.

But we don't push this dichotomy too far, for in our spiritual life, our mystical life, the incarnation of the Word and the parousia of Jesus Christ turn out to coincide; the Bridegroom of our souls is always arriving by grace.

That's why Jesus in the Gospel we have this year for the first Sunday of Advent exhorts us to "Be watchful! Be alert!"  (Mark 13:33) By quiet prayer we cultivate a watchfulness, a mindfulness in our minds and hearts, so that we may notice the graces our daily lives present to us, the graces that Providence puts in our path at each moment.

Buses for the Holy Souls

It can't be denied that living in Rome one does have occasion to be scandalized from time to time by some of the very human souls our humble Lord chooses for the building up of his Church on the rock of St. Peter. There's even a joke about it; they say that Rome is the Deposit of Faith, in the sense that you arrive with your faith and then lose it in Rome, making your 'deposit.'

But from time to time Rome also edifies, warming your heart with the depth and strength of her tender devotion to our ancient faith.

To get anywhere beyond the remote compound where holy obedience finds me at this stage of my journey, I depend on Rome's buses, operated by ATAC, the Azienda Tramvie ed Autobus del Comune di Roma (Tram-ways and Bus Company of the Municipality of Rome, @InfoAtac on Twitter). Almost every morning, especially when I have to go somewhere that day (or the next day) I check their web page called "the log of public transport of the week." It tells you about diversions and cancellations for construction, protests, parades, political and papal events, etc., and most importantly, when there will be a strike.

Checking the page this morning, I found a link to this page, entitled, "Cemetery Lines: Enhanced Departures from Saturday, October 26 to Sunday, November 3."  There are more buses to help folks get to cemeteries and pray for the dead around All Souls' Day. That means that the city of Rome is helping the Holy Souls in Purgatory by making it easier for the faithful to obtain the All Souls' indulgences on their behalf. 

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. 
Requiescant in pace. Amen.

Tents

Ever since I figured out that I was born on the second Sunday of Lent, the day has felt special to me. Not that it often falls on my actual birthday, but that's something I would prefer not to think about anyway. It only reminds me that I'm getting older without yet having made a solid start in serving God or doing anything with my life. But that's just pride, and in one of his uglier masks.

Winter Ordinary Time in Heaven

Ah, Monday of the first week of Ordinary Time. So begins that curiously plain liturgical 'season' that runs from the morning after the feast of the Baptism of the Lord until the night before Ash Wednesday. It's on the short side this year, just four weeks and three days.

Back when I was at the parish I used to joke that winter Ordinary Time was my favorite liturgical season. It was just so wonderful when I would go to open the church at six in the morning and have so little to do. There were no windows to open and fans to turn on, no crawling around, bumbling with the switches and plugs of Christmas trees and Nativity scenes, no trying to guess if you could get away with not turning on the suggestive racket of the baptismal waterfall, no futility of trying to light a paschal candle for a few minutes before giving up and getting the ladder, no trying not to notice the dead leaves of Easter lilies or Christmas poinsettias such that they could prick your conscience and have it remind you that surely taking the time to remove such things from the Lord's sanctuary before Mass would give him more glory than the pleasure of one's private prayers which were probably vain anyway.

In winter Ordinary Time there was none of that. All you had to do was throw on the lights and set up the few things for the humblest of Masses, and you could pray in the empty quiet.

Sometimes I like to think of Heaven as something like winter Ordinary Time; as finding oneself in place that is refreshingly, almost startlingly open and spacious, marked most of all by an emptiness of fuss and worry such that the only thing left to do is love God.

The Funny Feast of Christ the King

I woke up this morning thinking about today, the last Sunday of Ordinary Time, the solemnity of Christ the King. In a way that it hadn't before, it struck me as an odd day. I'll try to explain how.

The most powerful doctrines are the ones we hold as assumptions, moods, 'interpretive keys,' 'lenses,' and the like. The less they are explicitly taught and simply absorbed from one's surroundings, the more powerful and normative they become. One such doctrine I learned early on in my Catholic journey and theological education was a certain way of understanding the relationship between history and eschatology.

It was said that in the past there was too strong a focus on an other-worldly salvation, on an eschatology which was reduced to the four 'last things' (death, judgement, Heaven, hell). This absolved Christians of taking seriously enough the need to serve the salvation and well-being of people in the here and now. But since we modern Christians knew well that we would be judged according to our never-questioned reading of the Judgment scene in Matthew 25, our work was less in preaching, catechizing, 'making disciples of all nations,' but in serving the needs of the 'least of our brothers and sisters.' Our ancestors in the great modern flowering of apostolic religious life did this by finding new forms and building new institutions to serve the needs of people. For us it wasn't to do such things ourselves, but to try to make civil authorities do them instead. This was called the shift from 'charity' to 'justice.' It was one of the great dogmas of my Catholic upbringing.

Now maybe I make a caricature of these things and thus a straw man, but the theological insight behind them is solid; eschatology isn't about a far-away world that renders the current reality less important, but about a Kingdom that is transcendent, always and everywhere present, available, and inviting history into its beatitude.

To reiterate the the basic doctrine: we used to talk about other-worldly salvation, but now we are about peace and justice in the here and now. But here's the funny thing about Christ the King; as an observance, it has journeyed along the opposite trajectory.

The reformed liturgy presents the feast of Christ the King as a celebration of the rule of the cosmic Christ, the alpha and the omega. The day crowns the apocalyptic theme of the last days of Ordinary Time and makes us ready for the similarly apocalyptic first Sunday of Advent. The readings for the Mass and the Divine Office seem to emphasize Christ the King as a day to reflect on the end point of time, history, and God's purpose, without a lot of interference of the messiness of the 'here and now.'

It's funny because the feast of Christ the King used to be a lot more pointed toward the current moment, with much heavier political overtones. Here are a couple of quotes from the encyclical Quas primas of Pius XI, which established the observance:

In the first Encyclical Letter which We addressed at the beginning of Our Pontificate to the Bishops of the universal Church, [Ubi arcano Dei consilio] We referred to the chief causes of the difficulties under which mankind was laboring. And We remember saying that these manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations. (1) 

Nor is there any difference in this matter [i.e. the "empire of our Redeemer"] between the individual and the family or the State; for all men, whether collectively or individually, are under the dominion of Christ. In him is the salvation of the individual, in him is the salvation of society... If, therefore, the rulers of nations wish to preserve their authority, to promote and increase the prosperity of their countries, they will not neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to the rule of Christ. (18) 

When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony. (19)

That's 1925. Kind of shocking, isn't it? Somewhere along the forty years between Quas primas and Vatican II, the Church decided to make friends with the project of European modernity, and with it the idea of secular, pluralistic, modern democracy. And so, as we turned from other-worldly salvation to justice and peace, the funny feast of Christ the King had to take the opposite path and be changed from a politically-charged observance to a work of awe and wonder at the world to come. The politics of Christ the King went out of style, but since you can't just get rid of a feast day instituted by a Pope, the best thing you can do is to make it mystical.

But now, another fifty years on since Vatican II, perhaps the concerns of those who made such a fuss about 'modernism' are looking a little less stuffy and reactionary, as the happy friendship between the Church and modern liberal democracy starts to show some signs of stress.

Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat

All Saints Ramble

Everywhere I've been to Sunday Mass in Italy, both inside and outside of religious houses (with the exception of Santa Susanna in Rome, where you can go if you just want to sing out of Gather Comprehensive and have that slightly-to-the-liberal-side-of-center standard American sort of worship-experience), they seem to use this little Sunday bulletin/worship aid published by San Paolo and called La Domenica. It's actually pretty good. It has the readings and proper prayers of the day, as well as the Gloria and Creed printed in it. There's a little reflection on the front and a formula for the Universal Prayer inside. I usually expect such things to be not very good, but these aren't bad.

Today, however, on this solemnity of All Saints, I was a little disappointed. The reflection was too much history and not enough eschatology. And on the front are the patron saints of Europe: Benedict, Cyril and Methodius, Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Edith Stein. Now I have nothing against these saints in their service as patrons of Europe (although, as I expressed in this post, I have worry that Italian devotion to St. Benedict risks giving new birth to the excesses of Joachim of Fiore); indeed patron saints of Europe must be very busy in this tempo di crisi, as the phrase goes here in Italy. Personally, I've been praying to St. Benedict recently. My first priest, the good Fr. Larry at Connecticut College, has always maintained that I am supposed to be a Benedictine rather than a Franciscan. I have always dismissed this, but lately I've started to wonder. Maybe it's just the temptation of living near Norcia. And of course I'm more or less in love with Edith Stein; probably the best homily I've given in Italian was just a quote from her Kreuzeswissenschaft for the feast of the Stigmata of St. Francis. When I think about her description of her famous conversion-prayer moment in Frankfurt, it touches my own experience so strongly. It's funny; for my mothers and fathers in religious life the iconic moment in this mold seems to be Merton on the corner of 4th and Walnut; for me it's a struggle between feeling like Edith Stein in Frankfurt or like Lovecraft in Brooklyn.

But to get back to the patrons of Europe, all those saints have their proper days in the calendar; they don't need to be on the cover of the bulletin today. To me the feast of All Saints is about them, for sure, but also for all the saints who are unknown, who will never be canonized for the veneration and encouragement of the Church Militant. Indeed, we go through the cycles of the liturgical year celebrating the feast of this or that saint, we can read the Martyrology each day and meet even more. But to believe in the salvation we have in Christ, it seems to me, is to confess that all of these are but a small fraction of the members of the Church Triumphant. And because we who are still on the journey of this life hope to join the saints one day, but because few of us will ever be canonized, today is the day we look forward to as our own future feast day. Indeed, that is our hope as we pray through this day; that one day we will find ourselves on the other side of the praise and veneration that goes up from the Church Militant to the Church Triumphant on All Saints Day.

As St. Bernard reminds us in the Office of Readings today, this is, in fact, the function of All Saints Day. Not that the saints should gain anything from our venerating them, but that our recollection of their destiny should kindle in us the desire to share it.

resurgamus cum Christo, quaeramus quae sursum sunt, quae sursum sapiamus

says St. Bernard, riffing on the great Pauline Easter slogan, 'seek the things that are above,' sursum sunt quaerite. (Colossians 3:1)

"Let us rise again with Christ, may we seek the things that are above, may we taste what is above."

That's the spiritual life; seeking after a taste once tasted. Yearning for a God once glimpsed, but who seems to recede from our understanding and who seems to resist our comprehension. And indeed, it is supposed to be this way, because God refuses to be reduced to a 'thing' that can be possessed, that can be had like any other created good, much less any other consumer commodity. And this is why prayer is the first and best school of evangelical poverty, because what we seek can't be possessed in any way that our created bodies and minds can understand, and because as we settle into the 'uninteresting wilderness' of prayer, we find that our very desire for what we have tasted is itself the bread for our journey. It is the desire that turns out to be rest, and this is the way in which our prayer takes shape, as we journey to the Father, as the mirror image of the self-emptying God, of the immolated Christ.

non enim dispositus est aliquo modo ad contemplationes divinas, quae ad mentales ducunt excessus, nisi cum Daniele sit vir desideriorum.

"One is not ready in any way for the divine contemplations, which lead to interior ecstasy, unless he be like Daniel a man of desires." (St. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, prologue, 3)

Ferragosto

The holiday today has been good. In it God has provided some graces of realizing this moment in my vocation.

This little friary where I'm living now is the first place in my religious life where the Office of Readings is prayed in common. I don't think I prefer it, actually. I'm just so used to being able to take the readings at my own pace, stop and use the dictionary, etc., and then take some time between the readings and responsories to reflect a little. Nevertheless, it's a good thing and good practice. Being the friar in the house with the least Italian, I usually don't have to do one of the readings. Today, though, due to friars going out to offer Masses, there were only two of us and I ended up with the long reading from Munificentissimus Deus. Despite the many instances of incorruttibilità over which I stumbled each time, it went o.k. Sometimes I think I can feel the neural ruts being dug for Italian syntactical and grammatical logics.

Because the friars knew there would be few of us here today because of vacations and the soon-to-begin Capuchin general chapter, I was asked a while back if I would go today to offer Mass at the Discepole di Gesù Eucaristico, an institute of sisters that has their generalate here in the neighborhood. It was the first time I have offered Mass in Italian outside of a friary chapel. I did o.k., but not great. Nevertheless, the experience reminded me of my vocation. It was like, 'Oh yeah; this is what I'm meant to do in this world.'

I had put off writing the homily much longer than I usually would; my thought was that since I'm supposed to be learning more Italian each week, it would turn out better if I waited. I'm not sure it worked. It was too short, and also too short on presenting the hopefulness of the day.

It's funny about eschatology; you need some pretty advanced verb tenses to do it right. There are very delicate senses of time and eternity, of what has been, as well as the already fulfilled for which we still groan in expectation. Mary, the Immaculate Conception, is free from every burden of original sin. Today we celebrate her freedom from the most searingly obvious of the effects of that sin, the bodily corruption of our temporal death. In her we see our hope as she anticipates the resurrection for which we all have a sure hope in Christ. And yet we know all too well that even though we are free from the guilt of original sin by the grace of baptism, the effects of that sin still smolder and rot within us. All of us sinners, may God have mercy on us, know this as we face daily the anguished unmeaning of knowing how we have, with our sins, insisted on our own misery--and worse--insisted on the misery of others.

Mary's Assumption shows us that the fruits of Christ's victory are available to our humanity. The victory has been won; it is ours to surrender to it if we can only find the willingness. Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great. But she still fascinates, and so often we still hook our attention to her and drag each other down to the hell into which she eternally falls. But our hope in the confusion of our woundedness is that God wills our salvation. Salvation isn't a commodity held out by some merchant or landlord of a deity for those who might care to buy it. It is the very self-giving of God as it is experienced by a cured but still healing creature. In Mary, through whom this self-giving of God comes to be given to the world, we are shown today the destiny that God is just dying--literally--to give us.

Religious Profession Anniversary Ramble

At the friary where I've been staying it seems to be the custom that a priest may offer Mass twice a month for his personal intentions. The rest of the time Mass is to be offered for the intentions of the house. This wasn't altogether new to me; it used to be the policy also of my province, until such plans were abolished by a provincial chapter voting on the work of a task force headed by none other than your humble blogger. Nevertheless, my curious work as chairperson of what I called the 'purgatory committee' is another story, one of which I am simultaneously proud and ashamed. It produces curious emotional states, this 'religious life.'

So this morning I offered the Mass of St. John Vianney for my classmates in religion. You see, today completes ten years of religious profession for us. Ten years ago today we emerged from the now suppressed Capuchin novitiate in Mt. Calvary, Wisconsin, and made our temporary vows at Sacred Heart in Yonkers, New York, where I would later be assigned as a new priest.

At breakfast I let it out and told the friars. They, of course, immediately quizzed me with the standard questions: How many made vows that day? (five) Are we all still alive? (yes) How many are still in the Order? (all of us) And what are we doing now? Well, I'm here in Rome going to Italian school in preparation for a job at our general curia. Three others are parochial vicars in parishes of our province. The other is a couple of dissertation chapters away from the illustrious title of juris utriusque doctor.

Father Guardian, having learned of this anniversary, decided that we would have ice cream at the midday meal today. Usually we only get ice cream on days that rank a solemnity or proper feast, and it is always accompanied by the comment that since the ice cream costs less than both meat and fish, perhaps we could eat it for penance, instead of the other things.

New Translation: Prayer for Various Needs

Today I had my first chance to use the new translation of the good old 'Swiss Synod' prayer, formerly called in English the "Eucharistic Prayer for Masses for Various Needs and Occasions," appearing in the typical edition Missal as "prex eucharistica quae in missis pro variis necessitatibus adhiberi potest" and now similarly Englished as "Eucharistic Prayer for use in Masses for various needs."

It's a free day in the calendar today, at least where I am, so I took the ordo's suggestion to offer the Mass for the unity of Christians # 17A, which I presume is a way to participate in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

Generally speaking, it's fairly close to the previous English translation as it appeared for use in the United States in 1995. So if you're one of those who doesn't like the new translation and misses how things were before last Advent, this is the eucharistic prayer for you.

I especially like the new version of the post-consecratory epiclesis. Here's the old version:

Look with favor on the offering of your Church
in which we show forth the paschal sacrifice of Christ
entrusted to us.
Through the power of your Spirit of love
include us now and forever
among the members of your Son,
whose body and blood we share.

And the current one:

Look with favor on the oblation of your Church,
in which we show forth
the paschal Sacrifice of Christ that has been handed on to us,
and grant that, by the power of the Spirit of your love,
we may be counted now and until the day of eternity
among the members of your Son,
in whose Body and Blood we have communion.

I appreciate the stronger and more explicit eschatological language in the new translation. Our communion with Christ in the Eucharist is not just 'now and forever' but 'now and until the day of eternity.' This eternity is the blessed destiny to which Jesus Christ has blazed a trail through the death we have earned for ourselves with our sin. By passing through, with the humanity he borrowed from us by the consent of our Blessed Mother, all of our misery up to and including the searing grief of knowing oneself alienated from the Father, the Son of God has made the blessedness the Trinity himself available to our humanity. This is the eternal life we both have now and towards which we journey in the holiness of communion.

New Translation: Temptations to Idolatry

The Christmas season having ended, we find ourselves again in the tempus per annum, unfortunately Englished as 'Ordinary Time.' My first--and very influential--liturgy teacher used to refer to the typical day of low solemnity as the 'rainy Tuesday in Ordinary Time.' And so here it is. As the first day with the new translation when one is free to offer 'any Mass' as the Ordo puts it, a 'feria of the iv class' in an older dispensation, I decided to pray one of the new Mass forumularies for the dead this morning, offering the Mass for the the recently deceased father of one of the friars. Requiescat in pace.

After Mass I was thinking about how the prayers seemed like an improvement, and how they were more supplicative and contained less presumption about the deceased having already arrived at the beatific vision. But you know what? When I went back and looked at the old prayers, they weren't much different. I thought I would be writing a post about how the new prayers better recognized continued purification after death and the need to pray for the dead on their continued journey to the fullness of salvation. I was going to sing the praises of the new translation, saying that it would help restore a pastoral consciousness of the Last Things. As it turned out, there wasn't much in the old prayers to accuse them of failing in these things.

So I guess one has to say that the widespread error of presumption with regard to the state of the departed after bodily death is not the fault of the liturgy, or at least of the liturgy as the Church presents it (How the liturgy is celebrated, mis-celebrated, and abused is another matter.) Conversely, then, one has to say that the new translation won't auto-magically fix the problem. Thus we arrive, by extension, at a general principle: the new English translation of the Roman Missal will not magically solve all the pastoral and theological problems with which the Church is afflicted.

The new Missal isn't a savior. We have one of those already.

Rapture

I love the first preface of Christmas. I sing it all week during the octave.

...dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur.

"...as we recognize in him God made visible, we may be caught up through him in love of things invisible."

Maybe I like the old translation better. We used to say that in Christ we see “our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.”

It's the strength of the rapiamur that gets me. Somehow to me the English 'caught up' just doesn't grab the sense of an almost violent seizing in the verb rapio, rapere.

I was thinking about this today when it occurred to me that the same verb is at the root of the term 'rapture,' the idea, based on a certain readings of 1 Thessalonians and Revelation, that the end times will include the elect being snatched out of the world to leave those who remain to suffer a period of tribulation.

But the real bite and force of Christianity is that the end time isn't exactly a temporal event we await on some schedule. The end of time and of everything else has already appeared in the person of Jesus Christ. And, as the prayer of the preface reveals, it is his birth that initiates and makes available a rapture, and not just for a certain elect, for all humanity.

The Incarnation of the Son of God makes divinity available to our humanity. In him God becomes visible, indeed tangible. And by our surrender to having his divine humanity mingle with ours in Holy Communion, the invisible God makes a home in us as our own blessedness. The Incarnation of the Son of God, and the abiding Presence of his body in the Eucharist, offers us the chance to be caught up, to be raptured into the infinite joy, delight, and creativity that we call the Blessed Trinity.

The Gentle and Hopeful Doctrine of Purgatory

This is a homily for All Souls Day that I wrote a few years ago:

The observance we make today goes by many names. In English we usually call it All Souls Day, but it’s also known as the Day of the Dead, El Día de Los Muertos, or as it’s officially called, the Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed. Whatever we call it, today is a day that the Church sets aside in a particular way to pray and offer Masses for our beloved dead.

When we reflect on our laudable practice of praying for the dead, we can’t get away from talking about purgatory. This is because if our beloved dead have completed their journey to God and find themselves in the fullness of his presence—in the ultimate destiny we call heaven—then their feast day was yesterday on All Saints Day, and it is they who should be praying for us! And if, God forbid, someone finds themselves in hell, then there isn’t any use praying for them anyway. Keep in mind, though, that though the Church has always affirmed hell as a kind of logical possibility for the final destiny of human freedom, she has never claimed or affirmed that any human soul actually went there. Apart from the devil and his angels, hell might be empty.

In the midst of the two final destinies of heaven and hell we affirm the process of purgatory. We are not talking about a place, but a process. Sometimes we have this idea that purgatory is some kind of awful thing with fire and torments and all that. I’m not sure that this is the right approach. I’ll tell you right now, if I die today and I find myself in purgatory, I’ll be overjoyed! Why? Because, brothers and sisters, purgatory has only one exit, and that exit is the eternal joy and peace of the perfect vision of God, the blessed destiny of heaven. To be in purgatory is to be on the way to heaven, and there is nothing more anyone could ever want.

In fact, my friends, purgatory is not about punishment for sinners, but about God’s mercy on those who have already been saved and destined for heaven by their baptism into Christ’s death and Resurrection. The process begins at our baptism. We are freed from sin and configured to the perfect humanity of Christ. In the course of our life from that day on, we are called to grow in faith and holiness. Though we are free from sin by baptism, the wounds and injuries of sin remain in our hearts, minds, and bodies. That’s why we still struggle with selfishness and sin over the course of our baptized life. Now, if at the end of our life, whenever it comes, we have not yet fully freed ourselves from our attachment to the selfishness and sin, God provides a means for us to continue our purification after death. This final process of purification we call purgatory. See how gentle and merciful God is to us! God passionately desires the salvation of every human soul, and even if we don’t succeed in letting God make us perfectly good and holy in this life, he will purify and prepare us for heaven in the life to come.

That’s why I would be overjoyed to find myself in purgatory. I find it very comforting. With all of my sins, I know that even if I don’t succeed in becoming a saint in this life, God will make me one in the life to come. Purgatory is one more sign to us that God’s love and desire to bring us to the perfect joy of himself is stronger than sin. God’s desire to save the world will not be thwarted by something as stupid as my sins.

We don’t know what this process of purification will be like. We don’t know if it takes time—as we know it—or if it happens in an instant awareness of God. But today is a day to pray for those who are in the midst of this final, purifying journey to heaven, that through the communion of saints our prayers might speed them on the way to the final destiny we all look forward to: the eternal joy and peace, the perfectly satisfying vision of God we call heaven.

Bad Sign

Our Sanctuary Lamp jumped to its death during the night. It looked so sad, all mangled and crumpled. This means something. Nevertheless, on the good side, the friary didn't burn down.

Truer Than Twitter Knows

Post-Rapture Report

Well, yesterday came and went, apparently without the arrival of Harold Camping's earthquakes and rapture. The world--and even some of us Christians, God help us--has a good laugh at the whole business, and we're done until next time.

When we're all finished making fun, it seems to me that there are serious lessons to be learned from all this.

First, this episode is a good example of why sacred Scripture has to be read from within the Church that produced it in the first place. As Dei Verbum teaches, Scripture and Tradition together form a single source of divine revelation. One cannot try to separate one from the other, as if the New Testament could be understood apart from the apostolic authority from which it comes. This is not to say that there is nothing new to be learned from Scripture. On the contrary, it is through the Scripture that the Holy Spirit wills to teach the freshness of the faith to each age. But it is also true that these understandings must be tested and checked against the apostolic authority from which the Scriptures came in the first place, sacramentally handed over down through the ages. To put it another way, anyone can pick up the Bible and find God, and they should. But 'finding God' in a personal way cannot be separated from being led into his Church, where his Spirit abides and his sacramental Presence remains.

The 'rapture' depends on a very particular reading of Revelation and 1 Thessalonians among other books, and it is an interpretation that is quite apart from any sense we have in the apostolic Churches. And so in this episode we have the sad fruit of trying to read the Scripture outside of the Church: disappointment, wastes of time, personal resources and livelihoods, and the authority of the Scriptures themselves being mocked by the world.


Second, this rapture business reveals the shallow sense of eschatology that has gained a lot of currency in the modern world. It's as if there is an assumption that we now find ourselves in regular old time and then the 'end times' will suddenly start as a discrete new period. In some ways Christianity has forgotten that all through the Scriptures the Resurrection is the preeminent event of the end times, and this is why the rising of Christ is such a big deal. In other words, the Resurrection of Christ is the inauguration of the end times. So quite far from the linear timelines of dispensationalists (for example), we Christians find ourselves in a situation somewhat more ambiguous: we live both in the profane history that has marched on since the day of Christ's death and burial, but at the same time we live in the inaugurated eschaton signaled by Christ's Resurrection. This overly linear sense of theological time, which is particularly modern and scientistic, does not take seriously the Resurrection of Christ itself as an eschatological event. (And this doesn't mean that it is not also, in some sense, a historical event.)


Third, we who are Christians should observe closely the next 'end of the world' craze when it arrives later next year. My guess is that the world will not laugh as hard as we approach the alleged Mayan end of the world on December 21, 2012. I'll bet that a lot of non-believing folks who mocked this would-be rapture will wonder seriously whether the Mayan thing is real. Why should this be? It can't be about antiquity; the claims of the Scriptures are older. Is it because one seems more exotic than the other, like in the Seinfeld episode in which George's mother is willing to take advice when she thinks it's from a Chinese woman, but rejects it when she finds out it's from 'some girl from Long Island'?

Whatever the reason is, this whole sorry distraction, in which many people are now spiritually disappointed and in a situation of having wasted a lot of material resources, should be a call for all of us Christians to repent of how we have abused the authority of Scripture all the way to the point at which the very idea of its authority is a joke to the world.

The Journey

As I was meditating on today's gospel--St. Matthew's account of the Flight into Egypt--an old and encouraging memory came up for me. For my graduation from college, my parents gave me the gift of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I went with a group, under the direction of Fr. Callistus Bamberg, OFM, (may he rest in peace.) It was a wondrous and formative trip for me as a fairly new Christian. The crucifix I bought there to carry on the Via Dolorosa--from a storekeeper who insisted on showing me photo albums of the successes of his relatives in New York, and with whom I shared bread and herbs with a Goldstar beer while he tried to find a crucifix to my liking--has been the first thing I bring into a new apartment or cell ever since. It was in the Lord's tomb in the church of the Holy Sepulchre that I first proclaimed a reading at Mass. Whenever I think of that moment, given what has come in the years since, I am so grateful, and a little scared.

There were several of us on the pilgrimage who were there at some kind of juncture in life, or in celebration of some particular moment. One devout couple was there in celebration of a wedding anniversary. For someone else it was retirement. There were a couple of religious celebrating jubilees, and one priest having an anniversary of ordination. Me, I was the kid of the trip, and my thing was that I was about to enter religious life. At the end of our trip, the group wanted to do something to recognize these moments in the lives of us various pilgrims--I think we were at Tiberias--and so there was a little prayer service, and there were souvenir gifts. I received an olive wood statue of the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt. When Father handed it to me he said, "Whenever you see this, remember that it's a journey."

"The journey" is such an apt metaphor for the spiritual life, and so deep and full of resonance and meaning that it hardly seems worthwhile to try to write about it per se. Nevertheless, one aspect of the journey of which I have become increasingly aware over the years is that the journey itself is formative. The places and people, the joys and the losses, and in some ways most of all the insults and misfortunes, the meaninglessnesses and apparent absences of God by which the Cross is revealed in our individual lives, all of these conspire together to make us who we are before God and one another as Christian souls, or at least souls who desire God through the only Way of cruciformity.

When I'm at my best, the suffering and emptiness of the Cross as it has been revealed to me in my own life has made me grow in patience, compassion, and the sort of true peace that comes from perspective, from wideness of ultimate horizon. At my worst, some of my sufferings have left me damaged, skittish, dismissive, and prejudiced. One of the deep challenges of the journey, at least as I have experienced it thus far, is to accept that these two aspects of who I have become, of how I have been both formed and deformed along the way, are like the wheat and weeds of the Lord's parable. They are so intertwined in their growth together that it would be impossible to uproot the weeds without also taking the wheat along with them. Therefore, in everything I do in my prayer and in my life with the brethren and everybody else, I must remember that I have been graced for prayer and service through my journey, but that I also have dark spots that can come out in hurtful and unhelpful ways.

So I make it my prayer, that as I journey on to the moment of my own death, and groan along with every other member of the Church Universal for the final fulfillment of the creation (and along with the world, which in some ways groans harder, but ignorant of why or for what), God will harvest from me all the good he has worked in me, and let the rest fall into the pointless non-being it imitates in me each day.