Temple, Priest, and Sacrifice

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

3rd Sunday of Lent

“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19) So replies Jesus to those who protest his cleansing of the Temple. But they don’t realize “he was speaking about the temple of his body.” (2:21)

What is a temple? In the most general terms, it is a place or structure where sacrifice is offered, typically by priests, who are persons appointed to offer such sacrifices. Jesus Christ is all of these things at once: “the priest through whom we are reconciled, the sacrifice by which we are reconciled, the temple where we are reconciled, and the God to whom we are reconciled.” (St. Fulgentius of Ruspe, Office of Readings for Friday of the 5th week of Lent)

By our baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ and our communion with him in the Eucharist, we enter into the Temple of his Body and his priesthood enters into us, enabling us to be “built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 2:5) This is the priesthood shared by all the baptized. As we continue the journey of Lent, may we enter anew the Temple of the Lord’s Body that his priesthood and his Sacrifice may find a home in us.

What Kind Of Sinner?

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

Wednesday of the 1st week of Lent

The people of Nineveh were said to be wicked enough to have their wickedness rise up before God (Jonah 1:2) and yet Jesus offers them as an example of repentance. (Luke 11:32) And their conversion was indeed thorough; even the animals had to fast and wear sackcloth! (Jonah 3:7-8)

This can serve to remind us—notwithstanding our often sloppy speech about spiritual things—that saint is not the opposite of sinner. A saint is just a sinner who has refused to let the experience of sin—the boredom, frustration, and unhappiness of its ‘empty promises’—harden and close his heart, but instead has allowed this pain to break his heart open, open to God and to his fellow sinners in their suffering.

On this our Lenten journey toward either baptism or renewal of our baptismal promises at Easter, let us make up our mind to be that kind of sinner.

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.

Transfiguration

With Lent comes the Lord’s invitation: to let ourselves be led up the high mountain where we become our deepest and truest selves. The mountain is prayer. It is there that we discover the call that is God himself. In prayer we get to know God and ourselves, for our true identity is nothing more than who we are in God’s desire for us. This divine desire—or will of God—is revealed in how the call takes shape in our particular circumstances, and so becomes our vocation.

If we consent to remain on this high mountain of prayer we will have glimpses, visions of Resurrection glory, of the Christ who transfigures creation. These moments will be short and obscure for they are only a touching of the hem of his garment, but they will also be beautiful beyond our own imagining and desire. They may also be frightening, for they call us to a new boldness and single-mindedness in following Jesus. But the vocation is not to be feared, for wherever it leads us, the call is only to him, to Jesus Christ, and to the life of the new creation that dawns in his Resurrection.


(Reflection prepared for our vocation office to post on its social media for the 2nd Sunday of Lent)

Theses on the Parable of the Prodigal Son

(Luke 15: 11-32)

Those who deny, ignore, or hate God are still happy to make use of the good things he has given them. In fact, we have all done this because we have all used or sought gratification in ourselves, from other people, and in other created things apart from the proper identity and purpose with which God creates these persons and things. And this is what we call sin.

We tend to think of repentance as a returning to God, but it is more properly a 'coming to our senses,' a 'coming back to ourselves' that puts us back in touch with our most real and best selves, the true selves that God created and that recognize that this God is always arriving in order to meet us.

Sin is a sort of death. Repentance is a participation in the Resurrection.

The confession of the sins that have separated us from God's embrace is only of interest to him insofar as it is the means by which we accept that embrace anew.

It is just as easy for 'religious' people to lose their sense of God's goodness as it is for 'sinners.' Perhaps even easier. This is because righteous people easily forget that they are just as much sinners as are the 'sinners,' first, because all sin is overwhelmingly offensive before the infinite loving-kindness of God, and second, because people who ought to know better are that much more guilty. It is also because righteous people sometimes don't recognize--and confess--that the righteousness of their religion (as it is for everyone) is mixed with some elements of the flesh, such as fear, vainglory, or pride.

Helpfully, however, this latter condition is revealed by the emotion of resentment that arises at the gifts God gives to another, and in this it can be recognized and perhaps mortified.

Retreat Report

This afternoon we have returned home from our annual community retreat. It was held, as has been usual in time my time here, at our house in Frascati in the hills outside Rome.

Ah Rome. She's pretty from a distance, no?

For me the grace of the retreat was to pause and take a look at my life and vocation at this particular moment, especially in light of some changes in the recent past (e.g. loss of a spiritual director) and looking forward to changes that are on the way (e.g. the General Chapter this summer). My prayer was mostly about who I am at this point and the discernment of what God desires for me going forward.

For the days of retreat, I found myself most of the time in one of two places. The first was the Capuchin church adjacent to the friary:

San Francesco d'Assisi, Frascati. Consecrated 1579.

There I prayed, reflected on things, and sometimes just sat with the Lord. It was cold enough in there that even I wanted a sweatshirt, so there wasn't much danger of any other friar interrupting my solitude!

My other spot was in the friary rec room, where I read, journaled, and tended the fireplace in the later afternoons.

What a rich source of metaphor for the spiritual life! Long-time followers of this blog will remember my sufferings during a period of my religious life when I gathered with confreres to pray around a fake fireplace (supplied with real tools; 'Lord, close my lips' must be my prayer about that), despite the fact that the Blessed Sacrament was reserved in a number of nearby places.

During the retreat I finished Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation by Fr. Martin Laird, O.S.A., which had been recommended to me by a confrere, and I read most of Cardinal Sarah's The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, which is a prayerful, beautiful book. I recommend it.

Salvation

The mini-season of Passiontide isn't explicit in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, but it is there. On the Fifth Sunday of Lent the readings for Mass shift toward the Passion. The Letter to the Hebrews, with its emphasis on sacrifice and the priesthood of Jesus Christ, begins in the Office of Readings.

Hebrews 2:3 caught my reflection this morning.

how shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation?

For the 'ignore' that the New American Bible offers, the Italian breviary has the verb trascurare, a word I have used in confession for something I have neglected or overlooked, something I ought to have done but have not. The original verb is ameleó, which the dictionary tells me means 'to neglect' or 'to disregard.'

How shall we escape if we disregard so great a salvation?

I am grateful to be reminded today that the salvation we have in Jesus Christ is something that is ours to neglect or disregard. That is to say it is not something that is ours to obtain or attain to. It is freely lavished on our humanity through the humanity of Christ, if only we surrender to it and consent to receive it.

Of course, given our attachments and our concupiscence, this is not as easy as it seems. It is furthermore not so easy because it is a consent and a surrender that must be made each day, and will also include the suffering of giving ourselves for the sake of the salvation in Christ of others, those God gives to us in our lives, and of the poor. Without becoming a vehicle for salvation, we have not been saved. This is the mystery of the Cross as it takes shape in the journey of each baptized person, and without the Cross there is no Resurrection.

Get Up, Lazy

Just some thoughts for Laetare Sunday. Rejoice, Jerusalem, and come together, all you who love her.

If we haven't done so well with Lent so far, St. Augustine, in the Office of Readings today, reminds us that there is still time:

Get up, lazy! The Way himself has come to you and roused you from sleep; if then you have been roused, get up and walk.

We still have time to make something of our Lent. On this day especially we remember that rejoicing in the Lord is our strength. (Nehemiah 8:10)

The end of the second reading at Mass (if we're using Year B) from Ephesians also comes to our help in this regard, reminding us that the good works of our Lent are not our own:

For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them. (Ephesians 2:10)

The 'good works' have been prepared in advance. And what is this? It is the one good work that is the passing of Jesus Christ from death to life. In Holy Communion we receive this Passover of the Lord into our bodies and into our lives. The passage from the misery of sin that we have insisted upon for ourselves and one another to the life of the new creation has come to make a dwelling in us and its power has become available to us, that we may be transformed in it and surrender to God's work of transforming the world through us as members of Christ's Resurrected Body.

This is what it means for us to be the Church of God, that we may we live in the work of salvation God has prepared and accomplished in Jesus Christ.

Ash Sunday

Now far be it from me to be a liturgical innovator, but yesterday I celebrated the Mass of a liturgical day previously unknown in the tradition of the Roman Rite, the Mass of Ash Sunday.

Here's how it happened.

It was my turn to go and celebrate at the chapel of a certain group of sisters. I am very grateful for my turns when they come around. The folks who come to the Mass there are of a certain age, and it reminds me a little bit of when I used to go for Mass at Monastery Manor and Finian Sullivan Tower back in Yonkers.

While I was setting up for Mass, Sr. Sacristan asked me if I would be willing to impose ashes for anyone who had missed out on Ash Wednesday. Sister had saved a little bowl of ashes just for this possibility. Now back in the parish I would probably have said no to such irregularity, but at this place I'm a guest, I can see that some of the people (being of a certain age, as I said) have mobility issues, and I know how big a deal it can be for people to 'get their ashes.'

So I imagined that at the end of the Mass I would make an announcement, inviting anyone who had not received their ashes on Ash Wednesday to stick around a moment, whereupon I would go to the sacristy and put aside the chasuble so as to mark this extraordinary ash imposition as something apart from the Mass of the First Sunday of Lent.

It didn't happen that way.

As soon as the Liturgy of the Word was completed with the presidential prayer at the end of the Universal Prayer, Sr. Sacristan came up the aisle with the ashes in order to remind me of what I had agreed to do. So there it was. I turned to the assembly and said that if there was anyone who had not received ashes on Ash Wednesday, I could impose them now. One person got up, then a few more, and after another moment the whole assembly was in line for ashes (except for the two or three sisters.)

When I concluded the imposition of Ashes for Ash Sunday, I went to the sacristy and washed my hands (which is much easier with the dry ashes they use in Italy, as opposed to the ash and water paste commonly used in the States) and then went to the altar to continue with the offertory of what had been the First Sunday of Lent.

Ash Wednesday Confession

After Morning Prayer, Office of Readings, Mass, and hanging up some laundry on the roof to dry, I make it to the office and add an #ashtag column to my Tweetdeck, just for the day, so I can pray for everyone who uses it and share in the hope and promise of Ash Wednesday.

And as I start to see the faces with their ashes, it makes me think of the cross that Deacon Ron traced on my own forehead on the day of my baptism, and how necrotic I have let it become, Lord.

How little have I reached up to Heaven, entrusting myself to the prayers, protection, and example of Our Lady and the saints, knowing and taking courage from my membership in a sacred communion that overcomes the limits of time and space.

How little have I taken and still less have I sought the opportunities to be your own compassion to those who suffer because of my sins and the sins of the world, knowing that in charity and forgetfulness of self lies the freedom from the tyranny of this self that doesn't realize he was drowned in the Jordan.

How much of what I have called discipleship or a spiritual life has really been the work of a fleshly religion, an effort to make myself just and acceptable before God, as if our Father in Heaven were an earthly parent who love was conditional, as if I had not been baptized into your sacred humanity, Lord Jesus, a humanity with which the Father is "well pleased," (Mark 1:11), as if your Passion, death, and Resurrection had not delivered us from such a religion, from self-justification by works of the law, from wearing our human righteousness like a badge that marks as just and saved.

How little have I truly turned my life over to you Lord, preferring instead of rotten luxury of my own will. As long as my poverty is mine, I have not become poor, I have not followed in your footprint.

And yet you, Lord, have continued to hold me in your mercy, have continued to invite me to the salvation you are always working for me. Grant me the willingness to turn myself over to you, to find myself only in your love and your will. Grant me the surrender to sink into the grace of my baptism.

Pope Francis: Message for Lent 2015

In order to receive what God gives us and to make it bear abundant fruit, we need to press beyond the boundaries of the visible Church in two ways.

In the first place, by uniting ourselves in prayer with the Church in heaven. The prayers of the Church on earth establish a communion of mutual service and goodness which reaches up into the sight of God. Together with the saints who have found their fulfillment in God, we form part of that communion in which indifference is conquered by love. The Church in heaven is not triumphant because she has turned her back on the sufferings of the world and rejoices in splendid isolation. Rather, the saints already joyfully contemplate the fact that, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, they have triumphed once and for all over indifference, hardness of heart and hatred. Until this victory of love penetrates the whole world, the saints continue to accompany us on our pilgrim way.

[...]

In the second place, every Christian community is called to go out of itself and to be engaged in the life of the greater society of which it is a part, especially with the poor and those who are far away. The Church is missionary by her very nature; she is not self-enclosed but sent out to every nation and people.

Her mission is to bear patient witness to the One who desires to draw all creation and every man and woman to the Father. Her mission is to bring to all a love which cannot remain silent. The Church follows Jesus Christ along the paths that lead to every man and woman, to the very ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8). In each of our neighbours, then, we must see a brother or sister for whom Christ died and rose again. What we ourselves have received, we have received for them as well. Similarly, all that our brothers and sisters possess is a gift for the Church and for all humanity.

Read the whole message here.

Lent of Benediction

Thinking to write this post, a quick search revealed that my confrere Br. Anthony had already written it, more or less. So, with my apologies, I write my own version.

From the Rule of the Friars Minor:

Let them fast from the feast of All Saints until the Lord’s Nativity. May those be blessed by the Lord [Latin: benedicti sint a Domino] who fast voluntarily during that holy Lent that begins at the Epiphany and lasts during the forty days which our Lord consecrated by His own fast; but those who do not wish to keep it will not be obliged. Let them fast, however, during the other [Lent] until the Lord’s Resurrection. (III: 5-7)

It strikes me that in my years as a Franciscan it has never occurred to me to seek this blessing from the Lord that St. Francis promises to the brothers who observe this other "Lent."

Here's what the Capuchin Constitutions have to say about it:

Christ the Lord, having been sent by his Father and led by the Holy Spirit, fasted in the desert for forty days and forty nights. 

His disciple, Saint Francis, burning with the desire to imitate the Lord, also spent his life in fasting and prayer. 

We, too, therefore, practice fasting, prayer and works of mercy, which lead us to inner freedom and open us to love for God and neighbor. 

The season of Advent and, above all, the Lent before Easter, as well as every Friday, are for us times of more intense private and communal penance. 

In addition, the “Lent of Benediction”, as it is called, which begins at the Epiphany, and the vigils of the solemnities of Saint Francis and of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary are recommended. 

On these days, let us apply ourselves more eagerly to those works which foster conversion: prayer, recollection, listening to the word of God, bodily mortification and communal fasting. In a brotherly spirit, let us share with other poor people that which comes to us from the table of the Lord because of our greater frugality. Let us also perform works of mercy more fervently in keeping with our traditional custom. (111, 1-6)

I have decided upon some practices for observing this other "Lent." I hope they are inspired. Looking at the calendar I realize that to make forty days I have to include Sundays (unlike in the season of Lent) in order for my "Lent of Benediction" to conclude before the season of Lent begins. So if I begin the "Lent of Benediction" today (which is the day after Epiphany here in Italy), and include the Sundays, the last day will be February 15. That leaves two days for carnevale before Ash Wednesday on the 18. Thus may I seek the blessing of the Lord!

Blind

Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this
and said to him, “Surely we are not also blind, are we?”
Jesus said to them,
“If you were blind, you would have no sin;
but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains.
(John 9:40-41)

Lord, I am blind.

I am blind to the gravity of my sins, for if I could see them in their ugliness before your goodness, how could I persist in them?

I am blind to the goodness of your grace working in me, for if I could see how blessed I am, how could I do anything but follow you unreservedly from this moment forward?

I am blind to your presence in the poor and suffering around me, for if I could see you in such hunger and need, how could I go in living for my own comfort?

Most High,

glorious God,

enlighten the darkness of my heart

and give me

truth faith,

certain hope,

and perfect charity,

sense and knowledge,

Lord,

that I may carry out

Your holy and true command.

Updates

This old blog continues to slow down. Maybe it's over after eight (!) years. It's never really had a plan; I just wrote things as they occurred to me and since the Holy Spirit let me know that he was using it for my salvation and occasionally for the salvation of others, I was happy to continue.

But since it has been a while since I last wrote, I thought I would post some updates.

It's also the Second Sunday of Lent, a day dear to me on a couple of levels. The readings today are so rich; there's a sense of the first light before the dawn of a glorious blessing. Divine blessing promised for all the families of the earth through God's call to one man, Abram. The brilliance of the glorified Body of the incarnate Son revealed to the inner circle within the inner circle of Jesus' disciples. It's all what Paul calls the "grace bestowed...before time began."

There's your homily for today, the short version I suspect.

Prayer is good. There is something new in it, but I'm not sure how to name it. Some new level or call or surrender to the action of grace, I'm not sure how to describe it. There's also a new sense of what my priesthood means for prayer now that I'm living a more hidden life, as I pray for people especially in their suffering.

Spiritual reading is good too. I have the good fortune at the current moment to live under the same roof as the Capuchin Central Library. I've been reading volumes of the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality series that I've always wanted to get to but never have. So far I've read Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and Richard Rolle. I was especially grateful for Tauler; one of those books for spiritual reading that Providence sends just at the right time. There's something eerily modern about him in the way he speaks about prayer as a descent, a going deeper, a sinking into one's 'ground,' rather than solely as an ascent.

For Lent I'm doing a couple of simple things in the hopes that they will help me surrender to the grace of renewing my baptismal promises come Easter. One is a funny kind of non-standard fast that I have thought of before but never tried. It's going well so far. The other is a little adjustment in how I use the evening meditation period, something to keep me focused on the basics.

So that's what I'm up to and that's it for now. Thanks for your prayers, as I pray for you.

On Being Without St. Patrick's Day

I woke up this morning and the first thing I noticed was how much daylight there was. Spring is coming, I suppose, but it's also that on Sundays I can sleep in until almost six. I know, right? Scandalous. My second thought was, 'Passiontide!'

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.

Weeping, as We Should

I've been enjoying the prayers over the people that the new missal offers during Lent. Today's is especially good:

O God, who choose to show mercy not anger to those who hope in you, grant that your faithful may weep, as they should, for the evil they have done, and so merit the grace of your consolation. Through Christ our Lord.

Like so many prayers, this one would be easy to take the wrong way, as if God has somehow decided to be nice to us--and maybe just this once--when what he really wants is to be angry, or if our contrition somehow buys us divine consolation.

The punishment we receive for our sins, in this life and all the way down the road to hell, is only what we do with the emptiness we suffer from lacking the goodness of God that ought to be there. This emptiness, as we sinners sorely know, is all too easily filled with violence, craving, despair, self-medication, and every other settling for less by which we purchase for ourselves our alienation and misery. Take this to our created finality, and that's hell.

The spiritual work is to refuse to fill the emptiness with anything else, but to sit in it and grieve the absence of God we have insisted upon with our sins. This is the beginning of compunction. It does not buy us God's consolation, but merits it in the sense that praying out of the emptiness in a mode of receptive grief opens us to the consolation God is just dying--literally--to give us.

It is in the openness of this grieving for our emptiness that we really begin to see Christ crucified, God having united his very self to our pain, our stuckness, our alienation, our feeling of abandonment. And it is then that we realize the mercy of the divinity of Christ crucified, because he has blazed a trail--for our humanity--through our suffering to the new creation that is the Resurrection.

Laetare Ierusalem

Yes, I wore it.

Had I a pink rose cincture, I would have worn that too.

Compunctus

There was a lot to strike--and even the pierce--the heart in the new prayers for Ash Wednesday yesterday, but I was grateful most of all for the Prayer over the People:

Pour out a spirit of compunction, O God, on those who bow before your majesty, and by your mercy may they merit the rewards you promise to those who do penance. Through Christ our Lord.

 But when...you see that your nature is still twisted and disfigured by selfishness and by the disorder of sin, and that you are cramped and warped by a way of living that turns you incessantly back upon your own pleasure and your own interest, and that you cannot escape this distortion: that you cannot even deserve to escape it, by your own power, what will your sorrow be? This is the root of what the saints called compunction: the grief, the anguish of being helpless to be anything but what you were not meant to be. (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 263)

Ash Wednesday: Hypocrisy, Necrosis, Mimesis

Another Ash Wednesday, and with it the hope for a new beginning of the Christian life. This is my twentieth Lent already, and since I was baptized when I was twenty years old, that means that in another year or so--should God grant me to live that long--I'll be able to start saying that I've spent most of my life on earth as a Christian.

I'm thoroughly convinced of my own interpretation of Ash Wednesday, namely that it is public, communal, purposeful disregard for the gospel that serves to confess to God and to each other that this is who we have been all along, people who have heard the good news and received the divine invitation, but have not yet surrendered, not yet lived gospel lives. What else could it mean to proclaim the gospel that tells us to wash our faces when we fast and not to perform righteous deeds that they may be seen, and then eagerly line up to have someone put dirt on our faces with great solemnity and then walk around like that all day? I wear the ashes because I want everyone to know--and to remember myself--that I am a gospel-disregarding hypocrite. But within that confession is the hope for a new beginning, to do penance, to amend my life, to repent and believe the gospel once again.

Nevertheless, as attached I am to this understanding, there are other things going on with Ash Wednesday. One of them I didn't start to notice until I was a parish priest and was baptizing babies with some regularity. At the beginning of the celebration of infant baptism, the families are met at the entrance to the church. As the names of the babies are called out, the minister of baptism makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of each, inviting parents and godparents to do the same. With this, the minister announces that the Christian community welcomes her new member with joy, and that the child is 'claimed' for Christ.

It strikes me that this signing at the beginning of the celebration of baptism is the same ritual gesture that is used to give ashes. (I concede that this is not the custom everywhere.) When I receive the little cross of ashes, I think of how it relates to the sign of the cross I too received at the beginning of the ceremony of my own baptism. (Despite being twenty years old at the time, I was baptized according to the rite for children, long story.) It's as if that first sign of the cross, full of hope and joy, is now revealed again as necrotic, my first fervor having been burnt up and being nothing but weightless ash. The baptism that was to give me new life by burying me with Christ in his death has been foiled by the life of death I insist upon for myself with my sins and distraction. On Ash Wednesday I admit this, confess it to God, myself, and everyone else, and hope for a new beginning that I might prepare myself for the renewal of my baptism at the great Vigil of Easter.

Still another angle that comes to me on Ash Wednesday is its relationship to Holy Thursday. It strikes me that the ritual by which we begin the journey of Lent, Ash Wednesday,  is parallel to the ritual by which Lent gives way to the days of the Paschal Triduum, the Mass of the Lord's Supper. On Ash Wednesday we insist on not following Jesus' practical advice on how to fast, but on Holy Thursday, in the washing of the feet, we take great pains to act out a gospel commandment that can easily be taken figuratively. We begin Lent with a direct violation of the gospel on Ash Wednesday and conclude with direct imitation on Holy Thursday.  The humble service of the washing of the feet is the antidote to the hypocrisy of the dirtying of the heads.

As we begin this Lent, may we all come to know Jesus anew. In his saving humility, he washes the feet of those who don't know how to wash their faces.