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.

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.

Christmas Eve

"The LORD also reveals to you that he will establish a house for you," announces the prophet Nathan to David. (2 Samuel 7:11b)

This house is born for us in the divine humanity of Jesus Christ. This humanity will grow and teach and heal and suffer and finally die on the Cross, drawing into himself all the suffering we have brought upon ourselves and each other with our sins.

But by the power of his divinity this sacred humanity is raised from the dead, raised into the sacraments that make a people into a Church, into the mystical Body of the Risen Christ.

"and, like living stones, let yourselves 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)

Baptized into the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and becoming his Body and Blood that we receive in the holy Eucharist, we are the spiritual house God promised to David in an everlasting covenant.

As the Body of Christ, as Church, we become the presence of Jesus, teaching, healing, reconciling, and finally accepting the Cross with the faith that the divine humanity of Christ has blazed a trail through our suffering to the new life of the Resurrection.

So his birth is our rebirth as the resurrected humanity that is his mystical Body.

Salty Ramble

Jesus said to his disciples: "You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. (Matthew 5:13)

Two days before Christmas the fog lifted just enough to allow a single chopper to work its way up to us, a dangerous journey, squeezing beneath the cloud ceiling just a few feet above the jungle-covered ridges. Along with food, water, mail, and ammunition came the battalion chaplain. 

He had brought with him several bottles of Southern Comfort and some new dirty jokes. I accepted the Southern Comfort, thanked him, laughed at the jokes, and had a drink with him. Merry Christmas. 

Inside I was seething. I thought I'd gone a little nuts. How could I be angry with a guy who had just put his life at risk to cheer me up? And didn't the Southern Comfort feel good on that rain-raked mountaintop? Years later I understood. I was engaged in killing and maybe being killed. I felt responsible for the lives and deaths of my companions. I was struggling with a situation approaching the sacred in its terror and contact with the infinite, and he was trying to numb me to it. I needed help with the existential terror of my own death and responsibility for the death of others, enemies, and friends, not Southern Comfort. I needed a spiritual guide. (Karl Marlantes, What It Is Like To Go To War)

Theses on Prayer from Mary Magdalene

More and more over the years, I turn to Mary Magdalene's encounter with the Risen Lord as both a means to understand prayer and a model for praying. I've written the same stuff before, but instead of linking some old post I thought to make a new one in the 'theses' style.

Theses on Prayer from Mary Magdalene (John 20: 11-18)

• Getting up early helps
• Stay still, stay where you are inside. Don't get up and do something else either physically or interiorly at the first thought of doing so, even when others have run away.
• Even when all you have inside seems like emptiness, look into it.
• Whatever question or concern or hurt happens to be on your heart, address it simply to whatever presence seems to be there, whether you recognize the presence or not, whether it seems like anything or not.
• Know that when you recognize the presence of God, this is how we, in our limited perception, experience God recognizing and calling to us. So like many aspects of prayer--and indeed, prayer itself--things feel like our action and our perception when in fact they are the action of the Holy Spirit praying within us. This is a sort of optical illusion of the interior vision that happens because of our being limited to time and space.
• Accept without discouragement that the experience of God in prayer feels fleeting. It feels this way because God is not a 'thing' that can be possessed like our other created experiences and still less like a physical, temporal good. In this sense prayer is the first and primary school of evangelical poverty, because the object of our desire cannot be grasped and possessed. Prayer trains us in letting go, because we have no choice with God but to let go.
• Further, even if it seems as if God flees from us in prayer, he is not fleeing in order to be rid of us, but as a way of drawing us, seducing us even, deeper into the mystery, that we may begin again with an even more profound gaze into the empty tomb.
• The fruit of prayer is witness to and announcement of the Resurrection, that the world may know that the new creation has begun to arrive.

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.

Christmas Eve

The first entry in the Marytrology strikes me this morning:

Commemoratio omnium sanctorum avorum Iesu Christi, filii David, filii Abraham, filii Adam, patrum scilicet, qui Deo placuerunt et iusti inventi sunt et iuxta fidem defuncti, nullis acceptis promissionibus, sed longe eas aspicientes et salutantes, ex quibus natus est Christus secundum carnem, qui est super omnia Deus benedictus in saecula. 

The commemoration of all the holy ancestors of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, the son of Adam, namely those fathers who pleased God and were found just according to the faith of the deceased, who didn't receive the promises as fulfilled, but gazed on and hailed them from afar, from whom Christ was born according to the flesh, he who is the blessed God above all forever.

It's especially interesting as a kind of preparation for St. Matthew's genealogy in the gospel for the vigil Mass of Christmas and for the Christmas Proclamation, which is found in the Martyrology for tomorrow, but which ought to be proclaimed tonight ahead of the 'Mass during the night.'

On the morning of Christmas Eve, the Martyrology offers us a liturgical commemoration of all the ancestors of Jesus Christ, and reminds us that the Word became flesh not just in an abstract human nature, but as a historical human life in a particular place and culture with specific ancestors. To me it invites a reflection on the doctrine many of us have absorbed that culture is basically fungible, that the cultural elements of the time and place of the incarnation are ultimately accidental. More and more it seems to me that this set of assumptions impoverishes the doctrine of the incarnation.

We commemorate this morning the faith of all of those who looked forward to Jesus Christ come in the flesh, gazing on the great mystery in the obscurity of the night that preceded the first light of his birth and the full dawn of the Resurrection, the Resurrection that is the full meaning of the 'let there be light' by which the Word of God brings into being the first day of the new creation.

Prayer Before Mass

Most High and Glorious God, I am unworthy to approach you in any way. But my trust in your mercy softens my fear of your judgment.

From the very knowledge of my sins and my wretchedness, those things which render me unfit to offer you sacrifice, comes the awareness of my need for the healing and strength that flows from your Sacrament. And my consciousness of this dire need overcomes my fear of committing sacrilege by presuming to offer the Sacrifice.

For the Sacrifice I offer you isn't my own, but the Sacrifice of your Son, who, through the consent of our most Blessed Mother, has joined to his divinity my humanity, letting it be baptized in the Jordan, broken on the Cross, and raised into the new creation of the Resurrection.

By this Mass that I offer to you, and by the Holy Communion with which you nourish me, may this sick old man--already drowned in baptism--die more definitively, and may the new creature be born anew, again for the first time, ready to give his body, his self, for your people.

St. Cleopas

From the Roman Martyrology today:

25 September. The commemoration of St. Cleopas, a disciple of the Lord. Making a journey with another disciple on the evening of Easter, his heart burned when the Lord appeared on the way and opened the Scriptures to them. In the village of Emmaus, he knew the Savior in the breaking of the bread.

Peter's Example and Unregenerate Pastoral Care

(Another rant today, I guess. I must have been saving them up inside.)

St. Peter is one of my favorite players in the telling of the paschal triduum. In him we witness a remarkable transformation; in the reading of St. John's Passion on Friday, Peter denies Jesus three times. Then, at the Mass of Easter Sunday, we hear the bold confession and speech he makes in the house of Cornelius. This post-Resurrection Peter is quite a different character than the fearful and bumbling Peter who was a disciple of Jesus in his historical life; now we see Peter the Apostle, the bold preacher on whom the apostolic ministry of unity is founded, and who will soon enough go to his own martyrdom.

But here's the funny thing: in many homilies I've heard and spiritual advices I've been given along the way, it's not the latter Peter who is adduced as an encouragement, but the former.

For sure, the dullness and 'not getting it' of the disciples in the gospels is always a helpful reflection; it's easy enough for us to be like that too, just as it is very easy to slip into the misplaced religiosity of the scribes and Pharisees as the gospels describe it. We must always remember, and the Scriptures constantly needle and encourage us in this regard, that it's easy enough to call yourself a Christian, or to do religious stuff, without actually being a hearer and disciple of the living God.

On the other hand, I find it increasingly sad and annoying when I hear the example of the pre-Resurrection disciples adduced as an excuse for bumbling and mediocrity. Imagine a scene: I confess to some teacher or elder my struggles against the world, the flesh, and the devil, and ask how I might make progress in holiness and faithfulness to God. And so I am told: 'Don't be so hard on yourself. Look at Peter. He struggled to understand, he didn't always get it, and he even denied Jesus three times.' To that I want to say, 'Yes, let's look at Peter; he fearlessly preached that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ constituted him as the Risen Lord and Judge of all, and he went humbly to his own crucifixion.'

Are we not people who live in these last days inaugurated by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ? Should not our models and examples be the disciples in their transformation by that same Resurrection, rather than their confusion and dullness before they understood?

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.

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.

Receiving the Stigmata

Thomas Merton:

To live "in Christ" is to live in a mystery equal to that of the Incarnation and similar to it. (New Seeds of Contemplation, 158)

Edith Stein:

Thus a new incarnation of Christ takes place in christians, which is synonymous with a resurrection from the death on the cross. The new self carries the wounds of Christ on the body: the remembrance of the misery of sin out of which the soul was awakened to a blessed life, and a reminder of the price that had to be paid for that. The pain of yearning for the fullness of life persists until, through the door of actual physical death, entrance into the shadowless light is gained. (The Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel, OCD)

The Risen Lord continued to bear the wounds of the Crucified Christ. In the same way, the wounds of sin remain in the redemption-in-process that is the humanity of the Christian. For better or for worse, nothing makes us who we are more than our suffering. We find ourselves as human beings in an injured state, often foiled by our own faults and sins and subjected to misery because of the sins of others. This is the mystery of the effects of original sin in the world.

God redeems us in Christ by meeting us exactly in this miserable and alienated condition: This is the mystery of Christ crucified. Though killed in his human nature, death could not contain Christ as God. Thus the Cross blazes a new path for the humanity he shares with us, a path out of the deathly misery we have insisted upon for ourselves with our sins to a new and risen life.

As we become redeemed by consenting to let our own humanity be drawn into the humanity of Christ--and this is the mystery of baptism and Holy Communion, by the way--the wounds and broken parts of ourselves remain, but in a transformed way. Though freed and redeemed, our sufferings and struggles are still the things that have made us who we are. But these wounds, previously just a source of meaninglessness and pain, have been transformed into stigmata, signs of transformed suffering that illustrate to those around us the possibility of resurrected humanity.

Thus, in a sense every Christian is a stigmatic. But it's not that we 'receive' the stigmata, for the wounds have always been there. The hurts and brokenness that were meaningless and so often a source of the desperate cycles of violence of the world that does not know God, have now been transformed into the redeemed wounds that bleed only compassion.

Outburst

I love this moment in the first reading today:

Joseph could no longer control himself in the presence of all his attendants, so he cried out, “Have everyone withdraw from me!” Thus no one else was about when he made himself known to his brothers. (Genesis 45:1)

To me, it's a beautiful image of the Resurrection.

Joseph, after all, is a type and foreshadowing of Christ himself. Resented, abandoned, turned over to pagans and presumed dead by his brothers, Joseph ends up coming to power in a foreign kingdom and thereby is able to save his family from famine.

Joseph is recognized in his new power in Egypt when he can no longer control is emotions and reveals himself to his brothers. He "could no longer control himself" says the scripture. In the same way the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is like an emotional outburst; God's compassion is so much greater than the works of death and misery we have insisted upon for ourselves with our sins and violence. Despite our having dismissed, mocked, tortured and killed our own Lord, Jesus reveals that from this very state of rejection and death he has come into a new power in a Kingdom that is foreign to this world. The most high joy of the divine creativity comes to be experienced as forgiveness and reconciliation as God wills to not contain Himself and bursts out in the revealing of the Risen Lord.

Baptized Into His Death

One time I asked a spiritual director where God was when I would fall into sin. He looked at me like I had missed some basic point along the way.

"He's suffering with you on the cross."

Sanctity is our vocation, because our happiness and beatitude consists in imitating the holiness of the Creator from Whom we have come and in Whom we live and move and have our being. But if we imagine (in a spiritually reduced and binary way) that God is with us in the joy of holiness and not with us in the misery of sin, we have missed the point of Christianity.

The good news of our faith is precisely that God has entered into the misery and unhappiness we have brought upon ourselves with our sins in order to blaze a trail out of it for humanity. That trail is called the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So in a state of sin we feel unhappy because we have touched, to some degree, the alienation from God that is the final and complete human suffering. But for us who have been baptized into the death and Resurrection of Christ, our liberation is the knowledge that this is just that, a feeling that does not accurately reflect our spiritual condition. For God in Christ has joined us in the suffering of our miserable alienation, and this knowledge is the faith that saves precisely because it reveals the path that Christ has walked from the death of sin to the new life of the Resurrection.

This is not to say that there is no such thing as the final impenitence that leads to hell or the possibility of truly unrepentant mortal sin that cuts off the soul from grace, but only to say that the basic question of the spiritual life is not whether to be good or bad, to be a sinner or a saint (that is, in the way the world thinks of saints.) The basic question of the spiritual life is to ask ourselves what sort of sinner we want to be. We can follow the wisdom of this world and become the sort of sinner who lets his sin make him ever more bitter and selfish, or let the tragedy of sin in our lives and the world break our hearts open into humility for ourselves and compassion for others.

That's how suffering and alienation come to be transformed into kindness and communion, and that's what the death and Resurrection looks like when its Mystery comes to make a home in our hearts.

Book Recommendation

Well, this afternoon I'm finishing up what will surely be (alas) my last accomplishment of summer reading, N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God. I don't dare presume competence to write a review. All I can say is that as a student and a preacher, but most especially just as a Christian, I am very glad for the inspiration to read this book.

If you have ever found yourself perplexed about the differences in Paul and the evangelists themselves--not to mention the oddness of what they say--or by everything that has been interpreted for you about what really happened on the first day of the week following Jesus' execution, from noli me tangere to whether you can end a sentence with gar, or from what you have been told by priests and professors, by Bultmann and Crossan to Mel Gibson and the 'History' Channel, then read this book. I know it's 800 pages. You won't be sorry.

No wonder the Herods, the Caesars and the Sadducees of this world, ancient and modern, were and are eager to rule out all possibility of actual resurrection. They are, after all, staking a counter-claim on the real world. It is the real world that the tyrants and bullies (including intellectual and cultural tyrants and bullies) try to rule by force, only to discover that in order to do so they have to quash all rumours of resurrection, rumours that would imply that their greatest weapons, death and deconstruction, are not after all omnipotent. But it is the real world, in Jewish thinking, that the real God made, and still grieves over. It is the real world that, in the earliest stories of Jesus' resurrection, was decisively and for ever reclaimed by that event, and event which demanded to be understood, not as a bizarre miracle, but as the beginning of the new creation. (737)

Easter Preaching Rant

It's a joyful challenge to be preaching on the "Bread of Life Discourse" this week, all the while leading up to next Sunday when we will have the image of the Lamb in the reading from Revelation and the Good Shepherd in the gospel. Journeying through that particular conjunction, the Lord as Lamb and Shepherd, is the prayer of my homily preparation this week.

It reminds me of something I've heard from priests from time to time over the years, about how they dread preaching through the Easter season and don't know what to say. I have always found the sentiment both sad and disturbing, but perhaps now that I am a daily preacher I can at least sympathize. Easter is supposed to be the center of our faith, the preeminent moment of Christianity. So why should it be hard to preach? I think of two issues.

First, Easter suggests that the resurrection of Christ be preached. I say "suggests" because I have not always heard about the resurrection in Easter homilies. It's true, it's a hard thing to preach. Jesus rose, or 'was raised' (theological passive), 'in his human body' (as we say in the Roman Canon, "secundum carnem") to some sort of new, glorified, eschatological life. This new life is somehow continuous with his historical life, and includes, in some sense, the physical body that he, as Word, borrowed from us through the consent of Mary. He has breath, and can eat. Oddly, however, he is not immediately recognizable, despite being the same person. Perhaps even more strangely, the risen Jesus is not confined by the ordinary limitations of physical bodiliness, as he appears and vanishes, shows up in locked rooms, etc.

Even more, the Easter homilist must preach on how this resurrection of Christ has implications for us, how his passing over to new life is also ours, and how all of this is communicated through baptism and the other sacraments. Too often these are preached in a way that does not produce portable belief and practice for people. We throw our hands up and call it a "mystery." Not that I have anything against mystery, but we need to preach mystery so as to encourage mysticism rather than mystification.

All of this is just to illustrate that the Easter preacher has a delicate and difficult task, and if we are accustomed to preaching a vague morality or general, clever sayings about "spirituality" we, as a Church, will not be up to the task.


Second, I think Easter preaching is challenging because it forces Christian particularity on the preacher. It is about the good news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and there is no way around it. This particularity will be hard to preach and communicate if we have absorbed the comfortable and civil theology of 'many paths to one divine something-or-other.' Perhaps few of us would admit to adhering to this theology, but many have adopted it as an operative mode. Why not? It's comfortable, it helps us to fit into the relativism of the world, and it relieves us of the discomfort of having to say that anybody might be wrong about anything. Unfortunately, however, once we adopt this 'theology' as our comfy and unspoken over-arching paradigm (and I believe that many of us have) there is nothing left to preach but vague morality and general spirituality. The theological problem with this idea is that God becomes fundamentally unknowable, since all "faith traditions" are equally inadequate to the Mystery. God, apparently, is not actually capable of revelation. Therefore, when God is unknowable and not a reliable revealer of himself, worship cannot be anything but the worship of ourselves and our own ideas. More likely it will be worship of our own pride in how enlightened we are to have adopted such a magnanimous theology. Been there, done that. I can't think of anything more boring.


Via non est nisi per ardentissimum amorem crucifixi.

Surrexit Dominus Vere. Alleluia.

Take, Bless, Break, Give

When I hear the gospel of the disciples on the way to Emmaus, as I did when I proclaimed it this morning, it's hard for me to understand how anyone would want to be a Christian without the Eucharist.

To me the gospels of yesterday (John 20:11-18) and today (Luke 24:13-35) are parallel. Both are resurrection appearances in which the risen Lord is not immediately recognizable, and in which the experience of his presence is somehow fleeting.

To me these passages answer the basic question of the Christian: How may I have an experience of Jesus? The answer from the gospel is clear, at least to me: prayer and sacrament.

Mary Magdalene recognizes the risen Lord when he calls her name. In one instant she goes from thinking he might be the gardener to the certainty that he is her "rabbouni." As it was with Mary, so it is with us. If we want an experience of the risen Jesus (the only Jesus available to us personally and experimentally, by the way) we need to create a space in our lives in which we can hear Him utter our name, calling to each of us as His unique and unrepeatable creations. This space is called prayer.

To the disciples on the way, Jesus is just a friendly stranger. When they offer him hospitality, he breaks the bread for them. Luke's 'take-bless-break-give' makes it obvious that we are talking about the actions of the Eucharist. In these actions by which the risen Jesus offers the bread the Eucharist, he is immediately recognized for Who He Is. In this one of the basic dynamics of Christian spirituality is revealed: prayer, which is the offering of hospitality to Jesus in our hearts, drives us to recognize Him when he offers the Eucharist for us.

Noli Me Tangere

She said to them, “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there, but did not know it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” She thought it was the gardener and said to him, “Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni,” which means Teacher. Jesus said to her, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and then reported what he had told her. (John 20:14-18)

More than any other dominical word, Jesus' "stop holding on to me" in today's gospel speaks to my own experience of prayer.

When I first began to reflect on the idea of God, the idea drew me into a kind of prayer.

But then it happens, somehow, very obscurely, the Lord becomes recognizable when he calls the pray-er by name. "Rabbouni!" This call, this experience of God in his Person drives you deeper into prayer; you want to know Who this Presence Is. Whatever this is, it is somehow at once terrifying and delightful, joyful and serious. It makes you feel giddy and grave at the same time. But as soon as you feel like you can touch the Mystery, this same God Who invited you into prayer seems to retreat from the embrace and the understanding. At first you feel put off and reejcted, but after a while you learn to trust this, and see the retreat as an invitiation, as if this Beloved refuses to be touched in order to make you chase Him deeper into the mysteries of your own being and that of the creation.

This goes on a for a few years, and you find that you desire more and understand less. Somehow you know God both more and more intimately and less and less certainly. You desire in a way that can never be satisfied, and experience a satisfaction that never becomes satiety. Eventually you hardly know what is meant by the utterance "God." Yes, you believe that He is a Trinity because he has revealed Himself to be so, and because the life of the sacraments has convinced you of His Presence in them on the experimental level, but in the experience of prayer all of this language seems to become too coarse. The conversation or the love making of prayer seems to be below or above or around it. Pick you metaphor; in the end they don't matter either.

Noli me tangere. Amen.

Transfiguration

This weekend our pastor will be making one of our annual financial appeals at all the Masses, so I don't have a new homily to post. It's too bad, because the Transfiguration is one of my favorite mysteries of Jesus Christ. For a long time I've felt a sort of mystical affinity with it; it was on the feast of the Transfiguration in 1993 that I first consented to my religious vocation, and I was born on the Second Sunday of Lent when it is always proclaimed.

I often find myself including the Transfiguration in these posts, and so I just present three of my best:

The Resurrection, Transfiguration, and the End Times

Coincidence or Providence?

The Resurrection and the Bomb