RIP: Fr. Stanley Marrow, SJ

(Original post from 2012)

Today there was news of the death of one of our favorite teachers, Fr. Stanley Marrow, SJ. A seemingly cantankerous but really very gracious old Iraqi, every student he ever had is full of his sayings.

The last time I saw Stanley, on a visit to the old Jesuit home, he showed me a manuscript that he had just completed. A commentary on 1 Corinthians, I think it was. He remarked how nobody would publish it. Not the conservative presses, he said, because his exegesis proved the non-existence of the sacrament of penance, and not the liberal ones, because he insisted on calling God 'Father.' In this, as in everything else, he was the consummate iconoclast. He was very insistent on the God the Father thing. When he thought our more progressively-styled school Masses were ashamed of it, he declined to attend, saying that he worshiped a different God. I remember once when he did come to a school Mass, he remarked that the music sounded like "something from a Moroccan whorehouse."

During the same visit that I mentioned above, Stanley told me that he was praying for death. But, he said, the answer to his prayers thus far had only been, "Please stay on the line; your business is important to us." 

Underneath all the humor, though, was a very serious scholar of the Scriptures, and that's something we younger folks sometimes forget. You don't just get to be an iconoclast. You have to work for the privilege, and work long and hard.

When I was a new priest, Stanley sent me one of the most beautiful and encouraging notes I have ever received:

Before all else, congratulations! One of my fellow-ordinands, a man of extreme emotional reserve, remarked after the ceremony, "Now I know what Rahner means when he speaks of the 'physical redundancy' of grace." I shall offer my Mass for you some day this week, and ask the "author of our calling" to make your priestly ministry the unfailing source of your peace and joy. God has blessed you with an abundance of gifts, and the great beneficiary of that abundance will be those he entrusts to your pastoral solicitude. May you find in your selfless service of them the infinite satisfaction of saying, "We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty."

The quotes could go on and on. But I always respected how he responded when he was asked how he saw his work as a professor of Sacred Scripture: he said that it was his mission to minimize the damage his students were going to do to God's people.

Requiescat in pace.

2025 UPDATE: I missed this until now, but the manuscript mentioned above was published. In the foreword, Fr. Thomas Stegman, SJ (may he also rest in peace), alludes to the difficulties.

Paul for Today's Church: A Commentary on First Corinthians

Humility Against Shame

It's been my turn to be hebdomadary this past week so it fell to me to proclaim the short reading for first vespers of Peter and Paul:

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son: To all God's beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 1:1-3a, 7)

The Ambiguous Fate of the Fat

This morning I thought to practice the readings for the solemnity of the Sacred Heart tomorrow, knowing that I would be asked to proclaim one or another of them.

I soon found myself in an eschatological dubium.

Boasting in the Lord

Not to scandalize anyone, but I can't say that in my experience of religious life I have been edified overwhelmingly by the influence of Sacred Scripture in the discernment and planning of everyday tasks and administration. Today, however, was an exception.

A brother was at work preparing a request to certain ministers of the brothers, that they might compile certain informations regarding the maintenance of buildings, the condition of temporal goods, that sort of thing.

Another brother issued a warning, reminding the first brother that it had been Satan who had incited David to "number" Israel, and that the end result had been a divine judgment that left seventy thousand dead and Jerusalem just missing being destroyed. (Cf. 1 Chronicles 21)

The first brother responded that David had been punished because he tried to make an accounting of his strengths (which intimated failure to have faith in the Mighty One of Israel), but that the Order (according to the salutary spiritual advice of the Apostle) was endeavoring to render an account of its weaknesses.

Reading 'The Infancy Narratives'

I've been reading Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives on the Sundays of Advent and finished it this morning. The first thing I would say about it is that the reader does well to take seriously what the author says about the nature of the book, that it "is not a third volume, but a kind of small 'antechamber' to the two earlier volumes." It's a sweet little book of just a few chapters, but shot through with the sort of reflection that reveals a real devotion to the events recorded by Matthew and Luke. Particularly touching in this sense is the thoughtful section on the Virgin Birth:

It seems natural to me that only after Mary's death could the mystery be made public and pass into the shared patrimony of early Christianity. At that point it could find its way into the evolving complex of Christological doctrine and be linked to the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God--yet not in the manner of a story crafted from an idea, an idea reformulated as a fact, but vice versa: the event itself, a fact that was now in the public domain, became the object of reflection--understanding was sought. The overall picture of Jesus Christ shed light upon the event, and conversely, through that event, the divine logic was more deeply grasped. The mystery of his origin illuminated what came later, and conversely the developed form of Christological faith helped to make sense of that origin. Thus did Christology develop.

Another section that makes a similar point in a more general way:

The two chapters of Matthew's Gospel devoted to the infancy narratives are not a meditation presented under the guise of stories, but the converse: Matthew is recounting real history, theologically thought and interpreted, and thus he helps us to understand the mystery of Jesus more deeply.

How refreshing that is for us who absorbed so many brittle doctrines about history and fact and meaning and God--e.g. 'yes, it's just a myth' or 'yes, it's just a symbol,' 'but that means it's more true!' or 'yes, the Bible is all true, and some of it really happened'--all of these doctrines that when they are heard by unbelievers convince them more deeply that we religious people are self-deluded and full of nonsense. More and more I tend to consign such teaching to the large category of things that seemed liberating to our parents in the faith but have not delivered on such hope.

It is said by some that the Church needs to be updated according to the times, in order to be more relevant, more comprehensible, and set free from her doctrines that are offensive to the cherished ideas of contemporary society. But what they forget is that the world doesn't hate the Church because of her teachings; the world hates the Church because it hated Jesus Christ first. And those are his words, not mine.

And why should Benedict's assertions seem strange? Do we not in just the same way work out our spiritual understanding of ourselves? It is a historical fact that in the early afternoon on August 29, 1992, I walked up and out of the basement of Freeman dormitory and down the street to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Quaker Hill, Connecticut, where a deacon of the Roman Catholic Church poured some water on me and invoked the Blessed Trinity. It really took place. You can go to the church and find a historical record of it in their office. But to know and understand what happened that day requires some theological reflection. That's how our spiritual lives work, history coming to be understood in light of God's eternity. Why should the Sacred Scriptures be any different?

I also enjoyed a little jab at academic theology delivered by the old professor. He is discussing the beginning of Matthew 2, in which Herod, following up on the inquiry of Magi, asks the chief priests and the scribes where the Messiah is to be born. Despite giving a learned and complete answer, Benedict notes that this knowledge does not prompt them to actually do anything:

The answer given by the chief priests and scribes to the wise men's question has a thoroughly practical geographical content, which helps the Magi on their way. Yet it is not only a geographical, but also a theological interpretation of the place and the event. That Herod would draw the obvious conclusion is understandable. Yet it is remarkable that his Scripture experts do not feel prompted to take any practical steps as a result. Does this, perhaps, furnish us with the image of a theology that exhausts itself in academic disputes?

In Illo Tempore

One of the things I enjoy about this language-learning business is the chance to learn--as we were told people did in the olden days--with the language of the Sacred Scriptures. This is to say that in addition to the classes, there is also the daily liturgical environment forming one's learning.

In the text we were working from in class the other day the group stumbled on the word la folla. It turned out that I was the only student who knew the word, because I had heard it several times in the gospel readings at Mass: Gesù disse alle folle..., "Jesus said to the crowds..."

It reminded me of something from when we were at Spanish language school in Costa Rica. When we had arrived at the lessons on using properly the different past tenses, one of the exercises was to tell stories from our past. Without thinking about it, we would begin, "en aquellos días...," which is the usual Spanish way of rendering the Biblical opener that we know in English as in those days..., as in in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus..., famously on Christmas eve.

Well, the teachers would find this very amusing, to hear us speaking in what they heard as a biblical style. But we didn't mean to be pompous or even religious; it was just that we had heard these phrases, had begun to understand what they indicated in the simplest of senses, and had used them because they had remained in our minds.

And for such, as a form of prayer that the Holy Spirit works in his students, I'm grateful today.

Ignoratio Christi Est

Often when I read the Church Fathers or the great medieval theologians I can't help but notice how immersed they were in the Sacred Scriptures. The vocabulary, the theological imaginations therein, these writers seem to just swim in it.

Why am I not like that?

I think about it sometimes. Of course it's primarily my own fault and my own failure to let myself be absorbed by the Bible instead of clinging to the noise and nonsense of the world.

But I've come to think that we in our time are also subject to a set of mistakes and errors that keep us from living as deeply in the Scriptures as we could.

First, for some crazy reason that I've never understood, we have decided that all Christian doctrine is relative while certain other systems of doctrine are raised to an unassailable, dogmatic status. There are certain forms of psychology, for instance, and the anthropology and teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous, to take two common examples. Questioning these is often far more 'heretical' than leaning toward a genuine heresy. I imagine that most religious could name the seven sacraments. But I wouldn't be surprised to find out that more could list the Twelve Steps than could name the Ten Commandments, and I would be willing to bet on it for the mysteries of the rosary or the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Now I don't mean to say anything against the recovery movement itself, which has done a lot of good for a lot of people, but just to say that we religious are often confused and uncritical about what are and what ought to be the axiomatic foundations of our thinking and practice.

Second, I think our poor practices of liturgy contribute to the poverty of our relationship to the Scriptures. Since we have accepted as a norm, for example, the option of  substituting the ordinary texts of the Mass with songs and hymns, we receive the scriptural language and imagination of the Mass in a much more processed and derivative way in this regard than we would if we just sang the proper chants. That's really the lovely thing about chant on the theological level; the music conforms itself to the actual words of Scripture. In the offerings of the big music publishers, it's often more like the other way around; the scriptural theme conforms to the music.

Our practice of the Divine Office, too, represents certain missed opportunities to embed ourselves in the Sacred Scriptures. The Liturgy of the Hours is more or less made out of Scripture and provides an opportunity to return our hearts and imaginations to them five times each day. Unfortunately, I don't think we say our prayers. I know that I miss them sometimes, in my distraction and to my shame. This is bad enough for us as religious, but even worse for us who are clerics who have publicly promised the people of God that the Liturgy of the Hours would be celebrated fully and daily in our individual persons. In my own institute, because of our lukewarmness but also for good reasons regarding our ministries and good things we need to be about, we tend to celebrate in common the minimum of the Hours that our Constitutions demand. This leaves the rest to be prayed in private. Unfortunately, I don't think we do it. As one of my confreres once said, the 'saddest sound in religious life' comes from chunks of breviary pages being flipped forward in the chapel, not having been looked at it since the last time we prayed in common. Now I also think that some of this problem comes from an uncriticized and impoverished sense of liturgy as a community activity rather than the worship of God, but that's another rant. Today I only wish to rant about how we rob ourselves of the power of the Word by our failure to say our prayers.

Therefore, let's repent of all these errors. Let's say our prayers, sing the Mass instead of substituting something else, and recover the Sacred Scriptures as the true foundation of our thinking about ourselves, our spiritualities, and the world.

Theological Re-Flection

In the ferial gospel for today we hear St. Mark's version of Jesus' word on the lamp and the lampstand. Nobody lights a lamp to hide it away somewhere under a bed or a basket, but instead puts it on a stand, so that, as St. Matthew puts it, it may give light to all in the house.

This word is a good example of how we sometimes miss the richness of the scripture because we jump too quickly to a shallow moral sense. As soon as we hear the word, we go immediately into an examination of conscience, asking ourselves if we have hidden away the light of grace that God has given us, or whether we have sufficiently shared it with others. Before we know it, we miss the good news of the gospel because we are beating our breasts and saying Acts of Contrition.

Not that this is our fault; preachers too often do this on our behalf, as they throw in some vague and shallow encouragement to bolster the shallow exegesis.

Sitting with the word, we realize that is a word first of all about God. It is the eternal God who has lit a lamp from himself in the generation of the Son from the Father. In the incarnation of this only-begotten Word, the Holy Spirit conceives this Light on the lampstand of the humanity of Christ, from which all creation is bathed in divine light. From every Mass at which he is offered and from every tabernacle where he rests, the Light-lampstand who is the risen Christ shines out to anyone willing to become a little mirror, re-flecting and re-presenting the gospel light to others.

From here it is safer and more fruitful to turn to the moral demand of the word. The Light is already on the lampstand; it is only ours to join in its work of enlightening all in the house by cleaning the dust of distraction and the grime of sin from the little mirror that is our soul.

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.

Talking The End Times on the Train

The other day a woman approached me as I was waiting for the subway. It wasn't the standard, 'are you a monk/Buddhist/ninja?' question. No indeed. "Can I ask you a theological question?" she began.

As it turned out, she was a tremendously earnest person, though perhaps a little troubled. She was entirely preoccupied with the End Times and how they might emerge and unfold. Her reflection was a thick and complex mass of Biblical details, all of which she was trying to put together with some kind of intelligible cohesion, but apparently without much success. The various time periods from Daniel, the millenia from Revelation, and the possible returns of Elijah, Enoch, Ezekiel, and Mary seemed to swirl around in her efforts to make sense of it all. Entirely missing from her reflections was any larger sense or sweep of the eschatological meaning of the Scriptures, or that eschatology could be anything else, or anything in addition to linear time as we perceive one discrete event following upon another. She had no way of understanding the Lord's Resurrection as a sign, inauguration, principle, or beginning of the Last Days. Overwhelmed in a sea of numbers and disconnected ideas, her sense of these things seemed to be a source of distracting and anxious confusion rather than eschatological confidence and hope in God.

She left the train before me, and as I continued my ride home I took some time to pray for her and pray through the encounter. My first prayer was one of gratitude for being a Catholic. The Sacred Scriptures were written within the People of God and can only be read from within the living faith of the Church as a historical communion on the pilgrimage of the these last days. Trying to understand the Bible from outside of the living, sacramental communion of the Church risks just what this woman was suffering: becoming lost in a morass of contradictory details with no larger understanding or sense of the scriptural trajectory, no interpretive keys to make sense of it all.

I imagine that there are a lot of people out there in this sort of spiritual situation. They know that the Bible is God's Word, and so look for the Truth in it, but because they do not know that the Scriptures have to be understood from within the living Tradition from which they emerged in the first place, they only come to confusion and anxiety. May the Wisdom of God guide their minds and hearts to the Church.

Ut Melius Catholice Observemus

This passage from St. Thomas' commentary on John appeared in my reading for class today:

As Augustine says, the statements and precepts of sacred Scripture can be interpreted and understood from the actions of the saints, since the same Holy Spirit who inspired the prophets and the other sacred authors is the Spirit who drives the actions of the saints. As we read, Moved by the Holy Spirit holy men of God spoke (2 Pet. 1.21); and For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (Rom 8.14). Thus, sacred Scripture should be understood according to the way Christ and the other saints observed it in their practice.

(Quoted in Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Francesca Aran Murphy, 261)

In a simple and clear way, I think this passage explains what we mean as Catholics by 'Scripture and Tradition', and especially what Dei Verbum is getting at when it says that these form "a single deposit of the Word of God" whose life in the world is a mutual interconnection and intercommunication. (9-10)

This is why the Bible can only be properly interpreted from within the Church; to try to do so outside of her--as many do--is to divide God's single act of self-revelation and thus to arrive at conclusions that are incomplete and impoverished. Tradition interprets Scripture. This is not to say that 'traditional interpretations' are normative, in the sense of tradition as a species of human conservatism, but to say that the lives of the saints in the broadest sense of the revelation of the Holy Spirit in the concrete, historical sanctification of the baptized down through the ages is the interpretive key to the Scriptures which in turn are normative for the Church.

For us Franciscans, this helps us to understand that the statements of Francis at the beginning of the Rule and at the end of the Testament go together in a fruitful dialectic. "The rule and life of the Friars Minor is this: to observe the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ," which we then strive "to observe in a more catholic manner."

It's Just a Symbol

For some reason that I have never grasped, people think that just because something in the Bible might have a metaphorical or spiritual meaning, this automatically means that it can't also be a historical fact. Just because Adam and Eve, or Mud and Mom as I sometimes like to call them, are a symbol in various senses, doesn't mean they weren't real people. Just because the Lord's miracles have a spiritual meaning for us, and intended for us by the evangelists, doesn't mean that they 'didn't really happen.'

Finally I read where someone with some authority has made this point for me:

Hence some people interpret symbolically the entire episode of paradise itself, where, according to the truthful account of holy Scripture, the first human beings, parents of the human race, dwelt, and they turn those trees and fruit-bearing plants into virtues and ways of life. They assume that those details were not visible and material objects but were described as such in speech or writing for purpose of illustrating symbolically spiritual realities.

How absurd to maintain that there could not have been a material paradise because it can be understood also in a spiritual sense; as if it were an argument that Abraham did not have two wives, Hagar and Sarah, and from them two sons, one by the slave and the other by a free woman, just because the Apostle says that in them the covenants were illustrated; or, again, that there was no rock from which water flowed forth when Moses struck it because it can also be interpreted as a symbol of Christ in that passage, for, in the words of the same Apostle, 'The Rock, moreover, was Christ.'

(Augustine, City of God, XIII, 21, trans. Philip Levine)


It's all of one fabric, friends, because the the whole business, the natural world, history, revelation and everything else, are spoken into existence through the one Word of God.

Trinitarian Theology

This morning I'm reading Lewis Ayres's account of Augustine's "tenative" and "cautious" exploration of the how and in what way the persons of the Trinity can be "understood as identical with the intra-divine acts that Scripture attributes to them."

I'm grateful for this, because it helps me to remember that when it comes to the work of offering an account of the Blessed Trinity, the starting point is not reason, concepts of ideal community or social utopia, or a meta-argument about theological 'starting points.' The beginning is Sacred Scripture, from which God the Trinity is revealed to us.

Grammar Lulz

Maybe I'm spending too much time reading, but this sentence made me laugh out loud this afternoon:

"The next paragraph, [Romans] 5.12-21, is as notorious among scholars for its compactness as it is among struggling students working out how Paul can write Greek sentences, as in verse 18, without subject, verb, or object." (N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 249)

Ah, summer reading.

¹⁸Ἄρα οὖν ὡς δι' ἑνὸς παραπτώματος εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους εἰς κατάκριμα, οὕτως καὶ δι' ἑνὸς δικαιώματος εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους εἰς δικαίωσιν ζωῆς:

Rega! What's a Hypertrophy?

If and when I get to heaven, Jeremiah is on the short list of people to whom I look forward to meeting. Here he is from the end of the first reading from Mass today:

This is the nation that does not listen
to the voice of the LORD, its God,
or take correction.
Faithfulness has disappeared;
the word itself is banished from their speech. (7:28)

Jeremiah would never make it in religious life. I can just hear the formation director pleading with him: "Brother Jeremiah, you have to learn that you can't impose your idea of righteousness on others."

In the first scripture course I ever took, when I was nineteen years old and didn't know applesauce from sin, professor Hanker gave us an examination on Jeremiah. The essay question asked, "Do you think that Jeremiah suffered from a hypertrophy of sympathy for God? Why or why not?" Since none of us knew what "hypertrophy" meant, it was a hard question to answer. I wish I knew what ever happened to Eddie Hanker. He was an important influence on me in learning how to relate to the Word with reverence. Whenever anyone was saying anything without critical foundation he would start yelling, "rega, rega!," which I think means something like 'hold on' or 'wait a minute' in Hebrew.

Becoming a Preacher

As of this past fall, I am in my fourth year as a preacher at Sunday Mass. (I was ordained deacon on the feast of Our Lady of Rosary in 2006.) This means that I have begun my second journey through the Sunday lectionary cycles, and results in an interesting experiment: when I have prepared to preach for a weekend, I can look back and compare what I have with what I did with the same readings three years before. How am I different as I pray through the Scriptures and try to preach their good news? How have I changed in three years of Sundays? As the experiment of comparison continues week by week, I have to say that I am encouraged by what I see, and I give thanks to God who is helping me to learn how to preach.

Here's what I have noticed as I compare the homilies I prepare now to those of three years ago:

• I have become shorter and simpler. Nowadays I aim for around two written pages. When I started I was writing about three and a half. Instead of a couple of points and a point and a sub-point, I'm now tending toward a single point. I know that the 'three points' is a classic homiletic style where I work, but I think I do better with a single point developed well. In preaching, the hard part isn't coming up with something good to say, but letting go of good things in the name of the better thing. Here I think of one of my favorite sayings, which is the definition of engineering elegance of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
  
• I notice that I'm getting closer to the Scriptures themselves. In the effort to put the related readings together I'm less concerned with 'showing my work' and more likely to develop connections implicitly in the pursuit of simplicity. One thing I sometimes notice in my first homilies is a tendency to pick up on a single point in the readings and develop it into what is a fine spiritual reflection, but one that is tangential to the liturgy.
• I have become less theological and more catechetical. For example, there is less exposition of Christological doctrine in my homilies and more of their practical implications for Christian practice, e.g. sacraments, religious obligations, prayer practice, etc. At least in part this comes from my own change of circumstances; when I started preaching I was a full-time theology student, but now I'm employed as a parish priest. On the other hand, I see in this shift a filling out of my studies in that I am more conscious of the larger picture of how doctrine, practice, and prayer synthesize in Christian life.

When I first decided that I was going to compose my Sunday homilies and keep them, I did it for two reasons. First, writing is a good way for me to reflect, and it keeps me more disciplined than if I don't write things out. Second, I wanted to post homilies up as a blog. But now I recognize another purpose to the formal composition of homilies; it allows someone to go back and see how he has come along as a preacher, a praying person, and a Christian. In my case, this reflection has given glory to God and encouragement to me.

Census Fears

Today I learn that the 2010 United States Census will be using our church hall for employment applications and interviews. This is somewhat troublesome to me, because God's low opinion of census-taking is very clear in the Scripture. See 2 Samuel 24. Also, I would caution anyone applying to work for the census, lest someone eat his liver "with fava beans and a nice Chianti."

Sabaoth

For someone who makes a sincere effort to "Say the Black and Do the Red," I made an interesting error at Mass this morning.

I was preaching on the sin of Saul, on God's right to the spoils of war, and what it might look like to examine our consciences on the issue of sins against the sovereignty of God. (Obviously, I got up too early.)

In the course of this I had a parenthesis on the heavenly armies: 'Sometimes we don't think about this too much, and yet we acclaim God as the leader of the heavenly armies in each Mass when we pray the Sanctus: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts." The hosts, of course, are the angelic armies.

Trouble is, we don't say this in the Mass at all!

Our American English Sanctus says instead, "Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might," our current rendering of the familiar Latin text Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth from Isaiah 6:3. In translating this divine title, "Lord Sabaoth" the LXX transliterates it, and so too the Roman rite in its ordinary language. We should note, however, that St. Jerome did translate it, as his rendering of Isaiah 6:3 is sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus exercituum, "holy, holy, holy Lord of armies." (Now you know I got up too early. Something is up when both LXX and Vulgate are off the shelf already.)

So what was I thinking? Do I not know the texts of the Mass which I sing and pray each day? Am I reflecting across languages at some deeper level? Was I looking forward to the forthcoming new translation in which the "hosts" will be restored? (Among many other good things.) It's a funny thing I did. Luckily, nobody called me out on my error after Mass!

Washing Feet in Blood

This morning I was visiting someone in the hospital, and as I rode home on the bus I prayed my midday prayer from the 1962 Breviarium Romano-Seraphicum. As far as I can tell we are allowed to do so, and it's a lot smaller and lighter a book to carry around.

In praying from the older breviary, once in a while one gets a shock in coming by one of the psalms or sections of psalms that were expunged from the psalter in the production of the reformed Liturgy of the Hours. Imagine how taken aback I was to suddenly find myself praying the end of psalm 58, which does not appear in the LOH at all:

Laetábitur iustus, cum víderet vindíctam, pedes suos lavábit in sanguine iníqui.

"The just one will rejoice when he sees vengeance, and will wash his feet in the blood of the wicked."

There's a pious thought for one's midday prayer!

Porcius Festus

The other day I was telling someone about the passage of Sacred Scripture that amuses me the most, which is the description of Paul's trial before Festus in Acts 25.

Festus, at a loss at how to investigate the case, describes the situtation:

When the accusers stood up, they brought no charge in his case of such evils as I supposed; but they had certain points of dispute with him about their own superstition and about one Jesus, who was dead, but whom Paul asserted to be alive. (Acts 25: 18-19, RSV)

I used to riff off this passage for course evaluations when I was in studies. I would write:

Professor N. had certain points of dispute with us about his own superstition, and about one Jesus, who was dead, but whom Professor N. asserted to be alive.

Then I would write, "cf. Acts 25: 18-19."

"Superstition" here is δεισιδαιμονία, which is often translated "religion" rather than "superstition." It can go either way. This passage comes up in the lectionary on the Friday of the seventh week of Easter. Listen for it!