A friar who was ordained to the priesthood yesterday invited me to be the preacher at his first Mass. Here's the homily I gave.
(Trinity Sunday, A)
When I was a new priest—and had even less good sense and tact than the precious little I have now—I used to say that one of the benefits of becoming a priest was that you didn’t have to listen to any more Trinity Sunday homilies.
You know; they can be brilliant, but sometimes, not so much. It goes something like this: God is three, God is one, it’s a mystery, you can’t really understand it…please stand for the Creed.
And this is unfortunate; this business about ‘you can’t understand’ the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. We cannot have a full comprehension, of course, but this doesn’t mean we can’t have some understanding. In fact, all of us who are Christians can have some understanding of this great mystery, precisely because we have all had an experience of the Blessed Trinity.
To get at what I mean, let’s turn to something we all know well: Christmas. What is Christmas all about? As we read in the gospel of St. Matthew:
Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the holy Spirit. (1:18)
Showing posts with label Trinity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trinity. Show all posts
December 15, 2014
Love of God
William of St-Thierry is wonderful in the Office of Readings today:
Loving God is the beginning of the awareness of the love God has for us. This awareness bears further fruit in the continuing realization that we ourselves and everybody else and indeed the whole of creation is, in a sense, made out of love, coming into existence as it all does through the Word that is the Beloved proceeding from the Love that is the Source of all that is.
Realizing this love as the innermost identity of every creature, we begin to see our neighbor and the creation around us as not only lovable, but as something that demands love if it is to be truly appreciated and understood. This is how the love of God turns into the love of neighbor; when we realize that our neighbor has a demand on our love--if we are to truly love the love with which God creates--especially our neighbor for whom the awareness of the love of God may be obscured by the suffering and poverty that are the fruit of human sin.
O Lord, salvation is your gift and your blessing is upon your people; what else is your salvation but receiving from you the gift of loving you or being loved by you?The beginning of the love of God is the awareness of having been loved by God, loved into existence by the will of God and preserved in being from moment to moment by the love of God. In truth, God's love for us and our love of God end up being the same thing, for our love of God is the work of the Holy Spirit within us. The whole process is just that; the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son as it comes to live in us by baptism and faith.
Loving God is the beginning of the awareness of the love God has for us. This awareness bears further fruit in the continuing realization that we ourselves and everybody else and indeed the whole of creation is, in a sense, made out of love, coming into existence as it all does through the Word that is the Beloved proceeding from the Love that is the Source of all that is.
Realizing this love as the innermost identity of every creature, we begin to see our neighbor and the creation around us as not only lovable, but as something that demands love if it is to be truly appreciated and understood. This is how the love of God turns into the love of neighbor; when we realize that our neighbor has a demand on our love--if we are to truly love the love with which God creates--especially our neighbor for whom the awareness of the love of God may be obscured by the suffering and poverty that are the fruit of human sin.
May 26, 2013
Y el ventalle de cedros aire daba
I was quite struck by the homily of the friar whose turn it was to be principal celebrant at Mass today. I guess it was the Holy Spirit's way of taking me down a bit after last night's vanity of re-linking on Twitter my own Trinity Sunday homily from three years ago, in which I make fun of Trinity Sunday homilies as an opening device before stumbling around in my own doctrinal brambles.
December 18, 2012
Reek of Stupefaction
Yesterday I finally got to confession. It had been too long. In fact, it had been since the day of my pilgrimage to the bleak Via Ostiense 131/L. I just didn't know whom to ask. It's so much easier to walk up to a confessional box. When you have to pick someone, knock on his door, and ask him if he has a moment to hear your confession, that's something different. But I had been praying that the Holy Spirit let me know to whom I should try to go, and, perhaps spurred on by the beginning of the second stage of Advent yesterday, I finally managed it.
In his counsel, the priest invited me to live these days of immediate preparation for Christmas con cuore stupito. It probably just stuck in my mind because it sounds funny to the ear of an English-speaker. 'With an amazed heart' or 'with an astonished heart,' I guess you could say. 'With a stupefied heart' doesn't really do it, but it's not an entirely useless thought; perhaps it captures something of being overwhelmed by contemplation of the mysteries at hand.
In one of the little synchronicities of grace, later on I happened to pray Night Prayer in Italian. (As I have mentioned, I don't really prefer it.) When I came to the Alma Redemptoris Mater in Italian, there was the substantive of the same word:
O santa Madre del Redentore,
porta dei cieli, stella del mare,
soccorri il tuo popolo che sta cadendo,
che anela a risorgere.
Tu che accogliendo quell'Ave di Gabriele,
nello stupore di tutto il creato,
hai generato il tuo Genitore,
vergine prima e dopo il parto,
pietà di noi peccatori.
That's the Latin natura mirante that translates in our American-English breviary as 'to the wonderment of nature' if I remember rightly.
A certain amazed, astonished, joyful wonder is the spiritual climate of Christmas. We are amazed to see that the birth of Jesus Christ reverses everything that our insecure and acquisitive minds think power and mightiness should mean. The Word of God, through whom all things are created, is born as one of us, born to plain parents, born away from home, born into a people and a place that were considered important by no known criterion of human civilization.
But Christmas is not only astonishing because it is an amazing and even scandalous revelation of God; Christmas is also invites us to wonder because it reveals who we really are, what creation really is. The creation, and we ourselves as created beings in it, as full of wonder and beauty as it all is even just on its own terms, finds in the newborn Jesus its true destiny, that we and all created being exists precisely so that God might be with us, incarnate among us. And our prayer is to sit in wonder, con cuore stupito, at the astonishing realization that we exist so that the overflowing Love we call the Blessed Trinity may love all the more by drawing us into the dynamic relations that are Himself. This is why it is the Holy Spirit--the Love the proceeds from the Father and the Son--who conceives Jesus Christ, that in the humanity of Christ we might be invited, drawn, and folded into the eternal, blessed and infinitely happy generation of the Beloved by the Lover.
In his counsel, the priest invited me to live these days of immediate preparation for Christmas con cuore stupito. It probably just stuck in my mind because it sounds funny to the ear of an English-speaker. 'With an amazed heart' or 'with an astonished heart,' I guess you could say. 'With a stupefied heart' doesn't really do it, but it's not an entirely useless thought; perhaps it captures something of being overwhelmed by contemplation of the mysteries at hand.
In one of the little synchronicities of grace, later on I happened to pray Night Prayer in Italian. (As I have mentioned, I don't really prefer it.) When I came to the Alma Redemptoris Mater in Italian, there was the substantive of the same word:
O santa Madre del Redentore,
porta dei cieli, stella del mare,
soccorri il tuo popolo che sta cadendo,
che anela a risorgere.
Tu che accogliendo quell'Ave di Gabriele,
nello stupore di tutto il creato,
hai generato il tuo Genitore,
vergine prima e dopo il parto,
pietà di noi peccatori.
That's the Latin natura mirante that translates in our American-English breviary as 'to the wonderment of nature' if I remember rightly.
A certain amazed, astonished, joyful wonder is the spiritual climate of Christmas. We are amazed to see that the birth of Jesus Christ reverses everything that our insecure and acquisitive minds think power and mightiness should mean. The Word of God, through whom all things are created, is born as one of us, born to plain parents, born away from home, born into a people and a place that were considered important by no known criterion of human civilization.
But Christmas is not only astonishing because it is an amazing and even scandalous revelation of God; Christmas is also invites us to wonder because it reveals who we really are, what creation really is. The creation, and we ourselves as created beings in it, as full of wonder and beauty as it all is even just on its own terms, finds in the newborn Jesus its true destiny, that we and all created being exists precisely so that God might be with us, incarnate among us. And our prayer is to sit in wonder, con cuore stupito, at the astonishing realization that we exist so that the overflowing Love we call the Blessed Trinity may love all the more by drawing us into the dynamic relations that are Himself. This is why it is the Holy Spirit--the Love the proceeds from the Father and the Son--who conceives Jesus Christ, that in the humanity of Christ we might be invited, drawn, and folded into the eternal, blessed and infinitely happy generation of the Beloved by the Lover.
December 26, 2011
Rapture
I love the first preface of Christmas. I sing it all week during the octave.
...dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur.
"...as we recognize in him God made visible, we may be caught up through him in love of things invisible."
Maybe I like the old translation better. We used to say that in Christ we see “our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.”
It's the strength of the rapiamur that gets me. Somehow to me the English 'caught up' just doesn't grab the sense of an almost violent seizing in the verb rapio, rapere.
I was thinking about this today when it occurred to me that the same verb is at the root of the term 'rapture,' the idea, based on a certain readings of 1 Thessalonians and Revelation, that the end times will include the elect being snatched out of the world to leave those who remain to suffer a period of tribulation.
But the real bite and force of Christianity is that the end time isn't exactly a temporal event we await on some schedule. The end of time and of everything else has already appeared in the person of Jesus Christ. And, as the prayer of the preface reveals, it is his birth that initiates and makes available a rapture, and not just for a certain elect, for all humanity.
The Incarnation of the Son of God makes divinity available to our humanity. In him God becomes visible, indeed tangible. And by our surrender to having his divine humanity mingle with ours in Holy Communion, the invisible God makes a home in us as our own blessedness. The Incarnation of the Son of God, and the abiding Presence of his body in the Eucharist, offers us the chance to be caught up, to be raptured into the infinite joy, delight, and creativity that we call the Blessed Trinity.
...dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur.
"...as we recognize in him God made visible, we may be caught up through him in love of things invisible."
Maybe I like the old translation better. We used to say that in Christ we see “our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.”
It's the strength of the rapiamur that gets me. Somehow to me the English 'caught up' just doesn't grab the sense of an almost violent seizing in the verb rapio, rapere.
I was thinking about this today when it occurred to me that the same verb is at the root of the term 'rapture,' the idea, based on a certain readings of 1 Thessalonians and Revelation, that the end times will include the elect being snatched out of the world to leave those who remain to suffer a period of tribulation.
But the real bite and force of Christianity is that the end time isn't exactly a temporal event we await on some schedule. The end of time and of everything else has already appeared in the person of Jesus Christ. And, as the prayer of the preface reveals, it is his birth that initiates and makes available a rapture, and not just for a certain elect, for all humanity.
The Incarnation of the Son of God makes divinity available to our humanity. In him God becomes visible, indeed tangible. And by our surrender to having his divine humanity mingle with ours in Holy Communion, the invisible God makes a home in us as our own blessedness. The Incarnation of the Son of God, and the abiding Presence of his body in the Eucharist, offers us the chance to be caught up, to be raptured into the infinite joy, delight, and creativity that we call the Blessed Trinity.
October 23, 2011
Theses on Love of Neighbor
To love means to will the best for the beloved, that the beloved might enjoy the best in happiness and flourishing.
God is the best 'thing' there is.
God, in giving himself to his creatures by adopting us in the Spirit into his own blessed life by the death and resurrection of the incarnate Son, is the perfect practitioner of love of neighbor.
Therefore, if we wish to love our neighbor, our desire must be that our neighbor have God.
But since God has already given himself to our neighbor in Christ, we must not think that it is our job to give God to our neighbor.
Instead, both love of self and love of neighbor mean the facilitation and encouragement of the acceptance of and surrender to the Gift already given in Jesus Christ.
Therefore, we who are Christians much ask ourselves each day how we may live our lives such that those around us will desire what it is we have come to have in Christ. If the joy, peace, and confidence in God we have in the Spirit attracts someone else to the acceptance of the Gift who is Jesus Christ, then we have loved our neighbor in the most supreme way.
God is the best 'thing' there is.
God, in giving himself to his creatures by adopting us in the Spirit into his own blessed life by the death and resurrection of the incarnate Son, is the perfect practitioner of love of neighbor.
Therefore, if we wish to love our neighbor, our desire must be that our neighbor have God.
But since God has already given himself to our neighbor in Christ, we must not think that it is our job to give God to our neighbor.
Instead, both love of self and love of neighbor mean the facilitation and encouragement of the acceptance of and surrender to the Gift already given in Jesus Christ.
Therefore, we who are Christians much ask ourselves each day how we may live our lives such that those around us will desire what it is we have come to have in Christ. If the joy, peace, and confidence in God we have in the Spirit attracts someone else to the acceptance of the Gift who is Jesus Christ, then we have loved our neighbor in the most supreme way.
July 15, 2011
St. Bonaventure and Ideas of Trees
It's kind of a corny story, but I remember one day when I was taking a walk in the Arnold Arboretum and all of a sudden some of St. Bonaventure became clear to me. For his feast day today, I was just thinking through that moment again, and thanking God for the Seraphic Doctor.
I was looking at a tree and I became aware that the tree had the power, through the use of my senses, to introduce an idea of itself into my mind. That the tree should have this power is a vestige of the generation of the Son from the Father.
God the Father, Who is the Fontal Fullness of being, eternally emanates a perfect Idea of Himself; this is the generation of the Son from the Father, the Eternal Word from the Source. According to different degrees of similarity, this primal dynamic of emanation comes to be embedded in everything else that has being. As rational creatures created in the image and likeness of God, we become aware of this in the capacity of existing things to 'process' an idea of themselves into our minds.
Among many other things, that's an insight for which I'm thanking St. Bonaventure today; that we can know and love other creatures precisely because we were created as a footprint of this Primal and Delighted Overflowing called the Blessed Trinity.
I was looking at a tree and I became aware that the tree had the power, through the use of my senses, to introduce an idea of itself into my mind. That the tree should have this power is a vestige of the generation of the Son from the Father.
God the Father, Who is the Fontal Fullness of being, eternally emanates a perfect Idea of Himself; this is the generation of the Son from the Father, the Eternal Word from the Source. According to different degrees of similarity, this primal dynamic of emanation comes to be embedded in everything else that has being. As rational creatures created in the image and likeness of God, we become aware of this in the capacity of existing things to 'process' an idea of themselves into our minds.
Among many other things, that's an insight for which I'm thanking St. Bonaventure today; that we can know and love other creatures precisely because we were created as a footprint of this Primal and Delighted Overflowing called the Blessed Trinity.
June 15, 2011
Theology and Unspeech
In trying to write the paper that will finally persolve the spring semester for me, I'm reviewing some old notes from a most brilliant course I took back in the fall of 2005 on the development of trinitarian doctrine.
This passage from my notes says a lot about the nature of theological speech:
"Begotten, not made"...note that this distinction is totally made up, to protect, theologically, what we need to say...the distinction is invented, in an apophatic way, simply opposed not to something we grasp, but to another proposition. The same goes for homoousious--we don't know exactly what it means, but we use it to to protect, precisely, what we don't mean.
This passage from my notes says a lot about the nature of theological speech:
"Begotten, not made"...note that this distinction is totally made up, to protect, theologically, what we need to say...the distinction is invented, in an apophatic way, simply opposed not to something we grasp, but to another proposition. The same goes for homoousious--we don't know exactly what it means, but we use it to to protect, precisely, what we don't mean.
June 14, 2011
From Confusion to Understanding and Back
It's a funny thing about the Trinity. Before you study any theology, it's a pretty confusing idea. After you study a little, you think you get it. But after you study a little more, you're confused again.
Without solid catechesis or serious study, the Trinity is hard to understand. He's three, He's one. How can that make any sense? A lot of preaching on the Trinity doesn't help much either. My experience of Trinity Sunday homilies is that they take something of this form: 'God is one, God is three, it's a mystery, please stand for the creed.' Too often mystery becomes an excuse for mystification. But that's another rant.
A lot of folks keep themselves from these troubles and cognitive dissonances by being functional unitarians, modalists, or Arians, often unknowingly. And it's usually not their fault; such departures from Christian orthodoxy are sometimes taught by our catechists and theology teachers. I've done it myself. As a volunteer religious education teacher I once gave some kids a lovely and catchy analogy for understanding the Trinity. Trouble was, it was very modalist in implication.
So, if you were in the multi-parish Confirmation prep program that met at St. Lawrence in West Haven, CT in the late 90s, where you had the young, cool teacher, and you now find that your prayer life is inexplicably confusing, or you find yourself in marriage preparation (the kids would be about the typical age now) with a priest with whom you seem to have theological differences that you can't put your finger on, feel free to blame me.
When you study a little theology you are delivered from all of this confusion, emerging into the clarity of claims about the self-diffusive nature of goodness, the necessity of the social Trinity, or the necessity of opposition and comparison for any distinction in being. You are comforted as your pious mind swims in the clear, living water of 'it's all about the overflowing nature of goodness' or 'it's all about the self-diffusion of love' or 'it's all about relationship, in a perfect communion of persons without coercion or domination' or 'it's all about the opposed relations which we imitate by the creative tension of human community life.' Your reflections wax sublime as you realize how original and mutual generativity structure the whole of both created and uncreated being, and so realize how happiness lies in making our own relationships and generativity imitate God himself.
But then you keep going, drilling deeper into the sources of these reflections and the theologians and other sources from which they have come. Cracks start to appear. You start to notice that each effort at a theological articulation of the great Mystery succeeds in taking some of the data of revelation and some of the orthodox confession of faith seriously, but not all of it. Each approach succeeds in avoiding modalism on one side and Arianism on the other, but you realize that this feat alone doesn't mean every problem and question has been resolved.
So you're back where you started, wondering and confused. But perhaps with a greater and more prayerful appreciation of the Mystery Himself. And maybe that's the point.
Without solid catechesis or serious study, the Trinity is hard to understand. He's three, He's one. How can that make any sense? A lot of preaching on the Trinity doesn't help much either. My experience of Trinity Sunday homilies is that they take something of this form: 'God is one, God is three, it's a mystery, please stand for the creed.' Too often mystery becomes an excuse for mystification. But that's another rant.
A lot of folks keep themselves from these troubles and cognitive dissonances by being functional unitarians, modalists, or Arians, often unknowingly. And it's usually not their fault; such departures from Christian orthodoxy are sometimes taught by our catechists and theology teachers. I've done it myself. As a volunteer religious education teacher I once gave some kids a lovely and catchy analogy for understanding the Trinity. Trouble was, it was very modalist in implication.
So, if you were in the multi-parish Confirmation prep program that met at St. Lawrence in West Haven, CT in the late 90s, where you had the young, cool teacher, and you now find that your prayer life is inexplicably confusing, or you find yourself in marriage preparation (the kids would be about the typical age now) with a priest with whom you seem to have theological differences that you can't put your finger on, feel free to blame me.
When you study a little theology you are delivered from all of this confusion, emerging into the clarity of claims about the self-diffusive nature of goodness, the necessity of the social Trinity, or the necessity of opposition and comparison for any distinction in being. You are comforted as your pious mind swims in the clear, living water of 'it's all about the overflowing nature of goodness' or 'it's all about the self-diffusion of love' or 'it's all about relationship, in a perfect communion of persons without coercion or domination' or 'it's all about the opposed relations which we imitate by the creative tension of human community life.' Your reflections wax sublime as you realize how original and mutual generativity structure the whole of both created and uncreated being, and so realize how happiness lies in making our own relationships and generativity imitate God himself.
But then you keep going, drilling deeper into the sources of these reflections and the theologians and other sources from which they have come. Cracks start to appear. You start to notice that each effort at a theological articulation of the great Mystery succeeds in taking some of the data of revelation and some of the orthodox confession of faith seriously, but not all of it. Each approach succeeds in avoiding modalism on one side and Arianism on the other, but you realize that this feat alone doesn't mean every problem and question has been resolved.
So you're back where you started, wondering and confused. But perhaps with a greater and more prayerful appreciation of the Mystery Himself. And maybe that's the point.
April 15, 2011
Prayer and Tasty Wisdom
After three weeks of studying St. Thomas in the Trinity seminar, we ended up at this beautiful passage:
The soul is assimilated--made similar--to the Holy Spirit by charity, and made similar to the Son by "the intellectual illumination which breaks forth into the affection of love." The true perception of God--we would probably say 'experience' where Thomas says "experimental knowledge"--is thus a con-formity to the processions of the Word and Spirit in God, a loving knowledge or a recognizing love according to the Son and the Spirit Who are missisoned to the soul.
As the Word of God proceeds in God as God's own perfect self-knowledge and self-illumination, and as the Spirit proceeds as the Love that is the shared principle of these two moments, so the soul is assimilated to God by a loving Knowledge, a recognizing Love.
Today I was just reflecting on how prayer could be simply defined as a making of space, both inside and out, so that this 'experimental knowledge' can be noticed. We find a quiet time of the day. We seek a prayerful place. We practice whatever works for us in the letting go of the stream of thoughts and emotional charges that we superficially think of as our selves. All of this ascesis serves the simple purpose of helping us to notice the loving desire for God within. To notice it is to know it, and we find ourselves touching our true happiness and destiny: the loving knowledge of God.
St. Thomas reminds us that this experience of noticing the loving desire for God within is not something we are 'doing,' as if prayer were one more task during the day. In fact, to notice the loving desire for God is to become aware of the Son and the Spirit having become newly present in us, assimilating our minds and hearts to the perfectly delighted love and knowledge we call God. In other words, the loving knowledge of God within us, no matter how obscure and incomplete, is the Son of God having been missioned into our soul.
This loving Knowledge we call Wisdom, and prayer is our chance to taste the Tasty Wisdom that is the mission of the divine persons in us.
The soul is made like to God by grace. Hence for a divine person to be sent to anyone by grace, there must needs be a likening of the soul to the divine person Who is sent, by some gift of grace. Because the Holy Ghost is Love, the soul is assimilated to the Holy Ghost by the gift of charity: hence the mission of the Holy Ghost is according to the mode of charity. Whereas the Son is the Word, not any sort of word, but one Who breathes forth Love. Hence Augustine says (De Trin. ix 10): "The Word we speak of is knowledge with love." Thus the Son is sent not in accordance with every and any kind of intellectual perfection, but according to the intellectual illumination, which breaks forth into the affection of love, as is said (John 6:45): "Everyone that hath heard from the Father and hath learned, cometh to Me," and (Psalm 38:4): "In my meditation a fire shall flame forth." Thus Augustine plainly says (De Trin. iv, 20): "The Son is sent, whenever He is known and perceived by anyone." Now perception implies a certain experimental knowledge; and this is properly called wisdom [sapientia], as it were a sweet knowledge [sapida scientia], according to Sirach 6:23: "The wisdom of doctrine is according to her name." (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 43, a. 5, ad 2. Trans. English Dominicans)
The soul is assimilated--made similar--to the Holy Spirit by charity, and made similar to the Son by "the intellectual illumination which breaks forth into the affection of love." The true perception of God--we would probably say 'experience' where Thomas says "experimental knowledge"--is thus a con-formity to the processions of the Word and Spirit in God, a loving knowledge or a recognizing love according to the Son and the Spirit Who are missisoned to the soul.
As the Word of God proceeds in God as God's own perfect self-knowledge and self-illumination, and as the Spirit proceeds as the Love that is the shared principle of these two moments, so the soul is assimilated to God by a loving Knowledge, a recognizing Love.
Today I was just reflecting on how prayer could be simply defined as a making of space, both inside and out, so that this 'experimental knowledge' can be noticed. We find a quiet time of the day. We seek a prayerful place. We practice whatever works for us in the letting go of the stream of thoughts and emotional charges that we superficially think of as our selves. All of this ascesis serves the simple purpose of helping us to notice the loving desire for God within. To notice it is to know it, and we find ourselves touching our true happiness and destiny: the loving knowledge of God.
St. Thomas reminds us that this experience of noticing the loving desire for God within is not something we are 'doing,' as if prayer were one more task during the day. In fact, to notice the loving desire for God is to become aware of the Son and the Spirit having become newly present in us, assimilating our minds and hearts to the perfectly delighted love and knowledge we call God. In other words, the loving knowledge of God within us, no matter how obscure and incomplete, is the Son of God having been missioned into our soul.
This loving Knowledge we call Wisdom, and prayer is our chance to taste the Tasty Wisdom that is the mission of the divine persons in us.
April 12, 2011
Before the Mirror of Eternity
In today's gospel (John 8:21-30), Jesus is asked, "Who are you?" It fascinates me that he answers by talking about the Father. In the mysterious divine unity, Jesus cannot talk about who he is without speaking of the Father.
I've been spending a lot of time this semester reading on the Blessed Trinity. Much of it is very beautiful and inspiring, but none of it is easy.
But as I was praying through the passage yesterday, I began to think that the study and contemplation of the Blessed Trinity is a fulfillment of the beautiful advice of St. Clare to St. Agnes of Prague: "Place your mind before the mirror of eternity."
For the divine economy by which we are saved is the processions of the Blessed Trinity, in mirror image, as it were.
In eternity, the Father generates the Son, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
God's passionate desire for our beatitude, our salvation revealed in time, works a 'recession' that goes the other way: The Spirit conceives the humanity of Christ, which becomes the Way for us to enter into the delighted unity of the Father and the Son, 'filiated' to the Father as sons and daughters in the Son.
Our contemplation, then, is the placing of our minds and hearts before the mirror of eternity, for the eternal processions and relations of the Blessed Trinity are the mirror image of their revelation to us as our salvation.
I've been spending a lot of time this semester reading on the Blessed Trinity. Much of it is very beautiful and inspiring, but none of it is easy.
But as I was praying through the passage yesterday, I began to think that the study and contemplation of the Blessed Trinity is a fulfillment of the beautiful advice of St. Clare to St. Agnes of Prague: "Place your mind before the mirror of eternity."
For the divine economy by which we are saved is the processions of the Blessed Trinity, in mirror image, as it were.
In eternity, the Father generates the Son, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
God's passionate desire for our beatitude, our salvation revealed in time, works a 'recession' that goes the other way: The Spirit conceives the humanity of Christ, which becomes the Way for us to enter into the delighted unity of the Father and the Son, 'filiated' to the Father as sons and daughters in the Son.
Our contemplation, then, is the placing of our minds and hearts before the mirror of eternity, for the eternal processions and relations of the Blessed Trinity are the mirror image of their revelation to us as our salvation.
March 25, 2011
Notions and Relations
Apart from Sunday Mass, the highlight of my week is the meeting of the medieval trinitarian theology seminar that I have with professor Coolman and four doctoral students from the theology department. The two hours go by so fast.
We've arrived at a kind of notional pause in the course, having spent three weeks with Bonaventure before we begin Thomas next week. Thinking about this on the way home last night, I realized that the course is having both welcome and challenging fruit for me.
On the positive side, I am more convinced than ever that the Trinity is an eminently reasonable doctrine of God. What's more, and to be honest, for the first time I am thoroughly convinced not only of the reasonableness of the filioque, but that it is somehow necessary for an intelligible, robust, and durable account of God.
On the more challenging side, I now suffer with a heightened awareness of problems. I'm starting to see shadings into modalism and subordinationism all the time when the Trinity is mentioned in casual speech or even in homilies. Sometimes I even worry about these things in what I read in the great doctors.
God the Father of Heaven, Have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, Have mercy on us.
God the Holy Spirit, Have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, one God, Have mercy on us.
We've arrived at a kind of notional pause in the course, having spent three weeks with Bonaventure before we begin Thomas next week. Thinking about this on the way home last night, I realized that the course is having both welcome and challenging fruit for me.
On the positive side, I am more convinced than ever that the Trinity is an eminently reasonable doctrine of God. What's more, and to be honest, for the first time I am thoroughly convinced not only of the reasonableness of the filioque, but that it is somehow necessary for an intelligible, robust, and durable account of God.
On the more challenging side, I now suffer with a heightened awareness of problems. I'm starting to see shadings into modalism and subordinationism all the time when the Trinity is mentioned in casual speech or even in homilies. Sometimes I even worry about these things in what I read in the great doctors.
God the Father of Heaven, Have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, Have mercy on us.
God the Holy Spirit, Have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, one God, Have mercy on us.
January 26, 2011
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.
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.
January 19, 2011
Zero Understanding
So goes the traditional, humorous addendum to the celebrated "5, 4, 3, 2, 1" theology student's mnemonic for remembering trinitarian doctrine:
5 notions, 4 relations, 3 persons, 2 processions, 1 substance
So, in all of the obscurity of theological study, one should celebrate a moment when one of the great doctors admits that it ain't so easy to understand this stuff:
"The Greeks also have another word, hypostasis, but they make a distinction that is rather obscure to me between ousia and hypostasis..."
~Augustine, De trinitate, V:10, in Edmund Hill's translation in this edition from New City Press.
Obscure, indeed, not in the least because hypostasis transliterates to substantia, even though we Latins use persona to describe what the Greeks call hypostasis while they use ousia to indicate what we call substantia. That's way beyond terminological drift; it's quite literally confused.
5 notions, 4 relations, 3 persons, 2 processions, 1 substance
So, in all of the obscurity of theological study, one should celebrate a moment when one of the great doctors admits that it ain't so easy to understand this stuff:
"The Greeks also have another word, hypostasis, but they make a distinction that is rather obscure to me between ousia and hypostasis..."
~Augustine, De trinitate, V:10, in Edmund Hill's translation in this edition from New City Press.
Obscure, indeed, not in the least because hypostasis transliterates to substantia, even though we Latins use persona to describe what the Greeks call hypostasis while they use ousia to indicate what we call substantia. That's way beyond terminological drift; it's quite literally confused.
January 9, 2011
The Partying God
Praying over the texts for Mass today, I was struck especially by the beginning of the preface:
Father, all-powerful and ever living God,
we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks.
You celebrated your new gift of baptism
by signs and wonders at the Jordan.
It's a beautiful and brilliant image, to think of God celebrating. Perhaps we don't often think of God as joyful or happy, but of course He is, and infinitely so. And perhaps we don't often entertain an image of God as the host of a party, but there is a lot in the Scripture to justify such an idea. Jesus was infamous for his attendance at dinners, and he described the final fulfillment of creation in terms of a wedding reception.
At the Lord's baptism the Blessed Trinity celebrates the accomplishment of God's single purpose in creation and redemption alike: the inclusion of the creature in the flourishing communion of divine Love between Lover and Beloved, the Father and the Son.
(It seems that this vocabulary of celebration in today's preface is particular to the American English Sacramentary. It does not read quite that way in the 2002 Missale Romanum or in any other translations I have.)
Father, all-powerful and ever living God,
we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks.
You celebrated your new gift of baptism
by signs and wonders at the Jordan.
It's a beautiful and brilliant image, to think of God celebrating. Perhaps we don't often think of God as joyful or happy, but of course He is, and infinitely so. And perhaps we don't often entertain an image of God as the host of a party, but there is a lot in the Scripture to justify such an idea. Jesus was infamous for his attendance at dinners, and he described the final fulfillment of creation in terms of a wedding reception.
At the Lord's baptism the Blessed Trinity celebrates the accomplishment of God's single purpose in creation and redemption alike: the inclusion of the creature in the flourishing communion of divine Love between Lover and Beloved, the Father and the Son.
(It seems that this vocabulary of celebration in today's preface is particular to the American English Sacramentary. It does not read quite that way in the 2002 Missale Romanum or in any other translations I have.)
December 24, 2010
In Nativitate Domini
Merry Christmas, friends.
May the dawn of the new creation draw us in and be the refreshment and renovation of our hearts and minds! I'm on the road for Christmas and Holy Family weekend, but I left this post to publish itself in my absence. I've posted this text before, but I remain happy with it. It's a homily for the Christmas Mass in nocte that I wrote as part of the final exam for a course on the Blessed Trinity:
Rejoice, friends, for the mystery of Christmas is the revelation of God’s loving plan for our salvation. “The grace of God has appeared,” as Paul tells us. The human birth of the Son of God reveals the mystery that God indeed has a son. Our God is a perfect love, and what is love that does not love someone? Therefore from all eternity there is lover and beloved in God, the Father and the Son.
Be assured that this Son of God whose human birth we adore tonight is God himself, “light from light,” and “true God from true God” as we shall soon pray in the creed. Paul himself calls him “our great God and savior.”
While contemplating the poor and simple birth of the Lord, let us pay attention to our attitude toward the mystery. Is it just that we have awe for the humility of the God who was willing to accept not only the poverty of our nature but to be born among simple parents in an obscure nation? Is Christmas here to teach us to be humble too? I assure you that the Son of God is much more than a role model, though he is surely that as well. Paul tells us that this appearance of the grace of God will, in fact, “deliver us from all lawlessness” and “cleanse” us, making us into God’s own people.
This is the great good news of Christmas: the Son of God is born in our human nature and thus provides our human nature a path to the divine life of God that he himself has been from all eternity. By becoming one of us, the infinite love that the Son has always received is now extended to us through the human nature of Jesus Christ.
The Incarnation connects the divine with the human, extending God’s life to us. This sacred exchange is voiced in the preface to tonight’s Eucharist prayer when it says that in Christ we see “our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.” This stretching forth, as it were, of the eternal love of Father and Son to us is what we call the Holy Spirit. The Incarnation of God establishes a path for our human nature to be brought back to God, and God’s Spirit draws us in. This is what we mean when we say that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit; the Spirit of God, God’s desire to be known, works in the Incarnation so that God’s saving plan may be known.
This is good news! The birth of Jesus Christ reveals the new availability of the infinitely beautiful and satisfying love that is the personal life of God himself. This is our adoption into the eternal Sonship of Christ himself, through which we become the true children of God. We rejoice tonight for, through the human birth of Christ, the Holy Spirit includes us in the eternal and perfect relationship of the Lover whom we call Father and the Beloved whom we call the Son. And this is the grand and mysterious reality that we call God.
May the dawn of the new creation draw us in and be the refreshment and renovation of our hearts and minds! I'm on the road for Christmas and Holy Family weekend, but I left this post to publish itself in my absence. I've posted this text before, but I remain happy with it. It's a homily for the Christmas Mass in nocte that I wrote as part of the final exam for a course on the Blessed Trinity:
Rejoice, friends, for the mystery of Christmas is the revelation of God’s loving plan for our salvation. “The grace of God has appeared,” as Paul tells us. The human birth of the Son of God reveals the mystery that God indeed has a son. Our God is a perfect love, and what is love that does not love someone? Therefore from all eternity there is lover and beloved in God, the Father and the Son.
Be assured that this Son of God whose human birth we adore tonight is God himself, “light from light,” and “true God from true God” as we shall soon pray in the creed. Paul himself calls him “our great God and savior.”
While contemplating the poor and simple birth of the Lord, let us pay attention to our attitude toward the mystery. Is it just that we have awe for the humility of the God who was willing to accept not only the poverty of our nature but to be born among simple parents in an obscure nation? Is Christmas here to teach us to be humble too? I assure you that the Son of God is much more than a role model, though he is surely that as well. Paul tells us that this appearance of the grace of God will, in fact, “deliver us from all lawlessness” and “cleanse” us, making us into God’s own people.
This is the great good news of Christmas: the Son of God is born in our human nature and thus provides our human nature a path to the divine life of God that he himself has been from all eternity. By becoming one of us, the infinite love that the Son has always received is now extended to us through the human nature of Jesus Christ.
The Incarnation connects the divine with the human, extending God’s life to us. This sacred exchange is voiced in the preface to tonight’s Eucharist prayer when it says that in Christ we see “our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.” This stretching forth, as it were, of the eternal love of Father and Son to us is what we call the Holy Spirit. The Incarnation of God establishes a path for our human nature to be brought back to God, and God’s Spirit draws us in. This is what we mean when we say that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit; the Spirit of God, God’s desire to be known, works in the Incarnation so that God’s saving plan may be known.
This is good news! The birth of Jesus Christ reveals the new availability of the infinitely beautiful and satisfying love that is the personal life of God himself. This is our adoption into the eternal Sonship of Christ himself, through which we become the true children of God. We rejoice tonight for, through the human birth of Christ, the Holy Spirit includes us in the eternal and perfect relationship of the Lover whom we call Father and the Beloved whom we call the Son. And this is the grand and mysterious reality that we call God.
October 27, 2010
Midway in the Embrace
For class this week I'm reading William of St. Thierry's The Golden Epistle, which I really recommend for anyone who would like to take the spiritual life seriously. Check it out in this edition.
To me this gets at one of the most critical retrievals we need to make in our contemporary sense of Christianity. The Trinity is not just our doctrine of God; it is our doctrine of the spiritual life. In the most basic terms, our teaching is that God is not some kind of static 'supreme being,' but is constituted in an infinitely dynamic and creative set of relations. What we call our 'spiritual life' is our finding of ourselves drawn into and included in these relations, so that when we take about the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, we aren't talking about some kind of abstract, divine logic, but about the place where we find our own spirits in prayer.
Jesus Christ is conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we say in the creed. He is the stretching forth of the divine relations of the Trinity to include within themselves our humanity. Christianity, then, is the life of being adopted into the eternal Embrace of Father and Son, the enjoyment by grace and adoption of the relationship to God which the human Jesus enjoys by hypostatic union. As William puts it, "man becomes by grace what God is by nature."
The soul in its happiness finds itself standing midway in the Embrace and the Kiss of Father and Son. In a manner which exceeds description and thought, the man of God is found worthy to become not God but what God is, that is to say man becomes through grace what God is by nature. (96. Trans. Theodore Berkeley, OCSO)
To me this gets at one of the most critical retrievals we need to make in our contemporary sense of Christianity. The Trinity is not just our doctrine of God; it is our doctrine of the spiritual life. In the most basic terms, our teaching is that God is not some kind of static 'supreme being,' but is constituted in an infinitely dynamic and creative set of relations. What we call our 'spiritual life' is our finding of ourselves drawn into and included in these relations, so that when we take about the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, we aren't talking about some kind of abstract, divine logic, but about the place where we find our own spirits in prayer.
Jesus Christ is conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we say in the creed. He is the stretching forth of the divine relations of the Trinity to include within themselves our humanity. Christianity, then, is the life of being adopted into the eternal Embrace of Father and Son, the enjoyment by grace and adoption of the relationship to God which the human Jesus enjoys by hypostatic union. As William puts it, "man becomes by grace what God is by nature."
October 3, 2010
The Son Descends
What we mean when we say that the Son of God descended into the time and space of creation:
"The Son does embark on a space odyssey, leaving the Father for a period of time, literally coming down, and later returning to his proper abode in the trinity. Such an understanding arises from taking a metaphor too literally. It must be understood that God, precisely as trinity, is present at all times and places. To speak of a mission of one of the divine persons is to say that the eternal emanation is made manifest in time and has a particular temporal effect. The purpose of any such mission is to deepen the reality of the indwelling of God in human souls. Thus, when we say that the Son is sent, or that He descends, this does not indicate something new on the part of God, but designates that the temporal effect of the eternal emanation has a beginning and endures in time."
(Zachary Hayes, OFM, in his introduction to Bonaventure's Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity (Franciscan Institute, 2000)
"The Son does embark on a space odyssey, leaving the Father for a period of time, literally coming down, and later returning to his proper abode in the trinity. Such an understanding arises from taking a metaphor too literally. It must be understood that God, precisely as trinity, is present at all times and places. To speak of a mission of one of the divine persons is to say that the eternal emanation is made manifest in time and has a particular temporal effect. The purpose of any such mission is to deepen the reality of the indwelling of God in human souls. Thus, when we say that the Son is sent, or that He descends, this does not indicate something new on the part of God, but designates that the temporal effect of the eternal emanation has a beginning and endures in time."
(Zachary Hayes, OFM, in his introduction to Bonaventure's Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity (Franciscan Institute, 2000)
September 26, 2010
Sapientia Multiformis
As I've settled down to celebrating Sunday Mass in Spanish, I've begun to appreciate some of the differences between the English and Spanish sacramentaries. Different languages have particular gifts as they express the mysteries their speakers hope to approach through human speech. Within this one also notices the choices of translators.
Today I prayed the eighth preface for Sundays in Ordinary Time, which is one of my favorites:
En verdad es justo y necesario, es nuestro deber y salvación, darte gracias siempre y en todo lugar, Señor, Padre Santo, Dios todopoderoso y eterno. Porque has querido reunir de nuevo, por la sangre de tu Hijo y la fuerza del EspÃritu, a tus hijos dispersos por el pecado; de este modo tu Iglesia, unificada por virtud y a imagen de la Trinidad, aparece ante el mundo como cuerpo de Cristo y templo del EspÃritu, para alabanza de tu infinita sabidurÃa. Por eso, unidos a los coros angélicos, te aclamamos llenos de alegrÃa...
I am intrigued by the sense of the Church being formed into the image of the Trinity, so that it may appear to the world as the Body of Christ and temple of the Spirit. I'm not exactly sure how this makes theological sense, but perhaps that's why it draws me in. I also like the image of the children of God dispersos, 'scattered' or 'dispersed' by sin. I enjoy how that has an exterior and interior dimension.
Here's the soon-to-be-replaced English translation to which I have been previously accustomed:
When Your children sinned and wandered far from Your friendship, You reunited them with Yourself through the blood of Your Son and the power of the Holy Spirit. You gather them into Your church, to be one as You, Father, are one with Your Son and the Holy Spirit. You call them to be Your people, to praise Your wisdom in all Your works. You make them the body of Christ and the dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit. Now, with the saints and all the angels we praise You for ever...
The differences are subtle, but real. In the English version the Church is called to imitate the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit, a somewhat more pointed assertion that the simple image of being united toward becoming an image of the Trinity as it says in the Spanish. I definitely prefer how the Spanish uses the word 'Trinity.' On the other hand, I like the idea of wandering from the friendship of God. Sin is an erring, a missing of the mark, a departure from the path.
Of course, as a good WDTPRSer, I had to check the Latin...
Vere dignum et iustum est, aequum et salutare, nos tibi semper et ubique gratias agere: Domine, sancte Pater, omnipotens aeterne Deus: Quia filios, quos longe peccati crimen abstulerat, per sanguinem Filii tui Spiritusque virtute, in unum ad te denuo congregare voluisti: ut plebs, de unitate Trinitatis adunata, in tuae laudem sapientiae multiformis Christi corpus templumque Spiritus nosceretur Ecclesia. Et ideo, choris angelicis sociati, te laudamus in gaudio confitentes...
So there's the Trinity. In the English we are 'gathered' into an imitation of the oneness of Father, Son, and Spirit rather than of the Trinity. What's the difference, you say? I am teasing, I know, but see the end of the post. So let's hope for an improvement when we first have a chance to hear the new version of this preface in the winter of 2012, should the general judgment not come first.
Behind some of this are the daydreams I've begun to have about the dissertation proposal I will be expected to produce within the next couple of years. One of the half serious and half bemused inspirations I have had is something called, "The Use and Abuse of the Social Trinity: A Proposal for Disciplining Our Speech and Imagination."
Today I prayed the eighth preface for Sundays in Ordinary Time, which is one of my favorites:
En verdad es justo y necesario, es nuestro deber y salvación, darte gracias siempre y en todo lugar, Señor, Padre Santo, Dios todopoderoso y eterno. Porque has querido reunir de nuevo, por la sangre de tu Hijo y la fuerza del EspÃritu, a tus hijos dispersos por el pecado; de este modo tu Iglesia, unificada por virtud y a imagen de la Trinidad, aparece ante el mundo como cuerpo de Cristo y templo del EspÃritu, para alabanza de tu infinita sabidurÃa. Por eso, unidos a los coros angélicos, te aclamamos llenos de alegrÃa...
I am intrigued by the sense of the Church being formed into the image of the Trinity, so that it may appear to the world as the Body of Christ and temple of the Spirit. I'm not exactly sure how this makes theological sense, but perhaps that's why it draws me in. I also like the image of the children of God dispersos, 'scattered' or 'dispersed' by sin. I enjoy how that has an exterior and interior dimension.
Here's the soon-to-be-replaced English translation to which I have been previously accustomed:
When Your children sinned and wandered far from Your friendship, You reunited them with Yourself through the blood of Your Son and the power of the Holy Spirit. You gather them into Your church, to be one as You, Father, are one with Your Son and the Holy Spirit. You call them to be Your people, to praise Your wisdom in all Your works. You make them the body of Christ and the dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit. Now, with the saints and all the angels we praise You for ever...
The differences are subtle, but real. In the English version the Church is called to imitate the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit, a somewhat more pointed assertion that the simple image of being united toward becoming an image of the Trinity as it says in the Spanish. I definitely prefer how the Spanish uses the word 'Trinity.' On the other hand, I like the idea of wandering from the friendship of God. Sin is an erring, a missing of the mark, a departure from the path.
Of course, as a good WDTPRSer, I had to check the Latin...
Vere dignum et iustum est, aequum et salutare, nos tibi semper et ubique gratias agere: Domine, sancte Pater, omnipotens aeterne Deus: Quia filios, quos longe peccati crimen abstulerat, per sanguinem Filii tui Spiritusque virtute, in unum ad te denuo congregare voluisti: ut plebs, de unitate Trinitatis adunata, in tuae laudem sapientiae multiformis Christi corpus templumque Spiritus nosceretur Ecclesia. Et ideo, choris angelicis sociati, te laudamus in gaudio confitentes...
So there's the Trinity. In the English we are 'gathered' into an imitation of the oneness of Father, Son, and Spirit rather than of the Trinity. What's the difference, you say? I am teasing, I know, but see the end of the post. So let's hope for an improvement when we first have a chance to hear the new version of this preface in the winter of 2012, should the general judgment not come first.
Behind some of this are the daydreams I've begun to have about the dissertation proposal I will be expected to produce within the next couple of years. One of the half serious and half bemused inspirations I have had is something called, "The Use and Abuse of the Social Trinity: A Proposal for Disciplining Our Speech and Imagination."
May 29, 2010
The Most Holy Trinity
This weekend's homily contains an interpolation of the previously published rant on the same topic. Follow this link to check it out.
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