I Have To Rise From The Dead All At Once?

Overheard in church tonight:

The first glorious mystery: The Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ starting on the right side.

Martha

This morning, on her feast day, I'm thinking about Martha as a model of prayer:

Many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them about their brother [Lazarus, who had died]. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him; but Mary sat at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise.” Martha said to him, “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and anyone who lives and believes in me will never die. do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.” John 11:19-27

The process of prayer:

1. Go out to meet the Lord. We go out of our ordinary routine and ordinary pattern of thought and enter into prayer. She went out meet him.

2. We express our faith from our concrete situation in life. I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.

3. Through prayer the breadth and scope of faith is transformed. I am the resurrection and the life.

4. We go forth from prayer in gratitude for the process: Yes, Lord, I have come to believe.


P.s. For learners of pastoral Spanish, being able to utter Martha's words confidently is always a milestone, masterpiece of conditional and imperfect subjunctive that they are: si hubieras estado aquí, mi hermano no habría muerto.

Underwear

This morning at Mass, I dared myself to preach on this earthy image from the prophet Jeremiah:

For, as close as the loincloth clings to a man’s loins,
so had I made the whole house of Israel
and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the LORD;
to be my people, my renown, my praise, my beauty.
But they did not listen.

Too often we act like we have to reach up and grab God by agonistic prayer. In fact, God is just dying to be with us if we will only allow it. That's why the creation happened in the first place--that God might be incarnate in it and present to it. How close does God want to be? As close as your underwear.

Perhaps there's a vesting prayer to be written here. When we put on our underwear we could remind ourselves that this is how close God wants to be to us.

Finding the Treasure

Whether we find God because we are searching or because God finds us first, we enter the Kingdom of Heaven by buying into that experience and making it the focus of our lives. My homily for this weekend is posted here.

Mixed Motivations

In the end we will be purified of our mixed motives by the purity and brilliance of the vision of God. Until then, let us endure our situation of impure motivation and allow it to teach us humility. My homily for this weekend is posted here.

Heavy Metal Friar

This brother is my new favorite friar: Cesare Bonizzi, the heavy metal Capuchin!

St. Bonaventure's Perfect Science

Today is the feast of St. Bonaventure, the great doctor of the Franciscan family. In his honor I preached on a line from his Breviloquium, which is a kind of short summa of theology.

The Seraphic Doctor writes:

And so theology is the only perfect science, for it begins at the beginning which is the first Principle, and proceeds to the end, which is the final wages paid; it begins with the summit, which is God most high, the Creator of all, and reaches even to the abyss, which is the torment of hell. Breviloquium I:1:2.

It seems to me that this is a good meditation for us late modern people who live in a world so dominated by the power of natural science and human technology. As amazing as these human efforts and understandings are, they do not approach the questions asked and resolved by the first of the sciences, theology. Theology, after all, is the scientific reflection on divine revelation.

Here we have to struggle against two contemporary tendencies: scientism on the one hand and so-called fundamentalism on the other.

On the one hand we must live and preach against the error that natural science and human effort has priority over the truths of revelation and Sacred Scripture. Too often we give in to the "God of the gaps" model in which God is only left in charge of those areas of understanding that have not yet been explained by natural science.

On the other hand, we must also struggle against those of our brothers and sisters of faith who deny the rightful place of natural science and understanding. We believe that the cosmos was created through the Word of God, the logos as John the Evangelist puts it, and that this same Word or Wisdom of God became human as Jesus Christ the Lord. Therefore the natural world is a revelation of God in continuity with the revelations of Sacred Scripture and the Incarnation. So to understand the mysteries of the natural world is to reveal something of the mind, Word, or Wisdom of God. Those who deny, in favor of a very narrow "understanding" of the Scriptures, this full sense of the contuition of the human mind with the Wisdom of God in understanding the natural world do God's own revelatory intentions a grand disservice.

Pray for us, St. Bonaventure!