Stuff I Never Knew

It's almost a commonplace to say that neither the trials nor joys of our particular vocation are what we expected. I'm starting to wonder whether the Holy Spirit doesn't want us to indulge our vainglorious ideas about what a vocation will be like (e.g. marriage, religious life, priesthood) in order to get us to go ahead and do it. Once we have followed the Spirit in, then the truth can be revealed.

Anyway, there have been a lot of unexpected discoveries about priesthood. Celebrating the Eucharist as a priest has shifted my whole sense of it. For example, I always looked at the sacrifice as something that happened to the bread and wine. But now I look at it less as something that happens to the bread and wine, and more as something that happens to God; something God goes through as it were, his passio.

On a practical level, there are aspects of the Mass that I honestly never knew about before being a priest. Now I probably went to Mass 2,500 times or so as a layman, but there were prayers I had never heard and things I never knew about. Here are three examples:

1. The secret prayers. I had seen priests praying sotto voce, as it were. I had even heard lots of priests say the secret prayers in a regular voice. But a couple of them I just never knew about, like the prayer during the purifications, which has become one of my favorites: Lord, may I receive these gifts in purity of heart. May they bring me healing and strength, now and forever.

2. The Kyrie after the Confiteor. If option A is used for the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass, that is, the I confess to Almighty God..., the priest gives the absolution after the Confiteor, May Almighty God have mercy on us... and then is supposed to say or intone the simple Lord have mercy... before going on to the Gloria or the Opening Prayer, as appropriate. Before being ordained I had literally never heard any priest do this. When the I confess... was used, they would give the absolution and then go straight to the Gloria or Opening Prayer, omitting the Kyrie. I've asked a few priests about this. Most said that I was wrong, but others admit that they are supposed to do it but don't want to. The rubrics are pretty clear, though. I say, why omit this beautiful piece of our tradition, and a great opportunity to insert a little Greek into the Mass?

3. The prayer after the Sprinkling Rite. Here's another one I had literally never, ever heard before being ordained myself. If the rite of sprinkling with holy water is used in place of the penitential rite, the priest is supposed to pray this prayer over the people when it is done: May almighty God cleanse us of our sins, and through the eucharist we celebrate make us worthy to sit at his table in his heavenly kingdom. Again, I was shocked to see this prayer in the Sacramentary, because I had never heard it at Mass. My experience was that the Sprinkling Rite just ended and the Gloria would begin. Or, as is widespread practice among the brothers of my Order, the Gloria is sung during the sprinkling. This, of course, necessitates the omission of the prayer, because when you're done sprinkling it's time for the Collect. Age quod agis, I say. Let's do one thing at a time. Plus I like the prayer; it's been one of my discoveries.

As one of my confreres, a lay friar, likes to say, "Making up your own liturgy is the height of clericalism."

That Would Take All Night

On the other side of town we have a group of young sisters who run retreats for the Spanish speaking folks in the area. They are often in need of confessors, and I go when I can. Imagine my fear when I went the other night and was put in a room with this sign on it:

I thought to myself that I would never make it. Luckily for my sanity and my spotty Spanish, not to speak of those who had to suffer me as a confessor, there weren't that many.

St. Thomas and the Immaculate Conception

The feast of the Immaculate Conception, arriving as it does nine months before Our Lady's birthday (liturgical gestations are always perfect), is a favorite time for Franciscans to indulge our particular chauvinism by beating up on non-Franciscan theologians, St. Thomas in particular. This is because St. Thomas is said to have denied the Immaculate Conception, but only a generation or so later our own Bl. John Duns Scotus became a champion of the doctrine. Thus we Franciscans--sometimes infamous for our anti-intellectual tendencies--have a chance to be better than the great Angelic Doctor himself, and hence to all other smart people.

So this morning I decided I would actually read St. Thomas on the question, to see what he said. Truth be told, he does deny the Immaculate Conception in ST III. q. 27 II. (see the reply to 2nd objection in particular.) (1) He says that it would be derogatory to Christ as universal Savior to think that Mary never had any original sin. To be fair, we can hardly fault St. Thomas (whom I love, I'll admit it) for not holding a doctrine that would not be dogmatically defined for another 600 years. In order to answer the question of Mary's sanctification, of which he firmly believes, Thomas resorts (and as well he might) to Scriptural examples of holy individuals who were sanctified in utero, such as St. John the Baptist and the prophet Jeremiah, but not from the first moment of their conception. (See III. q.27 I, response.) (2)

In the end Thomas makes a good point. If Mary never knew original sin, what need did she have for Christ's salvation? Did Jesus Christ come to suffer for most? Didn't she need the salvation Christ won for us as well? The point provides an inadvertent reductio ad absurdum for the idea that salvation from sin was the principal purpose of the Incarnation. (It also shows us that the salvation Christ did indeed accomplish through his passover is not bound to time in a mechanical way.) It's not as if God made the world and when people sinned God then decided on the Incarnation as a means to our salvation. "The Incarnation was not plan B," as one of my favorite teachers liked to say. With God there is only plan A. Even if our first parents had not sinned, the Word would have come to us as the Incarnate Son of God, simply out of God's passionate desire to lift his creation to himself. That this required the salvation from sin we have through Christ's Passion is an extra, remedial gift. (Though it is a gift of inestimable value, which we celebrate each day in the sacrifice of the Mass.) After all, we could never say that sin controls how God behaves.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Immaculate Conception and Queen of the Order of Friars Minor.


(1) "Ad secundum dicendum quod, si nunquam anima beatae virginis fuisset contagio originalis peccati inquinata, hoc derogaret dignitati Christi, secundum quam est universalis omnium salvator."

(2) "Respondeo dicendum quod de sanctificatione beatae Mariae, quod scilicet fuerit sanctificata in utero, nihil in Scriptura canonica traditur, quae etiam nec de eius nativitate mentionem facit. Sed sicut Augustinus, de assumptione ipsius virginis, rationabiliter argumentatur quod cum corpore sit assumpta in caelum, quod tamen Scriptura non tradit; ita etiam rationabiliter argumentari possumus quod fuerit sanctificata in utero. Rationabiliter enim creditur quod illa quae genuit unigenitum a patre, plenum gratiae et veritatis, prae omnibus aliis maiora gratiae privilegia accepit, unde legitur, Luc. I, quod Angelus ei dixit, ave, gratia plena. Invenimus autem quibusdam aliis hoc privilegialiter esse concessum ut in utero sanctificarentur, sicut Ieremias, cui dictum est, Ierem. I, antequam exires de vulva, sanctificavi te; et sicut Ioannes Baptista, de quo dictum est, Luc. I, spiritu sancto replebitur adhuc ex utero matris suae. Unde rationabiliter creditur quod beata virgo sanctificata fuerit antequam ex utero nasceretur."

Think Again

The appearance of the Forerunner, John the Baptist, is the "beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God." John invites us to metanoia, to think again, to have second thoughts about our selfish ways, and thus to prepare ourselves for the arriving Kingdom of God in the person of Jesus Christ. My homily for this weekend is posted here.

Metropolitan Jonah

Over these recent days I've been, like many I think, amazed by what I've read about Metropolitan Jonah, the newly elected primate of the autocephalous Orthodox Church in America. It's partly because we're both college-age converts, and there are other similarities in our stories as well. But it's also because those statements I've read so far are so striking:

To those at St. Vladimir's Seminary here in Yonkers, he gives this vision of ministry:

[He] particularly reiterated the need to imitate the sacrificial path of Christ and his mother, the Virgin Mary. “To become the living presence of God, the living temple of God, requires us to crush our ego and shatter our will,” he said, “so that we might conceive God within us and become his presence in this world.

“Seminarians,” he noted, “do not come to theological schools to become ‘professionals’ and to be ‘respected,’ but rather to be crucified and thereby shine forth the light of Christ.” His Beatitude reminded the seminarians that his own title of “episkopos” means not “master of the house,” but “slave of slaves.”

On the topic of being an autocephalous church he said:

“Hierarchy is only about responsibility, it’s not all of this imperial nonsense,” he said. “Thank God that we’re Americans and we have cast that off. We don’t need foreign despots. We are the only non-state Orthodox Church. In other words, we are the only Orthodox Church that does not exist under the thumb of a state — either friendly or hostile.

“So the church is our responsibility, personally and collectively, individually and corporately. What are you going to do with it?”

I love that because it captures a shift in my own self-understanding as an American. The public education I received as a child (which was very good) left the subtle message that the so-called separation of church and state was for the protection of the state. I know realize that it is just as much for the protection of the integrity of faith.

May you be filled with the Holy Spirit as you take up your ministry, Metropolitan Jonah.

Holiday Blues

Luke 10:23-24:

Turning to the disciples in private he said,
“Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.
For I say to you,
many prophets and kings desired to see what you see,
but did not see it,
and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.”

It's a commonplace to hear us Catholics complain about how the world around us skips Advent and goes straight to Christmas, and then gives up on the Christmas season after one day. I don't think the world celebrates Christmas at all, but observes the pagan festival of Yule, but that's another rant.

More and more I experience all of the lights, decorations, sales, and trite songs as a form of denial. In ministry you learn quickly that this is a very hard time of year for a lot of people. The dark days make people blue. Many anniversaries of death are recalled. Family conflicts flare up.

The Advent season speaks to this spiritual condition. It is an invitation to enter into the dark places of our hearts and find the longing for God, the misinterpretation of which is the cause of so much of our misery in the first place. Advent invites us to give up on the failed strategy of drowning our alienation and despair with bright lights and noise, and invites us to seek the single Light that desires to be born into our personal darkness.

The Ascesis of Preaching

For me the greatest challenge in preaching is finding the right ascesis for preparation. To paraphrase Master Yoda, it requires a good deal of 'unlearning what you have learned.'

Ever since I have been able to read, I have been conditioned to read a text as fast I can (while still comprehending it, more or less) and to think of something clever to say or write about it right away. The quicker and the more clever the better. This is the relationship to a text that going to school has taught me, from the first grade all the way through theological studies.

The trouble is, you just can't go about preparing to preach on the Sacred Scriptures in this way. To skim the text and go with the first clever thing you think of is a serious error, and one that has caught me many times in the hundred or so weekends I've spent so far in the clerical state. Many times I have gone to an ambo to proclaim the Gospel and only at that moment realized how I ought to have reflected and prepared to preach on it. I realize that this is partly because this is when the printed word becomes the Word of God most eminently, i.e. when it is proclaimed in the assembly, but it's also because the Scripture simply has to be heard.

Through all of this I have learned that I need to employ all kinds of practical strategies to make myself slow down in the course of my weekly preparation. I need to read the Sunday Scriptures out loud, for one thing. I need to refuse to have an idea the first time. Ideas make you miss things, as you begin to conform the text to the thing you want to say. I need to play with several ideas and refuse to choose one right away. Finally, I need to keep reading the text as I prepare, to make sure it's not drifting off into my idea. For we are not meant to preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord. (2 Corinthians 4:5)