Dams and Delight

With the arrival of the warm weather I was thinking about some of the funny things we did as kids. One of our favorites was a game called "Dams." First we would run the garden hose up to the top of the overgrown area of our backyard. Then, as the water began to roll down the hill, we would carve canals in the soil to direct it. Finally, we would try to construct great dams and waterways out of mud and sticks and whatever else was around.

There was a great delight in what we created. A genuine act of creation is always a moment of delight. It is our participation in God's creative act, the over-flowing of goodness by which creation itself comes to be through God's Word. The Trinity is the original community of mutual delight. When the Trinity expresses Its Delight, we get the creation all around us.

When we create our heart touches the primordial delight of the divine life. This is why our acts of creation are always moments of delight. The creative process of the artist. The mutual delight of sex. Children making things out of mud. These are all ways in which we imitate God the Creator and participate in the creating power of divine Delight.

This is also the insight of Dante when he says that art is the grandchild of God.

Bad Preaching

I heard an atrocious homily this weekend. The deacon was speculating on what the first Christians did in these ten days between the Ascension and the appearance of the Spirit on Pentecost. He said that they were able to select Matthias as Judas' successor during this time because that was just business and didn't require much inspiration. He assured us that they were praying, but without much consolation because the Consoler had not yet come.

The whole mess brings up a real question about how we read the Scriptures in the first place. We hear of many mysteries during the Paschal seasons of Lent, Holy Week and Easter. But the truth of the matter is that all these mysteries, the Passion and death of the Lord, the Resurrection and the sending of the Spirit, these are all really one thing. It is as if we are contemplating one jewel through different facets.

There are intimations of this in the Scriptures themselves. In John the Spirit is handed over from the Cross. Luke alone (except for the longer and doubtful ending of Mark) relates the Ascension and does so twice, once at the end of his Gospel and again at the beginning of the Acts. This alone ought to lead us to see that we are dealing with a narrative device rather than a chronicle. The story of Pentecost is set in the same place as the Last Supper, helping one to see that there is a connection between the farewell of Jesus, the gift of the Eucharist and the sending of the Spirit upon the apostles.

Perhaps this is why the Spirit gave us four canonical Gospels with sometimes differing accounts, so that we might not try to make a timetable out of God's work of salvation. The Passion and death of the Lord, the Resurrection and the gift of the Spirit are one mystery which we come to understand only through a contemplation of its distinct aspects.

Meaning

When I was a freshman in college I took philosophy 101. We spent a few classes on the topic of the "meaning of life." The conclusion of students and professor was that there couldn't be any such thing as the meaning of life, and that the best we could do was to seek "meanings in life."

I remember being shocked. It wasn't good enough for me. Everything about the history of reflective human consciousness seemed to me to be about something more, from the Greek search for the arche to the quest in late modern science for the "theory of everything."

I wanted more than "meanings in life;" I wanted a seamless garment of a sense of how to interpret finding oneself as a human life in the world.

The Holy Spirit

As we approach the great feast of Pentecost, Bro. Chris has some fine reflections to help us on our way.

Poll

Dear readers, I can't figure out why the Univeralis liturgical calendar banner sometimes appears and sometimes not. It should be a box with the liturgical day and a link to Universalis, right between the most recent post and the ad banner. I presume that its unreliability has something to with the firewalls and privacy settings of different machines.

So, would you take a moment to leave me a comment and let me know if the liturgical banner generally appears on this page for you? If it isn't, I'll replace it with something else fun or edifying.

Thanks!

The Ascension of the Lord

I live in one of the last places in the States where Ascension is still celebrated today, on the 40th day after Easter. In most places it has been moved to the weekend and has replaced what used to be the 7th sunday of Easter.

Ascension always brings up some cloudy memories for me. It was, I think, at a vigil Mass for this day that I first presented myself to a parish for the catechumenate. That was 14 years ago, though it seems longer.

In the days approaching Ascension we always hear Jesus' farewell discourse from the Gospel of John. Never mind that the Ascension itself is only in Luke-Acts; that's a funny business for the Scripture scholars to figure out.

The whole thing reminds me of a brother here who famously said about the life of prayer, "God goes away." And that's the bizarre thing about prayer and devotion; the more we are drawn to God the less we feel as if we can say what we are even talking about when we make an utterance like "God."

Spiritual writers get at this particular anguish in different ways. Gregory of Nyssa talks about how prayer is both movement and rest at the same time. The author of the The Cloud of Unknowing tries to convince us that our loss of clarity and knowledge is itself an indicator of progress. John of the Cross talks about the "rays of darkness" which obscure the mind and force us to let go of everything we previously thought of as our "spirituality."

Poor Aaron

The psalter we use for Morning and Evening Prayer here in my fraternity is sometimes a little scrupulous about inclusive language.

This is the end of psalm 77:

You led your people like a flock
by the hands of Moses and Aaron.

But in our psalter it reads:

You led your people like a flock
by the hands of Moses and Miriam.

Now it's one thing to adjust syntax and pronouns so that each sex can feel included, or even to eliminate male pronouns for God so as to avoid the suggestions of theological patriarchy, but to change the Scripture itself in so bold a way is really something else.

Leaving aside the error of thinking we can just change the Scripture according to our taste, Miriam doesn't need our promotion anyway. Her song in Exodus 15 is said by some to the real historical beginning of Old Testament theological reflection. If you never noticed it in the breviary, that's because you've been forgetting to pray Morning Prayer on Saturday. So let's not expunge poor Aaron from psalm 77.