Inverted in Many Ways

The other day I was paging up a breviary and I came across the holy card from this post, and Fr. Venantius's reflection on a priest seeing his reflection in the chalice during the consecration. (I have three sets of breviaries going right now: Latin, English, and Italian.)

I was just thinking about how, most of the time, the reflection one sees in the chalice is inverted. It's like when you see yourself in a spoon; the concave surface refracts such that your reflection is upside-down.
Thinking on this, I'm reminded that the person I think I know as myself is not the same person known by the Creator. My distraction and sin distorts my self-knowledge. Coming to know myself as God sees me is the substance of the spiritual journey. So it turns out that you really should take the advice of your kindergarten teacher when she said to 'be yourself.' Trouble is, it's not something you can just do, but a long and sometimes terrifying work of the spirit.

Perhaps it's a trite reflection, and if it is I apologize, but maybe when I see my inverted reflection in the chalice I can be reminded that Jesus Christ died and rose into the Eucharist and the other sacraments precisely that I might be 'reverted'. That I, one who finds himself as a homo incurvatus in se, a human being bent over and turned back in on himself, might learn to stand up and be the flourishing creature willed by God. This new person, as he emerges in the course of my journey of prayer, might appear upside-down and foreign because of my confusion and my attachment to false selves, but this is an optical illusion of the spiritual vision. The image that appears to be upside-down only looks funny because my confusions and disordered affections have distorted my perspective; in the end it is he who will turn out to be the real me.

My Bride Ate Herself to Death, Father Director

I was once told the vocation story of Blessed Raniero of Borgo San Sepolcro, a friar who lived around the turn of the fourteenth century. Anybody who knows better please correct me.

He was from a poor family. When he grew up he attempted marriage with a young woman who was also from a poor family. They had a lovely wedding, and somehow the families scraped together enough money to have a nicer meal than either Raniero nor his bride had ever seen. Unfortunately, however, the food was so good that the would-be Mrs. Raniero ate so much that she died that very night.

Raniero interpreted all this as a sign that he ought to become a Franciscan, and entered the Order. Miracles were attributed to him, and he was beatified by Pius VII in 1802.

It just goes to show the vocation story is a category of religious narrative that proceeds according to certain accepted rules and critical vocabulary. Can you imagine someone going to a vocation director with this story? He would probably be sent away, told to get counseling, and his 'vocation story' would be a joke in the community from then on. I bet there are a lot of saints who had 'vocation stories' that wouldn't fly nowadays. Have we become wiser in our sense of God's action in the lives of individual souls, or more boring in the cautiousness of our claims?

Walter Hilton on Slips and Detours

From the Scala Perfectionis, as quoted in Augustine Baker's Sancta Sophia:

"But if it shall happen sometimes, as likely it will, that through some of these temptations and thy own frailty, thou stumble and perhaps fall down, and get some harm thereby, or that thou for some time be turned a little out of the right way, as soon as possibly may be come again to thyself, get up again and return into the right way, using such remedies for thy hurt as the Church ordains; and do not trouble thyself over much or over long with thinking unquietly on thy past misfortune and pain--abide not in such thoughts, for that will do thee more harm, and give advantage to thine enemies. Therefore, make haste to go on in thy travail and working again, as if nothing had happened. Keep but Jesus in thy mind, and a desire to gain his love, and nothing shall be able to hurt thee."

Weeping, as We Should

I've been enjoying the prayers over the people that the new missal offers during Lent. Today's is especially good:

O God, who choose to show mercy not anger to those who hope in you, grant that your faithful may weep, as they should, for the evil they have done, and so merit the grace of your consolation. Through Christ our Lord.

Like so many prayers, this one would be easy to take the wrong way, as if God has somehow decided to be nice to us--and maybe just this once--when what he really wants is to be angry, or if our contrition somehow buys us divine consolation.

The punishment we receive for our sins, in this life and all the way down the road to hell, is only what we do with the emptiness we suffer from lacking the goodness of God that ought to be there. This emptiness, as we sinners sorely know, is all too easily filled with violence, craving, despair, self-medication, and every other settling for less by which we purchase for ourselves our alienation and misery. Take this to our created finality, and that's hell.

The spiritual work is to refuse to fill the emptiness with anything else, but to sit in it and grieve the absence of God we have insisted upon with our sins. This is the beginning of compunction. It does not buy us God's consolation, but merits it in the sense that praying out of the emptiness in a mode of receptive grief opens us to the consolation God is just dying--literally--to give us.

It is in the openness of this grieving for our emptiness that we really begin to see Christ crucified, God having united his very self to our pain, our stuckness, our alienation, our feeling of abandonment. And it is then that we realize the mercy of the divinity of Christ crucified, because he has blazed a trail--for our humanity--through our suffering to the new creation that is the Resurrection.

Theological Study and Crises of Faith

The study of theology often produces crises of faith. In a certain sense, this is what it is supposed to do. True knowledge tends to upset all the subtle ways that we have made gods in our own image. The presence of the living God, especially as he subsists in the rational creature by our knowledge of him, always means the smashing of idols and the burning of pagan sanctuaries. Therefore, just as it is a tragic error to cling to forms of prayer that give us sensible consolation when the Spirit is inviting our hearts into the 'uninteresting wilderness' of contemplation, so it is a fatal error to cling to the way we have always understood the propositions of a catechism or manual as a way to fend off the crises of faith induced by theological study.


Births are hard and dangerous and painful. That's one of the basic effects of original sin. And so it is when God wishes to bring to birth deeper understandings and purer acts of faith in the minds of students. We have to consent to the vertigo and often to the letting go of ideas we didn't even know we cherished so much.


All that being said, not every crisis of faith occasioned by theological study is salutary. Some are pointless, and some are even evil. For these, we must take the Lord's advice and be careful what we hear.


Pay close attention to your teachers. Sometimes teachers of theology can be angry at the Church or at God. This doesn't mean that one can't learn from them, but the student must be careful. Anger and bitterness have their own proper contagion. Always pay attention to what's at stake in the doctrine you are being given. More than anything else, reject any idea of a God that would put an earnest soul in an impossible existential dilemma and thereby assure its misery.

Also, be very careful of any teacher of theology who advocates sin either by word or public example. All of our efforts to think clearly are hampered and darkened by the injuries of sin within us. Even if we are living a prayerful, sacramental life in an honest and ruthless effort to eliminate sin and its occasions in our lives, this will be still be the case to one degree or another. This is especially true in theology. As Augustine says at the beginning of the De Trinitate, nowhere is the work more laborious or a mistake more dangerous than in theology. If someone encourages sin, he has no reasonable hope of not being confused.


Finally, examine carefully the doctrine you are taught. This is not untrusting suspicion; a true teacher will rejoice to have his students do so. If what you are taught does not eventually--and the adverb is critical--help you to make a fuller intellectual assent to the truths of the faith and a more complete surrender to God, you may reject it. If the 'theology' you are given is finally reducible to political philosophy, sociology, psychology, or anthropology, or has no Christian specificity, you also ought to reject it. It's a 'post-Christian' world out there, and to our shame, our so-called theological reflection is sometimes complicit with it.


Above all, pray as honestly and devoutly as you can. That's the most important thing.

Very Pedantic Liturgical Dubium

Here's a liturgical dubium at the heights of pedantry.

I have Masses in two parishes this weekend, one a Saturday vigil and the other on Sunday. At the Mass on Saturday afternoon, the readings will be from Year B, but at the one on Sunday, the readings from Year A will be substituted per the option for RCIA.

That means two different Sunday homilies, but that's o.k. I don't mind being kept on my toes in that regard.

My question is about the hinge hours of the Divine Office. On Sundays I usually use the typical edition Liturgia Horarum, which offers three different antiphons for the Magnificat at Evening Prayer I and II and for the Benedictus at Morning Prayer. These three correspond to the three-year cycle of readings. (I have observed that most editions of the Hours do this; it is only the American English edition that does not, instead offering but one that matches year A at Evening Prayer I, year B at Morning Prayer, and year C at Evening Prayer II. That's something worth fixing when a new edition comes out, which is all the more necessary now that the collects are in the new translation, but I digress.)

So, the question: which antiphons do I use for the gospel canticles? My best guess is to use the B antiphon for Evening Prayer I and the year A antiphon for Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer on Sunday, as will correspond to the Masses I celebrate in the course of the veritas horarum of the Sunday.

Loneliness and Communion

I grew up feeling like something of a stranger and alien in this world, as someone who felt like he didn't get what was going on or why other people were the way they appeared to be. As I got older and made good friends, I found that people became less opaque as I got to know them. I was grateful for such connections and the gift of friendship. So as a young adult I had this idea that people would become less unintelligible as I got to know them, and I would delight to find that a lot of people were quite lovable once you really listen to them.

In a certain way, years of living in religious community have made me shift once again. There's a particular loneliness that comes from living so closely with others, for the exterior intimacy of common life serves to accentuate the irreducible discreteness of each member. In other words, after I get to know the other members, a new opacity starts to emerge, and I realize how much I don't really know or understand the other, why he says the things he says or does the things he does, what really 'makes him tick,' as it were. One comes up against a core of individuality that cannot be pierced by the insight into another. Many times we don't even have the option of sharing our own since we're not even acquainted with it ourselves.

I've been thinking about how this is why the communion of saints is an article of faith. To say that I believe in the communion of saints is not just to confess my confidence that Mary, Joseph, Francis and Benedict Joseph Labré are praying for me right now, although it certainly means that, but to confess my faith that the operations of the Holy Spirit among the baptized are broader, wider, higher, and deeper than my awareness. Thus, in the life of a religious in community, it is the confession that the connections and resonances one is aware of are just a portion of the larger economies of grace. To put it simply, in our life with each other, God is up to more than we are aware of. So we might feel lonely, but a sense of isolation is an illusion.