It is all about the prayer

After the man, Adam, had eaten of the tree,
the LORD God called to the man

and asked him, “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden;
but I was afraid, because I was naked,
so I hid myself.”

 

This past couple of months we have been reflecting on The Confessions of St. Augustine.  Augustine, although aware of his sinfulness, does not attempt to hide himself from God like Adam, but rather lays bare his most intimate self.  He does so,  not primarily for his readers, but for God to whom his prayer text is directed.  Augustine permits us to overhear his prayer in the same way that Christ permits us to overhear the prayer of the Pharisee and Tax-collector in Luke.  He writes down his Confessions to the same end that Christ relates his parable —to reveal just how the kingdom is coming about in his time and ours.   It's all about the prayer. 

Augustine begins with, and sustains throughout the confessions, a profound sense of repentance.  The Mass maintains the same attitude, beginning with the Kyrie right through to the reception of communion where we say, "Lord I am not worthy to receive you."  But repentance is not enough. We need hope for the future. God expresses his hope for us  in the incarnation of his son, the Word made flesh. At the heart of the Mass we hear spoken  the marriage vows of Christ with his Church-- “this is my body which will be given up for you” and “this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all that sins might be forgiven.”  Those in the congregation who constitute the spouse of Christ,  each in their own way, commits his or her body to this marriage -- sometimes to be born out in martyrdom but mostly to be born out in the everyday crosses and celebrations of life, but always born out in chastity.

the Will of God and the Eucharistic presence

Everything we see and hear and feel is in some way the will of God.    Ah yes, “in some way.”  For “unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it" (Psalm 127:1).  Indeed, to say that God creates the world is to say that God wills the world and so-- it is so. All that we ever know of God is the will of God      (including how much we know that we don't know).

All religious traditions attempt to answer the question, “What does God expect of me and us?” Conversely, to assert that there is no God, is to assert a belief that we are  free from being subject to the will of God.

Christians believe that Jesus is the Word, the revelation of God. They believe that God discloses his will for us in the life, death and teaching

Better than chocolate

Have you heard the story of the 9-year-old who asks her mother, “What’s sex like?”? While Mom hems and haws for an answer, the girl fires off a second question, “Is it better than chocolate?” Mom, happily relieved, says, “Yes, now go do your homework.”

Innocently, the girl has given herself and us a valuable clue. Although chocolate is an inanimate object without feelings, it gives intense pleasure on the tongue when savored in moderation. It is best as a treat or a dessert, not the main course--a lesson the girl may have to learn by getting sick a few times. Sex, of course, is better because the pleasure is reciprocal and grows with the increasing reciprocity between two free-willing adults. To give is to receive and to receive is to give. Children are a wonderful continuation of this reciprocity, through old age and the entire history of the human race, as the generations interact in many varied ways of giving and receiving. But everything begins with pleasure inside the bodies God gave us. We cannot think without bodies. We cannot love until we are loved. Blessed be God forever! Blessed be chocolate and sex, hopefully in combination with each other!

I notice that eating chocolate and making love are not opposites but on a continuum. The lesson of moderation is not abandoned but transformed into the lesson of reciprocity between equals. The wholly new element, however, is a second human being created by God, not by man. [And what a human being she is!

Jesus is no tease

Words fail in writing about the Eucharist, but I can’t help myself. I want the Word above every other word, the Word made flesh, the Word that is before and behind every word and more profound than all the books that have ever been, or will ever be, written to gather dust on dusty shelves. As Eliot demonstrated in The Four Quartets, words are messy tools, but we have to work with what we’ve got.

Jesus is no tease. He gives his all to all. Before the Eucharist, the greatest theologian is as humbled and as beloved as the illiterate peasant. Thus, the Eucharist is more democratic than the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Jesus is pure beauty, truth, goodness and compassion–and absolutely free for the asking. He is particularly kind to the poor, the ugly, the outcast–who in an instant are turned into princes and princesses. Since we are all subject to disease and death, is it not comforting to contemplate the Eucharist at any moment and be transformed?

Imperfect analogies may help. When we gaze upon a famous painting, we are not all art experts, but we are all able to soak up quite a bit of the emotional content. We don’t have to be musicologists to appreciate a Bach fugue or Handel’s Messiah. Experts may see more than we do, but we, in our innocence, may see other things in our awe. When I was a hormonally saturated teenager, I dreamed about being married. Little did I expect that a particular woman from Poland would be my fulfillment.

The Eucharist is always more than we expect. He is redeeming love for sinners. I cannot fix myself up to be beautiful or earn my own salvation. But I can ask Jesus to love me and he will not refuse. Without him I can do nothing. With him all is possible.

Ron Day

Choosing Belief

Doug spoke yesterday of belief as a choice we make daily. His thoughts reminded me of this commencement address the writer David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. The full address, widely anthologized, has now been printed as a (slim) book of its own. The full text can be found at http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallace-kenyon.html.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

et verbum caro factum est

   The  Resurrection is the blossoming of the seed  Jesus has always borne within him.  In the Resurrection, that which had lain dormant from the beginning in the vital existence of the Son of Man and God becomes apparent. My existence appears to begin with my birth and ends with death.  Before it lies a darkness so complete that it seems incredible that I ever could have begun to exist at all.  After it, again  a darkness. In Jesus this is not so.  He does not begin with his birth, but  rather "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh,"  and  He knew it in his very bones. "Before Abraham came to be,  I am" he told the Pharisees. (John 8:58)  

An Easter poem

Transport

The rose, for all its behavior,
is smaller than the lifelove it stands for,
only briefly brightening,
and even its odor
only a metaphor.
Or so we suppose
just as we suppose the savior
we employ or see next door
is only some hired man
gardening.

Marie Ponsot

How many crosses have been borne up and down in elevators of our buildings

   Jesus did not invent the cross. He, like every person, found it on his journey. The newness in his message was to plant the seed of love in our bearing of the Cross. The element of love turned the way of the Cross into a way that leads to life. The Cross itself became a message of love: a means of transformation. Our cross is also the Cross of Jesus!
This cross first embraces each of us, and entrusts us with a duty in our personal life, in our families, among our friends and acquaintances - in sum, with whoever else's cross we encounter. I think of the many broken

The Light That Gets Lost

"The Blue of Distance," a chapter in Rebecca Solnit's wonderful book A Field Guide to Getting Lost begins with a description of how color measures the distance light travels to get to us. The warmer colors are closest to our eye. At the farthest end of the spectrum, she writes, lies blue, the color of twilight, of far horizons, of deep water:

The light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole of distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

This chapter sprung to mind when I was meditating on Jesus' words in John 16. "It is better for you that I go." In particular, I remembered a passage later in the chapter where she compares a child's eye-view of the world, close-up and present tense, with an adult's view of life in retrospect. She quotes a writer describing an excursion to the Grand Canyon with his children.While the adults in the party sought vistas and panoramas, the children would 'scour the ground for bones, pine cones, sparkly sandstone... .' Solnit comments:

There is no distance in childhood... . The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, and the complexity of the terrain we traverse... .

With Jesus' departure imminent, the disciples are poised to discover melancholy as they too traverse more complex terrain -- physical, emotional, spiritual -- than they ever imagined. Solnit quotes Simone Weil writing to a friend:

Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.

Jesus' going away "for a little while" deepens our friendship by extending it. He shifts the disciples' (and our) gaze from the near, from close, daily contact, to the far horizon. He reveals that separation carries its own intimacy. "Love," writes Solnit, "is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between." Jesus tells the disciples of that love and gives a name to that particular atmosphere. It is the Comforter.

And, of course, without departure and separation we can never experience the exquisiteness of return and reunion, as Jesus tells his friends, tells us:

But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.

St. Marie Eugenie does John 14

   Today is the feast of St. Marie Eugenie of Jesus. The Assumption examiners are considering the meaning of  John chapter 14 for their lives,  so I thought I might draw  attention to this quote from Marie Eugenie contained in the Chapters of 1878.

   You have the direct teaching of Our Lord. "That the world may know that I love the Father. Arise, let us go from here" (John 14:31)  This means let us go to meet sacrifice so the world will know that I love my Father.  Sacrifice is therefore the sign, the fruit and the characteristic of love.  Why include mortification with charity?  At Easter, must we speak of mortification?  Yes,  because this is a virtue which must be practiced every day in the Christian and religious life.  Christian life has a basis of mortification and what best suits the daughters of the Assumption is the mortification proposed by the feast of the Resurection.
   To live in the divine life, we must mortify ourselves ...true charity cannot exist without a spirit of mortification and sacrifice.

Jesus washes Judas' feet

    In John:12 we witnessed Mary, the contemplative sister of Lazarus, anointing the feet of Jesus with a costly perfume which she no longer needed for her brother's corpse. In the next chapter of this gospel Jesus washes the feet of Judas knowing full well what was in Judas' heart. 

    A story is told along a simular vein about the great Rabbi Gamaliel, who was head of the Sanhedrin and defended the disciples ( Acts 5:34-40) and became an influential figure in later Judaism as well. At a banquet, he got up and served food and drink to several rabbis who were of much less stature than he, which shocked them. A debate ensued about whether the great rabbi could set aside his own honor and serve the others, with some initially rejecting his service, just as Peter rejected Jesus' offer to wash his feet. But then they considered how Abraham, who, even though he was the greatest of his generation, ran to serve what looked like three lowly wanderers (Gen. 18:8); and how God during the exodus from Egypt, walked in front of the Jewish people. (Ex. 13:21). Ordinarily a king would walk or ride in the rear of the party. Given these precidents they determined that Gamaliel could do table service for those of lesser stature.

    Then there was Paul, a disciple of Gamaliel, who expounded on the humility of God in the very person of Jesus. “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, although being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but rather made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! (Phillipians 2:5-11) There is a reflection of the incarnation and redemption of mankind in Jesus' washing of Judas' feet.

Spiritual Exercises for Lent

On Ash Wednesday a couple of Jesuits will launch a blog that will run through about Divine Mercy Sunday. On it, they plan to post daily reflections based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola so that by the end, one who reads it regularly will have gotten a basic introduction to the whole of the Exercises. For those looking to deepen their prayer life over Lent, this might be a good site to visit. You can find it at the link below. http://sedaily.wordpress.com/   


You can get  general information about lent at http://marysaggies.blogspot.com/2010/02/lent-2010.html

Good Shepherd

Wonderful pictures as well!

The Shepherd is the Lamb

As often happens, the current of Sunday's conversation carried me into morning mass where Christ revealed Himself in a new, unexpected way. The Good Shepherd becomes the Lamb of God. He lays himself down to be devoured by wolves, not in the form of a shepherd, but as one of the flock -- the smallest, most vulnerable, most innocent among us. I was more horrified by this than I have ever been before in contemplating Christ's sacrifice. As sheep myself, in my imagination, I watched in helpless anguish as the lamb was torn to pieces and died.

The flock is spared. The flock is free to live without fear. But we can't forget the crisis that brought us our salvation -- neither the danger we were in nor the price that was paid. It seems to me that knowing the enormity of our Shepherd's sacrifice we can't help but live in a state of mourning that is at the same time grateful, relieved, jubilant. In other words, as Ron noted in his posting last week, a state of paradox.

The Mystery of Faith also took on new meaning when contemplating Christ as Shepherd:
"The Shepherd has died, the Shepherd has risen, the Shepherd will come again."

The same for Christ as Lamb.

The Shepherd as Gate

    A Shepherd' s  life was exposed for all to see.  They literally gave up large portions of their lives for their flocks. Sheep are near-sighted and eat constantly. The shepherd has to live out in the wild,  protecting them from harmful terrain and from predators as they ate, mated and played.
  At night he herded them into stone enclosures that were open only on one side. Since there was usually no fixed gate for these pens, the shepherd would lay his body across the entrance. He became the barrier against harm, putting his life on the line for the sheep.

 St.Augustine's homily on John 10 can be found here http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf107.iii.xlvi.html

The Good Shepherd

     When Father Damien in a sermon used the memorable phrase, “ We lepers,” his listeners knew that the membrane of health that had hitherto divided him from them was gone, and that he was now one of them indeed. [They began to appreciate the incarnation of the Pascal Mystery happening in their midst.] Robert Louis Stevenson and thousands of others  have been awestruck by such devotion.  A not quite comparable event might be an oncologist addressing his staff and patients by saying, “Those of us with cancer.”
         It is easy to forget that the drama of human existence arising from Original Sin is aimed at curing death.
      Among the humbling satisfactions of aging is that one realizes truths he has been uttering all along. We can know things without, for all that, realizing them. The words are there, but the meaning, the connection  has been dulled by repetition and habit. And then, surprisingly, the penny drops.  The transition from notional to real knowledge is in many senses the essence of the intellectual life. Getting to know what we already know, but for real.
       Imagine Father Damien saying, “We mortals.” Where would be the drama in that, the sense of a new companionship?   Notionally, mortality is a pretty dull fact. But it is a feature of life that certain poignant situations bring home to us its reality. It is no longer notional. What then?
       Like Damien, we go on doing what we were doing. Yet everything is different.  We are then, hopefully,  in some true and final sense,  in the arms of that Good Shepherd.    - taken from We Lepers by Ralph McInerny

The Uncommon Thread

The stories of the man born blind, the woman at Jacob's well, and the prodigal son all involve the major character of the story in a new way of seeing.

In the parable of the prodigal son as Jesus tells it, the young man under the duress of being hungry, broke and living in squalid conditions “came to his senses" the text says. Flannery O'Connor, Henry Nouwen, and others have found this phrase from the sacred text to have resonance for the narrative of their lives.

We don't know if the woman Jesus met at Jacob's well went back to live with the man with whom she had been living outside of marriage, but we do know that she enthusiastically responded to the Jesus' invitation for the living water even after it meant giving up a fiction she had about her own life. And she invites others in her village to see if Jesus doesn't bring a simular change to their understanding of themselves. But why does Jesus demand that she bring her husband, her real husband, with her to receive the living water?  What is with that? This only makes sense from the perspective of that new life that Jesus is inviting her to.


And that man born blind-- he received more than just physical sight when he was annointed by Christ and then washed himself in the pool of Siloam.  He received strength to confront the synagogue authorities with the truth of who he is and did not shrink at the prospect of being expelled from the temple. And even more importantly Jesus extends to him the opportunity to see spiritually and to acknowledge Jesus as the "Son of Man."  The story reveals that Jesus came not just that the blind might see, but of equal importance “that those who see, should become blind.” 

Each story, in its own way, is about the coming of the Kingdom (the love of God) within the individual and in the world; and about that purity of heart that is required.  There is more to this and the other beatitudes than is immediately appearant. These three narratives and many others in the sacred texts reveal the deep meaning of the beatitudes. The beatitudes, taken together, describe in a suprising and poignant way the coming of the Kingdom, the ongoingly creative love of God, as it was revealed in the life that Jesus led and words that he spoke and continues throught the work of the Holy Spirt of God.

I'm happy !

Yes, I'm happy for many reasons, but today it's because I could connect me, at least, with our blog !
Prayers !
Sr Thérèse

The First and the Last

I'm happy to be the first follower with the full knowledge that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. We should get used to this kind of paradoxical language in John (light/darkness;blindness/insight;thirst/welling up;bread/eternal food). When Jesus says in John 8:58 "Before Abraham was, I am," we have the temporal/eternal paradox personified in him. We praise him every time we say the Gloria. Whenever we share his name, we are both fully in time and lifted out of it. I'm not expressing myself very well, perhaps because words are inadequate. The "I am" exists before the "past, present and future," both in time and out of time, fully at every moment and yet waiting for his glory to be fully revealed. Although we are almost at the beginning of Lent, I am still stuck on Christmas. I think of the juxtaposition of the Wise Men and the baby Jesus. Wisdom=big thoughts, big words, stars, heights, power. Baby Jesus=tears, cries, smiles, inarticulate, vulnerable, helpless, cows lowing. He allows every birth to be special, to be an incarnation, even our own.

In the beginning was the word..

This blog is an on-line venue to augment our Sunday morning conversation in the dining room of the Assumption convent for the alumni of the spiritual exercises.  The word "Assumption" in the blog's title is a reference to the role that the Religious of the Assumption   plays  in bringing us together. And  "Examiner"  is a reference to the role that the Spiritual  Exercises continues to play in our lives.