I make no bones about my brotherly affection and deep respect for Mike Aquilina – as such it shouldn’t surprise that I found his article on, if you will, ancient youth ministry so crisp and accurate.  Two snips really caught my attention:

They promised young people great things, like persecution, lower social status, public ridicule, severely limited employment opportunities, frequent fasting, a high risk of jail and torture, and maybe, just maybe, an early, violent death at the hands of their pagan rulers.

and

What made the Church attractive in the third century can make it just as attractive in the twenty-first. In the ancient world and in ours, young people want a challenge. They want to love with their whole being. They’re willing to do things the hard way — if people they respect make the big demands. These are distinguishing marks of youth. You don’t find too many middle-aged men petitioning the Marines for a long stay at Parris Island. It’s young men who beg for that kind of rigor.

Whether this concept of challenging youth instead of coddling them will ever catch on again within the Church, at least within my lifetime, certainly seems debatable and even doubtful in some corners.  As different as today’s youth are from those of ancient times they’re still youth, and their thirst and desire for a challenge has never abated.  Look a young man or woman square in the eye and tell them they too could move the world and they will follow you to the ends of the earth, no matter the cost – and in Christianity that cost starts with a death, death to self, death to the ways of this world, but that death opens unto new and everlasting life in Christ.  If it worked in the ancient Church, who knows, just maybe it can work here as well.

Because, you know, in a way it does.  Certainly we can live without prayer, but as for me, life without talking to God and doing my best to listen to Him just doesn’t quite measure up.  I’ve been reading through Pope Benedict’s The Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine, the collation of his addresses on the early Fathers of the Church and came across a quote so good that I’m not going to wait until I write up a review of the book for it.  In his address on St. Gregory Nazianzen, we find:

Gregory teaches us first and foremost the importance and necessity of prayer.  He says:  “It is necessary to remember God more often than one breathes” (Orationes 27, 4: PG 250, 78), because prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with our thirst.  God is thirsting for us to thirst for him (cf. Orationes 40, 27: SC 358, 260).  In prayer, we must turn our hearts to God, to consign ourselves to him as an offering to be purified and transformed.  In prayer we see all things in the light of Christ; we let our masks fall and immerse ourselves in the truth and in listening to God, feeding the fire of love.

I just love those twin images – “let our masks fall” and “feeding the fire of love.”  It’s like drawing a picture with words.

Some random patristic reflections on today’s Feast of the Baptism of the Lord:

Saint Ambrose of Milan:

Neither repentance avails without grace, nor grace without repentance; for repentance must first condemn sin, that grace may blot it out.  So then John, who was a type of the law, came baptizing for repentance, while Christ came to offer grace.

Saint John Chrysostom

John was setting forth the anticipatory and ancillary value of his won baptism, showing that it had no other purpose than to lead to repentance.  He pointed toward Christ’s baptism, full of inexpressible gifts.  John seems to be saying:  “On being told that he comes after me, you must not think lightly of him because he comes later.  When you understand the power of Christ’s gift, you will see that I said nothing lofty or noble when I said ‘I am unworthy to untie the thong of his sandal.’  When you hear, ‘He is mightier than I,’ do not imagine that I said this by way of comparison.  For I am not worthy to be ranked so much as among Christ’s servants, no, not even the lowest of his servants, nor to receive the least honored portion of his ministry.”  Therefore John did not simply say “his sandals,” he said “the thong of his sandals,” the part counted the least of all.

Saint Hippolytus

Do you see, beloved, how many and how great blessings we would have lost if the Lord had yielded to the exhortation of John and declined baptism?  For the heavens had been shut before this.  The region above was inaccessible.  We might descend to the lower parts, but not ascend to the upper.  So it happened not only that the Lord was being baptized – he also was making new the old creation.  He was bringing the alienated under the scepter of adoption.  For straightway “the heavens were opened to him.”  A reconciliation took place between the visible and the invisible.  The celestial orders were filled with joy, the diseases of earth were healed, secret things made known, those at enmity restored to amity.  For you have herd the word of the Evangelist, saying, “The heavens were opened to him,” on account of three wonders.  At the baptism of Christ the Bridegroom, it was fitting that the heavenly chamber should open its glorious gates.  So when the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove, and the Father’s voice spread everywhere, it was fitting that “the gates of heaven should be lifted up.

Saint Augustine

In the Scripture many details are mentioned distinguishably of each of the triune Persons individually, such as cannot be said of them jointly, even though they are inseparably together, as when they are made manifest by corporeal sounds.  So in certain passages of Scripture and through certain created beings they are shown separately and successively, as the Father in the voice which is heard:  “Thou art my Son,” and the Son in the human nature which he took from the Virgin, and the Holy Spirit in the physical appearance of a dove.  These are mentioned distinguishably, it is true, but they do not prove that the Three are separated.  To explicate this, we take as an example the unity of our memory, our understanding, our will.  Although we list these distinguishably, individually and in their various functions, there is nothing we do or say which proceeds from one of them without the other two.  However, we are not to think that these three faculties are compared to the Trinity so as to resemble it at every point, for a comparison is never given such importance in an argument that it exactly fits the thing to which it is compared.  Besides, when can any likeness in a created being be applied to the Creator?

Saint Gregory Nazianzen

As man he was baptized, but he absolved sins as God.  He needed no purifying rites himself – his purpose was to hallow water.