H/T to Aggie Catholics
From Pope Benedict’s God is Near Us:
I sometimes have the impression that there is a temptation today to set up beside the pastoral approach of faith, or even against it, a pastoral approach based on one’s own cleverness, an approach that no longer actually trusts in faith’s ability to call men together today. Because this approach no longer believes that faith can actually affect anything, it has, so to say, to outwit God and men with its cleverness and to build something on its own account. How can that stand the test? It may perhaps seem simpler to begin with. But it remains our own work and still has the weakness of what is ours.
It is incredibly tempting, and incredibly easy, to put our own intelligence or our own perception of our gifts first, to forget even if unintentionally that God is the one that gets the job done and not us. We are called, as Mother Teresa is so often quoted as saying, not to be successful but to be faithful. If we can do the latter God will take care of the former, and many times in ways far different and even far greater than we ever contemplated. To put it another way, if you do all the work the most you’ll get is what you can do; if you do your part of the work and let God do His part, the most you’ll get is what He can do.
When I first entered the Church I considered myself blessed to have a pastor who was intent to make sure we in the pews participated as actively in the Mass as we possibly could. I chuckle now as I recall a few times when he joyfully chastised us at a daily Mass for not singing with much gusto – and then made us sing the Entrance Hymn again. He also made sure that he said at full voice all the prayers, even those which normally are said in a low-to-inaudible voice by most priests, so that we all could know everything that was going on at the Mass.
Fast forward many years, I was reminded of this the other day on Google+ while reading a comment from someone who was likewise praising the opportunity to hear all the prayers of the Mass. In the intervening years I’ve come to considerably moderate my original position on whether the priest praying so quietly no one in the congregation can hear the words is a good thing or bad. I hadn’t really contemplated why my thoughts on the matter had changed, and really only upon reading her comment did I even notice how my thoughts at, say, the Preparation of the Altar have changed over the years.
Where once I would have been slightly annoyed if a priest prayed the Preparation prayers (“Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation…“) I now find myself silently praying the prayers with the priest. There is something even deeper though. Recently I’ve been assisting at Daily Mass at a parish where the priest not only prays these prayers silently but there is a certain obviousness that there is a “dialogue” going on between God and His alter Christus. Maybe I’ve just become a little overly sensitive to these things over the years but when I took a little time to reflect on these thirty seconds of silence it really hit me how great is the volume that is spoken in this silence. Father stands at the altar, fully consumed in his role as priestly intercessor, about to perform the fullness of his role as priest – as alter Christus – and he takes just a short bit of time to pray in a special and private way, for his actions to come, for his work, and in a special and irreplaceable way for the people in front of whom this great miracle is about to take place at his hands. There is something singularly beautiful about seeing a priest take hold of his role with both hands and, in a way only a priest can, offer it all to the Father.
As beautiful as it is to join in audibly with the priest, and as wonderful a catechetical tool as the Mass is, I’ve come to a new appreciation of late for allowing the priest to spend a moment (and I’m sure this isn’t the best way to say it) to be a priest in the most full way he possibly can. There is such great beauty in both opportunities, and I can only hope priests take the time and energy to do both when and as propriety allows.
Our earthly worship environment should help us see what we can’t see. It should strive to imitate its heavenly counterpart, which we glimpse through Revelation. Too often our liturgical art, music and architecture bow to utility and economy, when they should bow to the transcendent. John’s vision inspires us to rethink the ways we design our churches. The visible should be a vehicle for the invisible, giving our senses a taste of the glorious mystery in which we partake, filling our beings with reverence and awe, lifting our minds and hearts to heaven. — Scott Hahn, A Father Who Keeps His Promises
As I’m sure many of you know, the Northeast region of the US was hit by some pretty amazing amounts of snow this past weekend. My little corner of the region was not spared the white flaked spectacle of unimagined proportions – we were doused with somewhere between 6 and 8 inches of the heavy wet, well, crud that typifies early-season storms like this – although we were far from the hardest hit, with some totals of over thirty inches of snowfall. Yes, for some of the hearty folks in regions blessed with lake-effect snow these totals are paltry, the kind of thing they don’t even zip up their jackets to go out in. But when you mix the surprising earliness of this storm with the fact that very few leaves had yet dropped from the trees, and then plop on top of that the wet and sticky quality of this snow, it was a recipe for disaster.
So, yeah, disaster is what ensued. Not on Katrina-esque proportions of course, but I am not being overly flamboyant to say some
areas look like they had suffered a hurricane or tornado with all the tree damage everywhere. Millions without power, some were even killed. And just plain lots of grumpy, miserable people as they wait and wait and wait and … wait for the crews to clear off the thousands of trees and tree chunks from the lines and roads and repair the damage to the lines. Lines at Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds and Starbucks stretched out beyond parking lots and into roads as people looked for hot food and maybe a little time in a warm building. And Wifi.
My house was one of the luckier ones – we had power and heat the whole time, while several of my friends and co-workers still suffer in now very cold homes. But I didn’t have Cable TV or the broadband Internet connection that sizzles along that same line. I was reduced to browsing and checking email and social networks on a 3G network that was both up-and-down and slow as molasses in January when it did work. It. Was. Torture. Many things I couldn’t even get to before the connection timed out (Comcast’s outage status board, I’m looking at you!).
It took me a while to realize just how stupid I was being. I have often complained to myself how I would love a day when I can just do what I want to do without having to go somewhere or jump to do this or that. And I had it dropped in my lap by virtue of, and isn’t this ironic, an “act of God”. Yet here I was complaining that the one thing I really wanted was right in front of my face. Apparently my cell data connection wasn’t the only thing running slowly that day.
I’ve been perpetually behind on my goal to read the entire Bible cover-to-cover in a year (I’m, um, about a year behind on that). So once I grabbed a clue of what opportunity I was being offered I pulled down my Bible from the shelf, cross-checked my Logos reading plan, sat down with a hot cup of coffee and suffered through my first-world problem. In no time I was through Tobit and Judith and back on my way to finishing my one-year plan in under two years.
There’s a commercial on television wherein the father sees his family ignoring one another, all engrossed in some high-tech action, so he slyly flips the big breaker on the house power and fires up the grill to feed his family around one table. Maybe we all need some artificial first-world problems now and then to remind us how much can get done and how much better we can be to each other if only we keep the “gotta-do-now”s from constantly getting in the way of the “what I really oughtta do”s. Make time for God. Make time for each other. No matter if it takes a faked power outage or a true act of God, take it for what it is and seek the good in everything that comes.
I don’t normally plug products (well, I do book reviews, but that’s different) but I have to say I’ve come to love the Logos Bible software. Better than just a Bible search and cross-reference tool it allows you to access any of your (virtual) library from the same interface, with powerful search capabilities and the ability to tie multiple resources together to suit your particular preferences. When I first started using Logos their available books were decidedly skewed towards the Protestant churches, but over the past year or so they have been aggressively adding Catholic titles to their catalog, to the point now where I have to seriously question whether to buy a physical book that I can’t index and search when doing my studies.
Logos isn’t cheap by any stretch, but it certainly is powerful and they back their product up with excellent service – the few times I’ve contacted them with questions I’ve had a response waiting for me within a few hours. Just in case you’re in the market for a Bible software package and maybe want to drop some not-so-subtle hints about Christmas gifts, this might be something worth investigating. * Just to be clear, I get zippity-doo-dah for saying this, I just happen to love the package. And so does Stephen Ray.
This past week I had to give a presentation to our RCIA participants on the Creation and fall of man and angels. Like before I’m making my talk notes available in case anyone finds anything within to be of use. This presentation was timed to take roughly an hour – I think in the end with skipping some points and expanding on others I finished my talk just five minutes over schedule which, for me, is nearly unheard of. One great resource I happened to trip across just days before my presentation was a lecture given by Dr. Peter Kreeft entitled “Aquinas and the Angels” – he was, as usual, both witty and overflowing with information.
I have only just now had a chance to begin to sit down and read Pope Benedict’s Motu Proprio Porta Fidei in which he proclaims a Year of Faith, beginning 11 October 2012, the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and twentieth anniversary of the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and ending on the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King, on 24 November 2013. (So yes, for us nit pickers out there it’s a little more than a year.) While I haven’t had a chance to read the whole of the document just yet I get the feeling from the tone of what I have read that the Holy Father senses a great need in the Church and an urgent need in the world for a deep renewal in the very basics – the very bases – of our faith. The third paragraph is illustrative of my point:
We cannot accept that salt should become tasteless or the light be kept hidden (cf. Mt 5:13-16). The people of today can still experience the need to go to the well, like the Samaritan woman, in order to hear Jesus, who invites us to believe in him and to draw upon the source of living water welling up within him (cf. Jn 4:14). We must rediscover a taste for feeding ourselves on the word of God, faithfully handed down by the Church, and on the bread of life, offered as sustenance for his disciples (cf. Jn 6:51). Indeed, the teaching of Jesus still resounds in our day with the same power: “Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life” (Jn6:27). The question posed by his listeners is the same that we ask today: “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” (Jn 6:28). We know Jesus’ reply: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (Jn 6:29). Belief in Jesus Christ, then, is the way to arrive definitively at salvation.
He goes on to say, “The Year of Faith […] is a summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the one Saviour of the world.” Why? “Today too, there is a need for stronger ecclesial commitment to new evangelization in order to rediscover the joy of believing and the enthusiasm for communicating the faith.” Because, “[o]nly through believing, then, does faith grow and become stronger; there is no other possibility for possessing certitude with regard to one’s life apart from self-abandonment, in a continuous crescendo, into the hands of a love that seems to grow constantly because it has its origin in God.”
To wrap up my early thoughts on this Motu Proprio, I would like to note one more sentence: “Religious communities as well as parish communities, and all ecclesial bodies old and new, are to find a way, during this Year, to make a public profession of the Credo.” Granted I may be over-reaching this statement, but it certainly seems to be telling us all that we are to take this year to remember, renew and re-learn what we believe that we might bring it forth into the world.
Just when you think God has done a pretty good job surprising you with how he can pull things from all different directions and merge them all into something you never would have thought possible, He goes and does this. Sometimes there are just too many coincidences to be able to rationally think God didn’t have a very active hand in directing it all.
This past Saturday I was volunteered (*ahem*) to give a talk to my parish’s Men of St. Joseph group on, of all things, St. Joseph – his life and spirituality. Given that the talk was only to be for 15-20 minutes I could hardly do justice to the depth of scholarship available (particularly thanks to my dear Internet-friend Lisa Franciscat) but I shared what I could. The discussion afterwards was, in my entirely insufficiently humble opinion, even better than the talk itself. Should anyone want a cursory overview of the life and spirituality of St. Joseph, I offer you my talk notes following the break. I should note that these are only talk notes – highlights to keep me on track, not the fullness of the talk; I did go off-script and talk extemporaneously a few times, much to the delight (or perhaps chagrin, I couldn’t quite tell) of those present. If anyone has additions or corrections, please do let me know in the combox – I’d hate to think I led anyone astray. 🙂 [click to continue…]
