Ubi Petrus

You tell me: “Yes, I want to!”  Good.  But do you “want to” as  miser wants his gold, as a mother wants her child, as a worlding wants honors, or as a poor sensualist wants his pleasure?

No?  Then you don’t “want to”! — St. Josemaria Escriva, The Way

We cannot rightly acknowledge the gifts of God unless we acknowledge the Mediator for whose sake alone they are given to us.  There can be no genuine thanksgiving for the blessings of nation, family, history and nature without that heart-felt penitence which gives the glory to Christ alone above all else.  There can be no real attachment to the given creation, no genuine responsibility in the world, unless we recognize the breach which already separates us from it.  There can be no genuine love of the world except the love wherewith God loved it in Jesus Christ.  “Love not the world” (1 John 2:15).  Yes, but we must also remember that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

The path of the believer is always to Christ, everything must be seen through Christ.  Through Him,With Him, In Him.

Today the Church celebrates the feast of the martyr St. Lawrence, perhaps best known for his wry statement while being grilled to death, “Turn me over, I am done on this side!”  It’s hard to imagine such a reaction in our days of ease and plenty.  In the Common of One Martyr for Morning Prayer we read:

Praised be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all consolation! He comforts us in all our afflictions and thus enables us to comfort those who are in trouble, with the same consolation we have received from him. As we have shared much in the sufferings of Christ, so through Christ do we share abundantly in his consolation.   (2 Cor 1:3-5)

That last line has always struck me:  “As we have shared much in the sufferings of Christ“, more specifically, “As we have” – you’ll notice there’s no equivocation, no questioning whether we will suffer, only a guarantee that when we do we shall “share abundantly in his consolation“.  If we follow Christ suffering will come – the world will not stand idly by without fighting back – but when it does come we have the even greater guarantee of consolation flowing from Him whom we follow.

To me, at least, this serves as a reminder to neither run towards suffering unnecessarily nor to run away from it out of fear, but rather to just do what is right and keep right on moving.  If suffering is to come as a result, it is to come, but no suffering avoided can compare with the consolation that is to come in Him.  Let us only praise God in our fires as did St. Lawrence.

I’m seeing a few hits coming from people looking for the pastoral assignments announcement that used to be posted very clearly on the Diocesan web site.  After a little digging I’ve come across the page you all are (and I was) looking for here.  You might notice the return of a familiar name in the most recent assignment.

Motherhood is not a hobby, it is a calling. You do not collect children because you find them cuter than stamps. It is not something to do if you can squeeze the time in. It is what God gave you time for.

“It is what God gave you time for.”  I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how I’m spending my time.  This particular quote, one paragraph from a much longer and equally good article, was quite timely.  God doesn’t give us time for its own sake, but as a vehicle through which to do something – a means, not an end.  That is not to promote a certain activism, a twittering gotta-do-something attitude, because rest properly understood is something you “do”.  It is, rather, a reminder that not only are we given talents God desires to see us use properly, but we are given time that we must use properly as well.  Nothing good, nothing ordered to God, is a “waste” of time.

“Tomorrow!”  Sometimes it is prudence; many times it is the adverb of the defeated.

— St. Josemaria Escriva, The Way

Let your tomorrow be today.  Put off not what ought to be done.  Words to contemplate on this the feast of St. Dominic de Guzman, who truly spent himself for the Lord.  He was well known for spending the night praying to the Lord for his brethren, for heretics, for those who did not know God, indeed for any who needed prayers.  Maybe today is a good day to spend a little more time in prayer than you might have intended.  God would like the company.

I cannot begin to do the full reflection justice, but here is a small excerpt from Dom Gueranger’s The Liturgical Year:

Church of the living God ! how lovely art thou in thy first reception of the divine Spirit ! how admirable is thy early progress!  Thy first abode was in the Immaculate Mary, the Virgin full of grace, the Mother of God; thy second victory gave thee the hundred and twenty disciples of the cenacle; and now, three thousand elect proclaim thee as their mother, and, leaving the unhappy Jerusalem, will carry thy name and kingdom to their own countries.  To-morrow, Peter is to preach in the temple, and five thousand men will enroll themselves as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.  Hail! then, dear creation of the Holy Ghost!  Militant on earth; triumphant in heaven; beautiful, noble, immortal Church, all hail!  And thou, bright Pentecost! day of our truest birth! how fair, how glorious, thou makest these first hours of Jesus’ bride on earth!  The divine Spirit thou givest us, has written, not upon stone, but upon our hearts, the Law that is to govern us.  In thee, O Pentecost! we find realized the hopes foreshadowed in the mystery of the Epiphany; for though thou thyself art promulgated in Jerusalem, yet thy graces are to be extended to all that are afar off, that is, to us Gentiles.  It was thou, O holy Spirit! that dist attract them to Bethlehem: and now, in this Pentecost of Thy power, Thou callest all men; the star is changed into tongues of fire, and the face of the earth is to be renewed.  Oh! grant that we may be ever faithful to the graces thou offerest us, and carefully treasure the gifts sent us, with Thee and through Thee, by the Father and the Son!

As great and absolutely grace-filled as assisting at Daily Mass is, every once in a while you’ll see or hear something that puts that little itch in the back of your brain and the words “that just wasn’t right … was it?” roll through your mind.  The other day something … unusual … happened that actually had a couple of people talking in the stairway after Mass.  This particular liturgical oddity wasn’t what really stuck in my mind though, it was something someone said when I stopped to answer a question (it was inappropriate, I’m sure, and I probably should have kept my nose out of it but I just couldn’t … yet another thing for the Confessional I’m sure).  After I explained, in as brief of terms as I could, the theological reasoning behind the restriction of one particular practice one of the ladies said, “that seems awfully petty”.  At that my brain just stopped – petty was never a word I’d considered pro or con when dealing with the liturgy.

Petty – of little consequence, something of a “take it or leave it” thing.  Yet here we are at the worship of Almighty God, where is made present the Gift Christ himself died on the cross to give us – “who cares?” is not a term I’d really consider using around the Liturgy.  Yes, for me, liturgy is petty – it’s about thinking about those little things that you do (and don’t do) and whether they give greater glory to God or detract and distract.  To truly love someone is to fret over the little things – to know how they like their coffee, their favorite color, flower, author.  To love God is not to stop at the Beatitudes but to look beneath them, at the small things it takes to make the big things go.

Can you over-do it with a focus on the small things?  Of course you can, and I would never advocate a focus on buckled shoes over feeding the hungry.  To suggest, however, that one cannot do both the one and the other is frankly rather insulting.  In his The Spirit of the Liturgy Pope Benedict wrote that our unity comes not from our friendliness with each other nor from any other human source, but from our being centered around Christ – that it is through our common focus on Him that all our other forms of unity spring, and the source and summit of that focus is in the Liturgy.  Ought not we to make sure as best we can that our gaze is focused as closely on the center that is Christ by careful attention to how we cast that gaze?  Ought we not, in that sense, to be petty?

Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam.

As part of my Lenten practice I have this season been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship.  As he was a Lutheran I don’t necessarily agree with everything he writes, particularly when he (rarely) pokes into his understanding of the teachings of the Catholic Church, but I have found this work to be singularly powerful.  This was a man who devoted his life to Christ and, in the end, gave up his life for what he believed.  This book is just over 300 pages of reminding us we are called to just the same.  Pardon the length of the quote, but I found it incredibly applicable both to this season and to our times in general.

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church.  We are fighting to-day for costly grace.

Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares.  The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices.  Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits.  Grace without price; grace without cost!  The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can e had for nothing.  Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite.  What would grace be if it were not cheap? [click to continue…]