Ubi Petrus

Prayer to the Blessed Virgin
(Never known to fail):

“O most Beautiful Flower of Mount Carmel, Fruitful Vine, Splendor of Heaven, Blessed Mother of the Son of God, Immaculate Virgin, assist me in my necessity. O Star of the Sea, help me and show me here you are my Mother. O Holy Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and Earth, I humbly beseech You from the bottom of my heart to secure me in my necessity (make request). There are none that can withstand Your power. O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to Thee (3 times). Holy Mary, I place this cause in your hands (3 times).

Say this prayer for 3 consecutive days and then you must publish and it will be granted to you.

H/T to LaSalette Journey.

Honest. Just really, really busy. Still.

Pardon the one unclean word at the end. You can’t have gone through a computer degree in college and not have seen this movie at least once. Several of my friends could relate the whole movie from beginning to end from memory. Scary, yes…

A bleg to anyone out there who might know. My dear little daughter has expressed some interest in wearing a mantilla (and the Lord knows I’m not about to stop her). The problem is, first being a man (a.k.a. fashion dis-inclined) and second being mostly surrounded by people who are resistant to (or at least disinterested in) such things I’m not really sure where is a good place to get one. And, while I’m at it, what are the appropriate manners for its use? Any help for the clueless?

Yeah, I’ve been away from the blog for far too long. Again. Thankfully (and yet, no so all at the same time) my son’s baseball season is almost over even as it seems it’s barely begun.

So, in an effort to make up for all my time away I’m going to do something I don’t normally do and write a little about the non-ordinary. I suddenly feel like a scribe putting a quill pen to paper. Well, maybe not.

Several years ago my prayer life was far deeper and far more open than what I now find myself working through. Daily Mass, the Rosary and the Divine Office – all of it – were my constant companions. One day I was praying Morning Prayer in the second Sunday of the Psalter wherein we find the following reading from Ezekiel 36:25-27:

I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from all your impurities, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts. I will put my spirit within you and make you live by my statutes, careful to observe my decrees.

It really struck me deeply and instead of continuing on, for just a second I prayed, “Lord, remove this heart of stone and give me a natural heart in its place.” It was not the first time, nor the last, I’ve taken something like that and repeated it to myself, so that was not at all out of the ordinary. Suddenly though and with crystal clarity, as if etched into my mind, a response formed, “I do not destroy things, but rather transform them.” And that was it – as quickly gone as came.

At first I tried to argue from the text in front of me – you see, I knew just how much dirt and grime was covering my heart and I desperately wanted it gone and replaced with one without taint or mark. My ability to be thick-headed has never ceased to amaze me. Slowly, ever so slowly, I realized what my answer was telling me and that one sentence covered every part of salvation history from Adam and Eve to that very day and on until the end of time.

Our response when we get a glimpse of just what we have allowed ourselves to become is almost invariably to look for a quick fix – wipe it out, start over again. We’re always looking for a “fresh start” – we hear that term from our earliest days. And yet, even in the Sacrament of Penance, all record of our sin is not wiped out; God forgets, but we do not. This, however, is us cheating ourselves of what is a singularly great gift from God – our temporality. If we had not been created “in time” we could not learn from past experience because all experience would be in the same “now”. No, God created us in time to learn, to grow, to improve – no part of His plan was without need or design.

Just as God took hundreds of years to form and lead Israel to the Promised Land and then even more time to prepare them for the Messiah and even in their darkest days did not utterly destroy them but allowed some part to survive, learn and grow, so He will not destroy our hearts, no matter how dirty and grimy they may have become even if it may seem to us the fastest path.

Just as a diamond is found in surrounding material which only obscures its beauty and without that material and the force passed through it that diamond would remain only an obscure lump of coal, so we without our experiences both luminous and fetid would remain without understanding, without growth. I am not saying sin is necessary, that would be heresy; what I am saying, however, is that God works with every part of us to wipe away the effects of that sin and draw us ever closer to Him. That one spot that has, well, crud on it? That is the spot that is most in need of his polishing hand – to remove it would mean to remove a part of that very creation God himself called not only good but very good.

I find it interesting that after all these times of reading that quote this all finally starts to sink in. We all have areas of our lives we’d like to see gone, past parts we’d wish had never happened. I certainly have parts of me that I’ve spent a long time running away from, hiding from or ignoring. Those are the very parts though that God is reaching out His hand to clean and polish. God does not destroy, He transforms. We have only to remember this axiom and bring before God every part of us, including those parts we’d rather not remember.

This past weekend our Diocese had the delight of her Bishop ordaining three men to the diaconate as they continue to work towards the priesthood. Chris Martel, Matthew Mason and Jonathan White were all ordained to the service of Christ and His Church this past Saturday, May 31, the Feast of the Visitation, by Bishop John McCormack. All three will be continuing their seminary formation next year after their summer assignments, Deacon Martel at Mundelein Seminary, Mundelein IL; Deacon Mason at St. John’s Seminary, Brighton MA; Deacon Jonathan White at Bl. John XXIII Seminary, Weston MA. (Deacon Mason, incidentally, assisted at my parish during the Christmas break. I suppose it would be too much to hope that he be assigned here for his first assignment? One can always hope.)

We all look forward in hope to their ordination to the priesthood next year. This would mark the largest priestly ordination class in some time, and at a time the Church sorely needs Her priests. Please pray for them, and indeed all seminarians – theirs is a calling made to many but these days heard only by a few. Ad multos annos!

This fine book, published by Ignatius Press, is a collection of a series of addresses and writings by both then-Cardinal Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar on the subject of Mary, particularly in reference to her as an image and icon of the Church. As we are reminded by Cdl. Ratzinger, proper mariology is also ecclesiology and both mariology and ecclesiology are inseparable from christology. It is in an attempt to extrapolate the close interconnection between these studies that this book is given us.

Overall I was very impressed by this book – the level of its authors should make that no surprise. There were a few times where the selected work strayed for some time from the central topic but they all eventually returned there and it was only then that the heretofore tenuous connections were made clear. Having read enough of Cdl. Ratzinger/Pope Benedict and von Balthasar to know, this wasn’t altogether surprising – they both share a proclivity for, as someone put it, “speaking in paragraphs”. It is when you are feeling yourself lost in their writings that you must buckle down and hold on for this is where some of their more interesting points work themselves out. Incidentally, there is one note by von Balthasar where he pauses to contradict something Cdl. Ratzinger had written in Introduction to Christianitywhich I found rather amusing given that I had just recently finished the section of this book containing his contributions. It is obvious to the gentle reader who may not know otherwise these two men knew each other fairly well.

I’d like to take a couple of extended quotes from each author’s contributions to illustrate what one may find inside. First, from Cdl. Ratzinger:

In my opinion, the connection between the mystery of Christ and the mystery of Mary suggested to us by today’s readings is very important in our age of activism, in which th eWestern mentality has evolved to the extreme. For in today’s intellectual climate, only the masculine principle counts. And that means doing, achieving results, actively planning and producing the world oneself, refusing to wait for anything upon which one would thereby become dependent, relying rather, solely on one’s own abilities. It is, I believe, no coincidence, given our Wester, masculine mentality, that we have increasingly separated Christ from his Mother, without grasping that Mary’s motherhood might have some significance for theology and faith. This attitude characterizes our whole approach to the Church. We treat the Church almost like some technological device that we plan and make with enormous cleverness and expenditure of energy. Then we are surprised when we experience the truth of what Saint Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort once remarked, paraphrasing the words of the prophet Haggai, when he said, “You do much, but nothing comes of it” (Hag 1:6)! When making becomes autonomous, the things we cannot make but that are alive and need time to mature can no longer survive.

Then, from von Balthasar:

The Virgin, harboring a mystery under her heart, remains in profound solitude. In a silence that almost causes the perplexed Joseph to despair. Incarnation of God means condescension, abasement, and, because we are sinners, humiliation. And he already draws his Mother into these humiliations. Where did she get this child? People must have talked at the time, and they probably never stopped. It must have been a sorry state of affairs if Joseph could find no better way out than to divorce his bride quietly. God’s humanism at once begins drastically. Those whose lives God enters, those who enter into his, are not protected. They have to go along into a suspicion and ambiguity they cannot talk their way out of. And the ambiguity will only get worse, until, at the Cross, the Mother will get to see what her Yes has caused and will have to hear the vitriolic ridicule to which the Son is forced to listen.

*phew* That’s a lot to chew on. Then again, when you’re dealing with God’s plan for the salvation of mankind and the interaction of core parts of that plan it’s going to be rather heady work. If you’ve ever considered the connection between Mary and the Church, and particularly if you’ve never considered that connection, this book will give plenty to contemplate and a host of new insights. It may not be a definitive collection in this area, but then we will never have the definitive answers to these questions until we ask the One who put this plan together in the beginning. I’d highly recommend this book.

I’m apparently on a vocations kick lately. So be it. Servant and Steward has a reflection I want to see printed up and put in bulletins. Come to think of it, I want to see this type of writing periodically from priests all over, stuffed in bulletins, handed out or even just mailed randomly. It’s been said time and again the single greatest reason men don’t consider the priesthood is simply “nobody asked”. It’s time to remind them that they’re asked by God, and asked again by each of us to at least consider it.

And hey, while we’re at it, let’s not stop with priests – we need consecrated religious talking openly and honestly about their vocation. If Thomas Merton could write that much from a religious enclosure, certainly an occasional couple of paragraphs wouldn’t be a crazy idea. After all, if nobody asks, who can answer?

Today being the Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Church asks us all to pray in a particular way for all priests. The Weight of Glory has the goods. Read. Listen. Pray. Just in case you’re not inclined to click over, I’ll cut-n-paste the prayer for priests – now you don’t have an excuse.

Prayer for Priests

Lord Jesus, present in the Most Blessed Sacrament,
and living perpetually among us through Your Priests,
grant that the words of Your Priests may be only Your words,
that their gestures be only Your gestures,
and that their lives be a true reflection of Your life.

Grant that they may be men who speak to God on behalf of His people,
and speak to His people of God.
Grant that they be courageous in service,
serving the Church as she asks to be served.

Grant that they may be men who witness to eternity in our time,
travelling on the paths of history in Your steps,
and doing good for all.

Grant that they may be faithful to their commitments,
zealous in their vocation and mission,
clear mirrors of their own identity,
and living the joy of the gift they have received.

We pray that Your Holy Mother, Mary,
present throughout Your life,
may be ever present in the life of Your Priests. Amen.

… like four times in my previous post, I suppose it only right to show it done well.