Thursday, October 30, 2008

holy father on liberty

ZENIT - Freedom Doesn't Justify Everything, Says Pope

'A redefinition of the meaning of liberty' is needed, the Holy Father said, noting that it is more and more conceived as an 'untouchable right of the individual' while the 'importance of its divine origins and communitarian dimension' are ignored.

'According to this interpretation, an individual alone can decide and choose the physiognomy, characteristics and finality of life, death and marriage,' he added. But, 'true liberty is founded and developed ultimately in God. It is a gift that is possible to welcome as a seed and to make it mature responsibly so as to truly enrich the person and society.'"

grace

'Good Samaritan' saves crying woman's foreclosed home - CNN.com

'Are you here to buy a house?' Marilyn Mock said.

Orr couldn't hold it in. The tears flowed. She pointed to the auction brochure at a home that didn't have a picture. 'That's my house,' she said.

Within moments, the four-bedroom, two-bath home in Pottsboro, Texas, went up for sale. People up front began casting their bids. The home that Orr purchased in September 2004 was slipping away."

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

sermon for pentecost 22 / proper 23 / year a / october 12, 2008

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today’s Gospel reading from St. Matthew is the parable of the wedding feast. And the juxtaposition of today’s readings – from Matthew, from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and from the Prophet Isaiah – invite us into the in-between time of the Kingdom of God, the borderland between time and eternity. In short, they invite us into the divine society which inhabits in a preliminary way the peace of God, and which proclaims that peace by proclaiming its author and instrument, Jesus Christ and him crucified.

The reading from the prophet Isaiah is one of my favorites. Isaiah, making himself the mouthpiece of God, announces the coming age of the Messiah, and the work that God will do through the instrumentality of the Messiah. After speaking of judgment – of God’s casting down the citadels of earthly power and self-assertion – Isaiah speaks of God’s vindication of the poor and helpless. The prophecy builds to a beautiful, apocalyptic crescendo, in which Isaiah speaks of what God will accomplish on mount Zion for all people: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined. And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken.”

Isaiah is speaking of Jesus and his cross, the means of God’s vindication of the poor and helpless, and his provision for his people – the instrument of his victory over death forever, and the gift of immortality for all who desire it. And of course he speaks of a feast, of good wine and rich food. This no doubt is why this prophecy has been placed alongside today’s Gospel reading in our lectionary.

And there is no question that we, as Christians, are invited to read Isaiah in this way: of speaking of the SAME feast of which Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel reading, the feast which we learn is nothing less than the marriage supper of the Lamb, the Kingdom of heaven itself, into which many indeed are invited – the many, that is, for whom Christ died (Matt. 26.28), and to whom the King has sent his servants, saying “invite to the marriage feast as many as you find.” “So the wedding hall was filled with guests.”

There are two main questions to be asked about this imagery: why a wedding? and why a feast?

When the Pharisees asked Jesus about marriage, he quoted the book of Genesis: “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, `For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19.4ff & Gen. 2). As with almost everything the Lord says, this teaching, while it seems to be about one thing, is really about another. It seems to be about marriage, and in a sense it is: the Lord is situating the vocation to marriage within the context of the differentiation and complimentarily God himself instituted between men and women at the beginning. But he is really saying something about himself: that he is the Bridegroom – the Son who left his Father (God) and Mother (Mary) and cleaved to a Bride: our human nature. God has joined his own nature and ours, the divine and the human, in the person of Jesus. The two have become one flesh. And what God has joined together, no one shall put asunder, for all eternity. As St. Gregory the Great said, “God the Father made a marriage feast for God the Son, when He joined Him to human nature in the womb of the Virgin.” And everything the Church teaches about the sacramental form of life in “Christian marriage”, including the Church’s moral teaching about human sexuality, is an outgrowth of the truth of what God has done in this most real of conjugal unions: the Incarnation of the Word.

It is a marriage FEAST because, by the Incarnation, God FEEDS US with the “one flesh” of Jesus. It was this union that was consummated on the cross (“consummatum est” – Jn. 19.30), and at every mass we call this “our Passover”, saying “therefore let us keep the feast, alleluia!” because only God can satisfy our hunger and slake our thirst – and he does this with the Body and Blood of his Son, which we are enjoined not merely to behold, but to take and eat.

The love of God in Jesus Christ – the love that overflowed first in the mystery of creation, and which reached a crescendo on Calvary and the renewal of all things – this love, God’s own love, is the form of life we inhabit in our rediscovery of ourselves, as beloved disciples (Jn. 13.23), in the bosom of the Body of Christ: loving him and keeping his commandments – as St. Paul says: “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4.13).

This form of life, the life of divine love, is the “wedding garment” (cf. Origen and Gregory the Great) Jesus speaks of in today’s parable, the dress code of the feast. For without LOVE, no one can recognize the voice of the Beloved – without love, no one can EXPERIENCE the love of God as anything but judgment and exclusion, because love must be mutual if it is not to become bitterness and resentment.

But when we put on love then we find ourselves nourished by God. We find our home in him, and the peace of God that transcends circumstance. This is “the secret” Paul speaks of in today’s Epistle reading: “the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want.” When we put on the love of God in Christ, as a garment, when we love and obey the Bridegroom of our souls, we find the satisfaction of our most fundamental desire. The Desire from which every desire springs, and of which every desire is a pale reflection. Finding the love of God in Jesus Christ therefore means having no anxiety about anything, but living in peace and contentment – as Paul says – knowing how to be abased and how to abound… it means being enabled to do “all things in him who strengthens me.”

This is what it means to live in the borderland between time and eternity: to draw sustenance from the eternal God for life in the temporal world. It means, as Paul says, “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving” letting your requests to be made known to God. And it means listening, really listening, with hope and expectation and OBEDIENCE to Jesus when he commands us to be of good cheer, to be at peace in every circumstance, because he has overcome the world (Jn. 16.33).

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

making a home for jesus: the message of our lady of walsingham

This was the talk I gave at the Society of Mary meeting at Holy Cross on Saturday, October 4, 2008.

First I would like to consider the historiographical message of our Lady of Walsingham – that is, what does the HISTORY of the shrine have to say to us today, as 21st century Christians?

Before we can answer that question, we must first ask: what IS the history of Walsingham?

Walsingham was one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in medieval Europe. At Walsingham (in Norfolk, England) the Virgin Mary appeared in a vision in the year 1061 to a Saxon noblewoman named Richeldis de Faverches. The Virgin asked Richeldis to build a wooden house in imitation of the holy house at Nazareth, where the Annunciation took place and where the Word took flesh. This simple wooden house, with its image of our Lady and our Lord, was the most popular pilgrimage destination in England for five hundred years. During the Reformation, in 1538, the shrine and its adjoining priory were destroyed, and all of its gold and silver treasures were confiscated. The ancient image of Mary and Jesus was taken to London and burned. The sub-prior of the monastery, Nicholas Milcham, and ten others were convicted of high treason for resisting the destruction of the shrine and monastery, and were hanged, drawn and quartered. The site of the shrine was sold by Henry VIII to a private citizen who built a mansion there. An anonymous ballad, “The Lament of Walsingham”, records the sentiments of the people: “Weep, weep O Walsingham, / Whose days are nights, / Blessings turned to blasphemies, / Holy deeds to despites. / Sin is where our Lady sat, / Heaven is turned to hell, / Satan sitteth where our Lord did sway, / Walsingham, O farewell!” In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the shrine was restored by devout Catholics (Romans and Anglicans). In 1897 Pope Leo XIII blessed a new image, now housed at the “Slipper Chapel”. And in 1931 the Anglican vicar, Father Alfred Hope Patten rebuilt the Holy House. Walsingham has once again become an important place of pilgrimage and blessing for the faithful, and a place of cooperation and unity for Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics.

The history of Walsingham is the history of our Lady’s perennial invitation to each of us to make a home for Jesus - even as our Lady had done first: creating the space within her own soul for the Word of God to drop, “like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth” (Ps. 72.6); and then as Mary conceived within her womb, within her own finite materiality, and nurtured Jesus in that most intimate of human relations, that of expectant Mother and Child, and again as she made a physical home for him at the Holy House of Nazareth.

Mary’s “yes” to the Angel, her obedience to God’s summons, which is the message of the Annunciation, and therefore the message of Walsingham – Mary’s “yes” gives content to the Lord’s own word to all of his disciples: “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo, there! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Lk. 17.21). The Kingdom of God, the domain within which God’s will is carried-out, is of course Jesus himself. He is the location of the enactment of God’s will, the place where God reigns, and therefore Jesus is himself the Kingdom of God.

It was Mary’s vocation to nurture this Kingdom of God within her, to hold on in faith to God’s promise there, to give birth to him, to bring him forth to the world; again to make a home for him at the Holy House, and to watch as Jesus, the Kingdom of God, grew beyond the circumscription of her ability to hold onto him – her ability to make of God’s Kingdom something susceptible to her own custody. For as surely as God had chosen Mary, he had chosen others; he had determined indeed that the whole world was to become subject to his election in Christ.

Jesus perpetually outgrew the confines of his Mother’s embrace. He outgrew her womb; he outgrew the Holy House at Nazareth; he outgrew Galilee; he outgrew the Nations; and indeed he outgrew the cosmos: For indeed “he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1.18-20).

So of course as we walk in faith with Mary, we come to the cross, to the place of desolation, the place of a skull, where, if we are willing, a sword will pierce our own souls too (Lk. 2.35). And here we realize, with Mary, the mutuality of divine love. At the cross, the one-sidedness and self-seeking which each of us secretly hopes to smuggle into heaven, at the foot of the cross, with all its violence, we find stripped away. Here we discover the painful reality of what it means to have “found favor with God” (Lk. 1.30): that his taking hold of us means our desperate clinging to him in faith, in hope, and in love.

(And incidentally, here with Mary at the cross, and then at the tomb; we see what was proleptically, and prophetically, figured by the finding in the temple: when Mary and Joseph rediscover Jesus in the temple, after thinking that they had lost him, worried then too that the Kingdom of God had come to nothing.)

This is the narrative played out time and again in the history of the Catholic Church, and in our own personal histories too. We say “Yes” to the summons – “be it unto me according to your word” – and we live for a time in the expectant joy and intimacy of communion with the Lord. We become fruitful theotokoi – bearing Jesus to the world around us, making a home for him, and perhaps even finding that home to have become a place of pilgrimage for others.

But following Jesus in faith means allowing the universal scope of his mission to outstrip our need to enfold him in the embrace of our expectation. He is more than we can imagine, as he himself said: “I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (Jn. 10.16). And we experience as desolation his seeming to withdraw, though in truth he has said, “I will never fail you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13.5). But our holding on in faith leads us to the experience of his presence as absence, it leads us eventually to Calvary, where we can listen only to the echoes of his anguished cry, receding into silence, as he yields up his spirit (Matt. 27.50).

How do we hold on in faith in this place? Only by allowing faith to give birth to hope. Because we have believed that “these words are trustworthy and true” (Rev. 21.5), that his “faithfulness endures to all generations” (Ps. 119.90).

And here we can imagine Walsingham, on a silent morning in the year 1538, the priory and shrine a smoldering ruin, the faithful canons dead and hacked to bits, and the ancient image of Mary and Jesus taken to London and burned – the desolation of Calvary reenacted at England’s Nazareth. And the words of the Lament of Walsingham” receive their meaning: “Weep, weep O Walsingham, / Whose days are nights, / Blessings turned to blasphemies, / Holy deeds to despites. / Sin is where our Lady sat, / Heaven is turned to hell, / Satan sitteth where our Lord did sway, / Walsingham, O farewell!”

But faith gives birth to hope. Our Lady lost Jesus, but found him again in the temple after a three day search. She sat disconsolate by the cross, but was there again on Easter morning, another third day. And English Catholics, maintaining the faith for three dark centuries, would find Walsingham restored, the Holy House rebuilt, a new image enthroned, thanks to Pope Leo XIII and Father Hope Patten.

When we receive Jesus into our lives, when we make a home for him, inevitably we find the insufficiency of our circumscriptions, our efforts to hold on to him. As Augustine asked: “What place is there in me to which my God can come, what place that can receive the God who made heaven and earth? Does this mean, O Lord my God, that there is in me something fit to contain you? Can even heaven and earth, which you made and in which you made me, contain you?” Our holding onto the Lord must inevitably become a holding-on-to-him even as he withdraws beyond the horizon of our expectation. He has come to give us life – his own life. And so we find that his self-sacrifice never expends itself, on every altar of every catholic church at every mass in every century – that Jesus pours himself out in the deaths of a million martyrs, through the disastrous violence of the Reformation, and in the hours of our own darkness. This is the loving process of his taking us to himself, that where he is, there we might also be (Jn. 14.3).

But the Reformation will have run its course, and the dead shall be raised. The 20th century story of Walsingham is an Easter story: that God looked with mercy on the years of faithful hope, and through his servant Fr Hope Patten, restored England’s Nazareth. For he withdraws himself from us to take us to himself – he overflows the boundaries of our hearts, he goes about his Father’s business, leaving the feeble homes we make for him, so that we can find our home with him, in his Father’s house (Jn. 14.2). So the 20th century renewal of Walsingham is a sign of the restoration of all things in him by whom, and in whom, and through whom, and for whom all things were made – its a glimmer of the Apocalypse, when the Pantokrator will break his silence with the words “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21.5).