Have you heard the one about...

Yeah. Many times. Many, many times.

The one about the young Jewish girl who was visited by an...

... angel? Yeah. Heard it.

Archangel, actually. Top banana.

Yeah? Whatever. Anyway, heard it. Every Christmas since the year dot. It's how Jesus got born.

Ah. You know it.

Yeah. I was an angel in the school nativity play.

Really? Wings and everything?

Yeah. Mum made them. Coat hangers and pillow cases.

No feathers?

Nah.

Well at least you had wings.

Yeah. Is this going somewhere?

She was the same age you are now, you know.

Who, the girl with the angel? Yeah? Cool. Hey, wait a minute... fourteen and having a baby?

Yup.

Uncool. In a stable?

Well, probably but no-one can say for sure any more. Long time ago. Not in a nice hospital, that's for sure. Somewhere poky and cold, with animals snuffling around.

Not cool, then, heheh - cold.

I would think so, yes. Poor baby. Born shivering. Not a good start.

Jesus. Mary was his mother. Dressed in blue.

Yes. Mary. Not sure about the blue, though. Blue was expensive in those days.

Whatever. So he was born in a dump and freezing from the off.

Yes.

Rough start in life.

It got rougher. A lot rougher.

Yeah. Crucified, right?

Yes. Do you know that that means?

Well, kind of.

Tortured to death. Even before they got him he knew what was coming his way and he was so terrified that he actually sweated blood. It's very rare, but it happens. Your whole skin is agony if anyone so much as touches it, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.

Then they they came for him. All his friends took off and he was on his own. He was beaten by sadists who used whips with sharp bits of metal in them. 'Scourging,' it's called. He lost a lot more blood, of course. Then they rammed big thorns into his scalp like a kind of sick-joke crown. Most amusing. They called him Your Majesty and bowed and laughed and hit him round the head. Because they could. Then they marched him through the streets carrying a heavy wooden beam, only he couldn't do it because he was so weak from loss of blood. He kept collapsing. The crowd were encouraged to kick him as he went by. Local Tradition. Nice. They had to keep hauling him to his feet and finally they had to make a bloke in the crowd help him carry the wood.

When they finally got him to the execution place they stripped his clothes off him. Of course that meant he lost a lot more blood as all his wounds were ripped open. He was half-dead now. Then they nailed his hands to the beam he'd hauled, and got it up on to the top of a big upright pole that was already standing there. They nailed his feet to that. So now he was hanging there on the cross, pinned to it by the nails, his weight dragging on the nails. You can't last long like that, especially not after what he'd already gone through. Then, they just left him there to die. It took three hours. That's crucifixion.

I've seen pictures.

Mm. You get kind of used to those pictures, don't you? Easy to forget that you're looking at a man in unbelievable agony.

Yeah.

A man who was known everywhere for doing good. Healing sick people. Comforting sad and scared people. Telling them how we're meant to help each other get through life, without hate and viciousness, crime, all that sort of thing. He told them we're all created by God out of pure, eternal love, so that we can be loved. How this is and has always been the whole point of everything. Existence, life, everything.

Huge crowds followed him everywhere to hear him talk like that and to get cured of their diseases. They loved him. They tried to make him king a couple of times but he wouldn't have it. He kept running off into the hills, or to another town. He visited a lot of places, walked miles to heal people and tell them to make peace with those around them.'

Yeah. So, he did good and he tried to get everyone else to do like him. He didn't harm anyone. But look what happened to him. Bastards. But why?

Funny thing is, a lot of them thought that on balance they were doing a good thing, getting rid of a trouble-maker, a disturber of the peace. He knew what they were thinking and he forgave them. Even when he was dying in incredible pain at their hands, with his poor mother right beside him, and he could see the suffering in her face. Forgave them, prayed for them. Remarkable. Don't you think?

'Yeah. Don't know how he could forgive them. I wouldn't.

Silence.

That day, the day he died - they call it Good Friday.

Uhuh. Not really what you'd call a good day, though, was it?

For him, no. For us, yes.

What? Why?

There was a soldier who was told to stand there, by the cross, to make sure he was dead. He heard Jesus forgiving his torturers as he died and he realised that he was seeing a one-off, something more than human, right there. He saw it in the forgiving face of this man he watched die, without complaints and no screaming for 'Justice!' A man who just took all they could do to him and defended those who did it it - his killers. 'Love your enemies,' he'd always said. And he did just that, right to the end. Even a terrible, terrible end like that.

Silence.

Born in a freezing dump and tortured to death. What a life. How old was he?

When he died?

Yeah.

Thirty-three.

My mum's thirty three. I think. Or maybe she's forty-three. What happened to Jesus's mum?

She collapsed, but she got over it.

But how could his mum get over all that... that... horror story?

Well, because the next thing that happened was very weird.

What was that?

After Jesus died, his friends buried him in a grave in the rocks. Three days later, his mother met him. Alive. Walking, talking, smiling. Absolutely fine. Covered in scars, I would think - no-one mentioned them, but, well after all that? - but as well as can be. Yet somehow... different.

You're KIDDING! Even if a bloke survived all that, it'd take him months to recover. If he ever did. In intensive care too! Three days?

Yep. And he had foretold that, too, although pretty much nobody knew what he was talking about at the time.

Wait. Seriously? Actually dead. Really dead. And three days later, alive?

Yes. I told you it was weird. But thousands saw him. The whole city had been talking about his death, the failure of their hero, or so it seemed, so you can imagine the impact of his coming back to them.

Wow. A ghost!

Um, well, not a ghost, no.

Course he was a ghost.

Well, how many ghosts do you hear about who cook their mates a barbecue on the beach? He did. Or with holes bored in them by a torture squad and they show you those holes all healed up three days later and tell you to put your finger in the holes?

Blimey.

So, dead, and then alive again. The complicated word for it it is 'resurrection'. It means raised up again, from being dead to being alive again.

Yeah - I've heard of that... oh, yeah, wait - Easter!

Yup. Easter. When we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God.

Chocolate. But - what? Son of God? How do you make that out?

That's what Jesus said he was. He said it before he died, and he said it again when he came back to life. I don't know about you, but if anyone can come back to life after being dead for three days, just as they predicted, well, I sort of feel I have to believe whatever he tells me. So, not a liar or delusional. He predicted it, and it happened. Back from the dead in three days. A normal man AND the son of the God who made you, me, the world, the galaxy, the universe, everything. Son of that God. The God. Dead, buried and back to life. Because he was God.

So...

Remember that archangel? He told the young girl, Mary, that her son would be the son of God.

Oh.

The people who were around then and saw Jesus after he came back from being dead, well, suddenly they understood what he had been saying all the time. They were utterly transformed. They had been a band on the run, sad, scared, confused people, friends of an executed 'criminal', hiding from the law, but after they met Jesus again - ALIVE! - they were fired-up and they thought, "Right, the whole world has to hear about this, and nothing's going to stop us telling them!" So they braced up, got out and started telling people.

And two thousand years later, the people they told and the people they told... and so on down the centuries... are still telling the story. Best story ever. And it's all as true and amazing today as it was then.

You mean...?

Yes. He's still alive. He'll never die again. He's around for ever, now, just like he'd promised. And I'm one of those people going round telling people about it. So what do you think? How about you? Care to join in? Oh - and how would you like to meet him?

Silence

Er... I've got football in a bit. Later, OK?

OK. Good luck. Hope you win. See you later. We'll both be waiting for you. Whenever you're ready.

I will take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket —safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. - C S Lewis

Lewis's experience of love, vulnerability and heart-pain was profound and searing. He was a wounded man. He lost his childhood faith after losing his mother when he was nine, his best friend in WW1, then his father, and finally his wife. Through the balm of the love of friends, he found his faith again and learned to grasp the connection between his creaturely vulnerability and the vulnerability of the omnipotent Creator who, in the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, entered fully into human vulnerability, even submitting to degradation and death - for love. Just for love.

Without love, without its vulnerability, life has no meaning. Without love, I am a tinkling cymbal, walking around and making a little noise but barely human: as Lewis says, 'unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable'.

Life springs from love. Love is life-giving, in every sense. But it is life-taking, too – it requires no less than everything.

If you do not love enough, you are not truly alive. If you do love enough, you will be killed. - Herbert McCabe OP

Perhaps not physically killed like the Son of God, but if I love enough the price of love may indeed feel like a sort of death.

Grief is the price we pay for love - Queen Elizabeth II

To love is to become open, vulnerable. Without self-gift to the other and the embracing of one's vulnerability, if I am not prepared to accept pain as the price to be paid, it is not love. It is something, but it is not love.

Love alone can redeem. God is love. God alone can redeem.

Almighty God, the perfect fount of all love, who in Himself has need of nothing and no-one, so loved the world – us – unconditionally, with all His divine power, that His Majesty, the creator and sustainer of all, chooses to be vulnerable. Vulnerable as Jesus Christ, true God and true man, on earth, in time, two thousand years ago, and vulnerable now in the Blessed Sacrament of His Body and Blood.

I have loved you with an everlasting love. - Jeremiah, 31:3

In His Son, Jesus Christ, God suffered for love. And that same Son has told us that, to share in His life, to be alive, we must do the same:

Love one another, as I have loved you.  - John 15:12-17

*

Almighty God, you love me no more and no less than you love every other man, woman and child: with an immense and total love beyond my imagining, poor creature that I am. 

Let me remember this, whenever I look at people whom I do not like, or even dislike, those I resent, who irritate or offend or threaten me, when I look at the enemies of my loved ones, even the enemies of your Divine Son. 

Make me remember your Son's command, in the very same moment when I would reject them. Remind me that, in that very same moment, you are gazing at me and asking me to love them, because you love them, all of them, every single one, with an immense and unimaginable love, exactly as you love me, sinful, shallow, soiled and ungrateful as I am. 

Let me become vulnerable to them, Lord, like your Son. Make me remember that your Beloved Divine Son was made so vulnerable by His great love for them, that He suffered torture and died a criminal's death for them. And for me. Make me understand that, through His dying for love, your Son, Our Lord, made every, infinitely precious one of them my brother, my sister. 

And that if that if that hurts me, it is meant to. If it costs me my life, so be it. Thy will be done.

*

Ah, how easy it is to to write this at my comfortable desk. How hard to live it. And yet... of myself I can do nothing, but nothing is impossible with God.

Lord, teach me to love others as you have loved me. Take out of my flesh this heart of stone and give me a new heart of flesh. (cf. Ezekiel 36:26)

Love is His meaning. - Julian of Norwich

Trudging on trustfully - in the footsteps of doofuses

'The promise of the Holy Spirit is not that he will give you perfect people to teach you, but that he himself is the soul of the Church and that he will not allow it to define error as truth. When (not if) some member of the Church is shown to be flawed, that is not an appalling revelation of the horrible truth that everything you have ever believed is a lie. It’s a confirmation of what we’ve known ever since Jesus himself chose 12 doofuses to be his apostles and suffered betrayal and abandonment at their hands. And the chief of them was, in Chesterton’s phrase “a shuffler, a coward, and a snob—in a word, a man”. That’s good news, because it means that if Peter can be a saint, so can a couple of drips like you and me.' 

 Source:

Stolen property!

TimothyOP: 'The Order was started in a pub at an all-nighter. St Dominic could not have spent all night saying 'You're wrong, you're wrong!'

— ProdigalOPL (@ProdigalOPL) October 26, 2013

Guess who (no prizes): 'I suspect there are more people in Rome's theological colleges doing doctorates in canon law than in Scripture.'

— ProdigalOPL (@ProdigalOPL) October 26, 2013

'Jesuits? Splendid fellows but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one' - theologian, controversialist & wit, the late fr Herbert McCabe OP

— ProdigalOPL (@ProdigalOPL) October 23, 2013

SJs were founded to oppose Protestantism, OPs to oppose Albigensianism. Seen many Albigensians lately? (Apols to St Ignatius & friends)

— ProdigalOPL (@ProdigalOPL) October 26, 2013

Shamelessly stealing Timothy's jokes. Tsk.

— ProdigalOPL (@ProdigalOPL) October 26, 2013

Assurance

S Teresa of Ávila, by Peter Paul Rubens

  Let nothing disturb thee,
Nothing affright thee;
All things are passing;
God never changeth; 
Patient endurance 
Attaineth to all things; 
Who God possesseth 
In nothing is wanting;
Alone God sufficeth.


- Saint Teresa of Ávila, in Longfellow's classic translation from the Spanish.

... for he had great possessions.

Watts Gallery

Now that's what I call...

The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham launched its new Mass text this week, in its London HQ Church of the Assumption of the BVM, Warwick Street.

The NLM website reports (emphasis mine):

It began with words from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, hallowed by generations of Anglicans: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires are known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee and worthily magnify thy holy Name…”  

Other passages from the Book of Common Prayer included The Comfortable Words and The Prayer of Humble Access: “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in the manifold and great mercies…” Traditional elements of the Roman Rite such as the Last Gospel and the preparatory Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, options within the Ordinariate Use, were also included.  

The sermon was preached by Monsignor Andrew Burnham, Assistant to the Ordinary and a member of the special working party set up by Rome which devised the new Use. In his sermon, Mgr Burnham said: 

"...Have we, in the Ordinariate, dreamed up our very own ‘hermeneutic of rupture’? Certainly, we have broken away from the Church of England, in which most of us had spent most of our lives. We have broken away too from the trajectory of modern Anglican liturgical revision... But ... we have most truly discovered in place of rupture ‘a hermeneutic of continuity’, that is we have found a way of joining together Cranmer’s linguistic brilliance, and feel for translation, with the ancient Canon of the Mass, prayed everywhere in England from the time of St Augustine until the Reformation, that is, a thousand years. And that Canon continues to be prayed throughout the Universal Church. There’s continuity for you."

Excellent.

Er... I'm English. Did you spot that?

"Fear not." Hearing God's loving laughter in the Divine Office.

Woke up ridiculously early this morning and decided to read my email... big mistake!

Memo to self: do not read email and especially not Catholic e-newsletters before (i) Morning Office to put the world into God's perspective and (ii) a decent breakfast. Both are necessary to fortify you to deal with the daily flood of Really Bad News. 

Of which one piece this morning was an absolute corker - real Handcart to Hell stuff. What was worse than the catalogue of doom-laden facts was the comment section. (Will I never learn?) Obviously some Hell-bound handcarts have been customised with slick tyres and go-faster stripes.

As I read about species-self-hate and gobbets of the hate-filled ignorance which now seems to pass for serious debate about how to handle humanity's unprecedented technical power over its own life and death, I got very depressed. Not for the first time I found myself fearing that, in today's world, Catholic truth is... well, drowning. That the Church is losing the war. Or at least, some awfully big battles. (No, wait... it got better.)

Sometimes these days, apart from the sadness of it all, I often get frightened as, aghast, I hear the Devil laughing: laughing at the inhuman paths which, in many critical respects, our world is choosing. Laughing at his triumphal persuasion of millions of people that he does not exist, which of course leaves him free to rampage at will. And laughing loudest of all (or so it seems, because it's right here in my ear) at goody-two-shoes-faithful-Catholic me, for my gloomy, weak and wobbly faith in the Omnipotence of God.

Lord,  save us! We are sinking! Mt 8:25

And I think...

Christ has no body on earth now but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ must look out on the world.
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless people now.

I ask myself, What can I do for heaven's sake? I am a Dominican. I am to preach, but how, Lord, how, when I am so tiny? I am just a grain of sand...

... or a grain of mustard-seed, maybe? ... 

... caught in a tsunami of anti-Christ, anti-Catholic, anti-human forces. What can I do, against so many powerful people so much cleverer than I. Charismatic, popular people, many in positions of power and influence from which they persuade my friends, my government, whole societies, even some in the Church, that their way is truth and will benefit humankind. It won't. It won't. Their way is death, for souls and for the world.

I remind myself that, even though it can feel like it in the silent pre-dawn darkness, I am not alone, and that so many other people who are cleverer than I, and charismatic, popular and influential, are Christian (many even Dominican!) - the Body of Christ! They have stronger faith than I and are better-armed than I who am just a water-carrier in the rearmost rank of what we used to call the Church Militant.

So with a deep breath I take up my little sword breviary and, as the Enemy scuttles off, his chortling turning to snarling, I begin to read, and suddenly there is the glorious sound of the Son of God laughing, MUCH louder, a cosmic laugh, loud enough to banish all my fear.

It happens every single time. There, in the page of the Divine Office for THIS day, EXACTLY the reassurance I need in THIS moment.

You looked kindly, O Lord, on your land: you ended the captivity of Jacob.

You forgave your people’s unrighteousness and covered over their sins.

Truly the Lord will give generously, and our land will be fruitful. 

Justice will walk before him and place its footsteps on his path.

Trust in the Lord for all ages, for the Lord is your strength for ever.

He knows. He hears. 

I laugh and cry at the same time, and God laughs and embraces me. Ashamed of my lack of faith, I bury my face in Jesus's breast.

And I remember that, of course, Our Lord spoke of 'the Prince of this world' for a reason and the Almighty Father not only sees all the dreadful stuff that I see but sustains it in being for love's sake when He could wipe it out. Which is what I would do, of course, being extremely stupid.

"My thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways," says the Lord. Isaiah 55:8

No, Lord. Quite. Just as well.

Pilate therefore said to him, "... Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?" Jesus answered him, "You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above." John 19:1

Yes, Lord. Yes.

This Church, this 'drowning' Church (ha!) is the Body of Christ through Whom all things were made and without Whom nothing was made that was made. Oh, how fear drives out thought.

Oh, Lord, I do believe. Help thou my unbelief.

Let nothing disturb thee;

Let nothing dismay thee:

All thing pass;

God never changes.

- St Teresa of Avila

All will be well, and all manner of things will be well. - Julian of Norwich

For the love of God and neighbour

'The terrorists showed us what they do on Sundays. We show them what we do on Sundays. We unite.'

The words of Pakistani Muslim lawyer, Mohammad Jibran Nasir, who encouraged Muslims and Christians to stand together in a human chain outside St Anthony's Anglican church in Lahore which was bombed last week, causing death and terrible injuries among both the congregation and the poor people whom they were feeding, as usual, after their Eucharist.

via USCCB and The Express Tribune

Cardinal Dolan & Fr Robert Barron meet the press

Putting the gentlemen (and ladies) of the press straight on the Pope's interviews, his pastoral teaching and the Church's true priorities.

 Excellent stuff.

 

Trust

We have grown used to the idea that just as there are people with talents for sport or scholarship, and the rest of us can only admire them without trying to keep up, so there are people with a talent for holiness and heroic virtue, and the rest of us can only bumble along as best we can. We can’t do better because we’re not designed to do better, so there’s no point in trying. We sink into a consoling mediocrity. 

Thérèse wrecks this. She was physically weak and psychologically vulnerable. For her the great saints were giants, they were inaccessible mountains, and she was only an “obscure grain of sand;” but she was not discouraged. St John of the Cross taught her that God can never inspire desires that cannot be fulfilled. The Book of Proverbs told her, “If anyone is a very little one, let him come to me.” If you only look, Scripture is permeated with images of our littleness and weakness with respect to God, and of his care for us in our insignificance. 

Thérèse’s “Little Way” means taking God at his word and letting his love for us wash away our sins and imperfections. When a priest told her that her falling asleep during prayer was due to a want of fervour and fidelity and she should be desolate over it, she wrote “I am not desolate. I remember that little children are just as pleasing to their parents when they are asleep as when they are awake.”

Text source: Universalis.
Image from here.

Things may be looking up at last. Not before time, Lord. #music

Not long ago I was making my post-Communion thanksgiving at a beautifully devout and prayerful celebration of the greatest gift available to humanity this side of Heaven when the silence was ruptured and I was brutally (and temporarily, thank God) relocated to Purgatory by the most horrible, unspeakably ghastly noise coming out of the PA system.

It was a CD track of vacuous, hippyish, 1980ish, human-worshipping, faux-Celtic, unmusical, semi-literate dross suitable only for a hearing-impaired pre-schooler; the unfashionably nasal wail of a vain and foolish female who had believed the person with the tin ear who had told her that she was a singer. Quite possibly it was her strumming the accompanying guitar, too.

The 'libretto' concerned (you'll love this) making an offering to His Majesty the Almighty Father of the fluff in one's pockets and small bits of string. I am not making this up. (There were no children present. The average age of the congregants was about 60.) There were several verses in this genre, punctuated by a mind-numbing refrain with the sort of narcoleptic power which would have come in handy for David when all he had to pacify the insane Saul was a harp. This refrain, or actually hit Saul over the head with the harp.

Swallowing hard, I gritted my teeth and rammed my fingers into my ears as hard as I could, squeezing my eyes tight shut in a desperate attempt to deaden all my senses for the duration. I prayed hard for the grace of endurance, telling myself that it would all be over in three and a half minutes. I pleaded with St Cecilia (first) to have actually existed so that (second) I could appeal for her prayers to (a) make it stop and (b) remedy the appalling state of devotional music in this benighted country. I also prayed, naturally, for health and long life for my fellow Dominican, James Macmillan, prophet of hope for music lovers in the Western Church.

It was, as I said, Purgatory.

I know I am a sinner, Lord, unworthy and and deserving of harsh chastisement, but don't you think that was a bit much?



But now God be thanked for James MacMillan and for Pope Benedict XVI (music lover) and Pope Francis (music lover).

I think God might just be looking kindly on my desperate prayers, after all.

Really, really bad politics. No points.

Have to wonder: Do WH and HHS really want the optics of fighting Little Sisters of the Poor? Really? Bad, bad optics. http://t.co/iJsj9Vn7xx
— Elizabeth Scalia (@TheAnchoress) September 25, 2013

AMDG

Thanks be to God and the Blessed Mother of His Son for many blessings received during my recent 8-day guided retreat at St Beuno's Jesuit Spirituality Centre in Wales.

Dear Js. They raised me, so to speak – my convent school was in a Jesuit parish. They taught me how to think, as a young person, and when I became an adult they taught me the balance of faith and reason. One Jesuit in particular was a faithful friend for many decades until his death not so long ago.

I had always kind of followed the Js in the Great Dispute with the OPs about free will and grace... and then I got to know the OPs and heard their side of the story. As the time came for me to make a decision about becoming a Dominican, I confessed to a theologian friar that I thought I still might be a bit of a Molinist. He thought that, since I was not actually applying to be a friar, we could let that be our little secret...

Since then, I have learned a lot. I am no longer a 'secret Jesuit' or even a Molinist but a full-hearted and happy Dominican. That is what I remained throughout the eight blessed days of silence in the guided retreat at St Beuno's, learning once again, from a wonderful Ignatian retreat guide, the inestimable value to Christian spiritual life of the gift that is our brother St Ignatius of Loyola.

In the unlikely event that any of them is reading this, I'm remembering in my prayers of gratitude all my retreat companions, 'a very prayerful bunch', according to the director. God be with you. And may Our Lady preserve St Beuno's and all who sail in her.

Melkite Syrian village attacked - Patriarch's appeal

Please read this. And pray for them.

And for all the 450,000 Syrian Christians driven out of their homes.

Bad arguments against religion: No.789

Been a bit busy!

Our fraternity in Cambridge has been setting up a new blog/website. What with that and all the excitements following the annual congress in Hull, not to mention summer holidays, I haven't been here for a while.

Tsk. An idle blog is a waste of space. Must try harder!

If you want to check that I am still this side of Heaven, you may well find me over at the Cambridge Fraternity blog.

But not for the next couple of weeks. Off to St Beuno's. Eight days IGR (plus two travelling). Something I have always wanted to do but in past years when I could go they had no slot for me. And now, finally!  Hmm... scary or inspiring? I wonder...  Either way, I can't wait!

I love the Js. I was raised by them. Before Admission to the Dominicans I was wondering whether the OPs would actually accept me as I'd always felt very J-ish and was a bit unsure about The Great Dispute.

I confessed to an eminent friar-theologian that I might (whisper it!) be a bit of a Molinist on the quiet. He reassured me that since I wasn't applying to be a friar (tricky for a woman) we could safely let that be our little secret, implying, I supposed, 'You will learn, duckie, you will learn.' I have!

But I still love the Js. And funnily enough, one of the spiritual directors at St B's is (or was) a Dominican sister. I wonder who I'll get. Whoever you are, I am very grateful to you.

Q. What kind of Catholic are you?

Q. What kind of Catholic are you — a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?

 A. I don’t know what that means. Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?

 Q. Yes.

 A. Yes.

 Q. How is such a belief possible in this day and age?

 A. What else is there?

 Q. What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.

 A. That’s what I mean. . . .

 Q. I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?

 A. Yes.

 Q. Why?

 A. It’s not good enough.

 Q. Why not?

 A. This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.

 Q. Grabbed aholt?

 A. A Louisiana expression. . . .

SOURCE

The authentic voice of Peter, the same yesterday, today and tomorrow

"When we reached the place of the tomb of the Apostle Peter I saw the Holy Father transfixed, visibly moved, before the white wall covered with graffiti, testimonies to us even today of devotion to the Apostle Peter.

Climbing back up the stairs and having reached the Clementine Chapel, Pope Francis became absorbed in prayer and repeated with a loud voice the three professions of Peter: “Lord, You are the Christ, Son of the Living God”; “Lord, to whom do we go? You have the words of eternal life”; “Lord, You know all things! You know that I love you!”.

At that moment, we had the distinct impression that the life of Peter rose out of centuries past and became present and living in the current Successor of the Apostle Peter."

- Angelo Comastri, Cardinal-Archpriest of St Peter's Basilica

Death of irony, and some remarks made at the wake

On April 17, 2011, two of (Serrano's) works, Piss Christ and The Church, were vandalized. The gallery director plans to reopen the museum with the damaged works on show "so people can see what barbarians can do"... (Wikipedia)

/facepalm.

Huh? What do I think? Oh - this:

The culture war over Piss Christ is really a battle of competing egos: the ego of the artist and the egos of the offended observers. What more could it be? Consider, after all, what Piss Christ is. It is the "aesthetic equivalent of a temper tantrum," Rev. George Rutler, a Catholic leader in New York, told me in an e-mail. 

"Since Christ survived a crucifixion, Christianity will not be harmed by some man's display of his own arrested development," Rutler wisely remarks. 

[...] 

"Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination," writes Camille Paglia, an atheist, in her new book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. She is referring directly to Piss Christ. 

I interviewed Paglia last Thursday about her new book at the museum of art in Philadelphia, and she made the point that religion lies at the heart of all great art. One of the reasons why the art world is spiritually and intellectually hollow today, she said, is because it continues to "sneer" at religion and think, mistakenly, that doing so is still avant-garde. It's not. It's old news. 

Serrano's work is not so much anti-Christian as it is anti-intelligent. So why not let the Piss Christ, and the juvenile imagination that gave birth to it, die in the light of sunlight?

- from an article at Catholic Education Resource Center by Emily Esfahani Smith.

The Crucifixion - earliest-known depiction?

Well, according to the page from which I have borrowed this image, it is.

This is one of the carved panels in the 5th century cypress-wood door of the Basilica of Santa Sabina, the oldest extant Roman basilica.

Since 1222, Santa Sabina has been the conventual church of the mother-house of the Dominicans, the Order of Preachers, on the Aventine Hill in Rome.

On the feast of the Assumption, a prayer for England

Our Lady of Walsingham

O Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God
And our most gentle Queen and Mother,
Look down in mercy upon England, thy dowry,
And upon us all who greatly hope and trust in thee.

By thee it was that Jesus, Our Saviour and our hope,
Was given unto the world,
And He has given thee to us
That we might hope still more.

Plead for us thy children,
Whom thou didst receive and accept
At the foot of the cross,
O Sorrowful Mother.

Intercede for our separated brethren,
That with us in the one true fold,
They may be united to the Chief Shepherd,
The Vicar of thy Son.

Pray for us all, dear Mother,
That by faith fruitful in good works
We may all deserve to see and praise God
Together with thee in our heavenly home.
Amen.

                 Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman

Absolute freedom for all eternity? That's quite an Assumption.

The ancient Christian tradition that the mother of Jesus, not a deity but a human woman, did not actually die but merely fell asleep (the Dormition of the Eastern Church) and was taken body and soul into a state of beatific union with God (the Assumption of the Western Church) has been passed down the generations since the time of the people who actually knew her.

Most of the world-wide Christian community generally holds to some version of this idea because it is rooted in belief in the Divinity of Jesus Christ and in the Christian understanding of free will. That is to say that, for one who freely loves God (the idea of freely ‘loving’ a God who coerces you into it makes no sense) and is as close to God as Jesus' mother was, then death is a non-event.

To begin at the beginning: God. God is outside everything - that's the definition of God.

God and I are not two of any class of thing – Herbert McCabe OP. 

(Not getting that is only Richard Dawkins' first mistake...)

Only by positing that God is 'outside everything', i.e. neither part of nor like the material/cosmic system, can one begin to see that God is in a position to be the existential origin and ground of everything, including all conditions for all acts, that is, including freedom. (Words: ‘Freedom’ is not a stand-alone thing but a description of your condition when you do something – not a predicate but a condition of an act.)

So, to unite oneself with God means to unite oneself with the very creator of freedom, the essence and ground of freedom, and thus to become wholly free. This is part of what we understand Jesus to have meant when He said that He – the Divine – is the way, the truth and the life.

We do in order to become. To be Christian means to do whatever we can in order to become as like Jesus as we can – to become as totally united as possible with Christ the God-become-Man, and hence totally free and fully alive; so free, in fact, that death has no part to play.

That’s how it was with Our Lady. Redeemed by Christ from her unfreeness before she was even conceived (the Immaculate Conception), she was totally free to respond Fiat in loving response to the God who so loved her that he offered her His Own Word to be her beloved Son.

Both Mary and her Son were so utterly free that death could not have either of them.

But, you say, Jesus died. Well, certainly He died – He was human, wasn't He? (Whoops. Is. He's not dead.) But read on...

He didn’t have to die, being God and being free, but He chose to go the whole human hog, so to speak: to live our whole human life which naturally (sic) includes dying. That was His 'obedience' to His Father:

'Go and make it possible for them to glimpse something of the fathomless love of the Almighty for them by becoming one of them. Be fully human. Live as they live. Experience human love, longing, hurt, laughter, joy. And die, because they have to die, and so your human experience will be precisely their human experience in its totality. Then, when they look at you, they will see both themselves and Me.'

And die He did. The same unremarkable, violent death-by-torture as meted out to thousands of other losers and criminals and inconvenient so-and-sos in the socio-political set-up of that time and place. The manner of His death shocks us now but back then it was nothing special. Most people never even noticed.

However… His extraordinariness, His uniqueness as experienced personally by those who had met Him and the stunning, life-changing, tangible fact of meeting Him alive again after His very public death, made it blindingly clear that He had chosen death in order to be fully human. 

‘Atonement?’ Is that the word? 

Well, look. Total up all our human foul-ups starting from the day we evolved from the quadrupeds, from the trivial to the abominably ruthless; from the extra cake I know is a greedy one-too-many to the merciless massacre of innocents with machetes and chemical weapons; from occasional drink-driving to genocidal slaughter. All of it. Billions upon billions of crimes and sins. Too much. The mind cannot cope.

Now consider the willing submission to death-by-torture of the perfectly free and perfectly good creator-and-sustainer-of-absolutely-everything, the God-who-became-human just so that we could glimpse and begin to understand the otherwise unknowable source of all existence, who loved us into life solely in order that we could be loved and could love in return. The Ultimate Loving Good voluntarily became human and freely accepted the most horrible ‘suffering unto death’, to make His point: fathomless love.

Love is His meaning – Julian of Norwich. 

I would say that that degree of freely given love ‘atoned’ for human evil-doing, no?

But did Christ have to die that terrible way? 

His death was inevitable, wasn't it? What with His being human and perfectly free to be perfectly good. He could have lived any-when… now, even... but, whenever, His complete freedom with its concomitant radical virtue would have been an outrage to someone with the power to kill Him off: a scared, radically challenged political authority, or some violent crime boss who looked into His eyes and knew he was seen for what he was. Oh, someone would have gone gunning for Him. Yes, it might have happened differently from the events back then in Jerusalem, but it would surely have happened because darkness will always extinguish, as far as it can, the light which terrifies it.

‘Be one of them, in every way, Son.’ 

One of us in every way except sin – because He couldn't sin. Sin means freely making a choice, when offered a tempting reason to do so, to diminish oneself or another. And why would He, being the essence of goodness and of love for all created beings, choose that? It simply wasn't part of the Son of Man’s make-up to choose to sin, because, being wholly God as well as wholly human, He was (Is! Is!) free to make the right choices. He couldn’t sin, and so death couldn’t hold Him. It just… follows.

Death is the one thing that finally and utterly deprives us of freedom. 

But if we were truly, radically free, that would mean, by definition, that even Death could not have us, as it could not have Christ and it could not have his Holy Mother. Their total and radical freedom robbed Death of its victory over them.

Being radically free would solve our Death problem, too. If only. If only there was a way…

Christ offers Himself to us as the solution to that problem, inviting us to see unity with Him as the way: the way to total freedom from making all the wrong choices which harm ourselves and others, the way to eternal joy, love and fulfilment.

I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.

 If you love me, you will keep my Commandments. 

Love one another, as I have loved you.

Yes, the same offer made to the Apostles, Jesus' friends, the offer of eternal life in union with our loving God, is made to us. And all we have to do is try to become free and thus sinless and utterly loving, like Jesus.

That’s all we have to do – try, all the time hoping in Jesus, having faith that He wants, intends and is helping us to do it.

Not to mention His totally free, immaculate and utterly Blessed Mother who, Assumed into Heaven in defiance of death, is willing us on to freedom and joy in union with her Divine Son, because by His Will, she is our Mother, too.

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

On the Feast of St Dominic

Greetings in the name of our holy founder to Dominicans everywhere: laity, sisters, nuns and friars.

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel! He has visited his people and redeemed them!

St Dominic, pray for us.

Citius, Altius, Fortius, Exanime

Stuart Reed in the current (print) edition of Britain's Catholic Herald newspaper:

'Let's be clear about one thing: the Olympic Games is not a festival of light, whatever the leaders of the Christian community may wish to believe. It is a pagan spectacle, perfectly tailored to the secular age and a public hooked on reality television and "safe sex". The Olympic Organising Committee is making 150,000 condoms available to the 10,000 or so athletes. Some of those young men and women must be very fit.'

'A wonderful counter to the junk theology of our times'

"The most important publication to cross my path in 1994 was the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, prepared by a Papal commission under the chairmanship of Cardinal Ratzinger. This serene, scholarly and authoritative statement offers a wonderful counter to the junk theology of our times. 

Unashamedly traditionalist, it nevertheless addresses directly the problems of life in modern society, offering practical answers which reaffirm the Catholic vision of man's spiritual calling."

Roger Scruton,
Times Literary Supplement, 2 December 1994

Benedictus

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel!
He has visited his people and redeemed them.

He has raised up for us a mighty saviour
In the house of David his servant,
As he promised by the lips of holy men,
Those who were his prophets from of old.

A saviour who would free us from our foes,
From the hands of all who hate us.
So his love for our fathers is fulfilled
And his holy covenant remembered.

He swore to Abraham our father to grant us,
That free from fear, and saved from the hands of our foes,
We might serve him in holiness and justice
All the days of our life in his presence.

As for you, little child,
You shall be called a prophet of God, the Most High.
You shall go ahead of the Lord
To prepare his ways before him.

To make known to his people their salvation
Through forgiveness of all their sins,
The loving-kindness of the heart of our God
Who visits us like the dawn from on high.

He will give light to those in darkness,
Those who dwell in the shadow of death,
And guide us into the way of peace.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, 
as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. 
Amen.

Luke 1:68-79