Let all flesh be silent at the presence of the Lord: for he is risen up out of his holy habitation. Zechariah 2:13
Today is the feast of the Apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. By the Roman Church she is designated as the Patroness of the Americas and, so important is this feast to certain communities that, on the DL, of course, she is even commemorated by some Orthodox in the WR, and perhaps in the ER.
The image on the cloth looks very much like the image described in St John vision, which is an alternative reading for our feast:
A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun,
with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth. Rev 12:1-2
The miraculous image on the cloth weaves in such cunning ways the attributes of the Mother of God and the deities the local Aztecs would have known. The symbolism is easy to read for them although we - and their Spanish teachers - might miss it. And there are many more miraculous points to the image. My favorite being that if you photographically enlarge the eyes of the Virgin, you find that there are human images reflected in those eyes: It is believed to be the images of Juan Diego, Bishop Juan de Zummaraga, Juan Gonzales, the interpreter and others.
All of this may sound really quite surprising to you and decidedly unscientific, and even just clearly superstitious. These words are all useful if you don't want to say "miraculous". I prefer to say "miraculous".
In all her apparitions, as approved by the Church, Mary has appeared to the powerless - be they starving Irish, or oppressed Indians, Christians oppressed by Muslim invaders, or else the poor of Portugal or France. Always Mary appears to the weakest, the least and not always to their benefit: sometimes they are abused for their visions, sometimes they ridiculed and scorned by their families and neighbors. They may be, for a time, rejected by the Church. But always she reminds them that, though they are poor in the eyes of the world, they are, in her heart, richly blessed beyond measure.
I wonder why the rich never get that message? I can't imagine we don't need it.
In the Douay, the RSV, and the NABRE with other Mass texts
Confortamini, et nolite timere: ecce Deus vester ultionem adducet retributionis; Deus ipse veniet, et salvabit vos.
Take courage, and fear not: behold your God will bring the revenge of recompense: God himself will come and will save you. Isaiah 35:4b
Behold your God!
I've got little clips of the Messiah running through my head at this time of year. Not unexpected, but constant. This "Behold your God" is one of the places where the soloist can cut loose, embellishments happen, trills and runs, arpeggios and whatall, making a point of this prophetic utterance: BEHOLD YOUR GOD. This God with vengeance and healing is going to be a baby laying in a pile of cow fodder, born in blood and filth. And he will need his mother's milk to survive.
Behold your God.
There are some reasons not to like this guy - that whole vengeance part sounds scary, but verses 5 and 6 sound nice, "Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall be free: for waters are broken out in the desert, and streams in the wilderness."
Isaiah, however, puts the "Behold" right before the vengeance. As if to say, "Yeah, this is going to, on the whole, sound so very good that I'll need to put the tough bit first so you don't miss it: VENGEANCE." Gulp.
Maybe he means it for our enemies - like, all the people that beat up Israel will get punished. No, that can't be it: because most of the people that beat up on Israel God took the credit for. God was using them on us. Goodness. he means Vengeance on Us! Let's skip that part when we write up the music.
We like to edit God to make him conform to our ideas. I've been thinking about a few common edits popular today. I've decided to reject them. Here's why:
The first edited god I reject is the nearly-gnostic nudger. This dud planted hints in all our mind/world and wants us to just sort of get along. At the end of the day it's expected that this nudger will say, "Yeah, that wasn't the important part. Welcome to the important part now! Everyone's going to be there."
Were I to arrive at the Big and Pearlies and meet this party, I'd want to go to the other place: because this god is mute and powerless. I'd say to him, "You've seen us down here flummoxing along for millennia and all you could give us was a vague sense of "be excellent to each other" and that you might be here? Satan at least had the balls to try something more direct."
A wee bit further down the scale of desirable deities we find the Bipolar Holy Humbug: this one seems to have spoken once or twice, but not definitively. He has up days and down days. He's seemingly told the Jews to kill all the pagans, and told the Christians not to kill anyone, and told the Muslims to kill everyone except the Christians and the Jews, unless some politics intervene. He's told the Native Americans next to nothing, and together with all the pagans of Europe, they got bollox for not having a deity that could write.
Heaven for this guy will look like the Simpsons' version, with different clouds for different people, all having been promised different heavenly enjoyments. He will have to point out where each path got the "primal tradition" wrong. We'll all get heavenly treats, but we'll discover all our demerits too. Were I to arrive at the Sorting Supper for this archipelago, I'd let everyone know that this god has no power. Evidently once humans heard the Real Message, he couldn't stop us from making edits to the better passages. He left no authority and no teachers.
Finally, the Nihilistic Sociopathic Deity and Partier: the one that says "All are welcome, cross over! Everything is forgiven! Come to the banquet: the party is just starting! This deity has no rules and no one will get left out. He's either powerless to reveal any rules, or else he's made a lot of them (because we do have a lot of them) yet they are of no value at all. I might think sex is holy one way, but not another... this deity doesn't care. You might think ideas of justice and peace are important, but this god doesn't care. The liberal sort might imagine that they should be saving the world. This god doesn't care. This god doesn't care if you're Donald Trump, Mother Teresa, Larry Flint, or you and me. There is no punishment. There is no justice.
Were I asked to belly up to this bully's buffet, I'd throw the tray in his face: millennia of striving for various ideas of perfection (and, yes, some of them overlap, while some of them are mutually exclusive) when all we needed to do was kill, maim, grab all the bootie and the bootay and then we'd all get to heaven anyway. Yeah, this guy hates us. Totally hates us.
In the end, however, all three of these demonic delusions have one trap left to spring: you can't say no to them. Unless they change their minds - they could you know. We could all end up in hell just because they were passive aggressive as well as bullies. Unless they do that though, you're trapped with them though all eternity. They intend to save us all even if we don't want them to: eternal damnation in heaven.
I'll take a God who loves us so much as to give us the freedom to say no. I will follow a God who loves us so much that he gives us instructions for how to follow him and, from time to time, offers correctives when we step out of line. I will love a God who loves us so much that when we had fallen into sin and death he took sin and death upon himself to destroy them. I will dance with a God who says that my choices matter, my choices have consequences, and my choices might be good - or bad. Yet they are my choices to make, my consequences, my real life.
The God of Vengeance is the God who can do something. Anything less is a god it makes no point to follow. Yes to the idea of a God having wooed me without traps, having revealed himself to me with only a Baby and expected me to follow... yes. That's a God I need: vulnerable and yet omnipotent, just and yet merciful, glorious and awesome, yet humble and meek. That's a God I not only want to follow, but I want to emulate him.
And Elias the prophet stood up, as a fire, and his word burnt like a torch. He brought a famine upon them, and they that provoked him in their envy, were reduced to a small number, for they could not endure the commandments of the Lord. Et surrexit Elias propheta quasi ignis, et verbum ipsius quasi facula ardebat. Qui induxit in illos famem: et irritantes illum invidia sua pauci facti sunt: non enim poterant sustinere praecepta Domini.
Ben Sira 48:1-2
Advent is a time of hope - but also rightly of fear. God is coming among us. This can't be all good. Christmas is not only a time of remembrance, it is a time of forgetting all the reasons that God's presence among us is terrifying. It's a busy season for Prophets: because each one has a job to do, and the Christmas season not only reminds us of the Babe in the Manger, but also helps us forget the children whose unseen hands strung our lights, and glued the tinsel to our tree. Profits increase and souls are lost: we need Prophets.
I noted yesterday that even those who reject "organized religion" seem to, of their own, create organized religion; even if the process involves making religious claims out of atheism, or dogmatic demands out of relativism. We do this because we are naturally religious. We are created this way with, as Augustine noted, hearts that are restless until they rest in God. We will try many things until we find the one that fits - and there is only one that will work, finally. But we are cursed to try. We will try everything, sometimes.
Elijah's job is to stop all that. One at a time or all at once, you can't go that way... that's a failure. Turn around or fire will rain down. Come back or a famine will follow. Jesus says that John was Elijah. You see: anyone who gives the prophetic warnings - and makes them stick - can be Elijah. Yet prophets die. If they do their job right, they are so damned annoying that they get killed. Every time.
I'm disinclined to believe in what is called "American Exceptionalism". I don't think this place is all that special. It's certainly not doing anything today that Rome wasn't doing 2000 years ago: trying to run the world and suck all the resources into the center of our cities. At the same time keeping millions of people enslaved because we've ruined their cultures and environments so that they have nothing else to do except make our shoes that we can can sell for $1. Apart from that function as a Roman Surrogate, America is not special at all.
Yet we do have a second special roll, as of a Pharisee, standing up and saying, "I thank thee God that I am not like other countries..." And to the extent that we claim to be first in God's eyes and duties, God will hit us hard.
Let me say that again, more plainly: we are a nation who can't go to Church, won't obey God's rules for sex and marriage, and murder babies in the womb, all in the name of "freedom". We dump our garbage and our poor (in the persons of our military) on the ravaged world. We reject the stranger, insist that businesses have the right to oppress their workers, leave the hungry and the homeless on our streets, abandon the poor to their Vick's Vapo-Rub and their Theraflu - and yet we dare to call ourselves a "Christian Nation". Every time we do that without moving our laws more Christward, we ensure the wrath to come will be both excruciating for us and true tidings of comfort and joy for our enemies.
I laughed when it was announced that the American intelligence community thinks a foreign power may have tampered with our election. Why should not our laws be changed to reflect what we have done to the laws in other countries? Why should not our businesses be able to treat American workers in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco as they have treated workers in Manila, Taipei, and Seoul with our blessing?
Goose and gander: we get what we deserve. These are the days of Elijah.
And yet... and yet. If God's call to repentance is heeded. Elijah will reconcile the heart of the Father to his Son... that is, us: the tribes of the New Jacob. It may suck. It may be hard, but the rest of the world has survived and grown strong in their faith. Maybe we will too.
*I cannot offer these readings fully in the Douay because my usual source for Bible Texts is broken in Chapter 48 of Sirach! So here is Chapter 48 of Ecclesiasticus and Matthew 17 from another source. The readings are highlighted in yellow.
In the Douay, the RSV, or the NABRE with other Mass texts.
But whereunto shall I esteem this generation to be like? It is like to children sitting in the market place. Who crying to their companions say...
Matthew 11:16-17a
I listened to a sermon once, by a professed Atheist, who, having found a new psychological explanation for the idea of God, admitted that he now believed in this "only psychological" God, so he felt in communion with "you believers" even though we still insisted God was a person and he knew, really, that God was only an evolutionarily-necessary psychological construct. We were so lucky he could hang out with us now. Have you noticed that, taken to extreme, the "New" Atheism becomes a religion? Have you noticed that "spiritual but not religious" can become quite dogmatic? Have you ever noticed how new agey Carl Sagan sounded, or how philosophical Neil T can be even as he tries to deride philosophy? Unfounded on moral truths, man does not survive long or well without inventing others.
Of course the alternative is the smorgasbord: they like your religion as long as it agrees with them.
-You must accept LGTB folks because everyone is made in the image of God.
Where do you get that idea?
-From the Bible.
Well the Bible also says there's no such thing as LGTB people and sex outside of heterosexual marriage is evil.
-Oh, the Bible is all culturally biased, outdated mythology. They didn't know what we know now.
Or:
-Your religion is prolife so you must vote for Donald Trump
My religion also embraces the stranger, rejects untrammeled commerce, and tends to insist on social policies that care for the poor.
-That stuff is just opinion, the Church has no official teaching on those things.
God tells us again and again, that we can only find our peace in his justice. Yet he will let us reject him over and over. We want - crave, even - moral truth, rigidity. But we reject it when it shows up - especially if it leaves us on the outside. So we make up our own rigidity. Human beings, made in the image of God, know there is moral truth in the world and so we reject relativism - even if, as seems popular now, the only strict law there is is the law of relativism.
What is this generation crying out in the market? Over and over I hear, I want to be loved, but only on my terms - when it isn't even love to do so.
In the Douay, the RSV, and the NABRE with other Mass texts.
And in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God into a city of Galilee, called Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David: and the virgin’s name was Mary.
Luke 1:26-27
Today, in the Western Liturgies (of both the Catholic and Orthodox churches) is celebrated the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Tomorrow (the 9th) is the celebration in the Eastern Rites (both for Eastern Orthodox and for Byzantine Catholics). I'd be curious to know when the two feasts separated, or how - but then I'm a Church Geek. The Byzantines insist that Mary's conception (the 9th) is celebrated on a different day than her birth (September 8th) because Mary is not perfect. But they didn't make their Western Rite communities celebrate on the 9th. The Catholic Church doesn't see the calendar as all that important - because they didn't make their Byzantine communities change their dates either. I suspect that both East and West picked their days for different reasons and, later, decided to make up theological justifications for them. (A given feast is often celebrated on the day a famous church building was consecrated, though without reference to the building which now, often, no longer exists.)
This feast is a stumbling block for many Protestants, for many Orthodox and for some Catholics, who just don't get it. Mary's immaculate conception has nothing to do with the Virgin Birth of Jesus; it has everything to do, rather, with the person of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the East she is called "immaculate," "pure," or "spotless" (achrantos in Greek). Some Orthodox state that she was free from actual sin, some say she never sinned, and others just say she died sinless. The title Our All-holy, immaculate, most blessed and glorified Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary (Greek: Τῆς Παναγίας, ἀχράντου, ὑπερευλογημένης, ἐνδόξου, δεσποίνης ἡμῶν Θεοτόκου καὶ ἀειπαρθένου Μαρίας) is used in the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.
Yet some object to this feast because they say that it sets Mary apart from the rest of Mankind. I don't think so: God, in his grace, gave to Mary all that later Christians would have in Baptism and the descent of the Holy Spirit. That's all. One can debate about Augustinian ideas of "Original Sin" but Byzantine Catholics don't hold to such ideas. They are no less Catholic. Mary is celebrated as being, really, the first and greatest Christian, submitting to God's will and experiencing his grace. Her other feasts are, as well, manifestations of the life of a Christian: her birth, her presentation in the Temple, her death and assumption, her coronation - these are all events in the life of every Christian. They are writ large and rendered miraculous in Mary's life, yes, but they are ones we all share: she in her life, by God's grace, and we in our day by God's sacraments.
Mary's willingness to participate in God's plan for mankind undoes what Eve did, in her decision to step out of that plan. Mary's choice is to fully glory in her willing submission to as Eve attempted to glory in her willful struggle against God's command. The one wrecked us all. The other blessed us all.
A blessed feast and may we all, by Mary's intercession, come to share in her glory!
This whole city
the culture
the food
the beauty
I offer you because here I feel, fully and finally, always at home
this parish church
of prayer and praise where
Clergy and religious, laity and saints
find themselves in your presence,
I offer you because here i feel, fully and finally, always at home
And yet I'm so broken
aware that too much of my life
is lost, wasted, destroyed.
I can't get it back
and your church doesn't want it.
It's not me.
But is there enough of me left?
Can you be the me I'm not?
I cannot stand to be healed any more
because I can only kneel
half a man, unable to dance
Unwilling to wait
lost.
And knowing here,
on my knees
I may never stand at your altar
but I am fully, finally and always at home
I have thanksgiving to offer.
Even if it's not wanted.
This is my body, broken for you,
this is the chalice of my tears shed.
make it yours.
In the Douay, RSV, or in the NABRE with other Mass Texts
It is he that giveth strength to the weary, and increaseth force and might to them that are not. Isaiah 40:29
There came this moment in my daily grind where I said, "yeah, I'm not doing this any more." I was partying hard, and working full time. I was also going to college and balancing a relationship on top of that. There was a lot of other stuff going on in my life: a discernment process, financial struggles, my cat was dying. I was pretty pleased to be holding it all together. But, you know: I wasn't getting anywhere.
Another time, Job, Church and Chastity all in balance, now, and still, not getting anywhere.
Another time: monastic life spinning out of balance, becoming a really annoying struggle of "Gosh I hope I don't ever have to do that again." Followed by "Gosh I should go to confession" and then "Gosh this isn't my fault"... it's a terrible cycle that totally plays one out, emotionally and physically, and yet one never gets anywhere.
Before I get to the punch line, I admit: there will be more times like the above. Because it's a lesson I have not learned even now.
But all of these times ended when I prayed. I don't mean when I said "O God, help me here" although that sort of praying played a part. I mean, when I doubled down, cut a bunch of stupid time wasters out of my life, cleared swaths of time for God and said, "Here. I'm going to add the following things to my life: this weekly church service, that 20 minute devotion daily, this other thing before bed, which means no TV after 7PM.
Suddenly there was more time in my life than I knew what to do with. I can't explain it without falling into a sort of prosperity Gospel idea, but when something is important we make time for it. And when God is the thing: he makes time for us and when we let him, it sorts out the other stuff.
Yes I know, no one raises kids like I raise my hypothetical ones. And nothing makes for financial obligations like a family. I don't have an answer for you except I keep seeing it work. It may be that I'm just a lazy fool who, without kids, debt, or property, doesn't have much to worry about anyway. Or it may be that because of all that I'm just a hat trick, and God would love to resolve your actually-complex time-sink situations too. If I'm a lazy fool, imagine how much someone with actual labor could benefit from "Come to me all you that labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you."
My friend and Sunday School teacher, Jeanette, was raising three kids and a husband. She even let me live with her one spring when my parents were moving and I wanted to finish out the school year. What I remember about her is, as she kept house, fed her family, and let me listen to music on the headphones: her prayer life. Her secret was her sewing room. It was tiny - about 3 x 4 feet. It was essentially a closet with a window. Her husband had added a built-in table/desk, and there was a chair. It was warm and sunny. She would go into the room, and shut the door and do her business. The whole family knew not to bother her for that time. And she grew, she raised up her family and friends in prayer, and she had time.
If you give God time, he gives it to you.
To be honest: I know the world does, in fact, fall apart, if I don't hold on to it very well. What I've come to realize is, I was not supposed to be holding it together in the first place. Put your hope on Jesus and do not be distracted by the world, the flesh, or the devil. They that hope in the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall take wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
