[This post was written on Sunday, October 26, 2025]
Today, we had the blessing of celebrating Mass with the Benedictine monks at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert. Their chapel is small but beautiful – a mix of adobe, wood, and glass windows that start some 15 feet above the tabernacle and soar another 15 feet up, showcasing the red canyon walls just outside the chapel. Their impressive acreage borders the Chamma River in northern New Mexico, and, 13 miles down the dirt road you must take to reach the monastery, it opens up into what I call a mini Zion National Park. The natural beauty here steals your breath – especially since we’re here the last week in October and the brilliant yellow leaves of the hardwoods contrast with the dark green pine and juniper as well as the sage green of sagebrush and chama cactus. The monks tend a large flock of chickens, a modest herd of sheep, hundreds of honeybees, and a friendly working donkey. They also grow vegetables and carry out a number of other labors. They only have 15 brothers here, which is a shame, because both the working life and the prayer life in this treasure of a monastery are thriving.
It’s a special place to have a retreat, and on this, our third visit in 7 years, we see many visitors like us who eagerly take some days to stay in their modest guest housing and pray alongside the brothers. So – for anyone who’s reading – cancel your plans to visit Disneyland or Europe or whatever destination you have in your sights and take some time for God in one of the most dear-to-our-hearts places.
Today, my heart truly soared while participating in the liturgy with the monks. For my sensibilities, this was as close to perfect of a celebration of the Roman Rite that I could hope for. The entire Mass was chanted and sung, except for the homily (and what a great homily!). Brother David is an accomplished cantor and led us all through the proper antiphons for entrance, offertory and communion. We chanted the beautiful Missa Orbis Factor throughout, and Brother David even treated us to some contemplative organ music post-communion and after Mass. The monks, most of whom today were also con-celebrating priests, vested for Mass and participating from the choir stalls, all exuded a touching reverance for the rite from beginning to end. Incense was used before the gospel reading and again during the consecration. My soul was full!
The main celebrant was Fr. Zachary, the prior. Trained in the Neocatechetical Way and having served as a missionary priest in Japan for decades, he was a fantastic preacher. Neither full of rhetorical fireworks nor staid and musty, he was simply measured, articulate, and focused. He tied in the first reading to the gospel, as well as quotes from such sources as the founder of the Hassidic Jewish sect and St. Irenaeus. It was his take on the gospel, however, and his gentle suggestion that we allow Jesus’ words to touch us more deeply, that made me want to write this blog.
Fr. Zachary simply asked if we tell ourselves we are more like the publican who approaches the Lord in humility or if we see ourselves as the pharisee who feels that he is doing everything right and is following the Lord’s precepts as carefully as possible. While we all want to be like the publican, he suggested that perhaps we’re more like the pharisee than we’d like to admit. Jesus, he said, is talking about the nature of our hearts – do we secretly judge ourselves against others? Do we secretly feel superior to those who fail in little (and big) ways? Do we feel like we’ve kind-of got this under control, and if we keep making adjustments as we go, we can get to that goal of heaven?
This really struck me. Especially when he said that Jesus wants us to acknowledge that we need God. That we are fundamentally broken without him and will always fall back into a state of sin. It’s not the accounting of sins and the correcting them that’s at stake, Fr. Zachary said. It’s the more fundamental question of admitting our need that will never go away, confessing that to God and coming to him humbly in prayer and love. Christianity is not about small improvements and little personal perfections we make to get to our goal, he said. It’s not about logging hours caring for the poor and needy – even though those things are good and important. It’s about turning to Christ and acknowledging the brokenness within us and asking him – and only the Man God who died on the Cross – to help us, because that’s exactly the gift God gave us in Christ.
So, when we go to Mass or pray at other times in our day, is that our fundamental posture towards ourselves and towards God? What an excellent question!
As I thought about his homily, a number of things came to mind. First, if this is taken too far, we might be tempted to say that God wants us to be broken. This is clearly not the case because he has been working throughout history to lead us back to him, culminating with the sacrificial offering of his Son as a way to redeem humanity. But there is something here. Perhaps he wants us to acknowledge our fundamental brokenness and need for him to perfect us because he knows that that is the only way humanity can be perfected. This is the role of the Father. An analogy might be trying to have toddlers acknowledge that they can’t weild sharp knives in the kitchen even if they want to make us a fantastic meal and care for their family. It’s simply not possible for toddlers to handle a large chef’s knife, much less with the precision and effort it takes to prepare a meal. Plus, it’s dangerous. In like fashion, we are not capable of living a good life without the help of our Father. We don’t have the wisdom, fortitude, or sinlessness to do it. Concupiscence – the inborn tendency to sin that all humans since Adam have as a stain on their soul – acts like the tiny hands and attention span of the toddler who wants to cook like daddy.
But the Father can help the child. The Father has given us a Way, but that way begins with a heart that’s conformed to him. Not just a heart that likes Mass and chanting, not just a heart that likes the feeling of community or the spiritual consolation of the Eucharist. What does it mean to have a heart conformed to God? Today, I learned that it means the full admission that I need God fundamentally – in everything I do or think, and from now until I die.
Wow, that sounds really … weak. Really broken. Not something that attracts people to you or to the faith.
But I think this is just fear talking (and pride). The thing I might be forgetting is that God responds and provides supernatural strength and help. And the more we surrender to him, the more his response and guidance are the things that show in us. The most humble saint doesn’t appear weak! Even if physically withered, the holy person has a glow in their eyes, a gentleness in their movements, a welcome in their refusal to judge. It has a name: divine love, flowing through them.
Related to this, the part of the sermon about Christianity not being about incremental self-improvement really hit home with me. So much in my life has been about showing proficiency: in school, in sports, as a parent, as a homeowner, etc. The development of knowledge and skills has a premium in my family and in my (former) academic and professional lives. This isn’t necessarily bad, it just shouldn’t be number one. In fact, it can be spiritually harmful when it leads to a difficulty admitting fault or failure or a constantly critical nature, seeking for betterment (of ideas, of methods, of being). This is spiritually harmful because it pulls us into the thinking of the pharisee from today’s gospel reading. We begin to not only judge ourselves but others. We begin to think that – with enough knowledge and proficiency – we’ve got it pretty much under control. Worse yet, we might operate as if we don’t need God. In our quest to be impressive, or solve homelessness, or cure world hunger, we might lose sight of the fact that the real goal is unity with our Creator and that requires a constant vulnerability in coming to him for help and guidance.
Speaking of which, we are bombarded with products and programs aimed to help us improve ourselves. It’s created a pervasive feeling that while we’re not quite where we should be, we can get there with the right product or the right 12-step program. This type of thinking is exactly the type of stance that keeps us from truly conforming our hearts to God in full honesty and humility. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great for people to become smarter, more empathetic and other personality traits aligned with living the virtuous life. I just think we can’t let this type of thinking form our outlook. Because even with the best education out there, someone else might have a more truthful insight. Even with the best anger management program under your belt, human nature is what it will always be. In these times, God is the one who can make us whole, help us cope, and allow us a small share in his divinity to overcome those moments.
So, I ask myself, do I have the humility to admit that I can’t do this? To admit that I will never have it under control? Because the “it” we’re talking about is not fixing a broken pipe or giving a great lecture (although those are in the mix, too). The “it” we’re talking about is holiness, salvation, living in a way that will bring me to God for eternity. An even harder thing to admit as a Lay Dominican is that I’m fooling myself when I think that my hours of prayer and attention to the virtuous life are “gaining” me closeness to God and his Kingdom. The lesson here is that nothing we do can justify us (to use Christ’s words) except coming to God and admitting that we need him to guide us because we are sinners by nature and will be for the rest of our lives. We can’t fix ontology.
Last, I don’t want anyone who has read this far to think that I’m being gloomy. Quite the opposite! I actually feel like a huge weight is lifted – that I no longer have to worry about being the best at everything, all on my own. An acceptance of our lifelong need for God’s mercy is a fantastic spiritual insight that God has been giving us throughout the scriptures and poignantly in the life of Jesus Christ. “Not my will, but yours be done,” said our Savior, the only one in history whose human nature, will and energies were completely in accord with the divine nature, will and energies. Let’s listen to him.
Detail from Jesus, My Lord, My God, My All (1919), George Grenville Manton | Image from Catholic Art and Jewelry.
Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time: Wisdom 9:13-18b, Philemon 9-10, 12-17, Luke 14:25-33
This Sunday, we listened to a fantastic set of readings, including an echo of the gospel reading from St. Luke we heard three Sundays ago: “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on a household of five will be divided …” (Luke 12:51-52). In this Sunday’s gospel, Jesus proclaims to his followers, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” How do we react to these words? Is our reaction warranted?
We are traveling currently, leaving Salt Lake City after 25 years and starting our retirement with a “Farewell USA tour” to say goodbye to friends and family around the country (and see many roads we haven’t before we move to Spain permanently). It was a little hard to condense everything we owned into our SUV, but the process of giving away most of our belongings to friends and charities was actually quite freeing. For the next three months, our routine includes leveling the car on a camping spot so that our sleep in the rooftop tent doesn’t end up with us rolling into a clump on one side of the tent. Our dog is with us, until we leave him with Suzanne’s sister in Oregon in October, and we’re having fun on hikes and in lakes.
As a result of being nomads, we are getting to experience Mass in Catholic churches around the West. We went to St. John Neumann parish in North Las Vegas three weeks ago, St. Sebastian Church in Santa Paula, CA, two weeks ago, St. Francis of Assisi in Palm Desert, CA, last week and St. Daniel’s Catholic Church in Ouray, CO this Sunday. I’m thinking of writing a blog in a few months just about these experiences as a sort of random survey of the state of affairs of Catholic liturgies in the US, but I’ll leave that to another day. But one thing I heard three Sundays ago in Las Vegas and again in Ouray was that these gospel readings are “hard.” You may have heard something similar at your local church.
In fact, the deacon who gave the homily this Sunday in Ouray really pushed on the point. “Did we just hear Jesus tell us that we have to hate our parents, our wives and our siblings?” he asked incredulously. “How can we reconcile this with our Lord, who we know to be all-forgiving and all-loving?”
This is an incredibly important question for modern Catholics, and I think the answer is right in front of us, in the opening of the first reading from the Book of Wisdom: “Who can know God’s counsel, or who can conceive what the LORD intends? For the deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans.” So that I’m not just answering a question with another question, I hope to elaborate what I think the Word of God this Sunday presents to us.
Detail from Parable of the Wicked Servant (La parabola del servo malvagio), 1620, Domenico Fetti | Creative commons, Wikimedia.
The deacon at our church gave a thoughtful homily, first tracing the fact that “hate” in Hebrew more often meant “to love less.” I’m going to take a moment to both agree with him and add a little nuance. From my research, I’ve found that it’s true that in most contexts, שׁנה (sana’) in Hebrew does not translate directly to our everyday use of the term “hate.” The main difference is that, in modern English, hate is most often associated with emotions. For example, “I hate you,” is one of the worst things a teenager can say to a parent, often in a fit of pique. “I hate cilantro” is less emotionally charged, but still carries the feeling of disgust. In ancient Hebrew, especially in a scriptural context, the word hate (sana’) is most often used in reference to God. Consider Psalm 139:
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with complete hatred;
I count them my enemies.
I’ve read that some Jewish scholars prefer to use “reject” here rather than “hate.” The clear overtone is one of judgment and moral rejection, not something said emotionally or in a fit of anger. We should remember this when we read the Old Testament. When we hear at the beginning of the Book of the Prophet Malachi, for example, that God says, “Yet I have loved Jacobbut Esau I have hated,” we can understand that he has rejected Esau from his favor.
So, at least in the Jewish scriptural context, “hate” is not normally the emotionally charged verb it is in English. But I think the deacon was a little short of the target when he said it was “love a little less,” because there is definitely a sense of judgment (especially when applied to God) and moral decision-making. Technically, I guess that judging against something makes it “less” than the thing it is compared to, but why are we softening the impact here? I think that modern ears need to hear something like this because it helps us “reconcile” this with our vision of the Lord being all-loving.
But this is crucial! What does it mean to “reconcile” these thoughts? This means that we have preconceived notions of what love is, what forgiveness is, and we’re putting Christ’s words up against these notions, trying to look for some way they cannot contradict each other. Stop! We should recognize from the beginning that a.) do not put the Lord your God to the test, and b.) faith demands an acceptance of that which we cannot fathom or immediately understand. So, let’s meet Christ’s words with awe and reverence and try to accept and ponder them before we have some kind of emotional reaction.
The Church, in her wisdom, prepares us for this gospel reading through the inclusion of the first reading. Again, it starts, “Who can know God’s counsel, or who can conceive what the LORD intends? For the deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans.” In other words, know your shortcomings! Our thoughts are “timid” — too small to approach the grand thoughts of the divine — and this should make us humble as we approach the Word of God. The second part of this reading brings in a corollary important to understanding the gospel reading: “For the corruptible body burdens the soul and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns.” So, not only should we not attempt to fathom God’s plan and Word without the grace he provides for us, but we should recognize that we are already handicapped in understanding spiritual matters, for the “body burdens the soul” and “the earthen shelter weighs down the mind.” Jesus will return to this theme of earthly matters being problematic to us achieving the Kingdom. To recap, in a few sentences, the first reading reminds us that not only are we unable to fathom the plans of the divine mind, we are further encumbered when we try to think on spiritual things because we are concerned with earthly things.
As if this dose of humility isn’t enough, the author of the Book of Wisdom continues: “And scarce do we guess the things on earth, and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty.” Ha! How true. Even figuring out earthly things like, “what career should I choose?” or “does she love me?” or “how can we organize a society without fighting with each other?” are found with difficulty, if at all. The answer to this big multivitamin of humility is given at the end of the reading: “Or who ever knew your counsel, except you had given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high? And thus were the paths of those on earth made straight.” GRACE through the Holy Spirit is the only way we can make sense of ourselves and our world, much less the spiritual paths set before us by God. This important reading should set us straight in meekness and humbleness before we approach the Gospel — not in a stance of comparing Jesus’s words against our timid earthly notions of love and hate.
Dream of Solomon (1694-1695), Luca Giordano | Museo del Prado, creative commons via Wikimedia
So, when Jesus says, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple,” if we listen to this alongside everything Jesus has taught and shown us, we can grasp his meaning with the help of his Holy Spirit. If we think of the word hate as “reject,” we recognize that Jesus has said something similar many other times:
“So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:33)
“No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:62)
“And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.” (Matthew 19:29)
But today’s words seem like more than other statements about worldly renunciation. He’s talking about our most cherished relationships here on earth. If this sounds extreme, well, yes — I think it is. It’s impossible to hear Jesus in the gospels without hearing this type of “all-or-nothing” message. He tells the would-be-follower who wants to bury his father, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:60). !!! I mean, that’s pretty extreme. We think of funerals as a respectful, God-forward practice, but in the face of God Himself, this ritual pales in comparison. Without a doubt, this Sunday’s gospel challenges us to be “all-in” in regards to following Jesus.
Jesus follows up this sentence with words of preparation: “Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” With how often-referenced this sentence is, we can lose track of its power. The cross is sacrifice, undoubtedly, but it to his listeners, it was likely more charged with the understanding of spectacle and shame. After all, it wasn’t until his Resurrection that the shame and spectacle of the Cross turned into the glory of sacrifice.
Jesus is preparing his listeners to be true followers. He is letting them know that those closest to them will likely disagree with their newfound faith in Jesus Christ. He is presenting them with the fact that they must hate/reject those closest to them when they cast suspicion and begin to shame these new Christians and even make a spectacle of them. Jesus is both preparing them and trying to give them courage. This is why the end of the gospel reading focuses on “calculating the cost” of discipleship. Jesus wants his listeners to know the cost, to brace themselves and find the courage to follow him.
When is the last time we felt that we were carrying shame or spectacle by following Christ? Not that we should seek these things out, but I think we perhaps instinctively shy away from these, as anyone would. But this gospel is for us as much as it is for first-century Jews. When is the last time you boldly made the sign of the cross and said a prayer before your meal in a restaurant? This small gesture of thanks to God is essential with everything we do, but most often we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves in public. Are you picking up your cross here or just leaving it on the ground? When is the last time you walked in a Eucharistic procession in your town? I can recall a number of them on the University of Utah campus, including the catcalls and obscenities occasionally yelled at us. Atheistic culture wants to make Catholics feel ashamed, out-of-date, and ridiculous for something as beautiful and just as a procession! It is our responsibility and honor to stand with Christ, to process him in public as our King and Savior. When is the last time you talked about prayer or Jesus to a friend or colleague? Does it feel too awkward for you? When was the last time you asked someone not to use your Lord and Savior’s name in vain by shouting “Jesus Christ!” when something surprised them? The virtue of religion, St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, is part of the virtue of justice — that is, giving God what is due to him. We must consider that Jesus’s words in this gospel are telling us about the repercussions of holding this virtue of religion. Shame, spectacle and sacrifice are part-and-parcel of following Jesus and giving God what is due to him. The question is, have we dumbed down what our religion demands to simply “being nice to others?”
If we read the last few verses following today’s excerpt in the 14th chapter of Luke, we hear Jesus tell these same listeners, “Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away.” Remember that in the Beatitudes, Jesus tells his disciples that they are the salt of the earth — so clearly his meaning in this reading is that his listeners must retain their saltiness, that is, their openness to sacrifice, spectacle and shame, or be discarded from the Kingdom.
Salt of the Earth, contemporary, Alison Hale | Image from https://alisonhale.co.nz/paintings-archive/glass-works-sold/salt-of-the-earth/
From Aquinas to St. Paul
I’d like to bring up one last lens within which we can examine Sunday’s gospel, and through this lens, make our way to the second reading, St. Paul’s Letter to Philemon. The lens here is to actually challenge the reading above that hate isn’t really hate. What if we follow the Scholastics, St. Thomas in particular, in thinking about hate? In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas writes, “hatred is a movement of the appetitive power, which power is not set in motion save by something apprehended” (II, ii, q43, a1). To unpack this, what he is saying is that hatred is a movement of the intellect (aka, an “appetite”) that is only set in motion when you apprehend something. In other words, first, hatred is something natural in our soul and intellect, God-given and for a purpose. Second, it’s not a state of being but something that arises in us in response to something we encounter (a thought, a person, a thing, whatever). So, hatred is not an evil thing, but a natural thing, an appetite that we must work to regulate just like all of our other passions and appetites.
Why would God make us with this appetite of hatred, or any of the passions that we tend to regulate poorly, for that matter? In the case of hatred, Thomas tells us, “the object of hatred is evil.” Aha! So, God gives us hatred as a natural repugnance for evil and sin. When regulated well, hatred will turn us from evil and sin.
But regulating this appetite takes prudence and good judgment. After all, Thomas warns us: “Just as a thing may be apprehended as good, when it is not truly good; so a thing may be apprehended as evil, whereas it is not truly evil.” This is why studying and contemplating the truth in the scriptures and Catholic tradition are so important. We train ourselves to better apprehend and recognize good when we see it and evil when we see it.
So why would anyone hate what is good? Because they reject God’s revelation of truth and himself to humanity. Instead, throughout history, people cling to the world around them — what their senses tell them and what passes for “good” in their culture. Is the sound of applause and shouts of praise good? Our senses and culture tell us yes, but Jesus tells us that the meek are blessed because he sees that the cost of fame and recognition is the diminishment of others. Is the pursuit of money good? Pretty much everything in our culture says yes and pretty much everything in scripture says no. What about the flipside of this – what do we mis-apprehend as evil? Let’s think about one of the most common commands in the epistles – to “exhort” and “correct” one another in staying true to the teachings of Christ. But this is difficult to do because nobody likes to be corrected, and our contemporary culture has developed an incredibly robust system of moral idols in diversity and inclusion that make it an evil to tell someone that what they are thinking or doing is wrong. I truly think that today one of the most obvious ways a person can be a spectacle and shame for Christ is to openly tell someone that something they are doing is not morally right or a perspective they are defending is not the truth. In the name of acceptance of others, this is just not OK (so we are told)! But, Jesus commands us to be the salt of the earth, to take up our crosses and be his disciple. Which will you listen to — your culture or your Lord?
But surely our family members can’t be summarily judged as evil and thus worthy of hate! I guess that depends on the culture you live within. For Jesus’s listeners, the cultural voice resided in the Pharisees, Sadducees and scribes, most of whom were in disagreement with him on many aspects of his teaching (especially the core teaching about the conversion of one’s heart to God). Certainly, the broader cultural voices of Rome and of Greek culture were at odds with his teachings. In this context, it likely wouldn’t be too far off the mark to apply hatred towards voices that denied the Good News.
Perhaps referencing family members was way of giving an evocative example of earthly matters. With this reading, we can see that Jesus is being consistent with his other teachings about rejecting the worldly in preference to the spiritual life with God. But, I don’t think this is just rhetorical pyrotechnics. I think Jesus references family members specifically because his Apostles have already had to leave their homes and families to follow him. He has likely seen in the course of his ministry plenty of family arguments, anger and division over following him. This isn’t a hypothetical.
More important than this historico-critical reading of the passage is the understanding that there is a reason Jesus tells us this. The Divine Mind has a plan for our own good, for our reconciliation and union with Him. Remember the first reading: “you had given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high … And thus were the paths of those on earth made straight.” So what might this reason be? Jesus tells us time and again that God loves his children — that he will leave the whole flock just to save the one who has strayed — that he welcomes back the prodigal with open arms. All we have to do is to remain faithful to him. This means trusting him and putting him first, above all other concerns (including our family members and other worldly worries). Jesus is reminding us how we have to fulfill our end of the covenant, putting God above all else.
And in return? God perfects us with his grace and his love. He helps us be the loving humans he wants us to be, that he has created us to be. He fills us with his own love and sends us back into the world to love our neighbors (including those family members we judged to “love less” than him). Let’s not think we’re the only ones who are active in our lives! Our part is actually quite small — a continual conversion of heart to God — and then his blessings infuse us and those who we touch in our lives. His is the powerful work in the world, transforming it, not ours.
In other words, the whole point of hating your “own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters” is to allow God to perfect you and give you the ability to love those same people better than you ever could have without his help.
The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel ceiling (1511), Michelangelo | Creative commons, Wikimedia.
The second reading (the only one in the Sunday lectionary cycle from the Letter to Philemon) is seemingly weird and out-of-context, but blossoms with this understanding of the gospel reading. Paul, writing from jail, is sending Philemon’s slave back to him after this slave, Onesimus, has spent time following Paul and learning about Christ. Onesimus has fled his master, perhaps even owing him money — is this not someone who “hates” his “father”? And, having been nurtured at Paul’s breast, he is returning to his “father” in an act of love by Paul. This is a parallel to what we can read in the gospel account.
Add to this the overtones of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, where he writes, “So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God” (Galatians 4:7), and a rich tapestry emerges. In Sunday’s reading, Paul sits in the seat of a redeemed child of God — bearing his cross in jail for proclaiming Christ to the world, but acting with the power of the Father because of it. He sends back a former slave to his family, but not as a slave, but a fellow heir to the Kingdom:
that you might have him back forever,
no longer as a slave
but more than a slave, a brother,
beloved especially to me, but even more so to you,
as a man and in the Lord.
It is now Philemon’s turn to hate the teaching of his culture and the logic of the world, to accept Christ as Paul is urging him to, and to offer his forgiveness to a slave who has so obviously been healed by God. So, if we, like Onesimus the slave, hate our family in order to receive Christ and love him above all else, the divine logic decrees that this enables us to return to our families, even in debt or disgrace, in order to love them with clear eyes and a God-filled heart.
I hope that this contemplation of the Sunday readings have struck a chord with you, that perhaps they have helped move you to approach the gospel with open ears and without the urge to compare Jesus’s words with what we think love and forgiveness should look like.
Rejoice! Today we commemorate and celebrate the gratuitous love of the Father to bolster the faith of Peter, James and John by allowing them to witness a vision of Jesus in his glory. This episode in the life of Jesus and the Apostles is so rich and full of meaning for the Church. On Sunday, I led a discussion with our Lay Dominicans and inquirers about the Transfiguration in anticipation of this feast day. We discussed St. Thomas Aquinas’s writing about the fittingness of the Transfiguration as presented in the Summa Theologica, Part III, question 45, and I’d love to share a few bits of that fruitful discussion here.
The Transfiguration of Christ: Part of an iconostasis in Constantinople style. Middle of the 12th century. This is the earliest of the three paintings of the Transfiguration on this page. Below, you’ll see how the human expressiveness was emphasized in later Western art, while the symbolism of color, line, and figure took precedent over emotional content in the Eastern icon tradition (in fact, the more “fixed” and inexpressive faces are meant to indicate a more transcendent reality in this tradition).
Fittingness Versus Necessity
One of the questions an inquirer asked during our discussion was, “If the Transfiguration never happened, would the Crucifixion and Resurrection still have happened? In other words, was it necessary to our salvation?” This question is actually at the heart of how St. Thomas presents many aspects of salvation history. He readily admits that God could have ordered things differently — even to the point of not having the Incarnation or the Passion. These things, according to St. Thomas (and St. Athanasius and St. Anselm before him), are not “necessary,” per se, but he shows how they are “fitting.” The Latin word he uses is Convenientia, which translates to suitable, appropriate, harmonious or beautiful. The Church Fathers had a very good reason to be thinking in this way. First of all, they knew that they could never fathom the mind of God and “prove” some sort of necessity around the events and stories of our salvation history. Second, they had a huge body of texts that emerged from the early years of the faith, some orthodox and true, and some that were not. This contemplation of convenientia was a critical tool in helping to decide what writings were part of the canon of the New Testament.
As that same inquirer pointed out during our discussion, a good example of something that was NOT fitting would be in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, when Jesus is said to curse and kill a child who bumped into him. This is not consistent or harmonious with what we know of God and of Jesus’ ministry on Earth.
But beyond a tool for determining the truth of early texts, I think contemplating fittingness is a fantastic perspective for any kind of lectio divina. With this starting point, we can ask questions about why events happened and have them always point back to God and how he is revealing himself to us (as opposed to treating the divine plan like a puzzle to be solved, as if we could ever comprehend it fully!). In the case of the Transfiguration, the “why” of the event is answered amply by many Church Fathers. Here’s what St. Thomas has to say: “For anyone to walk straight along a road, he must have some knowledge of the end … Above all, this is necessary when the road is hard and rough, the going is heavy, but the end is delightful … Therefore, it was fitting that He should show His disciples the glory of His clarity (which is to be transfigured), to which He will configure those who are His.” In other words, one reason the Transfiguration happened was to provide the Apostles with the backbone to persevere when the going got tough — to let them see the goal of divinization alongside Jesus. Understood as a completely unnecessary but helpful and beautiful blessing for the Apostles (and the Church as a whole), we can start to glimpse the overwhelming, overabundant love the Father has for us, his delight in showing us a Way to him through his Son.
Transfiguration (1560), Titian | Wikimedia Commons. Ah, the Italian Renaissance. Titian indicates a number of internal dramas within each unique face, and is a master of color and composition, with dynamic (and melodramatic) poses somehow all working to frame Christ in his glory.
Bright Clothing
Another aspect we discussed was that more than Jesus’s face was transfigured: “his clothing became dazzling white.” This might seem like a simple detail, but the Church Fathers fastened onto it with gusto. The first reading from the Book of Daniel gives us a clue as to why they might have done so: “The Ancient One took his throne. His clothing was bright as snow … Thousands upon thousands were ministering to him, and myriads upon myriads attended him.” So bright white clothing seems to be an important detail in this beatific vision, but what does it mean?
St. Thomas tells us that “the clarity which was in His garments signified the future clarity of the saints.” This might seem like a leap, but he traces it back to St. Gregory the Great, who wrote, “because in the height of heavenly clarity all the saints will cling to Him in the refulgence of righteousness. For His garments signify the righteous, because He will unite them to Himself.” As we think of garments as things that cling to and adorn a person, this parallel starts to make more sense. The saints cling to Christ and his Way, and by so doing, they fulfill the word of God given to Isaiah: “You shall put all of them on like an ornament” (Isaiah 49:18). Thus, the Transfiguration is truly the full beatific vision: Christ in his glory, surrounded by the law (Moses) and the prophets (Elijah) and all the saints (his bright clothing, adorning him). What is nice about this understanding is that we see glory going back to God rather than ourselves in this vision of heaven. It’s not about us gaining virtue and being so good that we are given the gold star of heaven. It’s about us loving God so much (as close as we can mirroring the love he first gives to us) that we adore and adorn him, becoming more and more like Christ as an acknowledgement of the plan the Father has for all of us. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so the saying goes, and we can see a small truth — yes, we are trying to imitate Christ, but even more than trying to flatter him we are trying to sincerely love him and show the world that he is the only Way to heaven. Let us be your brilliant clothes, nothing more, O Lord!
We also discussed how there is more support for this understanding of the bright clothing in the Book of Revelation according to St. John: “Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, ‘Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from? … These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’” So John was doubly gifted with the vision of the Transfiguration during Jesus’s lifetime and then again in the visions that became the Book of Revelation. Only this time, the white robes have received their color from walking the Way of Christ — from going through “the great ordeal” and washing them in “the blood of the Lamb.” Whether adorning Christ or more literally being worn by the saints in heaven, the brilliant white clothes seem to symbolize the members of the Church who have remained faithful to the Way and entered into the divine heavenly eternity.
There is one last interesting note we discussed about the clothing. One of the great early Church Fathers was Origen, who lived in the first half of the 200s AD. His influence was huge. Many later Church Fathers quote Origen when discussing the Transfiguration and many other mysteries of the faith. He writes that the white garments are “the words in the Apostles which indicate the truths concerning Him,” that is, the Gospels themselves. Origen adds that if someone speaks with deep theology of Christ and explains the Gospels brilliantly, “do not hesitate to say that to Him the garments of Jesus have become white as the light.” Imagine saying that the next time you hear a good homily! “Hey, Father, the garments of Jesus really became white as the light today! Thanks!”
Transfiguration of Jesus (icon), 1408, Theophanes the Greek | Wikimedia Commons. Artwork from Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral in Pereslavl-Zalessky. This is one of the most common and copied icons of the Transfiguration, notable for it’s white star-shaped depiction of Christ’s brilliance, the positioning of all the secondary characters, and the lines of revelation shooting down to the Apostles. I always like how icons manage to paint more than just a single moment in time, and we see both the climb up to the mountain on the left and climb down on the right as well as little moments of the life of Moses and Elijah in the upper corners. Great way to depict kairos time!
Moses, Elijah, and Unfinished Stories
Of course, the other important detail, as we see in each of the paintings on this page, is that Moses and Elijah were present during the Transfiguration. Our little discussion group talked about how this might be fitting. First, we read the six separate ways that St. Thomas points out the significance of these two towering Old Testament figures. The one most often mentioned St. Thomas attributes to St. Hilary of Poitiers: that Moses symbolizes the law and Elijah the prophets, and this reminds everyone that Christ was foretold by these two important men.
But then one of our life-professed Lay Dominicans made an observation that none of us had considered before: “Isn’t this the first time Moses appears in the Holy Land?” We all went silent, and then burst out with agreement. Even Fr. Gabriel admitted that he had never read any commentaries that bring up this important detail.
Next, we had to contemplate how this might be fitting and why it might be important. We noted that both Moses and Elijah leave scripture with their stories somewhat unfinished or at least a little unsatisfying to the listener. Moses is told by God that he can’t enter into the Promised Land because the generation he ushered through the wilderness was so ungrateful and rebellious. So, he dies just outside of the Promised Land. In a way, he must suffer and sacrifice for the sins of others (sound familiar? nice foreshadowing of Christ). Elijah, on the other hand, is taken up to heaven alive. Why? What is he doing there? He’s not the Messiah, even if he is one of the greatest prophets.
Both of these stories find a suitable and fulfilling ending here in the Transfiguration, however. Moses does get to enter the Promised Land, but only now and here, with Jesus Christ as the Savior who ushers in the Kingdom. God is not a vengeful God but a loving God whose plan spans all time and who loves us so much that he instructs and points the way through generations upon generations. He wants Moses with him — Moses the bearer of his law who now comes back to the bosom of the Father in the presence of the fulfillment of that law.
Why Elijah is still alive, keeping the Jews in a state of suspense about his possible return, becomes clear when he returns here to commune with and point to Jesus Christ. Elijah, speaker of God’s living Word, never dies as the bearer of that living Word, and only reappears alongside that living Word made flesh. Jesus, who unites the dead (Moses) and eternal life (Elijah), is in the center of this vision. Jesus is the true Alpha and Omega here.
Like the brilliant clothes, Moses and Elijah are not there for their own glory, but to adorn and ornament Jesus Christ, the Son with whom the Father is well pleased. The Father’s voice and the Holy Spirit in the form of a cloud (something seen because it obscures the sun and darkens the sky and yet somehow “a bright cloud overshadowed them” in Matthew’s account) also appear, but again, to point to the Son. If ever there was an argument for the divinity of Jesus Christ, this is it!
I hope this post did some justice to sharing the fruits of a lively discussion and I also hope it enkindles a newfound reverence for the wonder of the Transfiguration. Thank you, God, for this vision of heaven, given to sustain us in our belief, faith, and fidelity to your Word.
Detail from The Blessing of the Wheat in Artois (1857), Jules Breton | wikimedia
Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ — aka, the Feast of Corpus Christi. We were fortunate to celebrate Mass in Park City at St. Mary’s Church, presided by Fr. Chris Gray, who is about to be transferred to the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City to serve as rector, and undoubtedly become a Monseigneur or even greater someday. He’s a great priest. He’s likeable, has a great singing/chanting voice, is funny, but most importantly, has a great reverence for the liturgy. So, in addition to a meaningful homily and prayerful sacrifice of the Mass, we enjoyed a Eucharistic procession around the church and a benediction, complete with incense and chanting of St. Thomas’s Tantum Ergo Sacramentum.
Celebrating Corpus Christi at St. Mary’s church.
This solemnity is the great marker of the Catholic faith; a dividing line between Protestants and Catholics. We believe that in the Eucharist the Body and Blood of Christ are really and truly present — mystically and spiritually available to us in all their power and glory. Protestants believe that Jesus was speaking symbolically when he said the bread and wine were his body and blood. Why does this matter? Because if we want to follow the entire Way given to us through Christ, we can’t ignore the sacraments and the Eucharistic miracle he gives us. (The early Church was unanimous in believing in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Heck, in 110 AD, St. Ignatius of Antioch told the Smyrnaeans to “keep aloof from” the heretical Gnostics “because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ” (Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, 7).) The sacraments are the way his Spirit is active in the world. Would you dare not believe in the power and work of the Holy Spirit?
Since the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church has affirmed that “for believers the sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1129). Protestants believe nothing of the sort. It seems to me that theirs is a passive religion when it comes to salvation — taken in passively by grace and faith alone. In comparison, Catholics are taught that we have an active role in receiving grace, through the sacraments and in love and charity of God and neighbor.
But something else stuck with me as I contemplated today’s readings and the significance of the solemnity. When Protestants say the Eucharist is just a “symbolic act,” they are in fact missing the depth of the symbolism. We, too, believe it is a sign — the greatest of all signs — but the significance of the sign is that it points to a new reality. So, I’d like to blog this Feast of Corpus Christi about the intersection of sign, symbol and reality as well as the unique and troubling (for some) insistence of Jesus Christ that we eat his actual body and blood.
Sign, Symbol and Reality
It can be confusing to talk about signs and symbols because they’re often lumped together. Unless you’re a semiotics professor, we all sort-of shoot from the hip here. (The academic field of semiotics that started perhaps with the ancient Greeks but blossomed in the second half of the 1900s is dedicated to studying sign, symbol, meaning and the like, but if there was ever a field that felt like splitting hairs, it’s semiotics.) Let’s first acknowledge that these words definitely overlap and share meaning, and not just in English, but also in Greek, Latin and Hebrew:
English
Latin
Greek
Hebrew
sign
signum
σημεῖον (sēmeion)
סִימָן (siman)
symbol
symbolum
σύμβολον (symbolon)
סֵמֶל (semel)
Despite the difficulties involved, I’d love to lay out a general difference between sign and symbol for the purpose of this blog. Let’s take a cue from the Latin signum, which is something that marks or identifies. An everyday usage could be something like a military signum in the form of a battle standard, and a supernatural signum would be a heavenly sign or miracle. We can see where we get the word signature (a personal “mark” that identifies the signer). I like also to think of a road sign, which points towards something. Taken together, let’s think of “sign” to mean a material thing that points to something else that holds extra meaning. So, when we make the sign of the Cross, it means more than just cross-shaped gesture around the face and chest area. It’s a sign of following Jesus Christ.
“Symbol” has an interesting history, too. In the ancient world, the Greek word symbolon described an object like a piece of parchment, a seal, or a coin that was cut in half and given to two parties. It established a relationship between them. When the halves of the symbolon were reassembled, the owner’s identity was verified and the relationship confirmed. To take poetic license with this etymology, we might say that a sign is like a signature, but a symbol is only half the story (half the signature). It points to something even more complex: a relationship to a shared history.
As a short side note, the early Christians and Church Fathers called the Creed they developed in the Council of Nicea and further councils as the “symbol of faith” or just the “Symbol.” This reveals that they saw our Creed as a way to recognize another Christian, and that a shared relationship is at the heart of our faith (shared with Christ and shared with one another as the Church).
In our language, we’ve applied the deeper, more abstract meaning of “symbol” into words like symbolism, which implies a shared cultural story that lies behind the symbol. To sum up, I think “sign” is more direct, although still pointing to something outside itself (we say, “what does that signify?” and we expect a direct answer). I think “symbol” is a bit more complex and abstract, pointing to something more like a shared story of significance (we say, “what does that symbolize?” and we push our minds to think of things like metaphor, analogy, and mythological and religious stories).
These terms have a deep history in our faith tradition. Circumcision is a sign of being a Jew, but it is a symbol of a circumcised heart — a life dedicated to God and living within his laws and precepts. Burning incense in our churches is a sign of reverence to our Holy God, and it is a symbol of our prayers rising up to Him in Heaven, as well as a symbol of immolating something precious to us as an offering to the Lord according to our covenant with Him. Importantly, signs and symbols in our religious tradition are material things in the world that point to spiritual realities we cannot see, touch, or otherwise sense. They help our physical humanity interact in some way, no matter how diminished, with something greater and immaterial. As St. Thomas writes: “Signs are given to men, to whom it is proper to discover the unknown by means of the known” (Summa Theologica, III, 60.2). I love the fact that he says signs are “given” to us, reminding us that there is logic and intentionality in the way God created the universe, even down to knowing how we might apprehend material things in the world and apply signification of greater things to them.
The Blessing of the Wheat in Artois (1857), Jules Breton | wikimedia. Religious processions, typically with the exposed Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance, are another important Christian sign. They symbolize our spiritual journey to everlasting life, our affirmation that we are in the world but not of the world and are on our way to our real home. Religious processions used to be more widespread, especially in Europe, and I think it’s a bit of a shame that they have fallen out of fashion. They’re a great way to show our secular society that there is an alternative to the narrative of consumption and materialism that is constantly fed through our devices and experiences.
This idea that signs are a bit more straightforward and symbols are a bit more complex gets turned on its head when it comes to the sacraments. This is because, as signs, they point to the mystery happening in our midst.
The Church teaches that the sacraments are the greatest of signs in our faith lives because they transcend being signs and actually have real spiritual effects within us. Even just at face value, each sacrament is more than a typical sign, which is a single material object or action. In their execution, the sacraments include a form of the liturgy specific to each — that is, the prayers, movements, and physical items used in each rite. So a sacrament includes a number of other “signs” within it, such as water, candles, incense, etc. For instance, water is a sign of spiritual purity, but when water is used in the sacrament of Baptism, that sign takes on more meaning and contributes to a larger understanding of the “sign” of the sacrament of Baptism. Likewise, the Eucharist has the material appearance of bread and wine, but those symbols/signs are part of a larger liturgical movement that calls down the Holy Spirit in sanctification and intones a shared set of prayers between priest and believers. The whole sacrament, then, is a “sign,” but is so much bigger than other types of signs.
It’s hard to overstate just how deep and important the sacraments are as signs. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sums up a discussion of the sacraments with the words of St. Thomas: “Therefore a sacrament is a sign that commemorates what precedes it – Christ’s Passion; demonstrates what is accomplished in us through Christ’s Passion – grace; and prefigures what that Passion pledges to us – future glory.” As a collection of material signs, prayers and action of the Holy Spirit, a sacrament is a sign that “points to” many other symbols and signs in salvation history at the same time it is doing active spiritual work through the power of the Holy Spirit.
All of this sets the stage for discussing the Eucharist on this Feast of Corpus Christi. As I thought about the great sacramental sign of the Eucharist, three aspects jumped out at me: how the bread and wine are a symbol of — and somehow the reality of — manna, the sacrificial Lamb, and the true Body and Blood of Christ.
Bread of Affliction, Bread from Heaven
The Passover figures greatly in a full understanding of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Perhaps the best exploration I’ve read is Brant Pitre’s Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. Highly recommended. I’ll do my best to summarize a few things here.
One of the seemingly smaller aspects of the Jews’ flight from Egypt is bread. On the original Passover night, the Jews had to get ready to move quickly because after the angel of the Lord passes by their homes and slaughters the firstborn throughout the land, they must hightail it out of Egypt. This means they don’t have time to let their bread rise with yeast and they have to bake and eat unleavened bread during their flight.
Moses enshrines the memory of the Exodus in the Festival of Unleavened Bread: “For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread with [your Passover sacrifice] — the bread of affliction — because you came out of the land of Egypt in great haste, so that all the days of your life you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 16:3). So much can be said about this “bread of affliction”! The bread made by human hands, out of necessity being less than satisfying — what a great symbol of our metaphysical state of being separated from God. The act of intentionally depriving ourselves of material comfort — a great parallel with the intentional deprivations practiced by saints and monastics thousands of years later.
But there is more to be said about bread as a symbol.
Detail from The Israelites gathering Manna (c.1490s), Ercole de’ Roberti | Image courtesy nationalgallery.org.uk
Wandering in the wilderness after they fled Egypt, the Israelites complained to Moses that they were hungry. God showed his love by raining down bread from heaven to sustain them. “The house of Israel called it manna; it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey … The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a habitable land” (Exodus 16:31, 35). Unlike the bread of affliction, the manna from heaven is both pleasing to the senses and extremely nourishing. Bread as a symbol had been sanctified. But sanctified bread came only from God, it was not something that could be made by humans.
After the Exodus, bread would never again be “just bread” for the Jews. It would always also be a symbol of God’s love for them and his commitment to them. God chooses good symbols; bread sustains life, and he was training them to understand that he sustains life even more fundamentally than physical food. By the time of King David, 450 years later, they had memorialized manna as more than normal bread: “he rained down on them manna to eat, and gave them the grain of heaven. Mortals ate of the bread of angels; he sent them food in abundance” (Psalm 78:24-25).
And 1,000 years after David, when Jesus perfects our understanding of God’s law and the words of the prophets, he deepens this reference to manna: “[My flesh and blood] is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever” (John 6:58). Jesus brought something new and shocking to the already-rich symbol of bread. God allowed the symbol to convey meaning for many centuries specifically so he could invoke all that the symbol of bread stood for and use that image to point to a new reality in our midst. Note what is going on here! It’s a reversal of how material signs usually operate in our entire way of building meaning. Until this moment, the material sign of bread was a pointer to something deeper, a symbol of God’s love and commitment. Jesus himself used this conventional symbology during his miracle of the loaves and fishes, when the bread demonstrated God’s inexhaustible and overflowing love for humanity. But now, the rich symbol is used to point to a new material and spiritual thing. In other words, usually things act as symbols pointing to complex concepts, but here the complex symbol is pointing to a thing. A very corporeal and perfectly spiritual thing that is Christ’s actual flesh and blood.
I’d even argue that it had to happen this way. Only with a symbol that was so richly endowed could Jesus teach us about the mystery of the gift he was giving us. He’s saying to us, “Even with how awesome you thought that manna given in the Exodus was, the gift of my flesh and blood for you to eat is the real bread of heaven because it does more than keep you alive in this world.”
Bread is still a material thing, and it’s still a symbol with a rich history of meaning, but now that symbol is pointing to something new, a new thing, the reality of the Eucharist.
The Sacrificial Lamb
Much like bread, the sacrificial lamb has thousands of years of meaning attached to it for the Jewish people. All the way back to Abraham, we have the willing but difficult sacrifice of the son, replaced by the ram provided by God. But the sacrificial lamb really becomes codified in the lives of Jews during the Passover, when each family takes an unblemished lamb (from the sheep or goats) and “the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the lamb that same night” (Exodus 12:6b-8a). The lamb here is an interesting mix of symbol (much more than just a lamb, it is a symbol of fidelity to God’s command) and physical sustenance. We really see the roots of the Eucharist clearly — in a ritualized way, believers gather as a community to slaughter the lamb as a sacrifice to God, then eat it.
Detail from the Brothers Haggadah (left) and the Rylands Haggadah (right, both from 1330-1350), manuscripts from Catalonia that detail Jewish life. | Image courtesy Museu d’Historia de Barcelona. These particular images show the slaughter of the Passover lamb and the painting of the lintels with the blood.
Famously, the Jewish faith includes a lot of animal sacrifice. Sin offerings were a common form of sacrifice and this particular ritual is important for Christians to understand because the phrase “He died for our sins” very much refers to this practice. God told Moses that they must make regular offerings as a payment of sorts for their sins. God prescribed that “The sin offering shall be slaughtered before the Lord at the spot where the burnt offering is slaughtered; it is most holy. The priest who offers it as a sin offering shall eat of it; it shall be eaten in a holy place in the court of the tent of meeting. Whatever touches its flesh shall become holy” (Leviticus 6:25-26).* Note the insistence of the holiness of the event and the offering, which is again eaten. Strikingly, the ritualized sin offering is transformative — “whatever touches its flesh shall become holy.” We can locate a number of things in our religion that echo this transformational aspect of the sin offering: primarily, the Eucharist, which is the new offering for sin that we eat and which transforms us into something holy, but also things like holy relics of the saints, from which we have seen miracles transmitted.
So imagine what must have been dawning on the Apostles, who were brought up with the rich symbology of the bread and the rituals of the sin offerings with an unblemished lamb, when “On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed” (Mark 14:12), they were led to the upper room for him to institute the Eucharist during the Last Supper. Surely, some of them remembered John the Baptist declaring when he saw Jesus, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:36). They were told he was the lamb who was going to produce some sort of never-before-seen, world changing sin offering!
Sure enough, Jesus uses the sign of the lamb, as well as those loaded signs of bread and wine, to point back to himself, the nearly unfathomable mystery of salvation for all of humanity. “Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body’” (Matthew 26:26). He sanctifies and sacralizes the bread, meaning that he makes it holy with his own essence and by his own divine power, then tells them to eat it, just like they eat the flesh of the Passover lamb. And why is the wine used? “Drink from it, all of you,” he says, “for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:27-28). It is used because the sin sacrifice requires real blood, real suffering.
We might ask why not use actual sacrificed lamb meat as the Eucharist during the Last Supper? I’ll offer a theory (Aquinas offers his own). I think there had to be a physical and mental break with the traditions of the Old Testament. Jesus was instituting a new covenant where he was going to be sacrificed, not a lamb. The “remembrance” of this great event is more fittingly placed in the symbols of bread and wine, which were symbols of a covenantal relationship with God and signs of God’s abundance. What’s more, the difference of Christ’s flesh is accentuated here — the God-man’s flesh cannot be appropriately signaled by actual meat of any sort. Jesus Christ’s body is united not just with a spirit, but with God’s Spirit. Meat would be too similar and encourage us to fall too short of recognizing this great difference.
Truly Eating Flesh
In the gospel of John, when Jesus tells the crowd, “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh,” the Jews don’t react well, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:51-52). Does Jesus back off a little and say, “I’m speaking symbolically”? No! He doubles down. He says, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (v.53). He is insistent on this point, which sounds a heck of a lot like cannibalism to ears not prepared for it and hearts not realizing that this is God speaking.
And as if to punctuate the literal nature of what he means, Jesus adds, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day” (v.54). But English fails us here, because in verse 53 he uses the common Greek verb for eating, “phagein” (φαγεῖν), while in verse 54 he ups the literalness and uses the verb trōgō (τρώγω), which means to gnaw, munch, or crunch. Those who gnaw on my flesh!!
As if he’s not shocking enough, he’s also claiming to be able to give eternal life through this eating of his flesh. The divine power of the Eucharistic sacrament is laid bare. But it’s only available to those who are willing to eat his literal flesh. Very truly, I tell you!
People call the gospel of John the most theological and the most symbolic. With the confluence of these two ideas, we see what Christianity is all about: we know God through a highly symbolic language that points to new realities, new things. Again, if what Jesus is doing is reversing the typical “sign /symbol is a physical thing pointing to a complex idea” into “complex sign/symbol is pointing to a new physical thing” (i.e., his flesh in the Eucharist), then this is precisely why our theology is the opposite of a mythology. Myths are stories to help us understand our world and experiences, but Christian theology is the exploration of God revealing himself to us as reality itself. Traditional sign/symbol meaning making is great for talking about ourselves and our experience, but God saw fit to use symbols in a new way: to help us access his own infinite reality.
Thinking back on our celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi, these thoughts were swirling around in my head as I listened to Fr. Gray’s homily and prayed with the congregation during the consecration of the Eucharist. The Eucharist contemplated and received can be an emotional thing. And I was contemplating what emotions Jesus may have wanted us to feel when gnawing on his unbloody flesh in the form of the host and the wine. Why insist that we physically interact with his flesh in this way? Why be a sacrificed lamb, whose holiness spreads to everything it touches but is at the same time unapologetically messy in its grease and juice and chew?
I have been taught to feel joy and thankfulness for this incredible gift of the Eucharist. I have imagined it sanctifying my mouth, my esophagus, and my stomach as well as my soul as I ingest it. Aquinas teaches us that the great difference between this food and other food is that instead of us turning the food into ourselves (by nourishing our cells and organs), the Eucharist helps turn us more and more into Christ. I love this teaching and love approaching the Eucharist with this in mind.
But, for the first time, I felt something different. As I considered the bloody sacrifice of the Cross and Christ’s insistence that we eat the flesh of this sacrifice, I had a catch in my throat. The moment when we as a congregation shout “Crucify him!” during our Good Friday Mass of the Passion came flooding back to me and my culpability as a sinner unfit for unity with He who is all good came over me. My eyes threatened to tear as I thought about the sheer sorrow of having to eat of a sacrifice that humanity made necessary through our initial disobedience and stubborn stupidity when he came in bodily form. There is something of the gag reflex here — of choking on something that is both sweet and horrible. Horrible not because of taboo (as in cannibalism), but horrible because we needed such a sacrifice. Horrible because that suffering of that very real savior Jesus Christ actually happened, and we remember that when we proclaim the Eucharist to be his very real presence.
Of course, God transformed our sorrow into awe and joy with the Resurrection, and this is the point of sharing in the Eucharist — sharing in the Resurrection. So, I didn’t dwell on that feeling of self-repulsion, because I don’t think it reflects what this sacrament is all about. At the same time, I think it was a positive experience. I think there are infinitely plumb-able depths to the reality of the Eucharist that is pointed to by our simple signs of bread and wine. I think Christ’s insistence on actually eating his flesh is something we need to take seriously and contemplate.
And I thank God for the fact that his Son’s flesh is made unbloody and spiritual in our sacrament. I praise him for his wisdom and his gentleness with us, who condemned his Son to death, only to desperately need his saving Body and Blood so that we can partake in the Heavenly banquet that is everlasting life with him.
Procession for Corpus Christi (1510-1520), Master of James IV of Scotland | wikimedia.
* Note: it is worth re-reading chapter 23 of Leviticus, where God teaches Moses how to celebrate festivals, or “holy convocations” to honor him. These are the seeds of the sacraments as we know them today: liturgical rites with specific practices and gestures that endured for 1,500 years before Christ instituted the New Covenant. The “sign” of each sacrament points back here (indeed, back to Abraham and Isaac), and simultaneously points to Christ’s life, work, death and Resurrection, as well as pointing to the everlasting life to come.
VERONA: Apse of Chapel Miniscalchi in Saint Anastasia’s church from year 1506 designed by Angelo di Giovanni with main scene of the Pentecost
Pentecost is one of our highest feasts — marking the anointing and confirmation of the Church by the Holy Spirit. It is a true turning point for humanity, when God begins to interact with us in a new way. The Church’s liturgy for Pentecost is so full of the mystery surrounding the action of the Holy Spirit that it provides us with a dazzling array of Scripture to shed light on this event. The Vigil Mass has an extended form, much like Easter Vigil. Through four Old Testament readings and associated psalms, it reminds us how the Spirit has been guiding us and transforming our activity into something holy from the beginning of time. We hear of humanity’s hubris in the Tower of Babel, a symptom of our fallen state that God remedies by confusing our language. Lest we think that God is a malevolent God, doing this to spite us, he promises us through the prophet Joel, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy … Then everyone shall be rescued who calls on the name of the LORD.” Of course, this is realized at Pentecost when the Spirit descends on Mary and the Apostles and reverses the confusion of Babel.
But it’s more than just a loosening of tongues. Those tongues have something new to proclaim. We have become intelligible to one another once again, but only in a specific mode: allowing the Spirit to talk through us, to tell us about the Triune God and his saving plan for us through the person of the Son.
The incredible reading from Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones is an astounding prophecy of the Pentecost in the upper room in Jerusalem. God tells Ezekiel, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them: Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!” Note how this foretells exactly what will happen. The “dry bones” of the Jews and Gentiles hear the word of the Lord from the mouths of the Apostles, the new prophets of a new age. God assures Ezekiel that his word will be efficacious. God tells the bones, “See! I will bring spirit into you, that you may come to life.” Indeed, Ezekiel sees sinews and flesh cover the bones as they stand, “but there was no spirit in them.” Now, note carefully — God tells Ezekiel to pray to the Holy Spirit: “Prophesy to the spirit, prophesy, son of man, and say to the spirit: … come, O spirit, and breathe into these slain that they may come to life.” How surprising! I find it more than a little striking within the Jewish context that the God who time and again reminds them that he is the one and only God, the Creator, tells his prophet Ezekiel to turn his appeals to the Holy Spirit. This is one of several times in the Old Testament, in fact, that when we read carefully, we see that God is telling us something about himself, about the three persons of the Trinity. It would take centuries until the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople could properly articulate an understanding (dumbed down for our human intellect) of the Trinity having one and the same essence of a single God, but three distinct persons in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, we can trace their distinction to moments like these in Ezekiel and even to the creation story itself where God tells us that it is him, but also his Word and his Breath that act in creation in different ways.
Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones (1866), Gustave Doré | Wikimedia Commons.
I want to take a moment to reflect on the person of the Holy Spirit. I think many of us might be quietly (and innocently) caught in a type of subordinationist heresy. Simply put, this means that we have the tendency to think that God the Father is hierarchically the main and most powerful person of the Trinity — effectively subordinating the Son and the Holy Spirit to being lesser than him. Don’t fret, we would be in good company because several early Church Fathers like Irenaeus, Tertullian and Justin Martyr were also likely subordinationist, but that’s because the Church hadn’t yet been forced to think hard and long about the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. That was foisted upon the Nicene Council by Emperor Constantine I to figure out in the year 325 A.D. In fact, it was the more serious heresy of Arianism, where Jesus was taught to be a created being, that was the cause of the council, but the effect was the same — the council came up with our formulation that we repeat in our Creed to this day, where the Father, Son, and Holy spirit are proclaimed to be consubstantial with one another. That is, of one and the same essence.
Perhaps it’s because of some of the references to the Spirit in Scripture might make us feel that it is not as, I don’t know, approachable (?) reliable (?) as the Father. For me, it’s when Jesus tells Nicodemus, “The wind (pneuma) blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (Pneumatos)” (John 3:8). This passage leaves me with a sense of flightiness about the Spirit (although I think that’s erroneous). Plus, the Apostles are waiting in the upper room for the Spirit to come, and it seems like no one knows when it will come. So, we don’t know where it comes from, when it will come, or where it will go next. A heretic might say that this Spirit sounds unreliable. But Jesus tells us emphatically that “everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him” (Luke 12:10). So, let us never say that the Spirit is unreliable!
Turning back to Scripture, of course, we find that the Spirit is both efficacious and reliable. If Ezekiel on the plain of bones isn’t convincing enough, we have the Word of God, Jesus, who tells us, “It is the Spirit who gives life” (John 6:63), and in reference to reliability, “how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him [than those who are evil and also fulfill promises]?” (Luke 11:13). We learn from Jesus that the Spirit gives us life, which is why we baptize in his name, and the Spirit is the one who speaks through us when we are blessed by God. The Spirit is the Father’s way of acting in and through us. All of this is possible because the Holy Spirit is God’s actual spirit! But I don’t know if that helps clear up the subordinationist heresy. A person’s spirit certainly seems to be an integral, if not central, part of oneself. But it’s not that whole self, is it?
This is where we go wrong — using ourselves as a reference point to try to understand God. We should always go the opposite way and use the mysterious truth God reveals about himself to better understand ourselves.
This Pentecost, I really leaned on correcting any misconceptions I was harboring about the Holy Spirit as a secondary divine player. Some of this was reflecting on the work of the Council of Nicea in affirming that the Spirit is the same exact divine essence of the Father and the Son. Another was a re-reading of the opening of the Letter to the Hebrews, where the Holy Spirit speaks through the writer (St. Paul or one of his followers) with this astounding and clear proclamation: “[The Son] is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1:3). I’m not presuming to tackle one of the most difficult fields in all of theology in understanding the mystery of the Trinity, but there is one point that my brain was able to process here. Being of the “same essence” is a technical way to talk about being “the exact imprint of God’s very being.” This phrase from Hebrews is very specific and resonates with me differently.
If we apply the “exact imprint” thought to the creation scene, we might see something different. When God creates Adam, he “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” — this breath is his Spirit (rukah in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek refer equally to breath, spirit and wind). This is not a metaphor, it is a way that God is revealing the mystery of the Trinity to us. The action of a human breathing might bear some resemblance to God breathing, but only a shadow of it. The Father is so superabundant and generative that when he breathes, his breath contains all that he is. This is no normal exhale. This breath is God sharing his very essence, so strongly that this essence has its own personhood and action in Creation. In the same fashion, the Word is from God, and it is also fully God, a personhood of his essence who is active in the world in a special way. This Creator who can make all of Creation with a Word and a Breath imbues his essence into everything simply by thinking about it! His presence is so overwhelming that just a whiff of his essence could spawn a thousand galaxies (although everything he does is intentional and intelligible, as his Word and law attest). Imagine what his actual, full Spirit can do!
These are things we cannot do — imbuing our very selves in our breath and world — and we have no power to create and inspire and be truth. And yet, by the grace of God we actually can create some things (physical, emotional, mental) and we can inspire one another, and we can speak the truth, all just in an infinitely reduced way compared to God. Do we pride ourselves in our little godhood or do we recognize that what we are sharing in is a gift from the one who created us? Can we realize just how much greater God’s power is than our little triumphs in life?
More importantly, are we doing the good that God wants us to do? I want to shift from thinking about how the Spirit is fully God to thinking about how important it is that God is giving his full self to us now in the End Times. We receive the Spirit as much as the Apostles in the upper room did, albeit the way this manifests in us is different. While the Spirit is present in all of our Sacraments, Baptism and Confirmation confer on us a personal evangelical call that we too often ignore. Consider what happened to the Apostles when the Holy Spirit descended on them. We are told in the first reading of the Pentecost liturgy during the day, “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim” (Acts 2:4). What did they proclaim? The rest of Acts chapter 2 relates Peter’s great homily, where he proclaims, “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear” (Acts 2:32-33). Here’s the nugget! The Spirit is poured out so that the Apostles can share the saving truth that God worked through his Son, Jesus Christ.
The Spirit is not poured out simply to make them feel emboldened or to grace them for being good people. There is a purpose, because now the End Times have begun and all of humanity is given some time to turn their hearts to the Way, the Truth and the Life before the Last Judgement.
Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit in the chapel in the village Stitar, Croatia. Photo from Adobe Stock.
Note how the Letter to the Romans acknowledges this moment that we still live within, found in the Pentecost Vigil epistle reading:
We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now;
and not only that, but we ourselves,
who have the firstfruits of the Spirit,
we also groan within ourselves
as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. …
the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness;
for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.
In other words, the whole point of life is the “adoption, the redemption of our bodies,” when we will be reunited perfectly with God. We — indeed, all of creation — are groaning in the labor pains brought about by Christ’s life, death and resurrection. And the Spirit is here to help us during this time, filling our mouths with the saving message of Jesus Christ, which gets us to this adoption, i.e., Heaven.
Let’s repeat this: the Spirit is given to us (today, in our Sacraments and freely by grace) specifically to fill our mouths with the redemptive message of Jesus Christ — intelligible in all languages and meant for all people. We are supposed to be sharing the Way, the Truth and the Life with others. This is what it means to truly love your neighbor. I meet so many Christians who think loving your neighbor means good deeds, kind words, and a helping hand. But without the message of Jesus Christ, who was literally raised bodily from the dead to create a new path to salvation for us, these good deeds are meaningless. Because the point has never been this life or making things better in this world. The point has always been to do God’s will, which is absolute goodness and truth, so we can be as worthy as possible for the redemption he is holding out to us. How can we have fallen so far from this message?
The second reading on the Pentecost liturgy celebrated during the day makes this point crystal clear: “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit that dwells in you” (Romans 8:11). Being raised from the dead — body and soul — to dwell with God in Heaven is the point of the Spirit being sent to us. That’s what we celebrate on Pentecost and that’s what makes us Christian.
I pray on this Pentecost that Catholics will be shocked out of their lukewarm tendencies, their acedia that keeps them comfortable in their jobs and money and little material triumphs. We must truly let the Spirit that has soaked our souls in our baptisms and confirmations to open our mouths to proclaim with the Apostles that Jesus Christ is the Way that all humanity has been given to share in God’s eternal glory.
You may have seen the recent information about the falling numbers of Americans who consider themselves Christian. The younger the group, the less they consider themselves Christian, even if they were baptized in the Church. The figure below is from an April 3, 2024 article in The Pillar. The main reason Catholics are outperforming our Protestant counterparts, by the way, is the influx of Catholic Latino immigrants.
While we forever trust in the power of the Holy Spirit to carry forward the Church and enkindle the hearts of all humans, there is much to lament here. It’s time for us all to take a hard look at how we might be caught up in something deeper and darker than a “phase.” I’ve been doing a lot of reading and listening to podcasts to better grasp a historical perspective on why contemporary culture is the way it is in regards to faith, and a few pieces have begun to fall into place.
Here’s an unsurprising reality: Americans’ most deeply held belief is that we are “free” individuals, and the freedom to choose our destiny — politically, materially, spiritually — is a sacrosanct right that has become the ultimate “good.” To many, especially young people, this doesn’t sound out of whack at all. Isn’t that what enlightened civilization is? Freewill and uninhibited choice!
Actually, that’s very much NOT what perfection is, according to our Lord Jesus Christ. And, in fact, we can trace a history of anti-Catholic thought that brought us to this point. In Western Europe and America, there was a determined effort to get out from under the authority of the Church. Truly, the sentence in bold above is really about denying any authority over us except our own. Consider how unimaginable it is today to suggest that a single perspective of authority be applied to everyone equally. You’d be called a fascist and/or religious fanatic if you suggest that we use the teachings of Christ (or the Koran, or the Book of Deuteronomy, or the Hindu Vedas…) to inform our laws and public policies. Forget microaggressions — it would be a macroaggression to suggest that a non-believer be subject to rules put in place from any belief system! Since individual freedom is the highest good in our culture, we are left with the absurd position of letting everyone choose the rules that apply to them. It’s no wonder politics are so divisive today.
I’m going to call this greatest of American beliefs the sovereignty of the individual. In order for the sovereignty of the individual to come about, many authorities must be questioned and ultimately removed (pope, king, nobility, teachers, parents). Part and parcel of this centuries-long effort to get out from the yoke of external authorities is the removal of God — from political life first, and, naturally following this, from private life.
Contemporary philosophers like D.C. Schindler make the point that when we prioritize the power of the individual to choose what he or she wants, we necessarily embrace a counter-Christian imagining of the world, human nature, and society. When we pursue individual freedoms and choice, we have to imagine that those things are naturally owed to us, our “inalienable rights.” But in order to envision a world where the sovereignty of the individual is our guiding light, we can’t admit that all of Creation actually owes a debt to God. We can’t admit that Christ is the one sovereign. Those beliefs conflict with a world where our freedoms come first. Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, our metaphysical worldview increasingly removed God as our source and Christ’s redemption as our guiding principle while pursuing individual choice under the garb of “freedoms.”
Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate), 1890, Vincent Van Gogh | Wikimedia Commons.
That might seem too comprehensive — too black-and-white — but I think Schindler is right. In fact, the Church also thinks he’s right. Many times in the past few centuries, popes have condemned modernism and liberalism, both of which are strains of intellectual thought implicated in this establishment of the sovereignty of the individual. One papal passage, in particular, jumps out at me: it’s October, 1952, and Pope Pius XII just steered the faithful through the existential horrors of World War II (the populace already reeling in the fog of nihilism in the wake of World War I). “Where is God in this?” was a refrain easy to be heard. In a radio address to a group called Catholic Action, Pope Pius XII makes this incisive critique:
Oh, ask us not who the “enemy” is, nor what clothes he wears. It is found everywhere and among everyone; he can be violent and sneaky. In these last centuries he has attempted to bring about the intellectual, moral and social disintegration of the unity in the mysterious organism of Christ. He wanted nature without grace; reason without faith; freedom without authority; sometimes authority without freedom. It is an “enemy” that has become increasingly concrete, with an unscrupulousness that still leaves us astonished: Christ yes, Church no. Then: God yes, Christ no. Finally the impious cry: God is dead; indeed: God never existed.And here is the attempt to build the structure of the world on foundations that we do not hesitate to point out as mainly responsible for the threat that looms over humanity: an economy without God, a law without God, a politics without God. The “enemy” has used and is used so that Christ is a stranger in the University, in the school, in the family, in the administration of justice, in legislative activity, in the assembly of nations, wherever peace or war is determined. [italics are mine]
Pope Pius XII places the work done to establish the sovereignty of the individual on the shoulders of the Devil. And well he should. But we have participated with the Devil to bring our culture to this point. We need to understand this, acknowledge this, and do something to return to God and the Catholic Church.
Fr. Ezra Sullivan, OP, performs a nice unpacking of this quote from Pope Pius XII in his podcast, “Christ vs. Secularism: The Ethics of the Day.” In short, he shows how certain revolutionary moments in history line up with the pithy middle part of the quote:
“Christ yes, Church no.” This is the theme of the Protestant Reformation. The first step for Western culture in elevating personal choice and the sovereignty of the individual was to assert that each person can better discern what the Bible means and what God is telling humanity than the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. What pride! Nonetheless, this crucial move to divorce the individual from the authority of the Church set the stage for more radical moves. The first external source of authority — the very one Christ established for our salvation — was done away with, at least for a vanguard of intellectual thinkers.
“God yes, Christ no.” This is the theme of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. God was not denied, per se, but was relegated to the great watchmaker, the one who simply set the table then faded into watching mode. In this view, humanity was freed to exalt in our gifts and become the rulers of the world and our own destiny. There is no room for Christ to be King here, and the authority of his sacrifice on the Cross is superseded by a new blood sacrifice in the form of the guillotine. As Fr. Sullivan says, it was the beating heart of the revolution, spilling a new sacrifice of blood on the ground as the state asserted its authority over any suspected opposition, particularly in the form of religious and those representing the “old order.” Rule no longer needed to be ordained by God but instead was rationally agreed upon by men. God and Christ had been removed from the political and public sphere.
“God is dead.” Friedrich Nietzsche published these words in 1882 as a way of marking the fact that Western culture had, for all intents and purposes, made God irrelevant to life. He actually didn’t believe in God at all — this was his poetic way of talking about the idea of God being worthless in the way modern humans governed their lives. But Nietzsche was much less thrilled with this state of affairs than people imagine. He understood the problem, “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole” (Twilight of the Idols). Truly, he saw things clearly, for the 20th century was to bring a complete collapse of morality, especially in the mode of state-sponsored killing. Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism… For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe.” And Fr. Sullivan shows this theme being actualized in the Communist Revolution, where it was forbidden to practice Christianity or any religion. The state had to enforce the purely rational concept of humanity creating its own destiny. The removal of everything supernatural marked a new century of humanity’s erasure of God from relevance in our lives.
“God never existed.” Fr. Sullivan equates this to the sexual revolution in the 1960s through today (prophetically, as it were, for Pope Pius XII). I see his point. Our understanding of our own reproductive biology, our tampering with that biology, our refusal to acknowledge the sacred purpose of creation at the heart of our reproductive biology — all of these are symptoms of a people imagining their own origin and purpose. We are perhaps made uncomfortable by the moral arguments the Church makes against contraception, sex outside of wedlock, homosexual sex, abortion, etc., but do we see how we are flailing about in end-stage God denial? Humans have always practiced these things, but there was a time in Western culture when the reality of God as our Creator who has laid out a definite plan for our perfection and salvation was evident and unquestioned. Those acts were not seen as our “right” but instead as a perversion of our good nature that God created. They were undeniably sins and removed us from reaching heaven (a truly frightening reality!), but now they are seen as normal practices in the life of a young adult achieving his or her sexual education and adulthood. The absurd extreme we are seeing today is our demand to create our own gender — to deny biology itself in the face of my internal choice, the full sovereignty of the individual. What’s more, we are all expected to support each other in this self-determination.
The Pillars of Society (1926), George Grosz | Image from time.com.
Well, I, for one, am ready to proclaim that the Emperor has no clothes. Or, better put, we all actually have a God despite the fact that we’re prancing around as if no one is watching.
How the heck did we fall so far to deny our Catholic truth that has remained constant through the millennia? And why are Catholics, in particular, so weak in allowing God to form every aspect of our personal, social, and political lives? I think we have gullibly accepted a secular worldview, and even tried to make the Church (the very Bride of Christ!) try to conform to our prideful ideas of what is right and good rather than conforming ourselves to the Mystical Body of Christ that holds within itself all truth, goodness and beauty.
Knowing the history of Western intellectual thought, specifically how it has systematically removed God from the public, political and personal spheres in the pursuit of individual sovereignty, is extremely important in remembering what it means to be Catholic. Each sphere requires us to re-align ourselves, to actively return to the unchanging teaching of the Church rather than the perverse secular teachings of our culture. We accept far too many cultural values around the sovereignty of the individual that are anti-Christian in their substance and metaphysical justification.
Public: Are you weirded out by the thought of being openly Catholic in public? The priest says at the end of Mass “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord,” or “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.” or “Go forth. The Mass has ended.” What does it mean to “Go forth” into the world, into the public space, consecrated to God and saved by the sacrifice of his Son? This forms who we are! Do we just put our entire Catholicity away like the sport coat we wore to Mass? Of course not. Instead, we bring our values and activity into the public sphere, advocating for and helping the poor and needy. Publicly asserting the teachings of the Church. Not affirming that every personal choice is ordered to the good. It’s not OK to tell people, “you do you,” or “whatever you choose will be right.” That’s just not Catholic. We must be guided by a well-formed faith, wisdom, and prudence. Another point here: the Church is never an individual thing, it’s found in community. This community is by definition public and cannot be sequestered away or separated from the rest of our lives. Our call is to be the Body of Christ in supporting, exhorting and even correcting our fellow humans.
Political: “Separation of Church and state” is part of what got us here in the first place and should not be something we blithely and wholeheartedly agree with. The Church (as in the Mystical Body of Christ, not the ecclesial ministers, per se) has much to bring to the state in terms of guiding moral decision making. The Church — that is, you and me — should be active in politics specifically in bringing Christ to our nation, not in any other way. Your strong feelings about private vs. public funding for education (or other purely fiscal concerns) matter little to achieving the Kingdom of God or the salvation of souls. The Church has a rich history of moral theology, teaching on attaining virtue, and practical recommendations for Catholics in the political zone. Do we know them? Do we advocate for them in our city, state, and nation?
Private: Each of us has specific challenges due to our personality, our material needs, our state in life, etc. There is one thing that is universal: God’s active presence and grace. Seriously, if we pray to God for his grace and recognize his hand in all that is said and done in a day, we will wonder how we ever got along thinking we were sovereign individuals. Praising God constantly throughout the day is a great practice to help us get out of the cultural lie that this life is all about us and the decisions we autonomously make.
So, to wrap up my mini-rant and reflection about why God is so absent from contemporary culture, I’d like to assert that it’s because we don’t think it’s a problem. But it is a problem, and we should be doing something about it for our own soul’s sake and for others. Forget grand campaigns of evangelization or sweeping reforms of church life. We can bring God back into culture by having him be the basis of each of our lives. Our example and very life will show the world that being a God-fearing Catholic is a viable — in fact, the only— way to be a great human being and uphold the dignity of all people. If we wake up each morning thanking him for our life and breath and all our blessings, if we ask for his help in making our daily decisions, if we strive to live like Christ, if we cede our accomplishments as well as our disappointments to him, we will not only find peace, we will show the world that being Catholic is a necessary and vital way to be human, regardless of the era.
Christ has transformed history. It’s time we acted like it.
I generally prefer to focus on Lectio Divina in this blog, so excuse me for posting a more wildly ranging reflection. Please let me know what you think in the comments below. There is much more to be said here, and I hope to post soon about the issue of tolerance, which is a great liberal ideal and something that is shared with Christianity but not in the way it manifests in society today.
Speaking of liberal, I do think that there are some great problems with the liberal intellectual tradition, and certainly people like D.C. Schindler take up this argument. Much of our contemporary worldview has come about through liberal political thinkers like John Locke, David Hume, Robespierre, Adam Smith, etc., and they were decidedly antagonistic to Catholicism. The point is that we’ve been fed an underlying animosity toward God and Christ while incorporating what we think of as positive ideals around freedom and democracy. This is dangerous and needs to be examined.
But, likewise, the conservative tradition is no great banner to fly, either. Riddled with reactionaryism, self-interest, and intolerance, the threads of conservativism have also embraced a Godless outlook, if not in name at least in practice. Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke were children of the Enlightenment as much as John Locke and Adam Smith were. Plus, we have disastrous forays in authoritarianism and fascism from conservatives.
In the end, the last generation’s liberals become the next generation’s conservatives. In other words, these categories are political in the worst sense — they have no lasting, absolute, or transcendent value. Why, then, are we so preoccupied with aligning ourselves with one or the other? They are manmade constructs, not the truth — which, by the way, we actually have access to!
We should be much more concerned with having everything flow from Christ, our fountainhead. Every time we partake of the sacrament of the Eucharist, our faithful hope is to become more like Christ, to allow him to transform us from the inside out into the very image of God. Lean into this! This is what it means to be Catholic. In this vein, Bishop Robert Barron speaks to this when explaining the most recent Vatican document, Dignitas Infinita. It is well worth the watch:
Feast of St. Augustine, Monday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time, Year A: 1 Thes 1:1-5, 8b-10, Mt 23:13-22.
Apart from St. Paul, it’s hard to think of a more pivotal early figure for the Roman Catholic Church than St. Augustine of Hippo. Even in the heady time of the late Patristic Age. Just consider the list of Church Fathers from this period!
Gregory of Nazianzus (329 – c. 390)
Basil of Caesarea (c. 330 – 379)
John Chrysostom (347–407)
Ambrose (A.D. 340–397)
Jerome (347–420)
Augustine of Hippo (354–430)
St. Augustine (1645-1650), Philippe de Champaigne | Wikimedia Commons.
His corpus of writing is immense and highly influential: more than 100 separate titles, including Confessions, City of God, and On Christian Doctrine. It wouldn’t be until St. Thomas Aquinas came along 800 years later that the Western Church would produce such a philosophically deep and theologically important writer.
Any facet of his life or works would serve to occupy us for days at a time. Today, I want to focus on something that might surprise you to discover: St. Augustine wrote the oldest known monastic rule in the Western Church. Yes, 150 years before St. Benedict of Nursia wrote the longer Rule of Saint Benedict, St. Augustine wrote his rule in 397 AD. We might not think of St. Augustine as particularly “monastic.” We might know of his early life as a successful rhetorician and promiscuous Roman gentleman on his way to being a provincial governor. Alternatively, we might recognize that his major vocation was as Bishop of Hippo, a position also not associated with the observance of a rule of common life. But that major turning point in his life when he was stationed in Milan (then, the most powerful seat of the Roman empire) brought him into intimate contact with the strong, orthodox St. Ambrose. He also knew other figures such as the cantankerous St. Jerome, who was translating Greek and Hebrew sources to compile new Latin texts (and picking fights with friends and enemies alike). All three men were successful Roman citizens, dedicated to secular upward mobility until they had their respective conversion moments and adult baptisms. All three men experienced that something electric in the 4th-century air that was appealing to adult converts ready to devote themselves to God. This electricity took the form of ascetical practices like virginity, voluntary poverty and other self-denials that had made their way into Christian minds from the Desert Fathers.
Let’s recall the history of the Church in the 4th century. Under the emperor Diocletian, this century opens with one of the most severe (and final) persecutions of Christians throughout Europe, north Africa, the Levant, and the East. Royal edicts banned Christian worship, confiscated books and sacred vessels, legally destroyed churches, arrested all clergy, released apostates, and made sacrifice to pagan gods compulsory. Christians began the century in the same state of putting their lives on the line for Christ that had occurred sporadically in the previous three centuries. Martyrdom remained the very real standard for which Christians strived.
But then along comes Emperor Constantine who surprises everyone. Christianity is made legal by the Edict of Milan in 313 and Constantine is the one who convenes the Council of Nicea in 325 to get the 1,800 bishops to agree upon and articulate their official doctrine. Imagine going from underground house churches to formal, state-sanctioned religion in the matter of a few decades. Christians who saw themselves as ready at any moment to sacrifice their lives for Christ were now surrounded by an influx of new Christians who saw it as a safe and sanctioned religion. As Henri Marrou writes in The Christian Centuries: The First Six Hundred Years, “From the spiritual point of view, of course, this progress was not wholly beneficial. The calm enjoyed by the Church deprived it of the sieve of martyrdom and on the whole lowered the quality of recruits; there is evidence of contamination, compromise, and some infiltration from the surrounding paganism, and we are no longer aware of the early fervor of the Church of Saints” (226).
It’s no wonder that the next several hundred years were very concerned with rooting out heresies.
The Four Doctors of the Western Church, Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) | Gerard Seghers, between 1600 and 1650, Wikimedia Commons.
While the martyr-as-model became a rarity, the Holy Spirit had been building a new model of Christian life: the monastic. In the second half of the previous century (the late 200s), men and women began to voluntarily remove themselves from “civilized life” to the desert just outside the cities in Egypt and later the middle east. These early monastics, sometimes completely alone, sometimes in loose communities, pursued a life more “pure,” away from the temptations and irrelevancies of secular life. Their personal habits ranged from severely to loosely ascetical. Christianity found a new role model in the desert monastics.
By the time St. Anthony the Great (the “founder of desert monasticism” although not the first) dies in 356, thousands of monks and nuns were flocking to the deserts for this lifestyle. And by the time Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine were being baptized (respectively, 365-ish, 374, and 387 AD), the monastic lifestyle was widely upheld as the new standard of Christian behavior. All of this explains why Augustine developed his Rule in 397 – it was his ideal to continue to live in community with like-minded Christian men.
The Rule of Saint Augustine clearly holds up the early Apostolic Church as the model for living in an intentional community. As it states, “The primary reason for your sharing life together is to live harmoniously in the house and to have one heart and one soul in seeking God. Do not call anything your own; possess everything in common … For thus you read in the Acts of the Apostles, that all things were held in common among them, and distribution was made to each one as needed” (from the text received by the Order of Preachers, as appears in the second reading of today’s Office of the Readings according to the Propers for the Order of Preachers). Thus, Christians have a lineage from apostle to martyr to monastic.
A thousand years later, St. Augustine’s rule was just as important as St. Benedict’s. By the fifteenth century there were over 4,500 houses in Europe following the rule (from The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism). Of particular interest to me, St. Dominic chose the Rule of Saint Augustine as the rule for his newly formed Order of Preachers. This shouldn’t surprise us since Dominic was drawn to the same Apostolic mission that appealed to St. Augustine: living simply in accord with one another while preaching the Gospel. In today’s Office of the Readings according to the Propers for the Order of Preachers, Blessed Humbert of Romans (fifth Master General of the Order of Preachers, 1254-1263) tells us how appropriate the rule is for preachers, particularly in its simplicity and emphasis on apostolic life. He writes:
There are many rules that lay down many bodily disciplines. The rule of Saint Augustine consist of more regulations regarding spiritual actions, so that there may be the love of God and neighbor, the unity of hearts, and the harmony of lives. Who does not know that spiritual exercises are more valuable than bodily ones?
So while St. Augustine gives the Church the most thorough synthesis and re-working of Neoplatonism within Christianity, while he gives us incredible understanding and articulation of the Trinity and other supernatural concepts, while he details exacting problems with heresies like Manicheanism and Pelagianism, he holds onto this core of simplicity in the apostolic life. His life shows us that a simple, apostolic way of living puts us on the Way to the Kingdom and reveals to us the treasures of wisdom that God is delighted to give us.
The earliest known portrait of Augustine in a 6th-century fresco, Lateran, Rome | Wikimedia Commons
More particular to today’s readings in the Mass, St. Augustine is a thorough foil to the scribes and Pharisees who Jesus warns in the gospel reading. Jesus calls them “blind guides” and “blind fools.” He points to their inability to see the forest through the trees: “And you say, ‘If one swears by the altar, it means nothing, but if one swears by the gift on the altar, one is obligated.’ You blind ones, which is greater, the gift, or the altar that makes the gift sacred?” Jesus is pointing out that in their tiptoeing around their many rules (case in point: do not swear by the Lord’s name), they create ridiculous new rules that have corrupted the very heart of God’s revelation to humanity. How could they ever utter the phrase, “if one swears by the altar, it means nothing”? This is the path of people who have forgotten the truths about God and instead of constantly conforming their hearts to God they conform their lives to a succession of trivial rules they make up to avoid trivial sins.
Jesus strongly states just how off-base they have become: “One who swears by the altar swears by it and all that is upon it; one who swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it; one who swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who is seated on it.”
At stake in this gospel passage is the concept of taking oaths – that is, declaring one’s commitment to something. The scribes and Pharisees have invented some sayings that exploit loopholes in Jewish strictures, but they’ve completely lost the point along the way. They should know that the first, and really only meaningful oath they take is to God Himself, and the altar and temple are His, not theirs. As Jesus says later in this episode, “You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!” (Mt 23:24).
Are oaths that important? Absolutely! We receive baptism, we receive our faith, we receive confirmation and the gifts of the Holy Spirit; but at some point God wants us to actively swear our lives to Him. He wants us to stake our lives in Him, to have Him be the basis upon which everything else in life is measured and committed. Thus, if He is the measure of absolute commitment, the seriousness of our oaths and commitments to other things in life can be made in reference to Him.
But doesn’t Jesus tell us elsewhere, “But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool” (Mt 5:34-35a)? St. Augustine himself replies to this when replying in a letter to “Honorable Publica” (thought to be a North African Jew in the process of converting to Christianity). Augustine writes that Jesus’s words are “in my opinion spoken, not because it is a sin to swear a true oath, but because it is a heinous sin to forswear oneself: from which crime our Lord would have us keep at a great distance, when He charged us not to swear at all” (Letter 47, 398 AD). Augustine knows that in the context of commitment to the faith and to each other, oaths serve a very great purpose.
His religious rule continues to elicit oaths of faithfulness to this day, 1600 years later.
So, today I thank God for the life, writings, example, and rule of Saint Augustine. May we continue to plumb the depths of his writings and wisdom throughout our days here on earth and maybe even praise God in heaven alongside him.
Sixteen miles northeast of the town of Abiquiú, New Mexico, just two and a half miles past the road to Georgia O’Keefe’s famous Ghost Ranch, is Forest Road 151. If you take this unassuming dirt road the length of its 13 miles, the sage, juniper, and cholla cactus flatland gives way to the red rock walls of Chama River Canyon. The further you go, the more dramatic the desert landscape becomes, and by the time you pass the rafting take-out and put-in points and arrive at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, you’re in the midst of what looks like a mini Zion National Park.
The natural beauty, instead of being the focus of this place, is the backdrop for something more alive, vital, and important. Here, monks pray and work in relative silence, joining their lives to the liturgy, seeking to praise God and know Christ in all that they do. (While inconceivably listed as a “Buddhist temple” on Google Maps, it is in fact a Benedictine monastery.) Founded in 1964, this monastery is a baby (temporally speaking) in comparison to those in Europe. The monks have tried a number of different cottage industries to help support themselves, and today they have a flock of sheep, 50 chickens, a donkey, and four horses, as well as a thriving gift shop for visitors. It is remote, so they create their own electricity thanks to solar arrays (diesel generators did the heavy lifting in past generations), and they are very conscious of water and energy usage.
Historical images from Monastery of Christ in the Desert (from their website). On the left: the monastic community in 1980. On the right: George Nakashima (architect of monastery church), Father Aelred Wall (the founding Prior), and Georgia O’Keefe.
Hospitality has been a part of the Benedictine charism since St. Benedict wrote his Rule for monks and founded his first monastery in Subiaco, Italy in 529 AD (1,494 years ago!). In the Rule of St. Benedict, he writes, “Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received…” (53.15). Hospitality is provided not only in the form of food (“the abbot’s table must always be with guests and travelers” [56.1]), but lodging as well, since St. Benedict, speaking of the guesthouse, says that “adequate bedding should be available there” (53.22). Thus, travelers, pilgrims, vagrants, what have you, all find welcome at Benedictine monasteries.
The Monastery of Christ in the Desert welcomes a steady stream of pilgrims, retreat-seekers, and vacationers, thanks in part to the famous American monk Thomas Merton who made mention of this monastery as a wonderful place. Suzanne and I have stayed there twice and we’ve encountered a huge range of fellow guests: Catholics, atheists, Protestant pastors, Jews, retirees, hippies, and discerning priests.
Each person has a different reason for coming, different expectations, and different ways of participating in the Benedictine life. Some use it mainly for rest and relaxation in a beautiful setting. Suzanne and I go for spiritual rejuvenation, embracing the ascetical life of silence, reduced calorie intake, work, and prayer. Chanting the Divine Office with the monks 4 years ago was so joyful and meaningful that we decided to commit to the Lay Dominican path as a way to being more devoted to Christ in our lives.
So, we planned another week at the monastery and have just returned. I had an unexpected and extraordinary experience there – this is my story.
Peace and Disturbance
We had plenty of time to prepare ourselves for the silence. We drove down from Salt Lake City, breaking up the 10-hour journey with a camping spot outside of Mesa Verde National Park, where a vicious storm rocked us to sleep in our rooftop tent. I was looking forward to the challenge of not speaking much for 7 days straight, especially because my last experience at the monastery showed me that silence can be a mind-opening experience in today’s world. I realized this time, like the last, that so much of what we say on a daily basis really doesn’t need to be said. We tend to be chatterboxes, mimicking an information- and entertainment-obsessed culture.
The one time I found the silence uncomfortable was during meals at the guest refectory, a room with 4 tables, each hosting 6 large, comfortable wooden chairs for the guests. Maybe it’s because I felt like being courteous and was also curious to know my fellow pilgrims’ stories, but being silent felt contrary to my inclinations. Perhaps that’s the point – humility in the form of radical respect for others’ space. In any case, after flashing a smile at these strangers across the table, we all just sat there shoveling in food and trying not to make more awkward eye contact.
We settled into a rhythm – walking from our room in the Ranch House up the pebbled path to the chapel, the crunch of our steps loud in the air. The chapel was always bright, even at 4am Vigils when the waning moon lit the path better than any flashlight yet the chapel blinded. It was an appropriate sign of the light of Christ, banishing the darkness of sin and the terror of the night. We chanted out of their prayer books, joining our weak and stumbling voices to the monks’ practiced ones. We took our cues from them – cadence, standing and sitting, bowing, and being patient with it all.
When the Divine Office was prayed, we either left the chapel to return to our room or walked over to the main building with the gift shop, Guest Master’s office, and the refectories where we ate. Depending on the time of day, we might head there for early morning coffee, to receive our morning work assignments (optional for guests), or to eat our main or light meals. Suzanne and I also took a morning walk down the road leading to the monastery in the morning and later in the evening.
The heat of the first few days was intense while the nights were blessedly cool. Our thick-walled room became a cool refuge throughout the days, when we would read for hours on end and nap in the hot afternoon. At night, with the windows wide open, we would fall asleep to the sound of the branches from the big, 7-trunked boxelder tree scraping on the wavy metal awning over the Ranch House walkway. We might sleepily tiptoe past the other two Ranch House rooms to get to the bathroom on the end, and try not to let the screen door bang shut when coming back.
We settled in and I noticed that I became a little more solid, a little more peaceful and grounded each day.
Friday was the first day we were there for Mass, which happens in the morning right after Lauds. To my delight, I saw that the priests had prepared a chalice for the monks and guests and offered the Blood of Christ during communion as well as the Body. I immediately felt drawn to receive the cup during communion but told myself I would wait until Sunday when we were celebrating the Feast of the Transfiguration.
Why wait? First, I think COVID did a psychological number on Catholics. Most, if not all, Catholic churches stopped offering the Blood of Christ as a precaution in the face of infectious disease that could be spread by a shared cup. This makes very good practical sense, but we unavoidably came to associate the precious Blood with getting sick. Of all the contrary notions! So, I think I had an initial reluctance out of the 3-year-old habit of being afraid of contracting a virus.
Second, one of the ascetical privations I wanted to undergo was avoiding alcohol for that week. Suzanne and I have a more “European” approach to alcohol, enjoying wine with nearly every dinner. I felt like a break was overdue and even though a tiny sip of the Blood of Christ does not really count as imbibing, I’m sometimes too punctilious. So, I gave myself a few days of absolute abstinence.
That being said, I was very much excited to receive the Eucharist under both species again. I hadn’t since the start of the pandemic. I have Dominican priest friends who actually see the demise of offering the cup at Mass as a good thing – it’s not standard practice outside of the USA, and it is seen as odd by those who grew up and/or trained for the priesthood outside of the US. After all, we are taught that receiving just the Body of Christ does not diminish the sacrament one iota, and receiving under both species does not somehow increase the reception of Christ. But, even my Dominican priest friends have discussed how receiving under both species might be reintroduced to help signify the solemnity of a feast or special day on the liturgical calendar, so there still seems to be something special there.
So, I sat with a measure of anticipation for Sunday Mass. And that’s when things got a little weird.
On Friday night, I was having some trouble getting to sleep. In that in between time, when you’re not asleep but you’re definitely not wide awake, I had a vision of myself going to Communion and grabbing the chalice when it was offered to me. I chugged it down, tipping it far back and spilling it down my face and shirt. I heard some wild laughing, encouraging me to guzzle it down. I awoke with a start, horrified at what I had done. That was awful I told myself, knowing I should (and would) never do such a thing. In the back of my mind, I immediately identified this scene with gluttony, and wondered if my subconscious was telling me that I only wanted the sacrament because I wanted some wine. That can’t be true I told myself, it’s not about the wine. But a seed of doubt had been sewn about whether I was approaching the sacrament in the right way.
After some shaky breaths, I tried to coax myself back to sleep. I even said a little prayer to my guardian angel to help me get to sleep peacefully. I should say that I never pray to my guardian angel. In fact, I’ve always regarded guardian angels as a bit of Catholic folklore, made worse by sappy figurines and overly romantic angel depictions on baptism cards. But, I read a lot about the Church Fathers and several early mentions of guardian angels made me take them more seriously. First, we see St. Jerome (c.342-420) write, “how great the dignity of the soul, since each one has from his birth an angel commissioned to guard it” (Comm. in Matt., xviii, lib. II). Then, we have Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c.500) define the Nine Choirs of Angels, the last of which contains those who are most concerned with human affairs, i.e., guardian angels. And if that wasn’t enough, Jesus himself says, “Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven” (Mt 18:10). OK, I tell myself, seems like there’s evidence in scripture and tradition that maybe I should be taking this more seriously. And who doesn’t want some spiritual help?
This might be a good time to share what I brought to the monastery for reading material. We have been studying David Fagerberg’s Liturgical Asceticism in our Lay Dominican study, and had recently covered his chapter about the Desert Fathers who retreated to the desert in the early centuries of Christianity to gain control over their passions and engage in other spiritual warfare with demons. I brought a few Dominican texts from Pinckaers and Lombardo to better understand our Dominican understanding of the passions and desire. I also brought Bernard McGinn’s The Foundations of Mysticism book, which I was halfway through – enmeshed in early monastic figures who wrote of transcendental experiences of unity with God, beyond language’s ability to describe, when the unknowable divine essence is somehow beheld or experienced, often in just brief glimpses of time.
All of this to say that I was enmeshed in desert asceticism and early Christian mystical experience, a time when spirits, angels, and demons were seen as very real.
So, I asked for a little help in finding rest. Next thing I knew, I was back in front of the priest, receiving the Blood of Christ, only this time when I tipped the cup back, a dark maroon, viscous liquid entered my mouth and throat. It was actual blood, and I was choking and gagging on it. A deep, malevolent voice sounded in my ears, “if this is what you want, here you go, have it!” This time, I sat up with a start, very upset. This felt wrong and I had no idea where such a nasty image would come from nor why. I felt like I couldn’t control the images that were coming into my mind and that was very upsetting. I figured that I needed to do something more heavy duty in terms of prayer and I’m not afraid to admit that in my distress I mentally uttered the only thing that came to mind – a scene right out of the Exorcist. Knowing the great importance that our tradition and Orthodox Christians place in the name of the Lord, I said in my head By the Name of Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, be gone from my mind you demons!
Writing it down makes it seem kitschy. It’s hard to describe that feeling of being besieged by profane thoughts that aren’t my own, that are out of my control. Maybe people who hear voices in their head feel that way. In any case, I said that with conviction, then recited the Jesus prayer a few times, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. By the time I finished these, I had calmed down and lay back to surrender to sleep and see what came next.
I slept soundly through the night.
But, the next day I was unsettled about whether I should go to receive the cup on Sunday. I had a day to let that experience percolate, and I had fairly made up my mind that maybe it was a sign that I shouldn’t go to receive the cup. We had been thinking much over the past few years about receiving Communion in the right state of mind, heart, and body. That is, without any type of grievous sin, having fasted for at least an hour before Mass, and having prepared ourselves over the course of the liturgy to be truly repentant, focused, and receptive. Something about those semi-dreams, those visions, made me feel like either I had sinned somehow in the way I thought about the Blood of Christ or perhaps I simply wasn’t in “right” mind to accept the cup if I was putting so much emphasis on it.
So, when Mass came on Sunday, it was still in the back of my mind to simply receive the Body of Christ and forgo the Blood. It was the Feast of the Transfiguration and I contemplated the great gift God gave the apostles in the vision of the Transfiguration, Christ in all his glory. It was something to give them hope in the dark days after the Crucifixion and even between the Ascension and Pentecost. An amazing mystical truth given to the Church. Before long, the liturgy had progressed to the Eucharist, and I even remember a small voice bartering with me in my head, offering COVID-influenced logic: if too many people go to receive the Blood before you, then just bypass it to avoid possible infection. Oy!
But as I approached the priest, it simply felt right to partake in Christ on this great feast in all of the ways he was offering himself to us and the Father. So, I accepted the Blood of Christ offered to me, a light red wine with a piece of the co-mingled Body floating in it, sweet and rich on the tongue, and warming in the esophagus as I went back to my seat to kneel in thanks. And I was struck with the most amazing sense of rightness. I was as positive as I was about the sun in the morning and my feet on the gravel path that Christ had entered into my body and perfected me. For that moment, I was made whole and warm in God’s presence, and I knew that this was a resounding confirmation that receiving the Body and Blood of Christ was right and good. Of course it was! How could it not be? I thanked God as I knelt and a profound sense of well-being swept through me, the grace of God. I was probably smiling like an idiot.
After Mass, I whispered to Suzanne that I had experienced a really profound Eucharist at Mass. She smiled and said, “good!” I said no more.
On Monday, though, during our evening walk at which we had given each other the go-ahead to talk since we wanted to discuss our readings and experiences (and we’re gabby Dominicans), I spilled the beans on the whole story. Another day of reflection had distilled some things for me, and I wanted to tell her about them. I explained that I had been excited to receive the Blood of Christ for the first time since 2020, but I really felt that a demon (demons?) had planted doubts in my mind that Friday evening. I shared how I had prayed to my guardian angel and then to Jesus to combat these demonic thoughts and how that seemed to work. Then I explained how they even sought to dissuade me just before Communion, but that my profound experience with the Eucharist almost seemed to be a spiritual encouragement or consolation from God for pursuing the good and fighting the distractions and temptations of the devil.
“That is really amazing,” she exclaimed, “because it totally mirrors what I’m reading in The Screwtape Letters right now!” (referring to C.S. Lewis’s classic short book, which I hadn’t read yet).
I was relieved on a couple of levels. I admit to being a bit sheepish about the whole affair. I have told people that I believe in angels and demons as part of the faith we have received, but I’ve never attributed specific, personal experiences to them. It was a nice surprise to find that someone as great as C.S. Lewis presented angels and demons along similar lines as what I had experienced.
We talked some more about it. “I’m actually hesitant to even be saying this out loud,” I said, “because what if I start reading into everything and get completely overwhelmed by a spiritual battle between angels and demons. I feel like I’d go off the deep end.”
“That’s just what the demons want you to think,” Suzanne said slyly.
She was right. It was the same tactic of dissuading me, of diverting me from the good and the true, that they had used a few days earlier.
Maggie the donkey and Brother David, an extremely talented shepherd, weaver, builder of farm infrastructure, and main cantor for the monastery.
What do I make of this? Well, I feel blessed to have had my first experience knowingly discerning spirits active in my life. I think we all do this unknowingly. When we are guided by our consciences to make good decisions instead of bad ones, we are navigating the dangerous turf of spiritual battle. When we master and guide our passions to only help things and ourselves reach our proper and good telos, or end purpose, then we are doing the same. But the desert, the silence, the study, the concentrated focus on God and my own response to Him – well, those things yielded something completely new for me. I became aware how as a spiritual being myself, I am influenced by other spiritual beings. This is quite apart from bodily senses – I found that as I was more slow and aware in my mind and heart, it was here that the spiritual life was being contended. It is in my thoughts, my motivations, my feelings and urges that I should be more aware of how I am progressing toward the good with the help of grace or whether I am perverting the natural good of things and myself thanks to the work of demons.
I think this is something very important to be aware of. We are very used to thinking of ourselves as autonomous beings heroically making our own way to God or tragically falling from grace. But, in fact, we are caught up in an inexpressibly vast drama of God’s love for creation, with spiritual forces more powerful than us. It is only by the unmerited and unexplainable love of God for humanity that He deigned to take our form and provide us with a special way back to Him.
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.
-C.S. Lewis, preface to The Screwtape Letters
A Note to Skeptics
Many who ready this may be skeptical of my experience, and I certainly understand. Are demons and angels real? In 2023, demons and angels are nothing but the stuff of fantasy and television series. I can hear the very learned psychiatrist and atheist friend in my book club, who we call “Michael the Elder,” saying, “this is just psychologizing of the emotions and dream states, pure drivel!”
Here is an important point: modern neuroscience has done an amazing job of describing how the brain works. Indeed, scientists can even identify chemicals and neuropathways involved in emotional states and religious-type experiences. I love reading these studies and gaining insight into the amazing machines our bodies are. But neuroscience can only understand the mechanics of the brain and psychology can only describe the strivings of intellect and reason. They merely guess at why emotions and visions happen. As far as the content and significance of them, these sciences try to apply systems of mythology and sense-making from people like Freud, Jung, Lacan, etc.
For people of faith, we engage a part of ourselves beyond the intellect, namely the soul, to probe and interact with the world beyond the senses. After all, it is not my sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell that leads me to believe in Jesus Christ as the gate to everlasting life (although all of those are lovingly engaged in our celebration of the liturgy where our souls and bodies rejoice in the Lord). No, it is trust in the revelation of God to humanity over millennia in the form of prophets, religion and scripture. If that was not enough, He gave us Himself as a real, historical person in flesh and blood to not just help us believe but also to raise us up spiritually and bodily to be with Him.
So, we’re not so different, atheist psychiatrists and me. We both trust in something (or have faith in something). They trust secular systems of sense-making from modern psychologists and published observational studies, while I trust a 2,000 year-old sense-making system that engages more than just the intellect.
There is one more issue that must be addressed: dismissing an experience like mine as superstition. Most of us would agree that the word “superstition” means belief in supernatural causes for which there is little evidence. Often, though, I think this word is used more like name-calling than honest evaluation of a person’s metaphysics. We undoubtedly live in a modern era where science and technology have transformed our physical lives so completely that discussions of spiritual beings feels archaic, medieval, maybe even cute and diverting. Why, then, do people continue to grope for faith on their deathbed? No matter how we try, we can’t seem to escape the question of whether something in us (a soul) might persist after death. Perhaps smart phones, brain surgery, and AI are the real diversion. Are we so busy making our lives comfortable and convenient that we’ve lost sight of the great human drama of life and death, oblivion, heaven and hell? These become important when everything is swept aside and we face the grave. This is when we ask if there might be more, when we desperately try to search with some faculty in us beyond our intellect – our soul like a decrepit cow kept caged its entire life and unable to even stand.
In fact, the weight of human history is on the side of faith and the spiritual. These are things we seem to have been created with, and maybe even created for. If we lift our heads out of a 100-year-old ascendance of science, technology, and atheism, we might be surprised to find an astonishingly sophisticated faith-based metaphysics that encompasses not just emotion, psychology, and earthly meaning, but spiritual forces, development of the soul, and peace with our eventual death. And this is anything but “belief in supernatural causes for which there is little evidence.”
800 years ago, codifying the Christian sense-making system along rational, intellectual lines reached a climax with medieval scholasticism. The greatest of the scholastics, the Angelic Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas, gifted us with a way of understanding how we can develop our whole selves in order to be ready for the grave when it comes. To the point of the experience I’ve described above, St. Thomas synthesizes bodily senses, emotions, passions, cognitive evaluation, memory, and intention within a broader environment of virtue, spirit, and striving for the good. He respects our faculties enough to evaluate and counsel how we might deal with complex feelings and visions rather than blow them off as dreams or meaningless fantasy. An experience like mine, for St. Thomas, is not the stuff of talk therapy, sleeping pills, or pharmacotherapeutics but of the actionable, vibrant spiritual drama of life and virtue. He would see the temptation towards the improper use of the good and discernment of the proper striving for the good. He wholly accepts the spiritual activity of demons and angels as revealed in scripture.
For me, at least, this is a much more real and full (not to mention exciting and alive) way to make sense of who we are and where we’re headed.
Thursday of the Fourth Week of Advent, Year A: 1 Samuel 1:24-28, Luke 1:46-56.
Today the Church reminds us how humanity has been working in concert with God, 1,000 years apart; specifically, how unlikely mothers bore a child who would be a special link for the people to their God (see readings). Hannah, the mother of the great Jewish prophet and leader, Samuel, is a forerunner of Mary in her complete devotion to God and assent to keep her covenant with her God. Mary echoes and Hannah’s words in the amazing Magnificat prayer, and supersedes Hannah in perfection. Both women work with God (as do their sons). In a past post, I compared their incredible prayers side-by-side. Today, I’d like to reflect on what this working with God might be – something more, surely than “living right,” or even doing God’s will. These women are in scripture because they inaugurated a special kind of cooperation with God.
The Visitation, Dorothy Webster Hawksley (mid 1900s) | Image from melaniejeanjuneau.blog.
We are accustomed to the word “cooperate” in our catechism: “Grace responds to the deepest yearnings of human freedom, calls freedom to cooperate with it, and perfects freedom” (CCC 2022). Cooperate in the religious sense means that our will gives over to God’s will, knowingly. It is different than the way we might cooperate with someone to, say, build a community garden. It’s not really just a cooperation of our intellect; it requires faith. Furthermore, it requires that our faith draw us into a correct relationship with God wherein we recognize His sovereignty and give ourselves over to His grace and love. We fully assent and He guides and draws us to Himself. If this sounds a little slippery and difficult, then we need to work on strengthening our faith, trust, and relationship with God.
Jean Corbon, OP, prefers the Greek word synergeia, which he defines as “combined energy” or “joint activity,” instead of cooperate. His book Wellspring of Worship is a deep dive into the liturgy, where synergy plays an important role: “when [God] elicits our response to his multiform energy, the Spirit and the Church become one in an astounding ‘synergy’: the liturgy” (66). Mary is the first person where the liturgy as we know it forms; her will is completely turned over to God. The Holy Spirit dwells in her, in fact, impregnates her with divinity. She fully cooperates with God. She achieves an astounding synergy with God in forming Jesus. As Corbon writes, “When the river of life joins the energy of acceptance, it acquires a name: JESUS” (39).
Let’s turn to just one small piece of textual analysis: Mary’s first line in the gospel reading. The lectionary says, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,” but this common English translation has removed perhaps the most intriguing and potent word from the original Greek: Megalynei (to magnify). The original Vulgate Latin got it right: Magnificat anima mea Dominum. Heck, that’s why we call this prayer the Magnificat! The literal translation is “My soul magnifies my Lord,” and it is a perfect way for Mary to describe what is happening within her. Mary is both growing a human child and also cooperating spiritually with God to magnify His image, not only within herself but for the whole world. I say “magnify his image” because this is what the Church has always taught. In his Homilies on the Gospel of Luke, Origen of Alexandria explains that, while we cannot enlarge God in His nature, we can enlarge His Image within us. Likewise, in his Commentary on Luke, St. Ambrose elaborates:
Truly the Lord is magnified: for you read somewhere else, ‘Magnify the Lord with me’ (Ps 33:4). This does not mean that human speech can add anything to the Lord; it means rather that the Lord grows within us. ‘Christ is the image of God’ (2 Cor 4:4), and therefore the soul that acts justly and devoutly magnifies this image of God, in whose likeness it was created (cf. Gn 1:27). It magnifies that image and – while magnifying it – participates in some sort in its grandeur and is made sublime. It appears to reproduce this icon within itself by the brilliant colors of its good deeds; and by its virtue it seems to copy the original. (2, 27).
Yet even Mary is awaiting a more perfect sacramental synergy that won’t be gifted to humanity until Christ fulfills his life, sacrifice, and resurrection. This is another piece of the waiting and preparation we can connect to Advent. The reason we anticipate the Christ child so expectantly is that he will usher in a new life for us all, one where the gates of heaven are opened to us. One where we, too, can cooperate and achieve synergy with God along the lines of what Mary experienced. A life where our souls can magnify the image of God and through our charity we can be a source of inspiration for others to join the Church in liturgy.
Synergy, Alex Raynham (contemporary) | Image from Saatchi Art.
The Catechism (which Corbon had a hand in helping to write) provides us with a summary: “The desire and work of the Spirit in the heart of the Church is that we may live from the life of the risen Christ. When the Spirit encounters in us the response of faith which he has aroused in us, he brings about genuine cooperation. Through it, the liturgy becomes the common work of the Holy Spirit and the Church” (CCC 1091) [emphasis added]. This is our Church, the one, holy, apostolic, Catholic Church instituted before time began and in a special way in history with Mary’s great “yes” to God. May we reverence her and see how she is a great signpost pointing to God, showing us how to cooperate, participate, and commune with the Spirit in the great liturgy that gives us life.
Wednesday in the Fourth Week of Advent, Year A: Song of Songs 2:8-14, Luke 1:39-45.
Today’s readings are pregnant (pun intended) with the mystery of the divine waiting to burst forth. Both Old Testament and New present us with figures full of a happy anxiousness for meeting their ultimate love. In the Song of Songs, it’s our unnamed narrator and her lover, God. In the gospel of Luke, it is Elizabeth speaking for humanity, John the infant jumping with the energy of all the prophets who have come before him. Can we feel it?? Can we immerse ourselves in this breathless expectation for our Savior in just a few days?
The end of today’s passage from the Song of Songs stirs me. “O my dove in the clefts of the rock, in the secret recesses of the cliff, Let me see you, let me hear your voice, For your voice is sweet, and you are lovely.” Much has been made of the erotic quality of the Song of Songs (dove in the clefts …), but apart from that I like to think of the dove in the more traditional biblical metaphors: peace and the Holy Spirit. The clefts of rock, the secret recesses, strike me as appropriate ways to talk of our hearts or our souls. The author knows that her lover, the dove, is present, but is dancing just outside of her field of vision, “gazing through the windows, peering through the lattices” at her. Is this not an accurate description of our God? We know in our hearts that He is there, He knows us better than we know ourselves and yet stays out of sight, peering at us through lattices like a lover. The author longs to see him and hear his voice, just as we do. And yet she knows that his voice is sweet (even not hearing it) and that he is lovely (even not seeing him). This is the memory of the soul, a spark of the divine within us, recalling its maker.
Depiction of the Christian Holy Spirit as a dove, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in the apse of Saint Peter’s Basilica, c. 1660 | Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia.
The same closeness that the author of the Song of Songs is reveling in is present even more in the Visitation. Christ is literally there, in the flesh, yet not quite there. Agh, the anticipation Mary and Elizabeth must have felt! A thousand times more than any other mothers in history because their spirits were soaring in concert with the Holy Spirit. The gift of a Son from our God, who is peering at us through the lattices, is very much bound up in this spiritual communion via the Spirit as well as the Christ Himself. Consider this sentence from one of the best liturgical theology books of the 20th century, Wellspring of Worship, by Jean Corbon, OP: “In the body of Christ and flowing forth from it, the Holy Spirit is as it were the impatient desire of the Father’s glory that human beings should live” (65). Here we have the same impatient lover as we have in the Song of Songs – located in the person of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the loving communion between the Son and the Father, and also the “sap” of the vine that allows us to commune with God. The Catechism phrases this nicely: “In every liturgical action the Holy Spirit is sent in order to bring us into communion with Christ and so to form his Body. The Holy Spirit is like the sap of the Father’s vine which bears fruit on its branches. The most intimate cooperation of the Holy Spirit and the Church is achieved in the liturgy” (CCC 1108). So, when Luke tells us, “Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, ‘Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’,” we understand this as God communing with us and we can even consider this a special liturgical action between Elizabeth, John, Mary, and Jesus.
The liturgy keeps coming up here, and our moment of history is special in this way. From our baptism onward, we are invited to live within the liturgy that was instituted in a new way by Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. All of the signs and actions in the Mass point to the actual communion being made present to us by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit prepares us for this communion (CCC 1098), recalls the meaning of the scriptures and gives life to the Word of God (CCC 1100), not only transforms the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, but also transforms those who receive the Eucharist into what they have received (cf. CCC 1105), and brings us into communion with Christ in the liturgy (CCC 1108). The liturgy is this amazing point where true communion happens, and this is why the Eucharist is so revered. It is not a type of overwrought, semi-superstitious, overly pious attitude. Our reverence occurs naturally during the Liturgy of the Eucharist because the communion that is received in bread and wine is the same communion that made John leap in the womb, that made Elizabeth cry out in a loud voice, and made Mary immaculate! It is the presence of God-with-us, God who transforms us into Himself.
The liturgy is a corporate action of the Church, not a private, individual event. This is important, as Corbon states, “in the liturgy the Church, which is already the communion of those who believe in the name of the beloved Son and have been changed into him, ‘becomes what it is’; that is, it becomes the body of Christ and a sacrament of the communion between God and human beings” (Wellspring 72). What a great understanding! The Church is “a sacrament of the communion between God and human beings.” Again, we participate in this thing we call the Church that Elizabeth, John, and Mary participated in (and still do!). As we participate in the Body of Christ, we begin to realize that we can more fully experience that same breathless anticipation and awe that Elizabeth, John, and Mary felt – particularly because we still await the fullness of redemption, the fullness of our union with God.
This is where we are now in the fourth week of Advent in the year 2022: begging the mystery to emerge, as a dove from the recesses of our soul, as a God-man from a sinless Ark of the New Covenant, as a King of Judgement to welcome our souls home.
