Unless the Lord builds the house

Today we read the great twist in the story of Advent, the great wrinkle as we have been preparing the way for the Lord. David wants to build God a house of cedar, and God comes back to him and says:

“Who are you to build me a house? I built you a house. Look around you at your palace, David: I built this for you when you had been living in the fields with your sheep.”

It is God who builds houses, it is God who chooses the place of his dwelling, not David. David thinks he can make a place for God’s dwelling, but all along God had been building one for David.

Moreover, God does not stop at building David’s palace that can be destroyed a couple generations later when the nation is divided, or a dozen generations later when the Babylonians destroy the city. God responds to David’s well-intended desire to build him a house by saying:

“Furthermore, not only have I already placed you in the very house in which you are living, but I will build you a house that will not fall. From your body, not your cedar, I will build your house, my house, that will never be destroyed.”

From David’s home in the fields, God built him a palace. From David’s loins, God built Solomon. From David’s son Solomon, God built a temple. From David’s children, God built a dynasty. From David’s daughter Mary, God built his Son.

And as we begin the fourth week of Advent, having spent three weeks responding (such as we have) to the call to prepare the way for the Lord, we realize that it is God who has been preparing places. God prepared the way for himself, not in a house of cedar, not even in a tent, but in a womb. God prepared the house for his dwelling within his people, within a woman, within me.

I take comfort in that, as I know my preparations for his coming this year have been no better than that of the people of Bethlehem, as I know I have no palace nor even a tent to give him, as I know my own sleep-deprived, mal-fed body has been too absorbed in exams to prepare a place for him to enter, as I know my own soul is not even a tent but a dirty stable: God has prepared a place for himself despite me and my weariness, without me and my ambitions, within me and my dirtiness.

Advent calls us to prepare, yet we are preparing for the one who has already built his home as he had already built David’s palace, as he has already entered Mary’s body, as he has already entered our own in the Eucharist.

And now, humbled by so subtle a builder, we can only wait.

Denominational lenses

Since I seem to be doing a bad job contributing to the blogosphere this semester, I thought I'd at least pass along a delightful chart that I have seen circulating it. As someone who has walked among people in each of these camps, I find it delightfully accurate.



Almighty and merciful God, you willed that the different nations should become one people through your Son. Grant in your kindness that those, who glory in being known as Christians, may put aside their differences and become one in truth and charity, and that all men, enlightened by the true faith, may be united in fraternal communion in the one Church. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Jokes that had once been funny

“I may be 62,” my dad said with a wily twinkle in his eye after he blew out his birthday candles on Sunday, “but I can still pass for 61.”

The joke is always funny to a few non-family members in the room as it might have been to us the first several times we heard it many years ago. At this point for the family members who have heard him say it year after year, however, who have adapted it on their own numerically smaller birthdays (after all, though I am 28, I do not feel a day older than 27!), the joke is not funny as much as it is comforting. It is part of the liturgy of the family, the repeated phrases and jokes-that-had-once-been-funny that let us know that, while so much has changed around us over the decades, some things have remained the same.

“I’m deathly allergic to zucchini, and anything else I can’t spell.”

“It’s as I always say: feta makes everything betta!” (my joke, to which my dad’s response is “Gag me with a spoon!”—he is allergic to a great many things).

“Ahhhhhhhhh...choo-choo train!”

Once upon a time, these jokes had been funny in their own right. Now they produce laughter not because of the joke, but because of the teller. We laugh because the words have somehow molded into our image of the speaker himself, because the words have combined vacuous ideas with a living, breathing person whom we love. We laugh because we love.

And as we grow in the faith of a God who has revealed himself to us as the Word made flesh, the rereading of Scripture and the repetition of liturgy has every bit as much vitality as my father’s predictable jokes. We repeat words we have spoken when our hearts were breaking or when they rose in exaltation, and we are connected to the person from whom we first heard them, the person who spoke them to us time and time again, the person of Christ and his Church. The Word was made flesh in the Incarnation, and words are still a part of the person from whom they are born. Repetition becomes an expression of love.

The family in Asia

My brother and I wove our way down narrow, dirty Asian streets on which neither of us had been before, hoping almost against hope that we were following the vague directions correctly. Finally we made our best bet as to the correct side ally out of the furniture market, hung a right, and began up the hill, unable to see beyond a couple buildings ahead of us.

And suddenly, there it was: a small building tucked in the ally with a makeshift wire cross on top. No wonder our taxi driver had been unaware of the building’s whereabouts; had we not known exactly where to look, we would have never found the tiny Catholic church.

At 8:15, the room was not yet too crowded, and my brother and I managed to find a seat in which the altar was partially blocked by a large pillar. In many ways, the room felt familiar, as if I had been there before in America or Canada or Ireland or Italy: there was the same holy water by the door, the same kneelers on the pews, the same altar in front, the same statues of Mary and Joseph on either side, the same crucifix in the middle, and the same silently praying parishioners as the congregation gathered. Yet there were other indications that I was most definitely “not in Kansas anymore”—the flashing lights around the crucifix, the florescent, cheap plastic flowers that decorated the corners of the arches in place of marble carvings, the bright red paper Asian characters that adorned various prominent places on the stucco walls.

An old Asian woman on our pew got up and retrieved some prayer books from the back of the room, handing the useless items to us with good-natured hospitality. I smiled and whispered my thanks, one of the few words I knew of her language, and made a mental note to follow along in the completely unintelligible characters in order to be a gracious guest. The Asians made it clear that this pair of light-skinned Westerners were more than welcome in the parish, and their hospitality transcended the language boundary.

When the service began everyone knelt and remained in that posture for the next hour, chanting in the bouncing strains of their tonal language. It could have been a pagan rite for all I knew; it certainly sounded like the ritual of a foreign religion. Of course, it was not, and as the minutes wore on I eventually identified from the particular patterns of repetitions that they were chanting the rosary. After that they moved on to a litany as the room filled up, the old women from the beginning making room for the families that were gathering. Finally, when mine and my brother’s knees were crying out for relief while the old women around us were seemingly unaffected, the congregation sat down.

Rather than a service, the congregation moved on to readings that my brother identified from his rudimentary knowledge of the language were from Luke. They read straight through a lengthy passage, alternating between readers and gaudy recorded renditions with background music, and it became clear to me that there would be no mass at this parish. The reading continued for nearly half an hour before we had to leave to get to my brother’s team meeting, both a little disappointed that we would not have the chance to speak with the parishioners who had exchanged many friendly words and glances with the pair of visiting Westerners.

“She told us, ‘You are family,’” my brother had translated after the first old lady had greeting us in our pews. And I left knowing she was right, that we were family members in this strange mixture of foreignness and familiarity, in that intersection of the West and the East where we could share in their prayers for nearly two hours without knowing the words, underneath a spread of plastic neon flowers and Asian characters and Western statues, in a culture of religious persecution that stripped away any need to distinguish between Catholics and Protestants (considered different religions in that part of Asia) and varying levels of communion with the Vatican and language barriers since there was apparently no priest to celebrate mass anyway. In that small, crowded room that morning, as we knelt on aching knees and listened to prayers we could not utter, we were simply family.

Busting the Myth of Originality

I remember one spring day, as a college sophomore who spent most of her time pondering ideals and trying to understand the way the world worked, when I stumbled haplessly into a history class. My professor lectured about Plato, explaining his analogy of the cave: we were all in a cave which we could not see out of, but into which a light from above was shining and reflecting on one of the walls. From the shadows it made, we could get a glimmer of the true reality, but the reality we saw was only a shadow of the actual world that was outside, shadows that gave us an idea of the true reality which was always mediated.

I remember listening to him, a nineteen-year-old who had never been exposed to Plato before, and being enormously frustrated. It wasn’t his idea itself that frustrated me, but the realization that I hadn’t come up with it. I had been developing a similar notion myself in all my philosophical ponderings, and had felt rather original about it. But alas, it turned out that I wasn’t original after all:

Plato had beat me to it by well over two thousand years. Drat.

As I recall that feeling of disappointment, I realize that it stemmed from two misconceptions, one of which was corrected in that class, and the other of which I would only learn to correct slowly in the next decade:

One, I was under the misconception that my ideas were my own. True indeed, I had not studied Plato before, and thus I couldn’t say I had been influenced directly by his writings. But I had certainly read C. S. Lewis, who had read and absorbed plenty of Plato’s ideas. Even aside from Lewis, I had been influenced by a church that had been influenced by a church that had been influenced by a church that had been influenced been Plato somewhere down the line. Despite what my 20th-century American culture had told me, I was not an original in that sense. My ideas were not my own.

Two, I was under the misconception that originality was an ideal, that it would have been better for me to have come up with a notion myself than to have learned it from the generations that had come before. We shoot ourselves in the foot and bite the hand that feeds us (to mix metaphors) in an effort to come up with new ideas, when we have a copious abundance of wisdom handed to us like a wrapped gift for us to unwrap and use.

Thank God for all the people who have passed their wisdom down to us, whether we have directly acknowledged them or not. And thank God we do not have to invent the faith on our own. It was always too heavy a responsibility for a nineteen-year-old to manage on her own, even if she thought she had to.

With both lungs

I learned once that Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. had been good friends, and that they had originally thought of going into ministry together. For whatever reason, whether for disagreements or mere differences in vocational leanings, they did not. “You stay in the stadiums, Billy,” King (or “Mike,” as Billy called him) wrote to Graham, “because you will have far more impact on the white establishment there than you would if you marched in the streets.” Perhaps he did. Perhaps.

But their divergence was not only strategic; it was certainly somewhat ideological. Graham was unsure of King’s methods of civil disobedience, saying that “No matter what the law may be—it may be an unjust law—I believe we have a Christian responsibility to obey it. Otherwise you have anarchy.” King responded with the words of St. Augustine: “an unjust law is no law at all.” Over time as King began to speak out against the Vietnam war and poverty in a time when Communism was a looming threat, the divergence between him and his old friend became more pronounced.

Nevertheless, their friendship remained intact, and Graham took some radical stances for desegregation at his crusades. He invited King to join him on the pulpit and paid his bail to have him released from jail, and King’s famous declaration that “Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America” is actually a quotation from an article of Graham’s.

Years later Graham confided to some Civil Rights leaders that he wondered what would have happened if he had taken to the streets with his friend, and I suppose we cannot know the answers to questions like that. What indeed might have happened if the iconic figures of liberal and conservative Christianity, figures whom both sides respect even if they disagree, had found a way to share their ministry? What kind of ministry would it have been? It might of course have been a loss to the great good that both of their ministries accomplished, but I cannot help but wonder if it might have muddled some of the sharp distinctions between liberal and conservative Christianity that I have grown up among.

Pope John Paul II, when calling for reconciliation between the eastern and western divisions of Christianity, spoke of the need for the Church to “breathe with both lungs.” Here in America, I am reminded of our lop-sided breathing in every walk from my poor neighborhood to my rich university, every transition from conversations with my Mennonite friends to my Catholic, every Sunday morning stroll by a white church to a black.

I’ve been told many times that Church unity is something we will not see “until heaven” (as if “heaven” were so ephemeral as to be identified by a time rather than a physical place). Today on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which happens to come the day before the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity begins, it seems as good a time as any to remember that our Lord has taught us to pray that his Kingdom come and his will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Amen. Come Lord Jesus!

Chosen to Choose

In the first conversation I had with my Irish priest in Cork, Father Padraic mentioned some of the disputes between various parties during the Protestant Reformation dealing with predestination and free will.

“The Catholic Church has never found that a divisive issue,” he told me, “because we have always looked at Mary as the example of what happens to us all when Christ enters us. She was chosen and she said ‘Yes.’ She was predestined and she freely obeyed. The same happens when Christ enters any of us.”

This is not intended to be a Marian post in particular, not one that goes from her being “highly favored” to the Immaculate Conception or from all generations calling her blessed to the role of Mother of the Church. But since the readings from the Book of Common Prayer for today depict her meeting with Elizabeth and her song of rejoicing afterwards, I remembered Father Padraic’s words over two years ago, and found comfort in the paradoxes of the Incarnation: the Creator is created in creation, we are chosen to choose.

Rejoice, my friends: as the Word has been made flesh in the womb of a virgin, he has entered the womb of creation, sanctifying the ground he treads. The Creator is in the womb, and creation will be reborn. As with her, so with us; he enters the world through his people, and we await his bursting forth from us. Blessed are we whom he has chosen; blessed are we who have chosen him.

Sonnet XXVI of Advent

My soul declares his greatness, for he’ll do
What he has done before: yea, he will stir
His might just as he stirs the barren womb,
And look upon the sojourner like her
Who served in lowliness. The Mighty One
Has done his wonders while our hearts were far
Away: He gives the rain and hides the sun,
He spreads abundance as he spread the stars.
Soon Lebanon will be a fruitful field
And fields be forests; we who dwell in night
Will live in light; the nations will be healed,
The hungry fed, the blind receive their sight.
And blessed is the chosen for her choice
To bear the ripened word and to rejoice.

Psalm 80, 147, 148
Isaiah 29:13-24
Revelation 21:22-22:5
Luke 1:39-56

Rejoice the Lord is King!

As I’ve had the chance in recent years to participate in the Church calendar, I’ve appreciated the profundity of living into the Gospel story year after year, experiencing the same traditions that Christians have been practicing for century upon century.

Christ the King Sunday, incidentally, is not one of those. On the contrary, it only began in 1925, the period l’entre deux guerres, between World War I and II, when Pope Pius XI was concerned about the growing threats of nationalism and secularism that Christians were swept up in.

And so here at the end of Ordinary Time, we remember that it is Christ who is King, not our party politics of choice, and that he reigns now over our oblivion. And unlike the forces that tore through Europe during the 20th century, Christ enters his glory as he is lifted up on a cross; and though James and John had campaigned to be on his right and left as he entered his kingdom, those places were reserved for two criminals. The Kingdom has come as the King is lifted up, and we are welcome to follow.

Your kingdom come, Lord, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Diverting Apologetics, II

I was invited again to write an article for the theological blog of a few friends of mine, this time touching on the understanding of sainthood from a Catholic perspective. Feel free to give it some feedback, whether or not you are sympathetic. Any qualms would be helpful for me to ponder because a) I am hoping to write a follow-up article about Marian theology in a few months and I want to make sure these bases are covered first, and b) I have been invited to help with a project in the relic chapel of the local basilica and multiple perspectives would be helpful for my own ponderings. I promise to listen!

While Waiting

There was a photo on the cover of the April, 2004 edition of Touchstone Magazine that depicted a girl looking wistfully toward the clouds with a pained expression on her face. Below her in the background you can make out the outer edge of the architecture of Mont Saint-Michel in northern France, and above her hangs the heading “While Waiting for Heaven.”

The girl was my little sister, who, as I recall from when I snapped the photo, was not waiting for heaven but for lunch.

When my family moved to Paris, my sister was ten years old, an age almost ideally selected to be as traumatic and disorienting as possible (admittedly not quite as ideal as when they moved back when she was thirteen). I remember the day she and my mom arrived in the city and the three other family members who had preceded them by a month showed them around the city. There was a rude juxtaposition of one of the world’s most popular tourist cities and my tortured sister whose life had just been shattered.

“Our apartment is down that street about a kilometer-and-a-half,” I pointed from the top of L’Arc de Triomphe with tourists all around. “That’s a little more than a mile, so it’d be about the same distance as the walk from our old house to Food Lion…” I realized too late my error of bringing up the home she had just been torn away less than a day earlier, and I gave her the privacy of pretending not to notice her tears.

It was a mocking irony: the girl’s agony set against the glow of Europe. Paris is a genuinely lovely city, but there was no conceivable way she could have enjoyed it that day.

In order to compound the irony, her health was a little spotty over her three years in Europe, and she always seemed to get sick whenever my family took mini vacations in the surrounding area: Belgium, Rome, the Italian Alps, Greece, Egypt, Prague. She was in a place of wonder whether she could enjoy them or not, but it is hard for anyone to appreciate an alpine ski resort or a Grecian cruise ship while throwing up.

And I wonder if I am there with her, lying on a hotel bed in Cairo with a stomach bug or dragging myself through the streets of Venice with a migraine. It is undoubtedly a world saturated with the miraculous: whether in the Sacraments of the Church or the sacramentals erupting from a world brimming with life that enters the world “trailing clouds of glory” (as Wordsworth says) and still bears hope of glory’s fulfillment, God is oozing from his creation.

Like my sister, I am incapable of appreciating the wonders that are nevertheless present around me, that I trip over just as certainly whether or not I appreciate their presence. I think part of the purpose of various disciplines in the Church, regular prayers and sacraments and fasts and celebrations whether you can engage or not, is a matter of conditioning our souls to appreciate those very mysteries. I pray that as I approach something closer to health, heath of body and heath of soul, I’ll be able to enjoy these mundane wonders a little more. I’m waiting for it, at any rate.

Death is not our home

As I mentioned once when a friend was shot, I have a tendency to respond to death by railing against it, which ought to strike me a bit like railing against the ocean for lapping up on the shore. “Death is natural,” people would reason with me. “Death is just a part of life.” “This world is not our home.” “Our citizenship is in heaven.” “He has gone on to a better place.” (Etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.)

I was never sure what exactly I was protesting. On the surface, after all, these adages were true, and I certainly had no argument against them other than the fact that my spirit kept rejecting them like a failed organ transplant. If death was indeed as natural as it seems to be, why would it shock us as it does? If this world was not our home, why would we have to keep reminding ourselves of the fact?

It didn’t help that Scripture is not half as clear on the topic as we make it out to be. It was downright frightening to imagine all the unsatisfying sorts of resolutions that could fit within the vague descriptions of the afterlife that were given to us by a God who never seems to spell the future out as clearly as we expect him to.

If this were a theological blog, that would have been a great set-up to introduce N. T. Wright, whose eschatology (theology of the end times) regarding the New Creation and the Resurrection (of us) I found to be quite healing after my years of railing. (He infamously says that “Heaven is not our home; we’re just passing through”—as we wait for our coming bodily resurrection in the transformed earth.) For now at least, I am friends with too many Biblical scholars to feel comfortable presenting Wright’s eschatology. Let’s just say that I have found great hope in the belief that just as the material creation fell (not only our souls) and just as Christ’s material body was raised from the dead (not only his soul), we are awaiting the restoration of the material creation (not only the spiritual), the resurrection of our material bodies (not only... well, you get the idea).

On the contrary, this is still my listening-blog, and yesterday as I sat through a funeral hearing my rector encourage the grieving family with the emphatic hope that the dead man had gone on to his true home where we would eventually spend eternity with him as well, I forbade myself from questioning his eschatology. Instead, I remembered my sister-in-law’s grandmother who died this past spring. When her son talked to her a bit about the possibility of a bodily resurrection, the dying Appalachian woman simply brushed him off by interjecting, “I don’t know what will happen, but as long as Jesus is in charge I know it will be good.” After a long life of walking beside Jesus, she had confidence in his goodness, and it was enough to face the unknowns on the other side of death.

I may not ever be graced with the simplicity of faith that Appalachian woman had, the faith that could find comfort in adages about heaven or that would not care either way. I’m grateful at least that in the Church my overly-intellectual faith can learn from her simplicity, that her confidence in the person of Christ can shed hope on my endless queries. As I learned from my unsettled spirit, a robust eschatology is important; as I learned from that grandmother, intimacy with Christ is more important.

If it had not been the Lord who was on our side

Every time I hear Psalm 124, I think of Lawrence.

I can almost count on one hand the number of times I saw him. The first was toward the end of my junior year of college when I was twenty one. I was on my way to a coffee shop, and he was sitting on the street with a cardboard box asking for money. On an impulse I asked him if he was hungry. The next hour involved chicken wings with ranch dressing, stories of his struggle with AIDS and loneliness, and plans to share a ride to church in the morning.

The next day involved picking him up in the parking lot where he was sleeping, letting him borrow my jacket when I noticed the wet man shivering in the air-conditioned church, telling him he could keep it since it fit so well, and promising to pray for him over the summer when I said goodbye. I left campus days later and spent the summer in Europe where my family was living. It rained a lot that summer, and I prayed for Lawrence every time it did.

The third time I saw him was my first Sunday back on campus my senior year of college. When the pastor invited us to greet those sitting near us, I turned around to see the cleanly-shaven, beaming face of Lawrence behind me, and I wept with joy and surprise. All summer as I had been offering prayers I didn’t expect to be heard, folks at my church had been helping Lawrence get off the streets.

“I would be remiss,” he told the Sunday school the next week, the week he also told me would be his last week at the large, middle-class, white, Evangelical church where he would never feel that he belonged, “if I did not sing you a song.” His eyes looked into the distance as if he were seeing God himself, and he sang in his clear, rich, gospel voice:

If it had not been
For the Lord on my side
Tell me where would I
Where would I be...

The last time I saw Lawrence was in my second year after graduation. I happened to be walking down the street near my old alma mater, and saw a man sitting on the street with a cardboard box. “No!” I almost shouted when I recognized him, tears welling up in me to see my lesson in answered prayer overturned so quickly. Lawrence’s optimistic promises that he would be off the streets soon rang hollow in my jaded ears, for I knew that while prayer was powerful, drug addiction was as well.

Every time I hear Psalm 124, I remember the whole story as one event: my young idealism, Lawrence’s loneliness, my gifts of raincoat and hopeless prayers, the church’s aid, the light in Lawrence’s beaming face, the joy of his song, and the cold power of cynicism when I saw him for the last time.

And when Psalm 124 came up again in Monday's evening prayers, I started to realize one of the reasons the Church has been praying through the Psalms over the centuries (or rather the millennia, I suppose, since praying the Psalms had been a Jewish tradition from before the time of Christ). In the body of the Church—the Church throughout the world and the Church throughout history—each desperate cry and joyful celebration in the Psalms exists together simultaneously, just as Lawrence’s entire story exists in my memory of that psalm. Thus even when we are joyful, we pray the words of those who are despairing; even when we despair, we pray the words of those who celebrate God’s salvation.

And on Monday evening, even though I don’t know if Lawrence is even alive anymore or whether he got off the streets again like he had promised me when I last saw him four years ago, I prayed “Blessed be the Lord who did not give us a prey to their teeth! Our life, like a bird, has escaped from the snare of the fowler.” In the Church, I know that the words are being fulfilled.

The gospel we profess

Today in the Divine Office, in my prayers before heading out to navigate the interesting world of Irish Sunday mornings, I read this:

God our Father,
we rejoice in the faith that draws us together,
aware that selfishness can drive us apart.
Let your encouragement be our constant strength.
Keep us one in the love that has sealed our lives,
help us to live as one family
the gospel we profess.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Hear us Lord, between the lovely charismatic and hurt Protestants who will greet me warmly as they declare the impossibility of being Catholic and Christian in Ireland, between the dry but faithful Catholics who will mumble their way through a mass they do not understand, between the late mornings of the hung-over Saturday night revelers who will not be joining me at either church this morning. In your mercy, hear our prayer.

Made Flesh

I once had a conversation with a friend who suggested to me that allegiance to the Catholic Church was an embracing of a glorified picture of the Church at the expense of Scripture. This impression is common enough, and were it true, it would be a grave error indeed.

“Em, Scripture is given to us by God himself,” she affirmed.

I agreed. “And the Church is not?” I cautiously asked.

“Well, the Church may be given to us by God as well,” she agreed, “but it is not part of the Trinity.”

This gave me pause. “...and Scripture is?” I hesitated.

“Yes,” she affirmed, but did not seem sure of her answer, “because Jesus in the Word made flesh...”

This conversation has spun in my mind quite a bit since it happened. It was not the first time I had heard the notion that the introduction to the Gospel of John means that Christ as the Word made flesh is the incarnation of the Bible, as if the Bible is the second person of the Trinity, the form of Jesus that has stayed with us in the past 2000 years since the Ascension.

Please hear me that I am not making fun of my friend. There are some ways the interpretation might have been hasty, an on-the-spot defense of conclusions she had beforehand, but there are other ways that she might have tapped into imagery that John welcomes us to explore. And to whatever extent I sympathize with the idea that the Bible is the second person of the Trinity, perhaps there is a sense in which the Church is the third, the tangible manifestation of the work of the Holy Spirit that has stayed with us for the past 2000 years since Pentecost.

I won’t take that idea very far (anymore than it would be kind to take my friend’s idea farther than it was meant to go), but I am comforted today to remember (as a friend insisted to me two years ago) that God has not abandoned his Church to muddle through the past 2000 years on her own, that the Holy Spirit will not abandon the Church, that God in his surplus of graces has poured his Spirit on us both individually and as a united body.

As I am Confirmed in the morning of the eve of Pentecost, it is good news indeed.

Diverting Apologetics

As promised, I wrote an article for a friend's blog on "Why I am joining the Catholic Church," which provides me the chance to send this link your way without turning my blog into a place for apologetics. The article deals with some basic principles that the more controversial issues are founded on, and I'll deal with the latter category later. It's an ecumenical enough article to allow my friend to write a "Why she is right but I am still Protestant" article for next week, so hopefully it won't be enormously offensive to folks in other camps. He is also inviting me to be a regular contributor to that blog, so if you enjoy the discussion you can keep going back there for more. In the mean time, Merry's Cloister will continue to be reserved for things I hear rather than things I assert.

The Lady in Red

After making our way through the metal detectors and other layers of security and finding our seats near the processional wall, the seminarian and I were looking through the mass booklet that talked about John Paul II, for whom this mass was being offered. It was my first evening in Rome.

“Oh my...” my friend suddenly gasped. “Is that her?!”

I looked up to see a large man in a suit forcing his way to a woman in a bright red jacket two seats down from us in the row ahead. She, like many others with seats against the processional wall, was already standing and leaning against it in preparation for the Pope’s entry.

“Who?” I asked as the man, obviously a security guard, began whispering to her.

“The crazy lady who attacks the Pope!” he answered, seeming to find it difficult to stand still. Benedict XVI, despite the controversy in the Church (one of the scholars at the conference I attended this weekend pointed out that “There has been scandal in the Church ever since the cock crowed”), is quite a loved man, and my friend received the attacks against him like attacks against his father.

Sure enough, it was her. We watched as the large guard finished his whispered conversation with her, removed her chair from against the wall so she could not use it to climb over, and wedged himself against her. Then we all continued to wait for the processional as before.

“They’re letting her stay?” I asked my friend.

“They have to,” he answered with a combination of laughter and anguish in his voice. “They’re not about to ban someone from attending mass if she wants to.”

“Even if it’s a known habitual Pope-attacker?”

“Yep. She needs the presence of Christ in her life as much as the rest of us, and it is not our place to say whether or not she is repentant. We have to let her come.” He continued to squirm uncomfortably at the thought of her leaping over the wall to attack the Holy Father. “But if she tries anything tonight, I’m not letting her near my Daddy!”

The Catholic Church is under a lot of heavy criticism these days for its eagerness to forgive. Certainly, the cases in question are quite different from a lone woman attacking a well-guarded 83-year-old man in public, but it was nevertheless beautiful to see the eager-to-forgive principle applied to physical assaults against the Pope as well.

Sacramental theology (not just a belief in seven or in two Sacraments, but a belief that the physical matter of the world and the spiritual substance are inseparable) will do that to you. Forgiving the lady who attacks the Pope does not merely involve wishing her well, and wishing her well does not merely involve positive feelings. Since the Catholic Church believes the Real Presence of Christ is in the Eucharist physically, they cannot ban her physically from the room. Forgiveness, in this case, involves a severe physical risk that no other tight security of a well-loved world leader would ever allow.

Benedict, in case you’re wondering, ended up just fine that night, and the woman left right after the processional, giving me the chance to take her seat against the wall for the recessional. I don’t know if she showed up for any of the other events that week, but I do know that as far as the Church is concerned, she is forgiven.

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.”
-John 20:23

All roads lead to Rome

It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it. But when that affection has passed a certain point it begins to take on the tragic and menacing grandeur of a great love affair.
- GK Chesterton

This Chesterton quotation strikes me as the kind of universal declaration only liked by those to whom it applies. But since I am evidently one of them, I do like it.

“So...” my friend interjected in a conversation about calling, a topic heavily on my mind in the aftermath of yet another graduation, “do you feel called to the Catholic Church?”

I pondered her question, unsure of the word. In the years leading up to my decision and in the months that had followed, I had certainly felt a sense of leading, longing, and provision, but I always associated “calling” with a command, and I had never felt ordered to enter the Catholic Church.

“I don’t know,” I hesitated. “I think I’d say I feel invited to the Catholic Church. It’s not something you would have to tell me to do at this point; I feel more like I’m standing on the edge of a great ocean of graces, and God has invited me to jump in. Is that what calling is?”

Maybe it is. At least in the case of the nation of Israel, “calling” had been God’s extension of a world of blessing to them, and their invitation to live into it. Maybe if God has specific assignments for us, he will make them clear as the time comes; Moses didn’t have to pray about finding God’s will for his life, after all. In the mean time, he has called us to be a people of blessing, a people who receive his lavish, superfluous graces and extend them to those around us. It is a calling I rejoice to live into.

This post was my way to make the official announcement on a blog that I have steered away from being a personal journal: I will be confirmed into the Catholic Church the weekend of Pentecost. Since this is not a blog of theological treatises, you can rest assured that I will not use it as a platform for controversial issues (and feel free to hold me to that!); a theological blog has invited me to contribute a “Why I am joining the Catholic Church” article, and I will point you there afterward if you are interested. But as I am about to travel to Rome for Holy Week, I imagine I’d have a hard time keeping it secret in any “listening” posts for the next two weeks.

The God who stands over our theological divides has beckoned to us that the mysteries and wonders of his Grace are deeper than we have imagined. We are called to jump on in. Come, let us plunge them together!

We Are Six

--------A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

Three separate dear friends of mine from three separate times past gave birth to three separate beautiful baby girls in the past week. Life is beautiful.

And today is the fourth birthday of another friend’s baby girl who died a few months before her third birthday after a short life beset with inexplicable seizures and a shrinking brain. And here in this strange intersection of life and death, I am reminded to continue praying for my two other dear friends who lost newborn sons this past fall, one because he had inexplicably failed to form a skull during the early months in the womb, and the other because he inexplicably failed to keep on breathing in the early days of his seemingly healthy life outside it.

I could insert some well-known maxim here, something along the lines of the familiar “Life is short” or Tennyson’s “O life as futile, then, as frail!” or Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle! / Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.” These are true of our experience, certainly of the experiences of those three grieving mothers.

But I wonder if these maxims are so often repeated because our spirit so thoroughly rejects them. If they are so true of our experience, true as obvious statements like “The sun is bright” or “The grass is green,” then why do we have to keep reminding ourselves of the shortness of life? If Macbeth was right that life is a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, why would we be so disturbed when my friend is given a full two hours (or two days, or two years) with her child?

Perhaps “the deeper magic,” to use Lewis’ lovingly weathered phrase, is that life is not a candle that can be extinguished. Perhaps my three friends are still grieving because the have been torn away from children who still exist. Perhaps (and pardon me if I’m being too erudite, too Platonic, or too Catholic here, especially for such a sensitive issue) love and life are parts of the same thing, as if life is the matter and love is the substance (or vice-versa?); and as the love exists no less in the grieving mother than in the celebrating one, perhaps we are assured that the life exists as strongly.

Perhaps I do not merely believe that the Church is a single body made up of the apostles and saints and my ancestors and my descendants because I learned it in a book or a sermon or a creed; perhaps my soul has always known it. As Christendom—Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike—affirm together that the soul is eternal and does not die when the body stops breathing, perhaps I do not believe it because I am brainwashed but because it is true. Whether we believe that we are anticipating a future reunion with our loved ones or that we can even speak to them now, we believe that we are mutually connected to a living unit of humanity that includes the not-yet-alive and the live and the even-more-alive.

Apart from that hope, I do not know how people can endure the severity of love. And to each of those six loving mothers out there, you are in my prayers.

"How many are you, then," said I,
"If they two are in heaven?"
Quick was the little Maid's reply,
"O Master! we are seven."

"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay, we are seven!"

from “We Are Seven” by William Wordsworth

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Just a small blurb for the sake of shameless advertising, which I normally don't do on this blog, and I promise not to begin with any frequency: today begins the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity that happens every year January 18 through 25. Fittingly, this year it happens to begin on Martin Luther King Jr. Day here in the United States, where our racial history shows the tragic scandal of Church division most poignantly. If you are unfamiliar with this week of prayer or with the ecumenism movement as a whole, feel free to read up on it on the website for the World Council of Churches. In addition to the history of the WCC, you can find a brochure with daily readings to take you through this year's theme: "You are witnesses of these things."

During the 2010 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity we are invited to follow the whole of chapter 24 of Luke's gospel. Whether it be the terrified women at the tomb, the two discouraged disciples on the road to Emmaus or the eleven disciples overtaken by doubt and fear, all who together encounter the Risen Christ are sent on mission: “You are witness of these things”. This mission of the Church is given by Christ and cannot be appropriated by anyone. It is the community of those who have been reconciled with God and in God, and who can witness to the truth of the power of salvation in Jesus Christ.

We sense that Mary Magdalene, Peter or the two Emmaus disciples will not witness in the same way. Yet it will be the victory of Jesus over death that all will place at the heart of their witness. The personal encounter with the risen One has radically changed their lives and in its uniqueness for each one of them one thing becomes imperative: “You are witnesses of these things.” Their story will accentuate different things, sometimes dissent may arise between them about what faithfulness to Christ requires, and yet all will work to announce the Good News.

Whether or not you can get take the time to follow all the readings, consider yourself invited to spend the next week praying with Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic Churches around the world for Church unity.

Superfluousness

Albert Einstein* once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler,” and, trusting girl that I am, I believed him. After all, there is quite a beauty in the simplicity of the profound laws that govern the universe, in the seemingly dissimilar properties of autumn leaves and planetary rotation that are both dictated by the “simple” law of gravity.

But somewhere along the way, while trying to understand the “simple” laws of salvation (I think the one word that was supposed to answer every question and sum up the laws of the Universe was always “Jesus”), I confused simplicity for scarcity. Scarcity seemed to govern the economy of salvation, as if God wanted to figure out how he could efficiently save the greatest number of people with the least effort, and sending his only begotten son to suffer and die seemed to be the best (because it was the only) way to do it.

But as Robinson Jeffers once asked (in a poem I’ve quoted here before), “Is it not by his high superfluousness we know / Our God?” What if the Cross is better understood as extravagance, rather than the last-ditch effort to save the sinking ship of humanity? What if Grace is not the abstract Platonic ideal that saves us from hell, but the lavish graces God gets a kick out of pouring on us? What if the economy of salvation is governed by the excesses of God?

The Catholic Church believes that Mary is the Mediatrix of all Graces (not Grace, interestingly, but Graces), and additionally has quite a legion of mediators in all the saints. I always thought this seemed a bit over-the-top, considering the extent to which the book of Hebrews goes in presenting Christ as the Great High Priest and the Mediator of the New Covenant.

But even without the Catholic troupe of mediators, it strikes me that scripture is not so stingy with its graces: it can assert confidently in one place that Christ himself intercedes for us before the Father and console us in another that the Holy Spirit is interceding for us in our weakness. Actually, it dawns on me that in the simple, stripped-down version of the Gospel that I always assumed was desirable, the Holy Spirit is entirely superfluous; all we need is a God to create us and his Son to die for us (the Resurrection is also superfluous if all we needed was someone to pay the price for our sins so we can go to heaven when we die). Issues of Mary and the saints aside, it seems that there are graces aplenty.

Maybe Einstein is still right out there somewhere, but maybe we tend to make things quite a bit more simple than possible. Maybe the governing laws of salvation are much more lavish than I had ever imagined, and maybe the one answer brings together many more questions than I had been prepared to ask.


*As quoted by internet quotation databases, always a precarious source.