2008-2009 Christian Liturgical Year: Nativity of the Lord

Readings for Vigil Mass: [Isaiah 62:1-5; Acts 13:16-17, 22-25; Matthew 1:1-25 or 1:18-25]

Readings for Midnight Mass: [Isaiah 9:1-6; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14]

Readings for Mass at Dawn: [Isaiah 62:11-12; Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2:15-20]

Readings for Mass During the Day: [Isaiah 52:7-10; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18]

In the Gospel reading for the Vigil Mass, we learn of a seemingly irrelevant genealogy, that of Joseph, the husband of Mary and legal father of Jesus but he’s never referred to as the biological father of Jesus.

In the Gospel reading for Midnight Mass, we learn that Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem to fulfill a call to enroll in a census (which has left no historical evidence though the Romans were nothing if not good bureaucrats and documenters). Moreover, shepherds in a field were told to go to the city of David (Bethlehem) where they will find a savior in the form of an infant in a manger.

In the Gospel reading for the dawn of Christmas day, we learn the shepherds did find Joseph, Mary, and the infant. All were amazed by the shepherds’ story of the angels and Mary begins to wonder (didn’t she already supposedly know)? The shepherds go away, glorifying and praising God.

In the Gospel reading for Christmas during the day, we learn of the Word of God, quite personal, with God in the beginning. The Word was God.

Few there are who will follow such a trail of words through the readings of four different Christmas Masses. Perhaps there are even fewer who can follow the trail through the Gospels or the New Testament or the entire Bible if they embark upon a more general reading program.

There are dangers here, some dangers for those who are careful and skeptical readers and some dangers for those who just believe what they are told and happily read the Bible in the same way they once read their books of fairy-tales.

The historian Carroll Quigley once summarized the philosophical teachings of traditional Christianity in these words:

The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

The Gospels can be read, along with the letters of St. Paul, in such a way that we can see the Good News unfolding in the hearts and minds of a monotheistic people just beginning to understand the Trinity of Persons who live as one God. The idea that God could be embodied in human flesh, while perhaps hinted at in the Old Testament, was shocking to the Jews including those who first followed Christ. In some ways, it would have been still more shocking to the more intellectually inclined pagans who were horrified by the misbehaving and lusty gods of Homer. However well-behaved Jesus was, a higher pagan wouldn’t have been so accepting of a God who needed a mother to change His diapers, a father to teach Him how to live in the world that baby supposedly created.

We know that Jesus of Nazareth entered a public mission which is usually described as three years long though it might have been a bit longer. We know that He scandalized the Jews by claiming that loyalty to Jesus of Nazareth was more important than loyalty to even father and mother. He even told one disciple to leave his father to be buried by others because the primary duty of men is to follow Jesus. [Matthew 8:21-22] Are we not bidden by God to honor father and mother? Can any but God override that commandment?

Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life…” [The entire story is told in John 6:35-65.] No wonder the pagans thought Christians to be cannibals.

Before His mission years, Jesus of Nazareth was said to have lived in obscurity. Mark tells us that this man who supposedly was announced as the Savior at His birth was not even acknowledged as having any authority by His neighbors. “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country and among his own kin, and in his own house.” [See Mark 6:1-6 for the more complete story.]

He multiplied loaves and fishes, using small amounts of fish and bread to feed thousands of those who’d followed Him to listen to Him preach. [Mark 6:31-44.]

He healed the sick. [Luke 4:38-39.]

He forgave sins. [Luke 8: 36-56.]

He exercised control over storms. [Luke 22-25.]

He turned water into wine. [John 2:1-11.]

Of all these, the forgiveness of sins is the most remarkable, but surely, we should be shocked by the power to overrule the commandments God gave to Moses.

The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

As the early Christian preachers and teachers came to understand more clearly that Jesus Christ, Son of God, was true man and true God, they struggled to communicate that great truth. It doesn’t seem all that hard to identify the parts of the Gospels which are history, stylized only in the Gospel of St. John. In the other three Gospels, most of the narrative is gritty and broken up and generally inconsistent. It has the smell of stories told by simple men who were there. Those parts give us no reason to believe the Savior was glorified at His birth. There is no reason to believe, and not a shred of historical evidence, that Herod or other powerful men knew something had happened to endanger their positions. The Gospels aren’t even consistent about Mary’s understanding of her son, until she stood at the foot of His cross, or maybe not until the Holy Spirit came upon her once again at the Pentecost. This much we know:

God became man that man might share the life of God.

The early Christians saw this truth unfold in time, within their communities. It was a process that involved deep thinkers, preachers, social organizers, and charitable workers. It was a process that would extend over time, reaching the clear statements in the creeds promulgated by the Church Fathers at Nicea, Chalcedon, and other conferences. Those clear statements were not finalized until more than three centuries after the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. But the matter has not ended there.

Matthew and Luke saw the truth unfold and felt compelled to speak of a Kingly birth and of visits from great men acknowledging the Kingship of the son of Mary, though there is no evidence that even the miracles or shocking words of Christ were sufficient to convince many to seriously contemplate His divine royalty. John saw the truth unfold and produced the most wonderful poetry in the history of theology:

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

This was something new, not Greek as some have falsely claimed. It was something beyond the reach of the human imagination. If it hadn’t happened, we could have never guessed at the possibility.

The truth continues to unfold. In the modern world, we have been particularly successful at learning truths of God’s Creation, starting with the physical universe but going deeply into more abstract truths. Even the more mundane truths of Creation lie beyond the reach of human efforts at schematic knowledge and we sin greatly in presuming that the origins of the human race or the nature of time and space will correspond to the thoughts of our minds untutored by proper responses to the Creator and His works. If not for those bones in the sands of Africa or the openness of the likes of Einstein to unfolding truths, we’d not have known about the evolution of the human race or the existence of black-holes.

We know much about the history of the human race before Abraham, much that is disturbing to those who would accept the story of Adam and Eve as literalistic truth. Still more disturbing is what our new knowledge of human nature tells us of the sheer wonder of God becoming man.

We know enough about space and time to know they’re one creature and not two absolute truths. What does that tell us about the journey of the Son of God as He entered Creation to embody Himself as one of His own creatures? What does it say about the possibilities of Heaven or the nature of our Creator?

The Lord of Creation will lie in a manger before the sun rises. He will need to suckle at the breasts of Mary. He will need to be fed and clothed and taught the skills of carpentry by His legal father, Joseph.

It is time to glorify and praise Him and time to open our hearts and minds that the truth might unfold.

[Biblical quotations from RSV, Catholic Edition as printed by Thomas Nelson Publishers for Ignatius Press.]

2008-2009 Christian Liturgical Year: Fourth Sunday of Advent

[2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38]

We are told in various ways that the Incarnation of the Son of God was part of God’s plans for His Creation. Through the Church’s selection of today’s reading from the Letter to the Romans and from a more general reading of St. Paul’s letters, we can infer that St. Paul is speaking of this Incarnation when we hear of “the mystery which was kept secret through the ages and is now disclosed and through the prophetic writings is made known to all nations…”

But the Incarnation as understood by the traditions of Christianity is not so easy to accept. It seems in conflict with not only the teachings from high school biology but also from our own observations of human begetting. But, with a serious effort and a willingness to think clearly, maybe we can make sense of the miracle which is the incarnation of Christ. Maybe we can see that miracle as a part of God’s story, which it has to be.

What, then, is a miracle? Some believers, even those who defend high standards of rationality speak of miracles as being suspensions or violations of the laws of this physical universe. I’d propose the following definition:

A miracle is an event, perhaps highly unlikely but not necessarily, which fits into the narrative of God’s relationship to His children in such a way that it gives evidence the Lord Almighty has acted directly in this world He created. He has acted as if a character and not a distant and dispassionate Sustainer of Creation.

A good story obeys its own rules. Unlikely events can happen but not impossible ones which violate the rules which are part of that story. Of all stories, those told by God must be good, the story which is this mortal world and — most certainly — the story which is the world of the resurrected. Notice that God’s story is different from a human story in that the story as actions of its characters is not separate from its setting. The stars and planets and all the events which take place upon that particular planet, Earth, are part of one phase of Creation and have a unity and coherence which are appropriate to the works of a God who is both rational and loving.

In some ways, God’s story is like a story told by a human being, but it’s not a story in which characters act within the context of a given world. God creates this world as He tells His story. He doesn’t tell a story on a stage which was given to Him nor even on a stage which He built from raw materials given to Him. God’s acts of creation, of bringing stuff into existence and shaping it into things or living creatures, aren’t separate from the action of His story. They are the action of His story.

I repeat:

A miracle is an event, perhaps highly unlikely but not necessarily, which fits into the narrative of God’s relationship to His children in such a way that it gives evidence the Lord Almighty has acted directly in this world He created.

Miracles may even be ordinary events to human perceptions, but they’ll be seen as miracles to those who have formed their minds to follow along with God’s story. We associate miracles with such acts as spontaneous cures of cancer, not noticing that those occur in the ordinary flow of events and not just when some pious Christian prays for the intercession of Mary or some other saint. That famous random act of charity, a moment of peace in an overly active society, and certainly the pursuit of holiness rather than the pursuit of financial success and physical comfort, are all miracles. They are acts of creatures aligning themselves with God’s own acts, realizations of our true freedom. We are truly free when we move with God and share in His freedom, the only true freedom possible. When we act with God, then the Lord Himself acts directly in His Creation. This was the case when Mary submitted to the Lord’s will. “Let it be to me according to your will.” [Luke 1:38b]

Then God acted directly. The Holy Spirit came upon Mary and she conceived a son. Words are tricky. They mostly speak of reality or of some abstraction related to reality. We hear words and try to imagine their meaning in terms of the world in which we live and breath. We think of the Holy Spirit as somehow invading Creation from Transcendental regions and then entering the holy womb of Mary. God was already present in all parts of Mary’s body as He is present in all parts of our bodies and in all parts of an elephant’s body and in the entirety of a black-hole. God was already present in the egg-cell in Mary’s womb, the egg-cell in which extremely unlikely but physically possible events took place.

If Jesus of Nazareth was true man, as the Bible and the ancient creeds tell us, He had a full set of DNA and He developed from a single fertilized cell in the holy womb of Mary. To get from the initial egg-cell in Mary’s womb to a fertilized egg-cell involves some unlikely, almost impossible, events, but we’re talking about real-world states. To get from one to another involves a highly unlikely pathway but the impossibilities are less than some involved in the shaping and stabilization of the expanding universe.

What’s most important is that this incarnation of the Son of God is the beginning of the most important part of the story God is telling in this world He created. This universe is the physical aspects of that story. God doesn’t have to override this universe and its matter to bring about the fertilization of the egg which will be implanted in Mary’s womb. He simply has to act directly, moving the matter He Himself created. We don’t have to suspend our beliefs in the law-like behavior of nature when we enter the Christmas story. We simply have to realize that the Creator can act within His own Creation.

If God is present and always capable of acting directly in His own Creation, then we have no need for miracles of a magical sort. We simply have better reason to fear the Lord and to wonder at His mighty works.

[Biblical quotations from RSV, Catholic Edition as printed by Thomas Nelson Publishers for Ignatius Press.]

2008-2009 Christian Liturgical Year: Third Sunday of Advent

[See Isaiah 61:1-2a, 10-11 (8b), 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24, John 1:6-8, 19-28]

Today’s readings might first give the impression that the prologue to the story of the Savior’s birth is dragging on a bit. Isaiah is still speaking of the good which will arrive in the wake of the conquering God. The gospel reading is again about the forerunner, John the Baptist, who reacts righteously this time against any suggestion he might be that mysterious Savior.

Our attention spans are limited. We live in a world where even our so-called leisure time is hectic. Publishers give us works where the action is well under way by the end of the first paragraph, training us to avoid spending the time to learn context and historical background. But we allow ourselves to be so trained, and the publishers and their pet authors aren’t the only ones to give us a distorted view of God’s Creation. Our commercial leaders and bankers make investment decisions as if the world had been freshly created that morn and awaited the shaping hand of one strong-willed executive or another. Our political leaders act in that sort of cynically naive way, waging bloody wars in countries whose histories remain unknown to Presidents and Senators and all their advisers.

In today’s second reading, St. Paul tells us:

Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything, hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil.

Encounter God’s world, even corrupted regions if you have the strength and calling, with courage and faith and hope. Speak the truths we have been given in the Gospel, the Good News of our Savior, but remain open to what we can learn about God’s Creation even from pagans and atheists. Test what passes for knowledge in the world around us, test its truth and plausibility. Test any presentation of truths or plausible speculations for consistency with the Good News of Jesus Christ. Hold fast to what is good, remembering that even by standards of self-interest, salvation is worth more than wealth and comfort and prestige in our mortal lives.

Encounter God’s world as a Christian. That means you make your decisions according to your duties to God and then according to legitimate but more ephemeral duties. As we await the Prince of Peace on this globe covered by wars and other acts of violence, we need to pay particular attention to our duties as Christians to not commit acts of violence unless they at least satisfy just-war doctrines and other Christian ideas of justice. (Some may go further and choose to not even resist violence in self-defense in imitation of Christ, but I’ll assume we can at least defend ourselves for now.)

When our government calls upon us or our children to fight a war, do we have a duty to obey the government first and then to do our Christian duty by putting clergymen in uniform to bless us as we do what might be wrong by Christian standards of justice? Do we go to heaven by doing what our governments tell us to do or by doing what’s right by the standards of justice given us by Christ and the prophets who came before Him?

More generally, as we live our lives in marketplaces, political and commercial, do we quench that often inconvenient Spirit or remain open to the movement of the Spirit? Do we turn from the various prophets who seem to speak truly of uncomfortable truths and turn to those who assure us that we can be greedy or hateful in a Christian way? Do we test the claims of the human institutions which promise prosperity and honor if we but obey them or do swallow those claims whole? Do we hold fast to what is good even when there’s a price to be paid or do we prefer to please the gods of the marketplaces? Do we abstain from every form of evil or do we merely avoid those which we don’t find attractive or necessary to our personal success?

The Son of God approaches but He brings justice and not just mercy. And that strange and often obnoxious man in camel hides, he who lives on locust and wild-honey, is staring us in the face, his eyes blazing with passion and accusing us of being luke-warm as he calls us to repent before the Lord arrives. The story is not just that of God come as a cute baby in a manger. The story is that of God who comes to collect those who are His own. Do you belong to God or to the Principalities and Powers? Do you obey God and then do your duty by your country within those Christian restraints or do you obey your country and seek to satisfy your duties to God within the constraints of your country’s orders?

[Biblical quotations from RSV, Catholic Edition as printed by Thomas Nelson Publishers for Ignatius Press.]

2008-2009 Christian Liturgical Year: The Feast of the Immaculate Conception

The Church has told us that the Blessed Virgin Mary was born sinless, though I think it better to say she was born in a state of grace. The major reason is that grace is of primary importance in our relationship to our Savior. A second reason, important also, is that we’re at a time in history when we don’t have a rational understanding of sin. Indeed, we have a compromised understanding of Creation since we’ve not yet made peace with modern empirical knowledge and many of our ways of speaking of God’s revealed truths are drawn from pre-modern understandings of living creatures and of stars, understandings now known to be wrong. In particular, there’s some serious divergence between the man who is the subject of Christian theological and philosophical discussions and the man who is being revealed by modern scientists, historians, and other explorers of the empirical realm. If our ideas of man, in fact, our ideas of life and of Creation as a whole, are being revised, what chance is there that our ideas of sin remain valid? What chance is there that our beliefs provide a coherent description of God’s Creation?

But sin was never the main issue, nor was sinlessness. Grace was the main issue. “Hail Mary, full of grace.” “Hello Mary, how is it that you already share the life of God?” To emphasize sin or sinlessness is to return to the forms of Law rejected by Christ and, in greater detail, by St. Paul. Mary’s sinlessness followed from her fullness of grace. The grace didn’t come as a result of the sinlessness.

Mary was born full of grace. From her conception, she was in a special communion with God, a communion at least similar to that enjoyed by the resurrected if not exactly the same. The obsession with sin and the possibility or impossibility of sinlessness in our mortal lives can often hide God and His Creation from us rather than bringing us closer to Him. We should instead realize that we are bound to obey not only the moral laws which arise from our biological natures but also the more demanding versions of those laws given to us by Moses and by Jesus of Nazareth. We should also realize that perfect obedience of these laws doesn’t save us; it merely brings us to a more perfect state of humanity. Some Medieval Scholastics discussed limbo as a way of dealing with the supposed problem of the nature of life after death for ungodly but virtuous men. Perhaps this is an important problem but one that is a side-issue when we discuss salvation.

We are saved when God is truly with us. We speak truly when we speak along with God. We do God’s work when we act with God.

God wasn’t hidden to Mary. From conception, she had a relationship to her Creator more intimate than that enjoyed by others after a life devoted to learning the craft of sainthood. Mary gave her flesh to the Son of God and suckled Him at her breasts. She responded properly and without hesitation to God’s direct guidance in matters small or large. The rest of us often feel that guidance, or at least suspect it, but have trouble responding properly, trouble even discerning if that’s really God nudging us to eliminate a bad habit or even to explore the possibility of a religious vocation. Those who move freely with the will of God don’t have conversations with God to discuss the details nor do they get their instructions through angels. Those who wait for God to speak directly to them will waste their opportunities to serve God and His children.

Mary was already aware of the presence of Her Creator and was responsive to Her Creator without reserving any part of herself. From the moment of her otherwise normal conception, she was in that state, already saved but aware of her Lord’s presence and waiting for His guidance.

And now we should contemplate the meaning of this part of the story which the Church tells as we travel with Her through the liturgical year:

Mary bears the Son of God in her holy womb and God prepared her for this maternal task by forming her from conception to be fully aware of His presence and responsive without hesitation to His will.

2008-2009 Christian Liturgical Year: Second Sunday of Advent

The readings for this Second Sunday of Advent seem unfocused at first glance as do the readings for many Sundays. [See Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8.]

Isaiah speaks of better days to come. Since he’s prophesying truly and not making some prideful effort to predict the future, he leaves us in some confusion as to when hills and valleys will be brought to a level. More importantly, in light of the resurrection, we’re in some confusion as to whether these alleged improvements to the landscape will take place in this world or in some sort of world God will create for His children.

Peter tells us that God will not limit Himself to use of bulldozer and shovel, instead using fires which will make those of Hiroshima seem pretty limited. All will be melted down and the Lord God Almighty will build anew from the ashes and slag.

In light of this apocalyptic build-up, the Gospel reading is a bit anticlimactic. But it’s worse than anticlimactic. It’s as if the entire world had suddenly become a deflating balloon and all we hear is a meaningless hiss of air as we learn of some sort of eccentric who’s retreated from all that’s good in human life to wear animal hides (were they even tanned?) and to eat locusts and wild honey. A story which had at least as much potential as that of Luke and Princess Leia has gone off in a strange direction.

I speak somewhat tongue-in-cheek and not to cast doubt upon Holy Scripture nor to encourage any sort of impiety. I’m trying to set the stage for better and more insightful readings of Scripture in light of an enlarged human reason, a reason shaped both by God’s word and also by His world.

Let me speak in vague terms. God created stuff from which He shaped this universe and the things and living creatures which are part of this universe. This universe is both setting and itself a participant in a story which God is telling, the climax of which was the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Yet, we have to remember that the story as a whole pleases God and works to His purpose, from the formation of the first stars to the collapse or heat death of this universe. When we see the universe in this light and have even a faint understanding of God’s story, the universe itself and all the creatures and events which are part of it take on a unity and coherence and completeness which make of it what I call a world.

Still there is a greater setting, all of Creation. There is that fundamental stuff which God created from nothingness. I call that fundamental stuff the primordial universe. From that primordial universe, God can shape worlds which contain things and living creatures as we can imagine them. He has shaped this world and continues to shape it. God creates some sort of stuff from nothingness, He shaped the particular stuff of this universe, and then He tells a story. There is a four-part structure to created reality in this simple model:

1. The raw stuff or abstract stuff created by God from nothingness.

2. This universe which was shaped from that abstract stuff.

3. Thing-like entities, including living creatures, were shaped from the matter of this universe.

4. The story told by God, a story set in that universe and using the universe itself and all the entities which are part of it.

The readings for this Sunday point to God as a story-teller. Isaiah tells us that the story may involve hardships (valleys and mountains to travel) but all will be made well in the end. Peter tells us the story will be told in God’s time which may stretch out far beyond human imagination, certainly far beyond the life-span of a mortal man. Mark tells us the story begins with an eccentric man who has left respectable society to preach repentance and to offer baptism though that baptism doesn’t promise much or seem to mean much. So it is that Marks tells us that God will tell the story He chose to tell.

For now, it’s best to contemplate this strange beginning to the Christian liturgical year. A proper human mind is shaped by proper responses to our environments or even to wider parts of God’s Creation, including His story seen as a story and not just a more or less meaningless stream of events. Sit quietly and let God’s story take hold in your mind. Let it shape your mind. It’s a story that will end in a just world of peace and plenty. It’s a story which will be told in God’s time. And it’s a story which has a special chapter beginning with a call to repentance by a humble but outspoken man who has sacrificed all to be the forerunner of a Lord and Savior who is coming soon.

Ask your very human self, “How will this story end? How will this great Lord establish His rule? How will He bring justice and peace and prosperity to those He chooses as His own? What concrete form will that justice and peace and prosperity take? When will the Lord conquer His enemies and bring about a better world?”

Alexander the Great. Julius Caesar. Constantine. Attila. Charles the Great. Genghis Khan. Frederick the Great. Napoleon.

Those were men who knew how to conquer, how to reduce their enemies, how to impose their will upon others. Surely, He who comes in the name of God, He who will bring justice to God’s people, will prove His power in such ways. To be sure, His justice will be true justice and not the false justice of human conquerors, but He will prove Himself the greatest of all conquerors.

Maybe not, at least not in human terms. The part of God’s story which deals with the coming Lord begins with that strange man who dresses in camel-hair and eats locusts and wild honey. That’s not promising from a human perspective. Those sorts of men were little more than pests to the likes of King David and his descendants.

But we’re characters in a story being told by God and the Lord’s ways are not our ways.

[Biblical quotations from RSV, Catholic Edition as printed by Thomas Nelson Publishers for Ignatius Press.]

2008-2009 Christian Liturgical Year: Preface

I’ll be doing my best to post a meditation each week throughout the 2008-2009 liturgical year. The meditations will be Bible-centered but also reflective of my understanding of modern empirical knowledge. This is to say that I’ll be explicitly viewing God’s revelations through the eyes of a modern man somewhat knowledgeable about modern empirical knowledge. I will be especially concerned with the revelation who was the Lord Jesus Christ. And that is the purpose of these meditations — to try to start a turn towards a sane Christian worldview, one that recognizes both the revealed eternal truths and the best available empirical knowledge.

Those who wish to read the translation of a particular reading as used in the Catholic Mass can find it here. I’ll be mostly using the RSV, Catholic Edition as printed by Thomas Nelson Publishers for Ignatius Press.

2008-2009 Christian Liturgical Year: First Sunday of Advent

God doesn’t need a world in which to live, not even a heavenly world. Where God lives is God Himself because God is a pure act-of-being, His own Act-of-being. You might say that God (the one divine nature) is where Father and Son and Holy Spirit (the three divine Persons) live. Or you might say that God is His own World and His own house, or His own tent if you wish to speak in Biblical terms.

Why did God, who needs no place as we know it, create this universe? Why did the Son of God become man? Why did God create this kind of universe in which there is much joy, even of a purely natural sort, but also more than a bit of suffering? There is even evil in this world. How could God have created a world in which there is suffering and evil? Surely, God Himself is absolutely good.

“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” [Romans 8:19-21]

Note that St. Paul doesn’t blame the disorder in creation upon Satan or some other force of evil. He tells us that it is part of the plan of the all-powerful God. As I would put it, it’s part of the story that God has chosen to tell, the all-powerful and all-knowing God who is telling a story in which there is suffering and evil. After all, modern science tells us that matter as we know it came to exist as the universe cooled down from states so hot and destructive that nothing could have existed. Any time matter tried to form in the early centuries after the universe began to expand, it would be torn apart to re-enter a state which would seem to human perception to be disordered. Yet, that hot and disordered stuff eventually cooled and developed into hydrogen and oxygen, into stars and galaxies, into mountains and dinosaurs. Modern science also tells us that man with his tendencies to violence and hatred evolved from a creature with the same tendencies. And that creature was ancestor also to chimpanzees, a sometimes nasty beast which embarrasses those who would see their ancestor as a special creation, Adam already an image of God. Empirical knowledge, what we know of reality, doesn’t give us any reason to believe that this world was ever in a state of blessedness nor that mankind was ever in a state of innocence and grace.

So what does this mean? Can we make sense of both the Bible stories and those told by those bones from the sands of Africa and by the patterns of radiation left from the time when the universe was little more than a hot ball of gas? Can we find moral goodness in a world so violent down to the most basic of physical processes?

The answer to the two latter questions is, “Yes.” We can speak of the incarnation of the Son of God and also of the salvation He has offered us in the context of this world of joy and misery, of goodness and evil, but we have to speak more sanely than Christians have spoken in recent centuries. We live in an age surrounded by mountains of empirical data, only some of which has been digested into a form where it can be called ‘knowledge’. We and our children are exposed directly and indirectly to scientific and technological wonders and those wonders conflict with the understanding of this universe which we have inherited, an understanding which we have intertwined with the most absolute of truths.

The answer to the question, “So what does this mean?” is likely to be one that will disappoint most listeners: the meaning is the story itself but it’s a story that includes not only the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ but also our individual stories which, we can hope, will continue in heaven, the world of the resurrected.

If a child of a Christian household in the 13th century were to ask, “Where’s heaven?” his parents could have pointed out into space and have spoken of regions on the other side of the clouds, on the other side of the moon if they were a little more sophisticated and knew a little about the teachings of the mainstream scientists and philosophers. If a child of a Christian household in the early 21st century were to ask his parents such a question, they would have no good answer for him because they, like that child, had watched movies from deep-space probes and from Hollywood’s animation studios which show a deep space empty of angels and heaven. We’ve learned enough to destroy our inherited understanding of God’s Creation and have not yet built up understandings appropriate to modern empirical knowledge.

We have no coherent understanding of heaven given our current knowledge of reality and thus, any talk of heaven becomes talk of a fairy-land and not a part of God’s real Creation. In truth, as flesh-and-blood creatures, we don’t believe in heaven but we do believe in a reality consisting of pro football games on Sunday afternoon and news of brutal wars in foreign regions. We believe in rock-and-roll and we believe in DNA and some have watched certain documentaries which have taught them to believe in the black-hole which is almost certainly at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

We believe in DNA and we believe in those bones dug out of the sands of Africa. We believe our ancestors were also the ancestors of chimpanzees and we believe we can be saved by valves from a pig’s heart being transplanted into our human bodies.

Do we believe that the Son of God was born a frail human child with a human brain and a human mind not yet developed? Do we believe that Jesus Christ, if born today, could have been saved in His later years by having the valves from a pig’s heart grafted onto His own heart?

We live in a universe well-described by Einstein and Darwin and their successors but we’ve not yet learned to think of heaven as being a part of the same Creation as this universe, nor do we have an understanding of important Biblical stories which make sense as part of the same universe as DNA and those bones from the sands of Africa. We have no coherent understanding of the stories of Adam and Eve, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of St. John the Baptist, of Jesus Christ who was true God and true man.

We try to understand the revelations of God by ancient pagan concepts. The ancient Greeks spoke of a Golden Age when men were like gods and the world a paradise in which food and all other needs could be had without effort. St. Augustine and other early Fathers of the Church thought this provided a way of understanding the story of Adam and Eve and so Eden became a story of such a Golden Age when man was in a state of grace and had not yet fallen.

The greatest of modern anti-Christian thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, proclaimed the death of God but he was really speaking of the murder of the God of Jesus Christ by Christians. We inhabit a land which we know to be well described by Einstein’s insights and manipulable by bulldozers and computing devices. We desire cures from the successors of Darwin. We’ve split God’s Creation and have left Christian beliefs in regions that aren’t part of reality. The greatest truths of Christianity have taken on the stink of superstition.

Can we do better? Can we begin to see Christ as having been incarnate in the universe of Einstein and Darwin? Can we truly act and speak as if God did create a universe which develops by often violent processes, processes which inflict suffering on living creatures and which bring about environments which encourage the evolution of evil behavior on the part of those creatures? Is our faith and our courage up to this task?

Few of us are called to the task of dealing directly with modern thought and modern empirical knowledge in order to make sense of this phase of God’s Creation but all who are Christians are called to contemplation of God’s world as it truly is. All Christians are called to pray for understanding. All Christians are called to have respect and some coherent understanding of God’s Creation and a still greater respect and a perhaps deeper understanding of God’s scriptures.

Let us begin on this First Sunday in Advent by listening to the Lord of History and of all Creation as He speaks in the Gospel reading:

But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Take heed, watch and pray, for you do not know when the time will come. [Mark 13:33]

Of what time does the Lord Jesus Christ speak? His words in the Gospels about time and about apocalyptic issues are strange, some would say mystical. Now we know more about time and the way that it’s intertwined with space. It now seems likely that space and time, space-time, are fully creatures as much as matter. From this modern viewpoint, we must fear that Christ often speaks of events that aren’t within reach of traditional human thoughts, events — if that is a proper word — which lie outside of time and space or perhaps in a phase of Creation with a time and space which is separate from the time and space we know.

We literally don’t know the meaning of Christ’s words but our Christian ancestors had a coherent tentative understanding of those words, an understanding which may be a bit wrong but is certainly too limited. As our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI has told us: we must broaden the horizon of human reason. We must do this if we’re to have some coherent understanding of God’s words in Holy Scripture and of God’s Creation as revealed in empirical knowledge.

We have not the means to such a broadening of our reason, at least not means as would be assumed in most of our educational institutions including Christian seminaries. That broadening of human reason must come from better understandings of Holy Scripture and of God’s Creation. We must open our minds and hearts to be shaped by our responses to God’s words and to God’s acts as Creator and as Savior. We must listen to God’s words, watch His Creation, and pray that He give us the wisdom to make some tentative sense of it all.

For now we know this: the Son of God has taken human form in the holy womb of Mary. We must quietly await His birth. Like His mother Mary, we must keep many things in our heart, not knowing what they truly mean and hoping He will reveal those meanings in His words and in His actions, including those acts of creation which shaped this universe. We must wait patiently for the Lord as He speaks and acts throughout this year and as He has acted throughout the past 15 billion years or so, since the so-called Big Bang. We must nurture our faith and our courage.

[Biblical quotations from RSV, Catholic Edition as printed by Thomas Nelson Publishers for Ignatius Press.]

The 2008-2009 Christian Liturgical Year: The End of Christian Illusions About Worldly Power?

We’re approaching the end of a liturgical year. This Sunday, November 23, is the Solemnity of Christ the King and those Christians who follow some version of the traditional Christian calendar will celebrate His reign over all that He created with Father and Holy Spirit. Then we begin advent and the preparation for the coming of the Son of God in the humble form of a human baby.

What seems remarkable in our current political and moral circumstances is that extreme liturgical transition from divine kingship to a humble birth to a woman married to a man who was traditionally seen as a poor carpenter though he might have been a middle-class home-builder (at best) according to some biblical historians. Seeing Jesus grow and reveal Himself as the Son of God, we’ll then understand the humbling nature of His incarnation.

We’re also well into a period in which some of the formerly Christian nations of the West have been humbled because they strayed from both the common-sense rules for human behavior which can be read from the books of God’s nature and also the more demanding rules which Christ laid down in the parables and the Sermon on the Mount. Our Lord Jesus Christ lived according those rules to the point where He conquered evil by refusing to fight it but instead submitting to the will of the Father who bestows various blessings and curses upon the good and the evil alike. Yet, we were deluded into thinking we had but to attend Sunday church services and avoid the more distasteful sins to bring upon ourselves both spiritual and material blessings. In avoiding even the sin of wrongful speech, Job asked, “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?”, [Job 2:10b in RSV, Catholic Edition]. Why would we have thought we had less need than the Son to learn how to obey God, to accept His blessings and curses alike? Is it not sufficient that we’re promised a share in God’s own life if we respond with the tiniest amount of faith or the tiniest desire for salvation as promised by the Lord Jesus Christ? Do we have an equal need for physical safety and comfort, for power to impose our political system or our view of Christ’s teaching upon infidels, for recognition — even from our victims — of our righteousness?

When God hasn’t always cooperated with our supposed needs for worldly goods and worldly power, various centralized governments of the West have stepped in to compensate for the failures of the Almighty and for the failures of the natural communities of His children. Those central powers, Powers and Principalities as St. Paul would have called them, did their job well enough to draw us out of our natural communities, families and churches and neighborhoods. Now, the Powers themselves have failed and we, who sold our freedom and our ways of making our livings in return for the promises of those Powers, are heading into times which will be very difficult at best. Some say that our problems would end soon if the bureaucrats and elected officials of our central governments would just go on vacation for a while. I’m in support of that vacation but I also see that we’ve reorganized our individual and community lives to assume that the promises and threats of the Powers and Principalities to guarantee our safety and prosperity can be realized. Even if our government were to go on vacation, or more properly — were to limit itself to its legal and moral activities as defined in the Constitution, we still face a generation or more of rebuilding human communities and recovering our abilities to make livings rather than to depend upon central governments and international corporations to provide us with jobs.

I point towards the suffering we’ll soon endure because of these political and economic problems only to gain the attention of the reader. We Christians need to remember Christ’s humble life and His refusal to take charge and act in the way of a prideful and sinful human leader.

We need to be active and not passive in dealing with the world but we need to be active in the way of the Twelve and the other apostles, a way that will also respect human nature with its capabilities and limitations. That is, we need to make the proper sacrifices and exert all possible energies to deal with concrete problems, to feed our children and ourselves and the poor around us, to preach the Good News by deed and word, to stand firm before evil without confronting it on its own terms. We must stand firm before Pilate with his skeptical query, “What is truth?” knowing that we have the truth, a truth which sets us free, a truth that teaches us to love our mortal lives in God’s Creation but also demands we serve the truth even by freely giving up those lives.

We must be willing to do what is right no matter what the consequences. The question, “What is right?” might well be very complicated when we’re responsible for others though I think it clear that we have no right to avoid difficult or even fatal decisions to protect ourselves. This is not to say we should seek any sort of martyrdom but we seem to be entering a period of history when various sorts of martyrdom will be seeking Christians who live according to their professed beliefs. Most who struggle to truly follow Christ in the next few decades of hardship will do so by serving the brothers and sisters of Christ. How many Catholics and Lutherans and Methodists will be willing to gain their lives by giving them up to revivals of religious orders, secular or ordained, active or devoted to prayer? How many will fill in as the various government services to sick or disabled children, to the elderly, to the mentally disabled or mentally sick, disappear? How many will prove themselves unable to think of charity in terms other than the degraded and materialistic terms of the West in its current sad state?

I have no desire to be either optimistic or pessimistic about the material goodness of life on earth over the next few years, though I have little doubt that some will manage to live well even while living a morally good life but it’s likely that most who live well will do so by compromising their spiritual and moral integrity. Being myself a middle-class American coward, I’ll try to concentrate on helping to create the possibilities of a God-centered and morally well-ordered life. That way, I don’t have to think so much about the likely hardships. It may be helpful to put aside considerations of consequences when making difficult moral decisions. In that vein, I’m going to try to put up at least one blog entry a week over the next liturgical year — the 2008-2009 liturgical year begins with the First Sunday of Advent on 2008/11/30.

These blog entries will be Bible-centered meditations which follow the liturgical year, a year that helps sacramental Christians to live in some sort of rhythm with the life of the Son of God as He is born and grows into manhood and then takes upon Himself a mission that leads to His suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection into Glory. Oddly enough, the climax of the story — Easter Sunday — occurs relatively early in the liturgical year but it is a year that compresses 40 years of often hidden wonders into but one year. A liturgical year which was well-ordered to Christ’s life on earth would, in fact, be impossible if we honor the connection between Passover and Easter and also the historically doubtful but otherwise valid connection between the birth of Jesus and the depth of winter. In any case, the liturgical year is what it is because of not only Christ’s life on earth but also the rhythms of the Jewish liturgical year, rhythms which our Lord accepted into His own life.

My meditations will be an effort to serve God and His children by following those rhythms in a special way for the entirety of a liturgical year. I expect many humbling failures and I pray for a few modest successes.

Easter Sunday: March 23, 2008

The Easter celebrations continue on Sunday, though the Masses aren’t nearly as elaborate as the Easter Vigil Mass held after sunset on Holy Saturday. For the most part, Easter Sunday Masses are very similar to Masses on any other Sunday but for the larger attendance and the greater number of new dresses and pretty hats. In the Roman Catholic Church, it’s a requirement that the priest lead the congregation in a renewal of baptismal promises but some priests use that form rather than the Profession of Faith on other Sundays as well.

Most of us are with family or will be soon. We struggle to pay attention to the Mass but our stomachs and heads anticipate ham and deviled eggs and far too much chocolate.

It’s a wonderful day and hard to understand why the baptized don’t all come to church, hard to understand why so many have never sought to be baptized. And then while we bask in the glow of our anticipated Easter feasts followed by our entry into Heaven, many years from now we hope, we who are Catholics find ourselves crossing our heads, our lips, and our hearts and the deacon begins to read from the Gospel of St. John:

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So, she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Peter then came out with the other disciple, and they went toward the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first; and stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb; he saw the linen cloths lying, and the napkin, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. [John 20:1-9]

As we hear those words for the umpteenth time, we can ask ourselves if we’ve ever really listened. Have we sunk into complacency?

Mary Magdelene saw the empty tomb and thought someone had stolen away the Lord’s body. The other disciple, almost certainly St. John, admitted that he and Peter had not even thought of Jesus rising from the dead until they saw the empty tomb. In fact, some of the translations leave matters unclear: did they believe when they saw the empty tomb or did that merely start the thinking process that led to the realization that the Lord Jesus Christ had risen from the dead?

We should enjoy the celebrations of Easter, in church and at the dinner-table and on the front porch watching the children play.

The Lord Jesus Christ has risen.

Yet again, we should ask ourselves if our faith has come by our good luck. Some of us were raised by devout Christian parents and some had friends who had spoken the Good News to us, lovingly and aggressively or lovingly and gently. They had loved us and the Lord enough to try to bring us to Him.

When we have a few quiet moments, we should ask ourselves if we’ve done our part. The pews are noticeably empty of young adults. Have we done our part to impart a love of God to our children and the young adults in our families? The pews rarely have strangers in them and most of those strangers seem to be already practicing Christians judging by their awareness of liturgical practices. Have we ever brought a friend or acquaintance to church with us? Have we ever spoken to a lost soul about God’s love?

What have we done to pass on the Gospel, the Good News, we celebrate so joyfully on Easter Sunday?

So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.” [Luke 17:10]

Have we even done so well as those unworthy servants? I know I’ve not done so well as those unworthy servants.

Easter Vigil: March 22, 2008

[As is my custom, I use the RSV rather than the translation used in the missal used for the Roman Catholic Mass in the U.S.]

The Easter Vigil Mass is celebrated after sunset on Saturday of Holy Week. It begins with a lighting of a fire which is used in turn to light the Easter candle. The Easter candle is carried to the altar at the front of the church in a solemn procession during which the Exsultet is sung, beginning with the verse:

Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God’s throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!

After the Easter candle is set in a place of honor, the mass moves on to the Liturgy of the Word, the reading and hearing of appropriate chapters or verses from Sacred Scripture. There are seven Old Testament readings followed by a reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and then Matthew’s account of the Resurrection.

The first Old Testament reading, [Genesis 1:1-2:2], is the account considered by some to be a description of God’s Creation of this world. There’s a reason why this reading is important on this night. The Lord of Creation has been resurrected. If we don’t know what Creation is, we can’t know what that means. If we don’t know what Creation is, we certainly won’t be able to have a rational idea of Heaven. And, in this modern world, where we know the empty reaches of space from documentaries and sci-fi movies, we don’t know where we might find Heaven, the world where Christ waits for those who belong to Him.

Let’s see if a meditative journey can help us to find the world of the resurrected as our Christian ancestors once found it in the heavens that we now know as outer space. Then we’ll have rational terms for discussions and descriptions of Heaven as those earlier Christians did.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. [Genesis 1:1-2]

Stanley Jaki, a Benedictine priest and scholar with wide-ranging knowledge and credentials, has shown in Genesis 1 Through the Ages [Thomas More Press, 1992] that the word translated as ‘created’ in the above verses actually means ‘cleave’ in the sense of separate. For most purposes, we can mentally translate the word ‘create’ in the book of Genesis as ‘shape’ or maybe ‘organize’.

We Christians believe God did create from nothing all that is not Him, but we can’t see or describe that event, even in our imaginations. Science tells us the same though some individual scientists would like to find an equation to describe a creation event — logically impossible since mathematics doesn’t describe existence as such. The so-called Big Bang is not a creation event but rather a transition from some prior state of being.

God shaped this world out of some very strange stuff which He had created as the basic stuff of all Creation. That basic stuff lies on the other side of the Big Bang, though maybe far on the other side. Many other phases might lie in between the rawest levels of Creation and our universe. If God shaped this world out of that stuff, we can have faith that He can shape Heaven — the world of the resurrected out of that same stuff.

In the beginning, God shaped this world from the basic stuff of Creation. God had created the basic stuff of Creation from nothing. God has also shaped a world in which Christ and those who belong to Christ will live with Him for time without end. We know this world of the resurrected exists because the risen Christ has visited this mortal world and given marvelous signs of His perfected body, a body St. Paul called a ‘spiritual body’ in 1 Corinthians 15, a wonderful discussion of these issues. Those who belong with Christ, those who will live with Him for time without end, will have spiritual bodies, much like that of the resurrected Christ. It’s perhaps even more fitting to say that our resurrected bodies will be us in the most complete sense.

Christ is the Lord of Creation. So long as we have faith in Christ and in His God, we can be confident that Christ’s promises will be kept. But we need a vision of the world in which those promises will be kept, else those promises will become no more than feel-good illusions to us and our children. We can gain such a vision if we have the courage and faith to mediate upon Holy Scripture in light of what we modern human beings know about this universe, this phase of Creation.