The lie that kills

4th Week of Easter 2006(F): Acts 13.26-33; John 14.1-5
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation


Are you, are we lost in a lie that kills?

Jesus tells Peter that he, Peter, will deny him three times. Peter cannot follow Christ nor can Peter lay down his life for Christ. Who and what Christ is for Peter, the disciples, and for us is not yet fully revealed and won’t be fully revealed until tongues of fire lick their souls and they and we are set ablaze with the Holy Spirit and witness the birth of the Church. Peter’s desire to follow is undeniable as is our own. Our deeply-hooked hearts long for the privilege of walking behind our Lord, taking on his teachings, preaching his words and his Word, but, like Peter the desire to follow him, the desire to die for him—no matter how hot, how large in our souls—is not enough. What we must recognize, take in and make part of our very being is the radical assertion made by Christ to his disciples: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

What does Peter deny in the chaos of the garden on the night of Christ’s betrayal? He denies that he knows Jesus. He denies that he is a disciple of the Teacher handed over to Pilate and the Chief Priests. He denies to all who ask that he follows Christ. In every word he speaks and by fleeing the garden, he denies that Christ is his means to the Father; he denies his certainty for salvation, and instead lays claim to death as his Master. Peter denies that Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And so, he is lost in a lie that kills.

Are you, are we lost in a lie that kills? This is a dangerous question. Dangerous because it requires us to believe several unpopular truths. First, that there is truth. Second, that we are morally obligated to believe the truth. Third, that the moral obligation to believe the truth and actually doing so will give us life. Fourth, that to fail to believe the truth will lose us in a culture where undifferentiated assertions about truth weigh equally against our conscience and we are told to choose the one prettiest to our eyes.

These truths about the Truth are dangerous to hold and teach because they identify you, pick you out, and label a desire for certainly, clarity, and righteousness—all elements alien to a culture (and some parts of the church!) given over to spiritual and religious indifferentism; a culture that hugs itself to moral wandering and calls it an ethical path; a culture that enshrines relativism and calls it tolerance of difference; a culture that habitually chooses death and calls it choice, or retribution, or defense.

Are you, are we lost in a lie that kills? The way, the truth and the life that is Jesus Christ is the way to the Father, the truth about the Father, and life in the Father. Jesus assures his disciples that he goes before them to prepare the way, he travels on ahead, leading the way. Wanting to walk the way and walking it. Desiring the truth and seeking it out. Yearning for a holy life and living a holy life. Wanting, desiring, yearning…and doing. Different sorts of things. Peter desired Christ powerfully. And denied him easily.

The lie that kills is that there is another way, another truth, another life, something or someone other than Christ who will clear the path for us, assure us in trust, and give us eternal life. There is no other. And you are his witnesses before the people that he has brought you to this fulfillment: that you are found, that you walk the way, and that you have eternal life because you desire it from him and because you live it with him!

Holy Pyromaniacs!

4th Week of Easter 2006: Acts 12.24-13.5; John 12.44.50
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

[Fair warning: preaching the gospel of John sometimes makes me weird!]

Get comfortable, breath deeply, let go of all fear, guilt, anxiety, thought, and surround yourself with bright, white light. “Run to the Light, Carol Ann! Run to the light!” Focus on your inner child and project a ray of light into the world. Hold hands in a circle, clear your minds, and generate a barrier of brilliant light around Earth. When I died I saw a welcoming, nonjudgmental Light at the end of the tunnel, urging me forward. Lord, give us your Light…small “l” light, capital “L” Light, and “lite,” l-i-t-e.

Sun, moon, stars. Fire, electric bulbs, phosphorus. Exploding gas, erupting volcano, lightning flash. Radiance, illumination, glow. Morning, day, noon. Rescue from Darkness, lamp at midnight, candle against the pitch. All of these are images, words, ideas linked to our primitive need for light, our primordial search for knowing, seeing, figuring things out. We reach for light switches, table lamps, headlights in order to cook, read, drive to work. In seeking out and finding what is lost, we manage it best in the light--distinguishing between this and that, avoiding danger, stepping around obstacles and over limits, seeing edges, relative positions.

Darkness is a vast sameness, an infinite indistinction, an absence of shapes, sizes, limits, edges. To be in darkness is to be without definition, without clarity or contrast. Light, however, shines on reality, brightening what is there, making the stuff of Here and Now visible—height, length, color, identity. To be in the Light is to know definition, clarity, contrast. Darkness is ignorance…light is knowledge.

Jesus concludes his public ministry by declaring rather sharply what has only been hinted at up until now: believe in me and what I have taught and you accept my Father who sent me. Do this and you step into the light of our salvation. Disbelieve in me and what I have taught and you reject my Father who sent me. Do this and you remain in darkness. Come into the light or dwell in darkness. The choice is stark and easy. And it is one we make daily, hourly against the temptations of despairing of God’s mercy, surrendering to the passions, submitting to false teachings; choices against the temptations of setting up idols and altars to our egos, our inordinate desires, our failures to love; choosing against the temptation to blind ourselves to the shapes, sizes, and edges of the truth.

When we believe the Word, we take it in, we plant it, we let it grow—wildly, without fence or tie—we feed it our love and obedience, letting its brightness shine out, radiate through the words of our mouth and the work of our hands to light the way for others. When we believe the Word, it sets us ablaze, urging us to spread the fire. We become Holy Pyromaniacs—crazy for speaking the truth, thirsty for righteousness, hungry for heaven. And possessed by a spirit of holiness that needs for us to speak the Word to the world, to talk about the light of Christ, to make what we do illuminative of his saving work for us.

The Father’s command to us is eternal life. To live in His glory, his splendor. Hear Jesus’ words then, believe them, observe them, and know that you are rescued from the dark.

Fr. Corbon's quote on deification

In my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter (below) I quote from Fr. Jean Corbon’s book, The Wellspring of Worship (Ignatius Press, 1988). This is one of the most beautiful books available on the Church's understanding of our redemption as deification.


The full quote (i.e. without my editions) follows:

“Following these three pathways of the transfigured icon, we are divinized to the extent that the least impulses of our nature find fulfillment in the communion of the Blessed Trinity We then "live" by the Spirit, in oneness with Christ, for the Father. The only obstacle is possessiveness, the focusing of our persons on the demands of our nature, and this is sin for the quest of self breaks the relation with God. The asceticism that is essential to our divinization and that represents once again a synergy of grace consists in simply but resolutely turning every movement toward possessiveness into an offering. The epiclesis on the altar of the heart must be intense at these moments, so that the Holy Spirit may touch and consume our death and the sin that is death's sting. Entering into the name of Jesus, the Son of God and the Lord who shows mercy to us sinners, means handing over to him our wounded nature, which he does not change by assuming but which he divinizes by putting on. From offertory to epiclesis and from epiclesis to communion the Spirit can then ceaselessly divinize us; our life becomes a eucharist until the icon is completely transformed into him who is the splendor of the Father”(223).

This comes from Chapter Sixteen of the book. A large portion of the chapter is reproduced on the Ignatius Press blogsite here.

Enjoy!

Fr. Philip

Are you saved?

4th Sunday of Easter: Acts 4.8-12; 1 John 3.1-2; John 10.11-18
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital and Church of the Incarnation



Are you saved? Have you accepted Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior? Do you know Jesus?

As a Catholic, how do you understand your salvation? When we talk about our redemption, what do you hear? If you were asked by a Protestant friend—“Are you saved?”—what would you say? Another (more indirect) way to ask this same question: what are you doing here this morning? Why are you here? Meeting an obligation? Did mama drag you outta bed? Roommates badgered you into showing up? Guilt? Habit? Piety? The need for true worship? The presence of the Risen Lord in the sacrament? Why are you here? Answer me that and you can answer me this: “Are you saved?”

I grew up in rural Mississippi surrounded by bible-believing Baptists—hard-core, heart-felt, deep-down Jesus folks who were assured of their salvation, in the possession of the perfect knowledge of their redemption. There was no doubt, no wavering, not even a passing shadow of uncertainty that Jesus is Lord. Their personal encounter with Christ defines who they are and who they will become: upright, moral people, righteous, God-fearing and heaven-bound. Salvation for them is a picture painted with bright lines, pure colors, perfectly framed. And it hangs in the center of their lives.

Do you as a Catholic understand what it means to be in a redeeming relationship with the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit?

Peter in Acts, John in his letter and his gospel this morning point us unswervingly to the conclusion that for us to be saved in Christ we must become Christ; we share in his passion, death, and resurrection. There is no other name under heaven given to us by which we can saved. We are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed, but we do know that when what we will be is revealed we shall be like him. Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me.” I will lay down my life for my sheep. I can lay down my life and pick it up again. And he can pick us up with him. Brothers and sisters, see what love the father has bestowed on us—He became man so that we might become God!

Are you saved? Have you accepted Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior? Why are you here this morning? I hope you are here this morning to confess your sins and hear God’s mercy; to listen to the Word proclaimed and preached; to offer praise and thanksgiving to God; to say again with us “I believe in One God, the Father Almighty;” to ask for what you need and to ask for others what they need; to place yourself—your worries, your loves, your resentments, jealousies, your impatience, yourself—all of you, placed on the altar with the bread and wine to be offered to God, sacrificed, made holy in surrender.

I hope you are here this morning to say AMEN to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, to his suffering, death, and resurrection; to this moment of eternity brought down for us to draw us back up, to catch us up in his glory—body, soul, divinity—to make us his children, his heirs.

I hope you are here this morning to eat his body and drink his blood, to take into your bodies his very person, to reap the harvest of his gift of himself to us, for us. And I hope you are here this morning to learn, to come to know that your salvation, your redemption is accomplished in this sacrifice of the altar, this liturgy of deification. We are not acting out a play here. We are not mumbling a script or miming a drama. We are not here to “git ‘r done” in time for lunch. We are here to cooperate in the redemption of our bodies and our souls! What we do here this morning is the public work of making us all Christs, the work of our Triune God in transforming us, perfecting us, making us like Him.

The great Dominican theologian, Fr. Jean Corbon, writes of our redemption in the Mass: “From offertory to [the moment the priest calls down the Spirit] and from [that moment] to communion the Spirit can then ceaselessly divinize us; our life becomes a Eucharist until the [image of God that we are] is completely transformed into him who is the splendor of the Father.” Perfectly said!

For Catholics, to be redeemed is not to be “holistically integrated as a person,” if by this we mean nothing more than to be made psychologically balanced. Jesus did not die on the cross and rise again to clear up a DSM-IV diagnosis. For Catholics, to be redeemed is not to be “made one with Earth.” All of creation will be redeemed in time, but Jesus did not die on the cross and rise again to show us the way to Gaia, Earth Mother. For Catholics, to be redeemed is not to be “absorbed into the Universal Oneness.” Jesus did not die on the cross and rise again so that we might be dissolved into stardust and spend eternity dodging gravity wells and rouge comets. For Catholics, to be redeemed is not to be “liberated from oppressive hierarchies and socio-economic structures of exclusion.” Jesus did not die on the cross and rise again to spark an elitist social revolution that worships the totalitarianism of political correctness and moral anarchy.

For Catholics, to be redeemed is to be made a child of the Father through the freely made sacrifice of the Son in the love of the Holy Spirit. To be redeemed is to be repaired, to be rescued, to be healed. We are found by our shepherd. Beloved as children; raised from the dead by the Only Name given to us for our salvation. To be redeemed is to be brought to Him as an offering, a sacrifice; made holy, perfected in His image and likeness. To be redeemed is to be transformed into Christ through Christ.

See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God!

The proper response, the only response worthy of this gift is to live your life in sacrificial thanksgiving—giving thanks to God by serving all His children in charity, by taking His Word to the world in hope, by offering to Him the course and plan of your life in faith; loving, hoping, trusting; knowing that our Father gives us an inheritance, an eternal estate.

Are you saved? Yes, every time you celebrate this liturgy. Have you accepted Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior? Yes, and even better: you’ve eaten his Body and Blood! Do you know Jesus? You know him and he knows you. He is the Good Shepherd and you are his brothers and sisters.

Now, having cleared all that up, it’s time for the really tough question: watching you, listening to you, do the people who see you everyday, do they you know you as Christ?

Offered, changed, consumed

3rd Week of Easter 2006 (F): Acts 9.1-20, John 6.52-59
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation


We will eat the Body of Christ and drink the Blood of Christ, taking into our own bodies and blood the Word Made Flesh for us. We do this, this sacred eating, not to remember Christ, not to symbolize Christ, not to firm up shaky communal bonds; no, we do this, this sacred eating, so that we might live, so that we might share in the divine life of Christ right now and always.

Of course, we will also remember Christ, symbolize his last friendly meal with his students, and we will strengthen our communal bonds in the Eucharist, but unless we are ordered to, focused on seeking out and living a divine life as our proper goal, memories, symbols, and community are little more than idols to be dusted off until we’re dead, second-class effects pretending at greatness. The Body and Blood of Christ—confected, worshiped, and consumed in this Mass—is the “medicine of immortality,”* true food/true drink, the banquet of salvation, and the feast of our holiness.

The profundity of what we do here everyday is astonishing. Perhaps the habit of it dulls the sharp edges of our own sense of audacity, but the radical nature of what happens here cannot be dulled. Why? Because ultimately we do nothing here. It is Christ who offers Christ for Christ to Christ through Christ. It is ultimately the Word Made Flesh that speaks the words of consecration as he did at the Last Supper. It is the Word Made Flesh who lifts up his body and blood and offers himself to his Father for us. It is the Word Made Flesh that binds us together in blessing, ties us up in the sacrifice on the altar of the cross, and lifts us up in offering, a sacrifice of our lives in service to one another for the greater glory of the Father.

But none of this makes sense if we leave here thinking that what we have done, what has been done to us and for us is mere remembrance, just symbolic, or simply communal. The quarrlesome Jews ask, “How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?” He cannot give us his flesh memorially. What can we who were not there remember about Christ giving his Flesh to his disciples? He cannot give us his Flesh symbolically. A symbol of his Flesh is a symbol of his Flesh and not his Flesh itself. I can give you a crown and call it a kingdom, but, ultimately, it is just a crown. He cannot give us his Flesh communally, that is, we cannot understand the sacrifice of the Eucharist as a work of the community. We cannot give to the Father what has not been given to us by Him first.

Memories, symbols, communities all pass away and none bring eternal life. Christ gives us his Flesh in the sacrament, in the bread and wine that become his Body and Blood for us, true food/true drink for our transformation, our perfection. The Word Made Flesh enters our bodies as divine food, seizing every muscle, every bone, every cell, transforming, changing our flesh and blood into the Christ so that we share now in the eternal life of the Father, all the while preparing ourselves to share His eternal life always.

The gifts of bread and wine are offered, changed, and consumed. And we are offered, changed, and consumed—gifts placed on the altar. We are given to Christ by the Father to be made holy in sacrifice, and raised on the last day to a shared glory, a divine union, a life perfected in love.

The Devil's poisoned bumperstickers

3rd Sunday of Easter 2006: Acts 3.13-15, 17-19; 1 John 2.1-5; Luke 24.35-48
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital and Church of the Incarnation


Why are you troubled? Why do questions arise in your hearts? What do you fear? What worry eats at your spirit, chewing your joy? Who took your peace?

I am convinced that for a whole lot of us it is the Devil who teaches us our theology, the Devil who instructs us in the faith. He uses half-truths, whispered hints at beauty, mumbled tries at goodness. He hands you a penny and calls you rich; he burps in your face and calls it a gentle summer breeze. And you buy it. We all do at one time or another. He tells us what we think we need to hear. What we wish were true. He lies and we believe it and we take notes and we repeat to him what he taught us because he fears the truth all the time as much as we do only some of the time.

The Devil doesn’t have to work up an elaborate theological lie to teach us when he can take the truth of the faith and give it a new spin, tweak it just a bit, perhaps “make it relevant for modern times.” His teaching works so well precisely b/c he begins with the truth of the faith and dips a single poisoned finger—just his pinky—into the edge of truth, hoping we won’t notice the spreading rot of dis-ease, anxiety, and fretting infection. Hoping we won’t bother to test his tasty, deadly dish until it is too late. But we do notice when we are troubled. We notice when we are confused. We notice when worry chews at our joy.

You know this already but it is a truth worth repeating: Christ suffered and died and rose again and it is written that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all nations. And so it has. And along with it the Devil’s slightly tainted, bittersweet version as well, chucked-full of half-baked half truths and raw lies. Here lie the lies that worry us, that thump our hearts and minds too sweetly, too gently to resist even when we know the gentle thumping is a bloody beating and the sweetness hides a poison.

So that we are not deceived I want to point to two of the Devil’s lies. The first is captured perfectly in the bumpersticker mantra: “God loves us unconditionally; God accepts us just as we are.” The second is as easily captured: “I have an adult faith; I’m into spirituality not religion.” These two are directly addressed in the readings.

To the first: “God loves us unconditionally; God accepts us just as we are.” Now, is this true? Yes. But it is only a half-truth. It is absolutely true that God loves us without condition, without prerequisite. Deus caritas est. God is love. And it is true that God welcomes us in, accepts us as He finds us—as sinners, as doubters, as deniers, in our ignorance, even in our defiance. This half of the truth is clear.

Listen again to Peter, John, and Luke for the other half: “You denied Christ to Pilate; you released a murderer in his place; you put the author of life to death; you acted out of ignorance; you worry, you question—but we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, who is our rescue from sin. ‘Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away.’” God loves us unconditionally, accepts us as we are in order to change us. It is God’s love for us that motivates us to repentance. God does not love us so that we may remain in our sin. He does not love the thief so that we might come to see that stealing is OK. He does not love the adulteress so that we might come to see that adultery is OK. He loves the thief and the adulteress so that they will stop stealing and stop committing adultery. God loves us to change us.

To the second bumpersticker half-truth: “I have an adult faith; I’m into spirituality not religion.” At the heart of this often-heard contemporary mantra is the truth that as adult Christians we rely on a spiritual relationship with the Father, that is, we grow and flourish in a relationship with God based on love, trust, mercy, hope, and constant conversion. An adult faith moves beyond the mere formalism of religious obligation, the raw legalism of ritual observance into a living, breathing, maturing relationship where the conscience is well-formed by truth and goodness and beauty.

All true. But that’s only half the truth. Listen again to Peter, John, and Luke: “God has brought to fulfillment what the prophets preached: that His Christ would suffer and die; he is the righteous one who died for our sins and the sins of the whole world; he rose from the dead so that repentance and forgiveness of sins would be preached in his name; to know him as your savior is to keep his commandments; those who say they know him but fail to obey him are liars, the truth is not in them.”

Our second bumpersticker half-truth makes a distinction between “spirituality” and “religion” that allows the gullible to believe that there is a theological difference between “relationship with God” and “obligation to God,” a difference between “knowing Christ” and “obeying Christ.” This bumpersticker hopes to teach us that an “adult faith” is one where we are in relationship with God without any obligation to Him or His church and that we can know Christ as our Savior without obeying Christ as our Lord. More often than not the battle cry of “I have an adult faith” is usually a more educated way of saying: “I will do this my way or no way and besides you’re not the boss of me!” More adolescent whining than mature self-giving, isn’t it?

It is also the case that the distinction made here between “spirituality” and “religion” –that spirituality is about relationship and religion is about rules—is made so that we can privilege spirituality over religion, or better yet, exclude religion in favor of spirituality. This is simple impossible in a truly adult faith. Our spirituality is how we understand and live out our religion. Our religion is how we know that our spirituality is based on revealed and well-reasoned truths. To have an adult faith is to know Christ as Savior and Lord; it is to be in a right-relationship, a spiritual communion with the divine firmly grounded in revealed religion.

These two half-baked half-truths steal from us the breath of life, the food and drink of our holiness. They promise us treasures and give us Crackerjack prizes. They are Happy Meals pretending to be the Heavenly Banquet. The bald-faced, open-handed, simple truth of the faith is this: God loves you—w/o condition, just as you are. God wants you to live with Him now and forever. God’s love for you and His desire for you to live with Him now and forever is all you need to repent of your sin, to come to Him in obedience, and to be radically changed, made into something utterly new, truly perfected in Him.

Why are you troubled? Why do questions arise in your hearts? We have an Advocate with the Father. Therefore, repent and be converted; be at peace and witness to his mercy; keep His word and…beware devils selling poisoned bumperstickers.

Takes a beating...

2nd Week of Easter 2006 (F): Acts 5.34-42; John 6.1-15
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation


Hearing the account of the apostles before the Sanhedrin in Acts this morning, I just couldn’t help thinking of the old Timex watch commericals: “They take a beating and keep on ticking!” If that’s too irreverent for a homily, I apologize. But I just have to think that the apostles, filled to the brim with the joy of the Lord, might chuckle as well, seeing in the dark humor of their predictament—the ripping sting of the scourge—the powerful effects of the Father’s favor. Here, between the Resurrection and the Coming of the Holy Spirit, do we see the powerful effects of the Father’s favor in our lives?

Here we are between Easter and Pentecost and we find ourselves pushed by the elation of the Resurrection and pulled by the expectation of the coming of the Holy Spirit—the joy of Christ’s defeat of death by emptying the tomb and the hope, the sure promise, of the help of God’s Spirit. To be delighted in the Lord and expectant of his coming again seems to me to be the perfecting recipe for holiness, the formula for feeding our growing right-relationship with God. We are at once convinced of his historical resurrection, the actual emptying of his tomb on Easter morning, and we are hopeful, expectant, sure of the coming arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Living faithfully, flourishing in this between-time, this between-place graces us, gathers us up with Christ, raises us to the Father, offers us to Him in sacrifice, to be made holy and pure, and set aside, preserved to receive his sanctifying Spirit—the Love of the Father and Son for one another, the Love that creates, redeems, and blesses; the Love that washes dirty feet, surrenders to unjust authority, suffers a bloody beating; the Love that carries a cross to the city dump, takes nails in hands and feet, and dies, accepting, willing, freely, and for us; the Love that death cannot contain, cannot corrupt; the Love that returns to the Father—blood returning to the heart, breath to the lungs.

With this love heavy in our hearts, with hearts weighed in the exceeding good will of the Father, we are pushed by the Resurrection and pulled by Pentecost, but do we see the powerful effects of the Father’s favor in our lives? Those eating the barley loaves and the fish with Jesus and his astonished disciples saw the wealth of God’s grace, His limitless favor. The apostles, bloody again from another beating, saw the wealth of God’s grace, the honor done them—to be found worthy to suffer for His name.

What grace astonishes your life? What honor do you receive for His sake? What blessings find their way to your work of perfecting holiness? If your righteousness, your right-relationship with the Father, is a merely human work, a work of your will discordant with the Father’s will for you, your perfection “will destroy itself.” If your work at perfecting holiness accords with the Father’s will, it will be invincible, undefeated even in death.


This time, this place between the Empty Tomb of Easter and the Mighty Rushing Wind of Pentecost is the time and place to ask yourself: do I see the Father’s favor in my life? Have I made my life a constant prayer of gratitude?

Can I take a beating and keep on ticking?

Reading List: Catholic Spirituality Fall 2006 U.D.

Christian Spirituality: History of the Catholic Tradition, Fall 2006
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP, PhD

Aumann, Jordan. Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition, Ignatius Press, 1985.
Egan, Harvey. An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, Liturgical Press, 1991.
O’Connor, Flannery. Three By Flannery O’Connor, Signet Classics, 1983.

(NB. All texts found in the Egan anthology unless otherwise noted. Additional texts TBA found on-line or distributed in class)

Patristic/Late Antiquity (JA, 1-74)

Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs
Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs
Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos
Augustine of Hippo, Homily on Psalm 41
John Cassian, Conferences, 10: On Prayer
Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology
Gregory the Great, Homilies on Ezekiel
John Climacus, The Ladder
Maximus Confessor, The Four Hundred Chapters on Love

Early Medieval (JA, 80-140)

Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns of Divine Love
William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle
Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs (sermons)
Aelred of Rievaulx, On Spiritual Friendship
Richard of St. Victor, On the Four Degrees of Passionate Charity

Medieval (JA, 80-140)

Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias
Francis of Assisi, The Stigmata
Hadewijch of Antwerp, Letters
Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God
Mechtild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead
Jordan of Saxony, Libellus (selections, handout)
Gertrude the Great, The Life and Revelations of St. Gertrude
Angela of Foligno, The Book of Divine Consolation

Late Medieval/Early Renassiance (JA, 8-140)

Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue
Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing
Julian of Norwich, Showings
Catherine of Genoa, The Spiritual Dialogue

Dionysian/Devotio moderna (JA, 144-175)

Meister Eckhart, Blessed Are the Poor, et al
Gregory Palamas, The Hagioritic Tome
Henry Suso, The Supernatural Experience, et al

Post- Tridentine (JA, 178-211)

Ignatius of Loyola, A Pilgrim’s Journey
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle
John of the Cross, The Dark Night
Blaise Pascal, An Experience of God

Modern (JA, 218-277 and handouts)

Therese of Lisieux, My Vocation is Love
M. Faustina Kowalska, Divine Mercy in My Soul
Rainer Marie Rilke, First and Ninth Elegy, Duino Elegies (handout)
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer
Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (novel)
Pope John Paul II, Rosarium virginis mariae (excerpts)
Pope Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est

The victory that conquers the world

2nd Sunday of Easter 2006: Acts 4. 32-35; 1 John 5.1-6; John 20.19-31
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul Hospital and Church of the Incarnation


Who indeed is the victor over the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? The victory that conquers the world is our faith. And so, peace be with you.

You might think that Jesus would take it easy after his passion, his death, his descent into Hell, and his resurrection! What better time, what better excuse would any of us have to take a break—“I was betrayed by my friends, beaten by the police, nailed hands and feet to a cross, left to die, stabbed by a spear, buried in a tomb, spent three days in Hell, and then my Father raised me from the dead. Yea, I think I’m gonna take the week off, relax, catch up on my reading, do the spa thing…” That would be me anyway. Jesus, on the other hand, has a much better work ethic than I do and seems particularly energized by his trial and tribulations; he’s revved up to continue his ministry, appearing to Mary Magdalene and the woefully hard-hearted and doubting disciples several times over the last week.

The disciples are wallowing in anxiety, self-pity, disappointment, and maybe even a little shame at their failure to better defend their teacher and friend against the self-serving powers of the Temple and the Empire. Are they reluctant to believe that he is truly risen b/c they are embarrassed to confront him? Maybe. They don’t seem all that ashamed when they finally come around and see Jesus for who he is. Maybe they are reluctant b/c they do not look like victors over the world; they do not look like those who have believed and conquered the world in faith. They are despondent, worried about many things, depressed, crowding together to comfort one another in their waiting, in their despairing anticipation.

What are they waiting for? What has paralyzed them so? Frozen their spirits and slowed their hearts? Why aren’t they out there in the world claiming victory in faith? Why aren’t they out there proclaiming the conquering Word risen from the dead and living among them? Why can’t they see? Why can’t they hear? Why won’t they believe?

Faith releases control, surrenders all possible options, gives up on freely available alternatives and the multiplicity of choices. Faith recognizes the powerful singularity of Truth, the breathtaking beauty of raw reality, the Very Good of all creation. Faith reorders priorities, reschedules plans, reorganizes futures. Faith is the seed of a covenant of love, a promise of boundless mercy and unconditional favor. Faith places you in the conquering good will of the Father—His will that you love, that you be loved, and His will that we keep his commandments. Faith comes first. Trust is primary. Then plans in faith, then philosophies in faith, then theologies in faith, then sciences in faith, then politics in faith…

The disciples will not believe absent the presence of Christ among them for the same reasons that you and I are not likely to believe. We like control. We need nearly infinite options, unfettered choices. We love the idea of relative truth—My truth, your truth, or no truth at all! We value human justice above divine mercy and cannot let go of vengeance. We have plans, expectations, back-up plans, important worries, dire anxieties, vitally important worries, extremely dire anxieties; we have schedules, deadlines, due dates, things to do, places to be, people to meet! And I don’t have what I need! And I don’t need what I have! I have sins; I have BIG sins. I’m a big sinner! A huge sinner! Lock the doors! Be afraid…!! Hell is rushing up to meet me and I’m running as fast as I can to meet the Devil….faster and faster and faster and…

And Jesus stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” He showed them his hands and his side, his passionate wounds. As the disciples rejoiced, Jesus said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” He breathed on them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And he gave them the power to forgive sin.

Thomas the Twin wasn’t with them when Jesus appeared and did not believe the apostolic witness when it was given. Thomas was not a doubter; he was a denier. Thomas did not say to his fellow disciples, “I’m having difficulties working through the implications of the Lord’s death and Resurrection.” He didn’t say: “The possibility that Jesus has been dead for three days and has risen from the tomb is troubling, and I’m struggling with it.” Thomas said: “I will not believe until I see it for myself.” That’s not doubt; that’s denial. He is placing his willful need for understanding above his trust in Christ and requiring that God be worthy of his trust.

The Lord lets Thomas feel his wounds and then lets him know in no uncertain terms that his denial is a failure of trust: “Have you come to believe b/c you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” Jesus is not calling for “blind faith.” He is calling on Thomas, the disciples, and us to believe the witness of the Church, to trust the evidence of those who have lived their lives in faith before us. Jesus is not asking us to deny our intellect, to deny our good sense, or to leave our expensive educations at the door of the Church. Nothing about the Catholic faith requires us to assent to foolishness in order to be good Catholics. Nothing about the faith requires us to adopt willful ignorance.

Doubt as such is no obstacle to the faith so long as you are ready to doubt Doubt, that is, so long as you do not invest a great deal of trust in your doubts. St Thomas teaches us that even believing resembles doubt sometimes in that both have “no finished vision of the truth.” Have your doubts. Struggle with the Church’s witness. Ask questions and seek faithful answers. But understand that doubt is not a license to dissent; having doubts does not constitute a God-given right to deny. We are victors over the world in faith, in trust, not in suspicious denial and rebellion.

Who indeed is the victor over the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? The victory that conquers the world is our faith. And so, peace be with you! Receive the Holy Spirit. Be unstuck, become unglued; be opened, enlivened, renewed; be born again in faith and victory; conquer this world by the power of your trust, your bone-deep, blood-rushing witness to the truth of our Catholic faith: the living faith of the faithful dead, unbroken and unchanged, for us and with us the same teachings of Jesus, the same preaching of the apostles, the power of the sacraments, the magisterial authority of the Church, the very Presence of Christ among us!

He is risen from the dead. And that victory conquers the world. Therefore, peace be with you. Receive the Holy Spirit, believe, and be at peace.

Impossible not to speak the truth

Octave of Easter 2006 (Sat): Acts 4.13-21; Mark 16.9-15
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory


Do you find it impossible not to witness to the truth of the Catholic faith? Do you find it impossible not to talk with others about the two thousand year old and still kicking tradition of Jesus, Paul, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Augustine, Benedict, Anselm, Francis, Dominic, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Pius V, John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, Ignatius, Francis de Sales, Pius X, Pius XII, Edith Stein, Maximillian Kolbe, John Paul the Great, and Benedict XVI?

Do you find it impossible not to talk with others about the fruitfulness of the Blessed Mother’s intercessory prayer, the redemptive sacrifice of the Mass, the gratutious offer from the Father to share in His divine life and His offer of boundless mercy?

Do you find it impossible not to share your faith, not to share your tradition, not to share what you know to be the teachings of our Lord, Jesus Christ? I hope so! I hope you find it painfully impossible to refrain from witnessing in word and deed, by your speech and by your work, to what you have seen and heard. I hope you will find yourselves among those who will dispute you, challenge you, deny you, perhaps even punish you for speaking the truth of the faith. It must be told. The truth of the faith cannot not be told. It will be proclaimed. If not by me, then you. If not the rich, then the poor. If not in America and Europe, then in Asia and Africa. If not by Catholics, then who? The Spirit will find His tongue and speak His Word.

Peter and John, ordered to silence by the elders, cry out, “It is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.” This is not stubbornness, an obstinate refusal to be quiet. It is quite literally impossible for them to be silent. Everything that they are, their very being, bears witness to, holds up for viewing the mighty work of Christ in their lives. They are transformed, made new, brought to fruition, perfected and given the spirit of witness—the power of the Word moves their tongues to incite the gathered crowd to praise God!

Temptations to remain silent abound. There are the temptations of being too embarrassed to speak the truth—I may be challenged by unbelievers! The temptations of false humility—I’m not holy enough! Not smart enough! The temptations of relativism—None of us can know the truth! My truth is my truth, your truth is your truth! The temptation of Pontius Pilate—What is truth anyway? The temptation of Peter before the resurrection—Out of fear, I deny the truth!

Name these temptations what they are: Cowardice. Deflection. Procrastination. Laziness. And then remember Mary Magdalene, the one to whom Christ first appeared after his execution, and remember her radiant joy, her overflowing peace, and her excited need to tell the truth: He is risen! The tomb is empty! Remember the Eleven at table. Remember Christ appearing to them and rebuking them for their hard hearts. And remember his order to them: Go to the whole world and proclaim the gospel. Go to every creature and speak my truth, teach what I taught, preach what I preached.

And don’t be afraid. I am with you. Death is dead. And I am with you.

No one else did this

Octave of Easter 2006 (F): Acts 4.1-12; John 21.1-14
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, Serra Club

Hear it!
None of the disciples dare to ask him, “Who are you?” They dare not ask b/c they know and to know from his own mouth the answer to that question would spin their world around, shake the ground harder than the day the temple veil fell in two, and bring to their despairing hearts the Best News of the Good News: their Lord and Savior had not only been raised from the dead! But he walked among them again, three times walked among them and made himself known to them in signs that the disciples would understand: in the breaking of the bread, in the wounds of his passion and execution, and in the sharing of the fishes and loaves.

And why is the Lord appearing to the disciples after his resurrection? Partly to encourage them—to strengthen their hearts for the hard times ahead. Partly to comfort their anxieties about his ignoble death—to ease their worries about the disappointing manner of their Master’s demise. Partly to show the Father’s power over life and death, over the impenetrable barrier between the living and the dead—His power as Creator of All reaches the darkness corners, the deepest wells of the world. But perhaps the most important reason that Jesus is appearing to the disciples is to reinforce his teaching that it is through his name alone, his suffering and death alone, his resurrection from the dead alone that his Father’s human creatures are saved.

None of the disciples dare ask him who he is. They know. To ask is to reveal the very possibility of a doubt. To ask is to express a weakness in trust, some crack in the foundation of the Good News. It is precisely who Jesus is that makes the economy of our redemption and sanctification work. It is precisely who Jesus is that freely offers us the invitation of the Father to live in enduring beatitude with the Blessed Trinity.

He is Jesus Christ, uniquely fully human, fully divine—one person, two natures—Jesus Christ, uniquely the only Son of God, the only Messiah, uniquely, finally the One Who Suffers for us, the One Who Dies for us, the One Who is Raised from the Tomb for us. There is no other name under heaven given to the Father’s human creatures by which we can be saved. No other name. No salvation through anyone else. He is the hobbled block, the crushed gravel, the cracked slate, the stone rejected. He is the cornerstone, the founding rock, the granite slab. He is the constituting Word, He Who Is for us Eternal Life.

No other name. No one else. Jesus Christ alone—uniquely, finally. Not mythic heroes, alien gods, comforting political agendas; not syncretistic religious chaos, not private revelation or self-serving authority; not pagan fantasy or invented theological novelty; not the whim of crowds or executive order; not money, works, talent, individual beauty, charm, intelligence or family name. Jesus Christ alone—uniquely, finally. No other name. No one else.


No one dared to ask “Who are you?” b/c they know who he is. He is the one who catches fish with a word. And brings a bounty ashore w/o tearing the net. He is the one who feeds his disciples breakfast. He is the one who sits with them and eats. He is the one who teaches, preaches, suffers, dies, and rises again for them. He is the one who appears to them three times after they have witnessed his death and then, three days later, find his tomb empty.

He is the one who saves them, saves us. No one else can do this.

No one else did this.

Revealing the Biggest Possible Picture

Octave of Easter 2006 (W): Acts 3.1-10; Luke 24.13-35
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert’s Priory, Irving, TX

Hear it!
They are slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Even now, after the betrayal by Judas, the trail before Pontius Pilate, the crucifixion on Golgotha, the last pleading words to God from the cross, and the rending of the temple veil, the disciples are slow of heart to understand the meaning of the prophetic events that find them without their Teacher. Mary Magdalene’s witness to the empty tomb jogs them a bit, enough to visit the tomb and see for themselves that he is not there. But still there lingers a small rumor of a doubt against the evidence: “But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel; and besides all this, it is now the third day since this took place.” You can hear the disappointment in Cleopas’ voice; he is wistful, darkly pensive. How foolish they are! The disciples, slow of heart to believe, sometimes slow enough to test even the Messiah’s patience, cannot muster the—what is it? The courage? Trust? Spirit?—cannot muster the strength of heart, the faith to see the clear prophetic signs, the arc of Christ’s redemptive history to its predicted conclusion: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”

What are they missing? Notice how this gospel begins. The disciples are “conversing about all the things that had occurred” in Jerusalem. They were talking and debating, rehashing events and worrying about what it all means. Jesus shows up and walks with them. Cleopas recounts to the disguised Christ the events in Jerusalem, “the things that happened to Jesus of Nazarene…” The disciples have the chronology right, this happened, then this, one event, then another. They have the plot and the characters. They don’t have, not yet anyway, The Story, the Big Picture. They lack the heart, the courage, to be witnesses to the Biggest Possible Picture of what happened on Golgotha, to teach the truth of the Empty Tomb. And so, Jesus walks with them on the road to Emmaus, teaching them how to see the Biggest Possible Picture. He reveals to them, opens for them, the text of the prophetic signs found in scripture and says, “I am here and here and here.” He gives them courage, hearts set ablaze with awe at the divine hand in human history.

And, as if this weren’t enough, he reveals himself again when he takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. They are awakened from their disappointment and despair, from their wistfulness and pining depression into loving recognition and apostolic action. They go to the Eleven gathered in Jerusalem and witness to the witnesses that Jesus had made himself known to them in the breaking of the bread.

If we will survive as disciples until Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church, we will survive by hearing the Word of God and eating the Bread of Life. We cannot be foolish disciples, slow of heart to believe. Why? Because we have Christ breaking the bread for us daily, revealing himself to us on every road we travel. We have the witnesses of scripture, tradition, the magisterium, one another, and we have Christ among us, here, now in the breaking of the Eucharistic bread.

Do not be foolish or slow of heart to believe: “The Lord has truly been raised!”

Easter Gratitude Prayer

By request…

(To be prayed especially btw now and Pentecost Sunday):

Father, our Abundant Provider and generous Lord: In You I live and move and have my being. Everything I am and everything I have is Your blessing. This day I offer it all to Your service. Thank you, Lord, for this season of my life, for the gifts You have given me, for those I love and who love me in return. Thank You, Lord, for Your creation, for Your revelation in scripture, for our salvation in Christ Jesus, for the holiness I await in the coming of the Holy Spirit, and for the Church that will rise from the tongues of fire. Make gratitude my constant prayer, Father, so that I may live as a Living Blessing for others. I ask all these in name of our Easter Lord, Jesus Christ! Amen.

(excerpted from my Easter Sunday 2006 homily, see below)

You know what has happened!

Easter Sunday 2006: Acts 10.34, 37-43; 1 Cor 5.6-8; John 20.1-9
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, University of Dallas

(NB. The bracketed words are responses from the congregation.)

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Are you here this morning, Church? [Yes] Royal Priests! [Yes] People of God! [Yes] Holy Nation! [Yes] Pilgrim Church! [Yes] Sons and Daughters of the Most High! [Yes], Brothers and Sisters [Yes], then you know what has happened! Christ Jesus the Lord is risen from the tomb! [Amen]

He was sold in betrayal by a friend for the price of a murdered slave! [Amen] He was denied by His best friends when He needed them most! [Amen] He was falsely accused of blasphemy by His own people, found guilty on perjured testimony, and given to Pilate for judgment! [Amen] He was bartered for a murderer with a riotous mob and given to Roman soldiers to be scourged! [Amen] He was crowned with thorns, robed in purple, mocked and spat upon, and hailed as the King of the Jews! [Amen] And, finally, in the place of Skulls, He was nailed hands and feet to the Cross to die forsaken! [Amen]

But you know what has happened! Christ Jesus the Lord is risen from the tomb! The stone is rolled away. His burial cloth thrown to the ground. The tomb is empty.

You know what has happened! But do you know what it means? The disciples, seeing the rolled-away stone, the empty tomb and the burial cloth did not yet understand. And it is no simple matter to say “yes” when asked: do you believe in 2006 that a man who hung on a cross, who was dead and buried for three days, has somehow sprung to live and walked away from his grave? How do you say “yes” to that absurdity? How does anyone in their right mind say to “yes” to that!? I say, it is precisely b/c you are in your Right Mind, your righteous mind, that you say YES to the Rolled Away Stone [Yes], that you say YES to the Empty Tomb [Yes], and that you say AMEN to what you know has happened: Christ Jesus the Lord is risen from the dead! [Amen]

We are not here this morning to celebrate a vegetative regeneration myth. Jesus was not raised from the tomb b/c a god of a myth must rise from the dead so the flowers and grains of the Earth might rise in spring. No. We are not here this morning to celebrate the defeat of our subconscious’ death wish. Jesus was not raised from the tomb because our neurosises need fuel for another year. No. We are not here this morning to celebrate the triumph of an archetypal Hero over an archetypal Death. Jesus was not raised from the tomb because we need a Jungian happy-ending to our quest. No. We are not here this morning to celebrate the triumph of empowered self-esteem over the oppressive, patriarchal structures of organized religion. No. Jesus was not raised from the tomb because our pet-ideologies would be empty without some revolutionary symbol of victory. No.

We are here this morning to celebrate the triumph of New Life over Death, Creation over Chaos, the Goodness of Being over the Evil of Nothingness, the triumph of Freedom over Sin. The tomb is empty because God raised His murdered Son from an ignoble death to New Life. The tomb is empty because the living do not live in the grave! The living have no need of burial clothes! The living say YES to the Father [Yes] and Amen to a glorious life lived in the sure faith of the Resurrection! [Amen]

It is easy to say YES and AMEN on Easter Sunday. The account of the Empty Tomb is still fresh in our hearts and minds. The courage of Mary Magdala’s witness to the cowardly disciples still stirs in us. But let’s be honest: the long 50 day march to Pentecost will see our fervor fade, our energy wane, and the alleluia’s of this Easter morning will droop with these lilies. We will find ourselves before long in the Upper Room cowering with the remnant of Jesus’ once mighty band, wondering what idiocy possessed us to witness to the ridiculous notion that a dead man rose to life and starting popping up all over the city and chatting with people. We hope for the coming of the Holy Spirit to put us back in our right mind, but we have fifty days of Easter to live faithfully. How?

If Palm Sunday is about welcoming the soon-to-be tortured and executed Lord into our lives and Good Friday is about witnessing His suffering for our sakes and Easter Sunday is about celebrating the New Life of the Empty Tomb, then our fifty days to the coming of the Holy Spirit needs to be about gratitude, about giving thanks. We have immediate access to the abundant blessings of the Father through gratitude. Gratitude does two things for us spiritually: first, gratitude is a confession that everything we are and everything we have comes from the Father—we are completely dependent on Him; and second, when we gratefully accept the gifts we are given by God, we become willing beneficiaries of His abundant goodness.

We deny ourselves the benefits of the Resurrection by living lives of entitlement (I am deserving w/o costs!), by living lives of victimization (My problems are someone’s fault!), by living lives of denial (That’s not me!), and by living our lives wallowing in hurt (I will never forgive!). Do not deny yourselves the benefits of the Resurrection.

Practice Easter Gratitude instead! Pray daily to the Father, our Abundant Provider and generous Lord: In You I live and move and have my being. Everything I am and everything I have is Your blessing. This day I offer it all to Your service. Thank you, Lord, for this season of my life, for the gifts You have given me, for those I love and who love me in return. Thank You, Lord, for Your creation, for Your revelation in scripture, for our salvation in Christ Jesus, for the holiness I await in the coming of the Holy Spirit, and for the Church that will rise from the tongues of fire. Make gratitude my constant prayer, Father, so that I may live as a Living Blessing for others. Pray for these in name of our Easter Lord, Jesus Christ!

The tomb is empty, brothers and sisters! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Are you here this morning, Church? [Yes] Royal Priests! [Yes] People of God! [Yes] Holy Nation! [Yes] Pilgrim Church! [Yes] Sons and Daughters of the Most High! [Yes], Brothers and Sisters [Yes], then you know what has happened! Christ Jesus the Lord is risen from the tomb! [Amen]

Rejoice! He is dead

Good Friday 2005: Is 52.13-53.12; Heb 4.14-16, 5.7-9; Jn 18.1-19.42
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, University of Dallas

Hear it!
Why do we do this every year? Why do we celebrate betrayal, abandonment, and brutality. Why do we attend this Good Friday’s party of violence?

Our celebration of Christ’s Passion on Good Friday is as perverse an event as any we might conjure. Or, it would be if we were to settle for watching from the crowd, coolly watching events as they unfold. It is not enough to observe. Not enough to stand behind the crowd not caring. Our apathy, our lack of passion for Christ’s suffering and death for us, that will make today’s celebration truly perverse.

Rejoice then with each rip in His flesh. Rejoice with each drop of blood. Rejoice at the anguish of his betrayal, at the sting of his abandonment. Rejoice that He freely accepted this pain for you, instead of you. Rejoice! Or, cry. Or laugh. Or love Him more. But do not fall into the loneliness of not caring—that Pit is a Darkness older than humanity, and It is desperately hungry for your soul.

By the cross we are redeemed, by Christ’s willing sacrifice of himself we are saved from the Pit that would eat us for eternity. Christ freely choose to make his pain and death redemptive for us, to give his pain as our pain so that we might know the way to the Father. Without it we are lost and alone—forever.

Walk up and venerate the cross, the altar of Christ’s sacrifice for us, and offer your joy, your anger, your hatred, your love, your gratitude…offer something passionate to Christ and know that the loneliness you fear is dispelled. Who can be truly alone who lives in the presence of a Loving God? And that is what our redemption is about: living now with God in a friendship that takes us to a life with Him forever.

Walk up, touch the tool of your redemption, give yourself passionately to him. And rejoice! Give thanks!

Our Savior is dead.

Speak kindly of Judas

Wednesday of Holy Week 2006: Isa 50.4-9; Matthew 26.14-25
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

Hear it!
I will speak kindly of Judas. It is fashionable among the most fashionable to look at Judas and see a man too much maligned for his careful act of deceit and betrayal. Aren’t we being just a little too hard on the poor man? He was under a lot of stress! The agony of being the one of the Twelve who would betray his Master and friend must have been horrible to bear. The sweaty nights tossing in his bed, worrying about the small band’s money problems. The constant gnawing bite of ulcers, watching Jesus provoke the authorities. The pounding headaches from anxiety as his Master and friend claims, near-suicidally, in the middle of thronging crowds, that he is the Son of God! The insults, the arguments with the priests and scribes, even that day when the crowd starting throwing stones and they had to run for their lives! Too much, too much. You can see why he did what he did. All was lost anyway. Jesus’ end was inevitable.

Some suggest that Judas was predestined to hand Jesus over. Others will claim that Jesus asked Judas to betray him in order to fulfill the prophecies that prefigure his sacrifice on the cross. Still others will claim that Judas is an existential figure, a man persecuted by history for making a choice and playing out the consequences of that choice with a focused integrity. Maybe, maybe, maybe. What we know is that Judas went to the chief priests. Offered his friend’s freedom, his life, to those who would see him dead. Negotiated a price for his friend’s betrayal, thirty pieces of silver, the fine for murdering a slave. And then continued living, working, ministering with his friend, looking for an opportunity to hand him over.

But I said I would speak kindly of Judas. We all should. Why? Judas is so repugnant to us, so vile a man, and deserving of our contempt that, if we believe, truly believe, what Jesus died in order to teach us, we must find it in our hearts not only to forgive him his violence against Christ, but we must see clearly, staring back at us from the contorted face of the Messiah’s betrayer, our own face, creased with disobedience, etched with rebellion, scarred again and again with battles against killing temptation, the struggles to find, grasp, and cling to God.

If the Christ is the best face we could wear, turned to the Father in beatitude, then Judas is the face we could wear in those moments of despairing loneliness, dark, dark distress at the impossibilities of ever finding the light again. His is the face we put on when that small devilish whisper almost causally speaks ruin to us: “This cannot be forgiven. Not even God loves you that much.” What aren’t we capable of then? What act of betrayal, deceit, selfishness, or violence is beyond us when we believe we are unlovable?

Speak kindly of Judas not to excuse his sin, not to make right what is always wrong. But perhaps as an act of caution against what we hope is impossible for us. He is our anti-exemplar, the model of what happens in the ruin of despair, the wreck we make of ourselves when we kill tomorrow’s hope with yesterday’s hatred or today’s passing anxiety.

Sometime today, ask in prayer, “Surely, it is not I, Lord?” Wait for an answer and then, with whatever answer you receive, speak kindly of Judas.

Who is this?

The Procession
Palm Sunday 2006: John 12.12-16
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation

Jesus rides his donkey into the Jerusalem crowds. Most cheer. Most wave their palm branches. Most call his name. But some, shaken by the adulation and the apparent fulfillment of ancient prophecy in their own day, ask anxiously, “Who is this?”

He is the one prepared for burial by the woman at Bethany. He is the one sold by his disciple and friend, bought for the price of a murdered slave—thirty pieces of silver. His is the blood of the new covenant, the new wine shed for the forgiveness of our sins. He is the one betrayed, arrested, falsely accused, interrogated by Pilate, and, finally, sentenced to death by the same crowd that cheered him earlier. Whipped, mocked, spat upon, and stripped naked, he is the One nailed to the cross, pierced by a spear, the one who died so that we might live.

Who is this? We know already what the Roman soldier shouted aloud: “Truly, this is the Son of God!”

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At the Mass
Palm Sunday 2006: Is 50.4-7; Phil 2.6-11; Mark 14.1-15.47
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation

Though we welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem with singing and waving palm branches, we will spend this week celebrating his betrayal and execution. What a truly perverse thing to celebrate! If we are tempted to move too quickly from our Lenten self-examination and denial to the joy and exultation of Easter, we have this holy week to contemplate the most difficult of Jesus’ teachings: the nature of his vicarious suffering.

Take these rather dark questions with you into Holy Week, pray with them, wrestle with them, and come back on Easter Sunday to hear again the answers our Teacher gave us through His death and resurrection:

How am I like the woman of Bethany? How do I honor his sacrifice? How do I show respect for his suffering for me?

How am I like Peter and Judas? In what ways do I deny Jesus under the pressure of ridicule from friends, family, colleagues? How do I betray him for worldly approval?

How am I like the High Priest and the Sanhedrin? In what ways do I envy Jesus and seek to discredit him? How do I seek false testimony against the Church’s ancient witness about who Jesus truly is?

How am I like the crowd that frees Barabbas? In what ways do I “hand Jesus over” to popular opinion? To the masters of my culture? To the mainstream media? To the rulers of this world?

How am I like the Roman soldiers? In what ways do I just “do my job” in the face of injustice, oppression, and falsehood?

How am I like Christ? In what ways do I suffer for others? How is it that the way I deal with pain and death can be healing for others? Am I ready to die so that my worst enemy might live?

Finally, How am I like the centurion? Can I show up here on Easter Sunday, and answer the question “who is this?” with the awesome confidence of the centurion: “Truly, this is the Son of God!”

Almost against hope

5th Week of Lent (F): Jer 20.10-13; John 10.31-42
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation

Hear it!
If you don’t believe me, believe the works I do. Jesus is sounding very American this morning, very modern, downright pragmatic even! Why the pragmatism? Why the common sense argument based on evidence? Jesus is doing his job as a teacher, as a preacher, and as One Anointed for sacrifice: he is opening every way, every door, any possible avenue to understanding, to knowing who he is and who he is for us. He is giving the crowd what they need to make the jump, to see their blind spots, to hear what they will not hear, to skip around their settled ideological categories and know cleanly the truth of Jesus’ Messianic claim: “I am the Son of God […] the Father is in me and I am in the Father.

At the risk of sounding a little too Baptist, how did you come to know Jesus as Lord? I mean, how did the full awareness, the complete understanding that Jesus is the Christ, the Anointed One get planted in your head and heart? Think for a moment what you have to believe to be true to draw this astonishing conclusion: you have to believe that there is a God Who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that this God is creator, redeemer, and sanctifier of His creation; that the most filial relationship possible between a Father and His children was violated by disobedience; that centuries of Law, prophets, animal sacrifices, and divine interventions in history and nature failed to bring us back to righteousness; that the second person of the triune God, the Son, took on human flesh in the womb of a virgin and was born a man among us; that he taught the truth of freely abundant mercy, the necessity of repentance and good works, and that he performed sign after sign after sign, pointing unambiguously to his divinity.

This is the historical, theological, philosophical, religious, trail that leads to Jesus’ black and white claim: “I am the Son of God […] the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

Why do you believe this claim? Why do you believe the truth of the claims that lead to this Messianic claim? None of us here saw Jesus walk on water. No one here saw him raise the dead or heal the blind. No one here heard his preaching. But many began to believe in him. Why? Because though John himself never performed a sign, everything he said about Jesus was true. John’s witness, his word about Jesus, was true. And the next step is the first step toward cultivating a habit of trust that produces again and again the good fruits of holiness. That step is? Surrender. To do what the crowd, the Pharisees, the scribes could not do. What Pontius Pilate would not do: accept the opened way, surrender, believe, come to the Father’s love, know Him, and step—one foot after another—into the habit of trust, a life lived steeped in faith, vibrating with the promise of ready abundance, and the fruits of his permanent victory over sin and death.

Surrender to what is to come. Jesus enters Jerusalem. He shares one last meal with his friends. He washes their feet. He suffers betrayal. Brutal violence. Denial. Abandonment and death. And we wait. Vigilant. Against the tomb. Almost against hope. And then we hear, just under the wind, a voice say what we have known all along: “I am the Son of God!”

Will you hear a difficult teaching?

5th Sunday of Lent 2006: Jer 31.31-34; Heb 5.7-9; John 12.20-33
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital and the Church of the Incarnation


Will you hear this difficult teaching: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces good fruit.” You must change. Move from seed to fruit, from kernel to harvest. You must move from what you are to what the Father made you to be at the first flash of creation. There is that moment, that instant when you surrender, when you truly say yes to God, that single breath, that single catch in your throat when the clarity and depth of a foundation-shaking decision dawns in your soul and you say with flesh and bone and heart, “Father, glorify your name in me!” Then you will suffer. Then you will die. And then you will rise again.

Surrender. Suffer. Die. Rise again. This road of redemption is open to you because Jesus walked it first. “Whoever serves me must follow me.” This road is open to you because our Father will have you back. Our Father will love you into your perfection. He will have you again, whole, complete. He loves you to change you.

You are the seed of His glory.

Here are the hard questions of Lent and Holy Week: will you die today? Will you surrender to Christ and follow him? Will you suffer to be with him at the cross? To be with him on the cross? Will you hear this difficult teaching: “Where I am, there also will my servant be.”

The Greek converts to Judaism come to Jesus seeking an audience. They approach Philip and say, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” Philip and Andrew go to Jesus with the request and Jesus, in a moment of bleak clarity, knows. Knowing all along that his life will end in pain and blood, Jesus whispers what has shouted in his heart since his baptism: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” His voice a sigh, resigned and determined, he warns Philip and Andrew that to follow him to glory requires that they do what he does. Surrender. Suffer. Die. Rise again.

Will we hear this difficult teaching? Are we prepared to hear it? We are prepared to hear that we are loved. We are prepared to hear that we are forgiven. Are we prepared to hear that we must surrender, suffer, and die to be with him forever? This is a road that we watch him travel every Lent, every Holy Week. We watch him, in the last days before Golgotha. We watch him take our licks, bleed our blood, cry out our pain. We watch his flesh tear against the nails and this blood seep out of his wounds. We hear his last words. And feel the ground shake.

Yes, we travel with him in our way. But does it seem second-hand to you? Does it seem that we suffer and die with him three or four steps away? Behind the barricade, across the street, and around the corner? We can’t be there, literally. Not historically speaking, we can’t. We can enact, of course. Dramatize. We can recreate in gesture, symbol, word. Third person participation in a First Person act of vicarious sacrifice. It tastes of plastic, made up and weak.

Does it have to? No, it doesn’t. The chances that any of us here will find ourselves scourged and nailed to a cross for the faith are right at zero. This is a fact of historical circumstance; it is where we are in time and the place we live. We might suffer humiliation in the media or a kind of death in scandal. We might even act in such a way that we find ourselves jailed for our beliefs. I suppose we could find ourselves martyred in the right part of the world: Islamic Africa, communist Asia, killed just for being the voice of Christ, a witness to his freedom.

But I don’t think we have to be jailed, beaten, and killed to find a way to surrender, suffering, death, and resurrection. Will you hear this difficult teaching: “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.” If you cling desperately to who you are right now, with no other purpose, no end beyond living the next minute, the next hour, you will lose the life you have been given. Why? Your life has purpose, meaning—to live with God in holiness now and in beatitude forever! If you turn that goal into mere existence, dumb living, then the point of your being here is murdered. If you hate the life the world tells you to live—the life of momentary pleasure, easy sin, temporary happiness—then you will see beyond the illusion of the Lie and serve what is permanent and life-giving, liberating and eternal. You will serve him, the one who has given your life to our Father.

To do this, to serve him, you must give yourself to Christ. Surrender completely. No reservations. Nothing held back. This means that what God wants for you must become your first concern. His will for you must come before your politics, your “needs,” your self-control, your anger, your grudges, your debts, your hatreds, your loves, anything and everything must be heard and seen through the Father’s will for you. We must be subject to the Father. Perfected in obedience. And nearly ready to explode with the need to serve! We must be ready at any moment, at every hour to repeat Christ’s prayer: “It was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name in me.”

That’s surrender. What of suffering? We suffer well if we feel our pain with a purpose. Having surrendered everything to Christ, even our pain, everything of ours now belongs to Christ and perfects his work in us. We can experience pain like an animal. Or we can suffer, experience pain with a purpose, use it to perfect our obedience, our permanent openness to hearing the Father’s will for us. There is a stark, white clarity to suffering; a way that it has of focusing the spirit, tightening the will. Put it to work serving others. Give it to Christ for them. To what he did and suffer for them.

That’s suffering, what of dying and rising again? Not yet. Two more weeks. Death and resurrection in two more weeks.

Until then, remember: you are the seed of His glory. And you have some hard questions to answer before and during Holy Week: will you die today? Will you surrender to Christ and follow him? Will you suffer to be with him at the cross? To be with him on the cross?

Will you hear this difficult teaching: “Where I am, there also will my servant be.”

Heretic. Blasphemer. Criminal. Rebel.

4th Week of Lent (F): Wisdom 2.1, 12-22; John 7.1-2, 10, 25-30
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation

Hear it!
How would you like to drive up to Plano, get out of your car at Central Market, and have the folks in the store point at you and yell, “Hey! Isn’t he, isn’t she the one they are trying to kill?” Now, me personally, I would forget the glories of bulk couscous and organic coffee beans and head back to the car! What could be more disconcerting, more disturbing than to find yourself among your own people and marked for death, truly reviled, and hunted? Of course, not everyone was out to kill Jesus for his alleged blasphemies, not the small people or the pushed-aside, but those in charge, those with the political and religious power had labeled him a cancer, a riotous tumor to be found, diagnosed, and cut out of the body of the State and the Temple.

Why? Heretic. Blasphemer. Criminal. Rebel. Take your pick. The problem, essentially, is that the Son of God has come and he is sweeping through history, grabbing the threads of creation, tying and untying the knots of everything that was, everything that is, and everything that will be. He is binding and loosing whatever is loose and bound, and quaking the foundations of the Way Things Are Done. But perhaps most importantly, Jesus’ public ministry points to the consummation of the people’s grandest story, their most fundamental cultural narrative: the prophetic birth of the Messiah, the coming of the Christ among them. Anxiety rules because God is about to make good on His promise to give them a Victim whose sacrifice will split the Temple veil and bring them back, again, out of exile, out of sin, and make them into a nation of priests, a prophetic family, and heirs to His kingdom.

For them and for us, to reject Jesus, to reject Christ’s ministry as our redeeming sacrifice is to reject a history of generous covenant with the Father, to reject a history of prophetic witness to His law given for us, and to reject in history His revelation, His manifest goodness and beauty.

To deny Jesus now, to deny Christ’s ministry as our redeeming sacrifice, is to deny the truth that we are forgiven our rebellions, to deny the truth that we are reconciled among ourselves—that we are a Church, a single Body in Christ—; it is to deny the truth that we are saved, once for all, by his sacrifice on the altar of the cross.

To fear Jesus now, to fear Christ’s ministry as our redeeming sacrifice, is to fear freedom from the slavery of sin, to fear a future set right for holiness; it is to fear the guarantee of our own divinity, our final Beauty, in Him.

To reject, to deny, to fear Jesus is to reject, deny, and fear our history, who we are now, and who God will make us to be forever. Jesus said to the trembling crowd, “You know me and also know where I am from.” He then claims to be from the Father, the one whom they do not know. And they try to arrest him…out of fear, denial, rejection. But his suffering was not due; his time of betrayal and pain was not yet.

His sacrifice and our redemption will wait two more weeks, two more weeks for us to witness his power, his glory.

It is two weeks before iron bites wood through his flesh and blood and we are free…forever free.

Signs and wonders, signs and wonders

4th Week of Lent (M): Isa 65.17-21; John 4.43-54
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

Hear it!
Why do we flock to churches where an image of the Blessed Mother is allegedly weeping? Why do we thrill over stories out of New Orleans that entire churches were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, yet the statues of Our Lady of Prompt Succor were spared? And more recently, our Catholic papers and blogsites were loaded with reports that a consecrated host in this very diocese was found bleeding in a glass of water.

Signs and wonders, signs and wonders. Why do we thrill at these reports? Why do seek to be shown that which we already know to be true? When Jesus says in this morning’s gospel, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe,” are we the “you people” he’s talking about? I can confess here and now that there are times when I find myself seeking signs and wonders, wanting something unusual, something otherworldly as a sign of God’s presence, as a signal that He is working in my life. In some ways this desire grows out of our very natural desire to be with God, to seek Him out and dwell with Him forever. But we cannot get away from Jesus’ exasperation: you will not believe unless I show you something miraculous, something wondrous. You can almost hear him sigh.

You can hear the impatience of the anxious father, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” Jesus is worried that the people of Israel aren’t hearing his word, that they aren’t hearing him as The Word, and thus clamoring for signs and wonders as proof that he is who he says he is. The father is worried about his dying child. Despite his fretting about the people’s need for miracles to prove his identity, Jesus heals the official’s child and the word of this miracle spreads.

If Jesus is worried that his miracles are a distraction from his gospel, why does he heal the dying child? Why reinforce this faithless clamoring for signs and wonders by performing more signs and wonders? Could Jesus look into the eyes of the terrified father and deny him? Could he sit there with this man and tell him, “I will not heal your child b/c all these signs and wonders are distracting you from believing in me”? No, of course not. Notice carefully that the father believes Jesus’ word before the miracle is confirmed. This man begs Jesus for the life of his child not for a sign that Jesus is God. And this is why Jesus gives him his miracle.

When we thrill at reports that consecrated hosts are bleeding, or that rosaries are turning to gold in the presence of a Marian apparitation, what are we asking of God? What need are we confessing when our hearts leap at news of the allegedly miraculous? Are we running after supernatural confirmation in order to ease some lingering doubts? Are we hoping to soothe some fear, some worry by investing our trust in a remote possibility, some off-chance wonder?

We do not have to run after signs and wonders—not the kind reported in the tabloids anyway—b/c, first, the greatest sign, the grandest wonder we have as Catholics will occur on that altar in the next ten minutes: the sacrifice of the Mass; second, we don’t have to run after signs and wonders b/c we ourselves are signs and wonders, we ourselves constitute revelations of God to one another. Incomplete individually, yes. More perfect together, absolutely. We are here this morning at the prompting of the Holy Spirit and gathered in Christ name, that’s hope, that’s faith!

Thrill then at being here in the presence of Christ as a sign of God’s love, as a wonder who unveils his mercy, who reveals all the possibilities of his fatherly grace to everyone you meet today. That’s what we do as a people of the Cross and the Empty Tomb.

It's time to bathe...

4th Sunday of Lent 2006: 2 Chr 36.14-16, 19-23; Eph 2.4-10; Jn 3.14-21
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital, Dallas, TX & Church of the Incarnation, Irving, TX

Hear it!
I’ve been feeling rather proud of myself this last week! I got up early everyday and said my rosary. Spent thirty minutes in front of the Blessed Sacrament on my knees. Prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet and the Forty Days Prayer for Lent. I did all this before breakfast, without food, in our unheated chapel at the priory. I don’t mean to boast, but you know, I feel really, really holy, like I’ve really managed to get God to love me a little more, maybe I got a little closer to convincing Him to let me into Heaven. One morning, one of the other brothers just popped into the chapel for a second. Just bopped through like a rabbit and grabbed one of those missalette things and ran off. Guess he’s not interested in saving his soul. Well, I tell you, not to boast, of course, I’m determined to earn some Heaven Points today. I’m saying the rosary two more times, praying the Stations, and doing a few prostrations before the Blessed Sacrament! That should top off my grace account for the day.

Man, you know, working for redemption ain’t easy! But at least I’m working, right? At least I know that God loves me when I’m working for His love. I’m not like those other friars in my priory—I can fast more often, kneel longer, pray louder (and in Latin!), I adore the Blessed Sacrament instead of the TV, spend time with the Blessed Mother instead of the computer, and I know I’m holier because my habit is cleaner, and I iron it too! Jesus loves me best and most because I deserve it. You know, I’ve earned it.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you’re absolutely sure that you’re holier than the guy kneeling next to you at Mass? That you are most certainly better loved by God, closer to redemption and better insured against Hell? Look right now at the people around you. Can you tell who God doesn’t love as much as He loves you? Who isn’t as close to Heaven as your hard work has gotten you? They’re just spiritually lazy, right? Don’t you have a solemn duty to let them know that they’re being spiritually lazy, that they need to work a little harder for their grace points? Don’t you, as one more loved by God, have a duty to monitor their spiritual progress and correct their faults so that they will earn as many points as possible? Don’t you have a responsibility to save them, to save them from themselves for Christ?

No. You don’t. And do you know why? Of course you do! Grace ain’t earned. God’s love cannot be worked for. Our salvation was accomplished 2,000 years ago on the Cross and out of the Tomb, and no amount of kneeling, fasting, praying, boasting of holiness, monitoring our brothers and sisters, correcting others’ faults, or walking the Stations during Lent will get us one more ounce of redemptive grace, not one step closer to the Father’s mercy. Listen to Paul again: “[…] by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.” His love for us is not our handiwork. We are the Father’s handiwork. We do not conjure His love. We can stand in awe. We can offer thanks. We can bend the knee in adoration. We can even fall flat on our faces in righteous humility. But we cannot earn, buy, beg, steal, or in any shape, form, or fashion bank God’s love.

You’re probably thinking: “OK, Father, why are you on about this again!? Didn’t you just prattle on about this recently?” I’m on about this again because I think we all need to be reminded, especially in Lent, that God loves us and that our redemption, the healing of the Original Wound, is done and nothing we can do now will make redemption more available or freer or easier to get. Lent brings us to a powerful recognition of our mortality, a kind of panic about the years left to us and the weight of the years behind us. Lent dangles before our eyes our lives of sin: our disobediences, our many failures to love. It is uniquely a season for us to pull out of our souls all the festering junk that poisons us and set it ablaze in the desert. That vulnerability, that nakedness can leave us open to alien notions about grace, ideas foreign to our tradition. Our bishops know this well, so we have today, in the middle of Lent, John’s gospel on Christ’s love for us. How fitting!

Any time we spend with God alone leaves us naked in His glory and every blemish, every smudge, every little imperfection in us shines like a beacon. God does not love us despite our blemishes and little imperfections—as if we will live with Him forever stained with sin. No! It is because He loves us first and always that He opens a way to cleanliness for us and then He leaves us to wash. We do not earn the invitation to bathe. But we must bathe to enter His house.

Whoever believes in him will be saved. Whoever refuses to believe in him is already condemned.

I said to you earlier that no amount of fasting, prayer, or kneeling, none of these, will get you one more ounce of God’s love. This is true. It is true because you have every once of God’s love right now. He sent His only Son to die for us. He loves us as Love Himself, caritas per se. There is no love for Him to hold back. No love held back for Him to reward those who work harder. Deus caritas est. God is Love. And God is a person, Jesus Christ.

Our Holy Father, Benedict, in his first encyclical, teaches us, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” Perhaps too boldly, I want to elaborate on our Holy Father’s teaching: being a Christian is not the result of righteous work or well-earned grace, but the result of “bumping into” the love that is God, the person of Jesus Christ, the Christ who freely accepted his death on a cross for us, and in so doing, makes it possible for us to live with him everyday of our lives and with him always in glory.

Pray. Fast. Kneel. Fraternally correct. Prostrate. Confess. Do penance. It is Lent! Be repentant, absolutely! But know that your spiritual athleticism will not save you. If you pray, fast, kneel, and do penance to earn God’s love, you will not grow in holiness. If you pray, fast, kneel and do penance because God loves you, in the full knowledge that your redemption is accomplished, then your work will be a blessing and holiness will prosper. The temptation of this wonderful penitential season is to fall into the Devil’s trap of believing that the Father expects us to earn His approval, His love. This is evil. The truth is that we are loved now, always. And we are loved sacrificially.

By grace we have been saved, raised up with him. By the light of this truth may our works be clearly seen as done in Him, with Him, and through Him.

Brothers and sisters, it’s time to bathe!

Love grows through love.*

3rd Week of Lent 2006 (F): Hosea 14:2-10; Mark 12.28-34
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation

Hear it!
Think back to about three weeks ago when we started this desert trek. Back to when we were told to never forget that we are ash and to ash we will inevitably return. Remember packing for the trip, loading up our need for righteousness, our longing for forgiveness, for mercy, packing all the essentials for desert living, for living alone with God for forty days. Remember your urgent need to be done with worry, your rush and scurry, your hassled spirit and serious heart. Remember the temptations—the voices of skimpy charity, spare hope, and mean faith—those temptations that panic at your resolve to walk a clear path to God alone, and in their panic they sweeten their tune, sharpen their logic of scarce grace and argue persuasively for despairing impatience and the quick-easy immediacy of self-righteousness.

(Isn’t it so much easier to give up on God and find the salvation we long for in our own honorable work, our own well-designed world?)

Remember ash and longing and the dry burn of Lent; remember the lure of effortless annihilation, simply falling quietly into nothing and being done with it all. Remember the original rumor, the one first heard in a lush garden, the hissed promise of self-made divinity: “You can be a god without God.” That’s a different sort of nothing: a darker loneliness.

If you have remembered all of this, let me ask you: do you remember that this time away, this time in seasonal exile is about love? Do you recall why we do this every year, why we set aside the forty days before Easter to fast and pray and be alone with God? We do it because, as Jesus teaches the scribe today, “The Lord our God is Lord alone!” And because He alone is our God, we will love Him singularly, extraordinarily—Him alone. And we will love Him with everything that gives us life. We will love Him as His image and likeness, as His created revelations of truth, goodness, and beauty.

And because we will love Him first and most, we are able to love one another. It follows then that our most obvious failures to love one another betray, first and most, our failure to love Him. Our Holy Father, Benedict, writes in his letter on God, Deus caritas est, “I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own”(n 14). Jesus’ commandment to the scribe to love his neighbor as he loves himself is grown root and branch out of his first commandment to love God alone. And both the first and second commandment to love are deeply planted and richly nourished in the ancient revelation: “He is One and there is no other than He!”

Lent is our seasonal exile. A time away to be alone with God who is Love. It is desert and wasteland and trial and temptation. It is also rich, fertile ground for our growth in holiness if we remember that we are His and His alone. We will not be God without Him and we cannot be nothing with Him.

Three weeks in and we hear Jesus say, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.”

*Pope Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, n. 18.

Leave it there!

1st Week of Lent 2006 (F): Ezekiel 18.21-28; Matthew 5.20-26
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving and Church of the Incarnation, Univ. of Dallas

Hear it!
I’ve decided to spend the rest of Lent in the desert west of San Antonio. I’m leaving right after Mass. Nothing but me, the sand, the hot wind, and a few lizards. I’ve packed the absolute essentials for desert survival: nonperishable food, lots of water, light but durable clothing, portable shelter…my laptop and printer, my cell phone, a small TV with satellite feed and TIVO, a microwave oven, an electric razor, a minifridge, portable air conditioning unit, a CD player, two trunks of books, a full set of vestments and Mass kit, twelve pairs of shoes, a cappuccino machine, and a table-top Kitchen-Aid mixer.

I’m also bringing a thirst for God, a hunger for righteousness, a longing need for love and hope, a contrite heart, several wounds that I won’t let heal, a couple of well-nursed grudges, some petty competitiveness, three sins that even God can’t forgive, a quiet self-loathing rooted in a fear of the flesh, several strange obsessions with rules and ritual observances, self-righteousness, pride, an envy of others’ gifts, a couple of huge decisions that I have to make soon, an unwillingness to say thank you to God, and a sure sense that I deserve more than I’m getting. With all of that and that minifridge on my back, I should be dead within a week!

No, I’m not going to the desert west of San Antonio. And, no, I’m not carrying any of that stuff around. But I am wondering how tempted we are to treat out Lenten retreat just this way. Are you tempted to bring into this time of survival in the desert alone with God all of the extraneous things of your life, all of the excesses of stuff, excesses of anxiety, hurry, plotting and planning, hurts, fears, lapses in holiness? You are? Good!

In some sense, I think this is the right way to do Lent! Bring all of this along. Bring your doubts, your panic, your rushing around, all your future preparations, all the sins you can’t or won’t let go of. Bring it all to the desert of Lent! But leave it there. Take it all into the desert and leave it there. Leave it all to the fired wilderness, the scouring sand, and burning wind. You are here among the cacti and lizards for forty days to survive alone with the Father, to be set ablaze with the austerity of a simple need—a need for Him alone.

This is the time to run after righteousness. A righteousness that surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees. Run after the righteousness of a heart scrubbed raw by humility. Not a heart stressed to failure by meticulous rule-following or showy acts of religiousy compliance. Or a heart murdered by useless anxiety, self-pitying guilt, or a deep love for unhappiness. Jesus dares us to a righteousness, a justice of the spirit that settles us firmly into the peace of our Father’s rule.

You are dared by Christ to surrender, to just give up, give up everything that bends your back, hardens your heart, darkens your spirit. You are dared to walk into the desert naked and alone, and find there the peace of His kingdom, the rule of His eternal favor. And find Him there rejoicing at your freely offered sacrifice of a heart burned bare, your heart set ablaze by a longing, an aching need for His mercy.