Knowing nothing but the crucified Christ

Solemnity of Saint Dominic: 1 Cor 2.1-10; Luke 9.57-62
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

While “knowing nothing” and without the “sublimity of words or wisdom,” what does a preacher proclaim when he proclaims “the mystery of God”? And if this proclamation is preached out of “weakness and fear and trembling” without “persuasive words of wisdom,” from where does the demonstrative “spirit and power” of the preaching come? Paul writes to the church in Corinth, claiming that he preached to them so that their “faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God. . .not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. Rather,” he insists, “we speak God's wisdom, mysterious, hidden. . .” If contemporary Dominican preachers speak God's wisdom, without “sublimity of words” or the wisdom of this age, while “knowing nothing,” from where we do draw the “spirit and power” we need to prepare eyes and ears to see and hear His saving words and loving deeds? Paul, recklessly but not without hope, sets before us a demanding quest: to know nothing “except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” What does it take, what must we do to grow ignorant of this world's wisdom and flourish in God's?

While on a journey with his disciples, Jesus is approached three times by those who would join his traveling school of wisdom. Each time the prospective student would declare his intention to become a student of the Master. The first intended disciple says that he will follow Jesus wherever he goes. Jesus replies, “. . .the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” The second is told “Follow me,” but he needs to bury his father before committing to the life of a preacher. The third says that he too wants to follow Jesus, but that he wants to say goodbye to his family first. Jesus, knowing what lies ahead for anyone who follows him, issues these potential preachers a warning: you may follow me wherever I go, but there is no place for rest, and if you follow, you must do so absolutely, without condition, doing nothing—not even burying the dead or saying farewell to family—putting nothing and no one before the preaching of the gospel. Let the dead bury the dead, never looking back at what you have left behind.

God's wisdom, revealed in Christ, and him crucified, is this: to follow Jesus as a preacher of the Good News is to abandon all attachments to the burdens of this world, to throw off the yoke of man's wisdom, and do nothing else but proclaim God's marvelous deeds to all nations. Paul could have said that he knows nothing except Jesus and leave it at that. Instead, he says that he knows nothing except Jesus. . .and him crucified, nailed hands and feet to his cross, abandoned to death. The vows we take as Dominican preachers are not meant simply to regulate belief and behavior, what we think and how we act. Our vows—even when imperfectly lived—are meant to make us into the sorts of men and women who are eager to seek out crucifixion, to run after Christ along his way to Golgotha, all the while proclaiming the Lord's mercy and love to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. Will you long to stop along the way to say farewell to family, or feel the obligation to bury your dead, or look over your shoulder to see what you have left behind? Of course. And not only will we long to cultivate and harvest these worldly attachments, we will do so, sometimes with great fanfare and expense. Thank God then that there is more than just one of us walking the path in this gospel adventure! Paul says that “we speak God's wisdom.” We use our strengths. We perfect our weaknesses. With Christ and one another, we live this reckless life of gospel preaching.

From where do we draw the “spirit and power” to proclaim God's marvelous deeds to all nations? Even as we empty ourselves out on the cross of Christ, we are filled with a purer sort of knowing: we are, whole and entire, the sons and daughters of a loving God, the Father of a preaching family, the only source of anything and everything we will ever need.

Faith, Science, & the Contemporary Catholic

Faith, Science & the Contemporary Catholic

(A Retreat for the Dominican Laity of Dallas/Irving, TX)


Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP, PhD (retreat leader)

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Saturday August 8, 2009
9.00am-3.30pm (three 45 min conferences w/meditation periods)
Mass & Morning Prayer
Breakfast & Lunch

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St. Albert the Great Priory
3150 Vince Hagan St
Irving, TX 75062


Leave a comment if you are interested


All are welcomed to attend!

Faulkner's Homeric epics?

A literary question/observation. . .

My American literature class finished up reading and discussing Wm. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying this afternoon.

I argued that the novel could be read as a sort of Homeric epic. I doubt this is original to me given the libraries stuffed full of Faulkner scholarship, but the idea struck me as worthy of mention to my students. We found a few Homeric moments along the way, including the whole notion of the misadventurous quest to Jefferson to bury Addie, the mother.

One scene in particularly got my Homeric attention. Addie Bundren's coffin is inside a barn. Her allegedly mentally unstable son, Darl, sets the barn on fire. Jewel, her son by Preacher Whitfield, races inside the barn to save his horse. He returns to rescue Addie in her coffin. Faulkner describes Jewel coming out of the barn "riding" the coffin like a horse. The scene is filled with heroics, swirling masses of sparks, and our hero is set alight in his nightshirt. The whole scene reminds me of the funeral games in Homer's epics. . .heroes, funeral pyres, horses, etc.

Thoughts?

On Used Books & Thank You notes

A note on books received since mid-June. . .

I've rec'd a few books here in the U.S. since I left Rome on June 13th.

I am really good about sending Thank You notes. . .so, if you haven't rec'd one from me two possibilities for this come to mind:

1). I haven't rec'd the book yet.

2). I have rec'd your book, but it didn't come with a return address on the invoice.

Possibility #2 happens if you bought the book used and had the bookstore ship it to me. They rarely put the buyer's name and address on their invoices.

Also, used bookstores sometimes take three times as long to ship books. However, Used Book are perfectly fine with me. When I read a book for class or for research, I really use it--marginal notes, dog-eared pages, cracked spines, the works!

So, don't be afraid that I will think less of a Used Book. . .I welcome them as laborers from the fields!

P.S. A third possibility just occurred to me. . .you bought the book just before I left Rome and it was shipped to me there.

Coffee Cup Browsing...

Women religious in the U.S. have rec'd the Instrumentum laboris for their apostolic visitation. Note: this is NOT the doctrinal assessment of the CDF. Both the visitation and the assessment need to be wary of allowing the LCWR to conflate "being women religious" with "being feminists." The two are not identical. My guess is that 99% of women religious in the U.S. have no idea what the feminists who run the LCWR are doing in their name.

Occasionally--nay, rarely!--Shea gets it right. Even a stopped clock and all that. . .

Will Obamacare use your tax money to pay for abortions? Of course.

This happens to me all the time!

Highly disconcerting photoshopped pics of fathers and sons

Neurotic poets. . .but I repeat myself.

A moving, graphic representation of Italian bureaucracy. . .on a good day.

Several galleries of beautiful fractals

Obama Book Bail Out fail...

Howdy, Readers!

My Obama Book Bail-Out check hasn't arrived yet! I filled out all 3,689 pages of paperwork, sent my cash "contribution" to ACORN and the Black Panthers, and signed the contract in blood, so what's the problem???

Anyway, browse the recently updated WISH LIST and help a friar fill out his dissertation library! [NB. Amazon has revamped the "look" of their Wish Lists. Still can't list books permanently in order of priority. . .]

:-)

Fr. Philip, OP

P.S. The BP has stabilized. Now I have to stop eating like an American before I end up as a screen shot on CNN for one those elitist lefty homilies about "The Obese."

Some stuff from over there...

If you have ever wondered what the historical-critical method does to scripture, I commend to you this parody: "New Directions in Pooh Studies." It is frightening acccurate! (H/T: New Advent)

That Pustule of Warted Face-Follicles, Mark Shea, whines incessantly b/c HancAquam has outranked him. . .again! BAWAHAHAHA!

McBrien wails and gnashes over the CDF's doctrinal assessment of U.S. religious women. Note that all of the critiques of this assessment consistently fail to charitably summarize the reasons for the evaluation, preferring instead to couch the visitation in terms of "the evil hierarchy is trying to put the sisters back in their habits and into kitchen." There are perfectly good, debatable reasons for the assessment. Hint: the assessment is about rampant theological dissent on dogmatic and doctrinal issues, neo-pagan/Wiccan liturgies, feminist ideology, and outright scandal.

This is what happens when Citizens are made Wards of the State by the State for their own good. . .in this case, when the State is made your doctor. . .for your own good.

The so-called "Fairness Doctrine" in action. . .

Scary proof that Obama is the anti-Christ. . .not really. . .but the coincidences are fascinating. Remember: the anti-Christ is a spirit of rebellion not a person and as such flows through human history. Many different people have embodied the spirit of the anti-Christ. "Anti-Christ" means "against Christ" and describes a spiritual philosophy. It is not a proper name.

I think took the name of the game a little too far! :-)

Hey, can't say you were not warned. . .

Secularism: Kant's mistake?

from an article by Fr. Anthony Carroll, SJ on Fr. George Tyrrell, SJ's modernism:

Chief among the opponents of the medieval system of thought who would cause concern for the Church at the time of the modernist crisis was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant asserted that medieval and early modern thought had failed to question the appropriate limits of human reason and so had become tangled up in interminable confusions. His critical philosophy would famously deny the capacity of reason to come to know God, in order to make room for faith. For Kant, God could not be affirmed through our sensory perceptions but could be a postulate of practical reason that would ground our moral action.

Without intending to do so, Kant removed questions about God from modern philosophical discourse, creating what we now think of as "secularism"--the notion that religious belief is intensely (and only) private. From this we have inherited the false idea that religious belief has no proper role to play in public discourse.

Kant's insistence on locating the ground of our moral action in God was quickly undermined by British analytical moral philosophers (G.E. Moore, A.J. Ayer), leaving us with a purely emotive ethics: moral judgments are really just statements about emotional states and personal preferences, e.g. "Adultery is wrong" = "I don't like adultery."

Secular orthodoxy continues to affirm the purely emotive/personal nature of moral judgments, excluding from consideration any appeal to objective standards of ethical behavior. Thus we have the near hegemony of "personal autonomy" in medical ethics.

Carroll points out that transcendental Thomists (Tyrrell, Rahner) attempt to incorporate Kant's basic philosophical insights into traditional Catholic theology in an effort to retake the rational battleground for God. The success/failure of this project is still under debate.

Losing your mind to Christ

18th Sunday OT
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, Univ of Dallas

Have you ever lost your mind and wondered where you put it? Have you ever changed your mind and wondered if you are now another person? Ever have something on your mind and wondered if the weight of it was showing up on the bathroom scale? According to Plato, the human mind is a reflection of the Nous, the One Mind, corrupted by the body. Aristotle argued that the mind is that faculty of the soul that reasons. Aquinas and most of the scholastics propose that the mind apprehends reality as it is and understands that reality according to the nature of the divinely informed human intellect. Empiricists tell us that our minds are sensation collectors, blank slates that scoop up impressions from the world; Rationalists that the mind is best understood as a repository for those innate ideas that make it possible for us to think. Kant puts these two theories together and concludes that the mind orders sense experience using ideas that already exist in the mind. Most contemporary philosophers have more or less accepted that the mind is simply the work of the brain and that when we use “mind-terms” to describe mental activities and states (happiness, confusion, insight), we are really just talking about neuro-chemical activity in the brain. All of these theories tell us what the mind is; how it works with memory, perception, learning, and will; how we use it, and how we lose it. So when Paul writes to the Ephesians, “I declare and testify in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds; that is not how you learned Christ...,” we much ask: have we learned Christ, or do we live as the Gentiles do in the “futility of their minds”?

By the third time I attempted college algebra—having dropped it twice out of abject fear—I concluded that my brain was not wired to comprehend the occult lore of math. To my mind, geometry is an ancient magical system for plotting an eternity of suffering. Calculus is a demonic wisdom that tricks us into giving our souls to the Devil. Confronted by the squiggly gibberish of numbers in formulas, my mind freezes in fear and then flees to poetry where nothing can hurt me, or make me hurt myself or others. I failed to learn math as a kid, and now, as an adult, I will not put on the mind of math because such a renovation project seems to me be utterly futile, hopelessly empty of promise or prize. So, along with all the number-challenged souls in the world I rejoice to hear Paul say, “...truth is in Jesus...” Alleluia! This truth is the one truth I do not fear. Though I seek this truth, there is some question about whether or not I have learned it. This is a judgment to be made at the conclusion of this world, the Mother of All Final Exams. I hope Professor Jesus allows us all a crib sheet!

Desperate to witness signs of wonder and learn the mysteries of salvation, crowds follow Jesus around throwing questions at him like paparazzi after Britney Spears. On occasion, Jesus obliges the crowds by healing the blind, the demonically possessed, and even the dead. He teaches his Father's mercy and calls all to repentance and a new way of living life toward a glorious end in heaven. He even demonstrates his command of math by multiplying five loaves of bread and two fish into enough food for five thousand. Impressed but unfulfilled, the crowds demand more and wait on the next miracle to confirm their faith. Jesus tells them that they are asking him to teach the wrong lesson: “...you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.” They are lead by the stomach not the mind; hunger-pains brings them to Christ not the pains of ignorance. Though the bread they eat fills the belly, it does not fill the soul. Therefore, Professor Jesus concludes, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life...”

What do you hunger for, thirst for? What do you need to see, to learn, to feel before you can say that you are filled-up, completely satisfied? If you were in one of those crowds following Jesus around, what one gift would you beg him for; what one question would you ask him? You might say, “I only desire to do the work of God!” Do you know what that work is for you? Have you read the job description for being a good Christian? Have you learned Jesus as your one truth, putting “away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and [been renewed] in the spirit of your minds”? If you have, then you have done the work of God. Jesus says, “ This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” First, believe; then think, feel, act, be always out of this belief in Christ and your life will be a sign to others that you have “put on the new self, [and have been] created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.” You will be a sign of hope to all those who seek the truth that Christ is the truth they seek.

Though we have a long, long history of exploring the philosophical, scientific, and theological nature of the human mind, we do not need an empiricist or rationalist or materialist theory of consciousness in order to comprehend and live the mind of Christ. We do not need a clear and distinct idea about the structure of memory or perception, or a fulsome argument for the nature of thinking or the workings of emotion and will. If mind is simply the neuro-chemical activity of the brain, fine. Do your dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine belong to Christ? If mind is the rational faculty of the soul that allows us to abstract ideas from sense experience, fine. Does your reason belong to Christ? Do you see and hear and touch Christ first? And if mind is a reflection of the One Mind corrupted by the body, so be it. Are you receiving God's graces to perfect your body and elevate your mind? If not, Paul reminds you, “...you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.” For Paul, the Gentile mind reaches for knowledge and understanding without first having grasped Christ. This is utterly futile because “truth is in Jesus.”

You might be the one in the crowd who yells out to Jesus, “OK! The truth is in you. What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?” Jesus says to you, to all of us, “What can you do? Our ancestors ate manna in the desert...it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.” You look to the sky. Glance around at the ground. Your stomach rumbles a bit. “Well, sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus smiles. This is the perfect set-up, the best of all segues. He takes the moment in hand, pauses just long enough to build an arc of anticipation, and then teaches the crowd, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” Never hunger. Never thirst. First, believe; then think, feel, act, be always out of this belief in Christ and your life here and now will be a reflection of your promised life at the foot of the throne. You will be the only sign any of us will need to believe, the only miracle any of us will ask for.

Have you learned Christ? If so, then be Christ for us! If not, then let the Body and Blood you take this morning be your food and drink for the pilgrimage to heaven. Receive him as you would a rescuer come to take you from the wilderness. He will bring you to a far holier land.

Where's your dancer?

[NB. This is my last daily homily preached to the sisters here in Fort Worth. I am headed back to the priory in Irving later today. . .]

St Alphonus Liguori: Lv 25.1; 8-17; Matt 14.1-12
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Sisters of St Mary of Namur

Herod hands us a warning —the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Surely, Herod has no idea that this grisly gift to a dancer would serve as a caution twenty centuries down the road. Fearing the anger of the people, he sets aside his own anger at John and enjoys his birthday party. He enjoys it a little too much; so much, in fact, that he foolishly vows to grant the party's exceptional dancer whatever she might wish. At the prompting of her mother—Herod's illegitimate wife—the young woman asks for John's head. For us, twenty-first century Christians, the girl's naivete produces a first-century warning: those in power will not tolerate prophets who speak the truth, especially if the truth spoken risks stinging an unruly conscience and rousing an unjustly ruled people. We are duly warned. But if Christians cannot or will not speak the truth to those who rule, who will? Can we afford to tolerate rulers who will not hear the truth spoken? Are we ready to surrender our heads to the court dancer?

John discovered the hard way that princes and kings do not like God's grubby spokesmen spouting off about truth, justice, and the holy way. Out of fear, Herod allows John to live despite John's harangues against his royal adultery. Watching the daily tracking polls, Herod no doubt sees John's popularity as a prophet of God, a man worthy of the job given to him. Focus groups indicate to the king that beheading John for speaking out would be a very dangerous move poll numbers; so, he refrains. Instead of the calling the axeman, Herod funds a political action committee and begins oppositional research. The negative ads were poised to air the day the dancing girl moved seductively onto the scene. She's the game-changer. In what will become one of history's most notorious political gaffes, Herod promises her the world. She wants and gets John's head. For the next several months nothing else is discussed in media. How will Plattergate play out at the polls? Has Herod hurt himself with the religious demographic? Was the whole affair a set-up by Herod's zealous opponents to embarrass him?

Among the witnesses that day were John's disciples. They collect his body and bury it. Then they tell Jesus that his herald is dead. Hearing this, Jesus goes alone to a deserted place. Does Jesus think that John was foolish to admonish Herod? Would Jesus have advised John to resist speaking the truth to his king? Maybe the better way here is the path of quiet persuasion through earnest dialogue and common ground engagement. After all, the truth is so harsh, so dramatically uncompromising, and impractical. Surely, our Lord would have coached John to be more tolerant, less judgmental, more willing to see both sides of the issue for the sake of staying at the political table. And then there's the whole beheading episode. There's a message for us from our rulers: tell me the truth, and I get your head. What compromise won't get me, the axe will cut away. Negotiate away the truth or die.

Are we ready to surrender our heads to the court dancer? A grim question! One we can hope and pray we never have to answer. Of course, the question will never be put to any of us in exactly those terms. We'll be asked a much more subtle question: are you willing to stop being so stubborn about all those moral and religious issues if we allow you to participate in the democratic process? If not, chop! You're out. Your head won't be on a platter, but your voice will be muffled under the weight of lawsuits and judicial injunctions. If we fall, we fall to the tax-man not the axe-man.

So, what do we do? Negotiate? Engage on “common ground”? Get what we can and thank our secular betters for the scrapes? We are as wise as serpents and gentle as doves, so we could. But too often gentle doves forget that they must sometimes be wise serpents. Fortunately, we are political animals only for a while. The life we have been chosen for and have received is the life of truth lived on the way to an eternal life. There is nothing to fear in speaking the truth, nothing and no one to tremble before when absolute moral virtue needs our voices to be heard. We have been warned. True. But we have also been promised. Warned by a king. Promised by The King. Promised to his Father. The beauty of this promise is that we have already been beheaded, died, buried, and made ready to rise again. Why would we fear the wrath of a king when we truly belong to The King? Besides, who told you that being a prophet was an easy road to fame and riches? Welcome to the Platter! Where's your dancer?

No Class

A picture is worth a thousand words. . .or a couple of dropped points in the polls.


H/T: American Thinker

The Return of. . .Coffee Cup Browsing!

2009-10 is the Year for Priests (pssst. . .I hear priests really like books. . .) :-)

For all your Catholic philosophy needs. . .which are many, I'm sure. . .

Gerald Collins, "Jesus Our Priest" (Caution: Jebbie site, so keep your Summa close by!)

Jesus Beads. . .(not that he is envious of the rosary, of course)

Ever wonder how the Church figures out which Sunday will be Easter Sunday. . .?

Ten Great Existential movies. . .yes, their existence preceded their essenses

The basic idea of HancAquam. . .

Wise Sayings recycled for the cynic

Bar Stool Economics: the American tax system

Great political cartoons

An extremely biased definition of a political liberal

Hmmmmm. . .I know I'm supposed to scowl at this. . .

Finally, a website made for Coffee Cup Browsing!

Hell is good for you!

17th Week OT (Th): Ex 40.16-21, 34-8; Matt 13.47-53
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Sisters of St Mary of Namur

Setting aside for the moment a few ugly episodes and outrageous characters from the Order's history, it is safe to say that Dominicans have a well-deserved reputation for preferring to teach folks into heaven rather than scaring them away from Hell. We would rather persuade than cajole, influence rather than frighten. Generally speaking, it is better to touch a rational soul with the Light of Christ than it is to scare the snot out of a sinner with ghastly visions of Hell. But sometimes the rational soul of a sinner might need to be shown a scene or two of eternal life without God—just a brief glimpse into exactly what never-ending torment looks like. Doesn't a soul twisted in folly, unable to choose the Good and come to God, doesn't a soul so injured deserve the mercy of wisdom's most immediate remedy? Jesus, the Master Philosopher, knows that even a mind deeply dedicated to right reason but steeped in sin may need a hot-shock, a whack upside the head in order to see through foolish to wisdom. The “fiery furnace” he refers to so often in Matthew's gospel is just that jolt of reality we sometimes need. It's not pretty, but it sure is helpful.

As helpful as images of Hell may be, we tend to shy away from preaching about eternal damnation these days. Too 1950's. Too fundamentalist. Very “pre-Vatican Two”—whatever that means. But if we are going to preach the gospel, there is simply no way to avoid the subject given the lectionary readings! These last two weeks alone Jesus has separated the goats from the sheep; pulled the weeds from among the flowers; culled the good fish from the bad; and his angels have set the midden-heap of pruned branches ablaze. The wicked and the righteous are well and truly labeled, properly queued up, and ready to receive their eternal itineraries. So, let's not mince words; let's study the truth as Jesus presents it to us: make a choice—goat or sheep, flower or weed, good fish or bad, fertile soil or barren dirt. All you need to do is make the right choice. The consequences of making the wrong choice are—shall we say—extremely unpleasant! In the best sense, the choices before us really are just this stark and the consequences of our choices just this easy to discern. Few of us, however, experience the choices in such stark terms.

So why is Jesus presenting the choices in such glaring black and white terms? Why the threat of eternal punishment in the fiery furnace for making the wrong choice? Jesus is a Master Philosopher and a Master Psychologist. Think about how Jesus preaches and teaches. He uses parables, scriptural allusions, conversation, examples, even miracles. Sometimes he interrogates and cajoles. Rarely does he argue like a Greek philosopher or a Pharisee. The people in the crowds respond to him b/c he sparks to life their intuitions about what is true and good and beautiful about being well-loved creatures. He knows that his very presence jump-starts that nagging desire for God that we are born with and strive to satisfy in this life. And he knows that without God's help we will consistently fail to reach high enough when reaching for our happiness. Settling for imitation happiness, faux-joy—this might impress the neighbors, but it takes the real-deal to enter the kingdom. And if Jesus has to scare the snot out of us to get us to pay attention to our eternal choices, then get the hankie ready—here comes the scare!

If you were frightened into the faith, you might not be particularly proud of the fact. It would be more embarrassing, however, to remain faithful out of fear, to remain a believer because the fiery furnace looms large in the imagination. The threat of the furnace is meant to scald a foolish soul into seeing the light of reason, to awake a sleepy desire for God. Clearly, Hell is a very real option for anyone who chooses to live without God for eternity. But Hell is not the be-all and end-all of the gospel. Once the furnace-option has been rejected and we have joined the flowers, the sheep, the good fish, and the fertile soil, Hell might linger as a whiff of smoke to remind us of our wise choice, but the daily life of a Christian is not dominated by the fear of an already and always defeated enemy. We chose to receive the extravagant graces poured out from the cross and the empty tomb. Though the heat of the furnace may have turned us from its punishing flames, setting us on the right course, we stay the course for Christ b/c nothing else, no one else can bring us home. For us, no one else is home.

From mourning to belief

St Martha: Ex 34.29-35; John 11.19-27
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Sisters of St Mary of Namur

In the presence of the people, Moses veils his face, shielding them from God's radiance even while sharing with them the Lord's commands; in the presence of the Lord himself, Martha unveils her face, revealing her grief to Jesus even while confessing her belief in him. Moses must hide God's brilliance so that the people will hear what the Lord has to say. Martha must show Jesus her mourning so that he will ask of her, “Do you believe?” Both Moses and Martha see the Lord face-to-face. Both hear him and converse with him. Moses speaks with God for the sake of His people. Martha speaks with Jesus for the sake of her deceased brother, Lazarus. Moses is the anointed prophet of God and leader of His people. Martha is sister to Mary; friend to Jesus; and no one has anointed her to be a prophet or herald, yet she believes that Jesus is the promised one to come; she proclaims his arrival among us; and names him, she names him Christ, the Messiah. What Moses must hide so that others might see, Martha announces so that all may hear.

If you have ever mourned, you know how wholly consuming the pain can be. The gravity of loss drags against every offer of comfort, or and possibility of relief. Nothing, no one can lift the ruinous pressure that squeezes your guts and chokes your heart. There is nothing to see behind you anymore and nothing of promise for tomorrow. There is only more defeat in the futile hours that circle around. . .again and again. Martha and Mary mourn the death of Lazarus, their brother. They do not grieve alone—neighbors, friends, family visit with them. Martha goes out to meet Jesus on his way. Finding him, she says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. . .” She “says” this? Or does she scream it? Is she accusing Jesus of neglect? Is she merely disappointed in him, or just annoyed? Do you hear grief in her voice? “Lord, if you had been here. . .” If only, you had been here. . .

What we could easily take to be Martha's accusation against Jesus, quickly turns into something else entirely: “...my brother would not have died [had you been here, Lord]. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” From accusatory outburst to faith-filled profession, Martha moves from being a grieving sister to speaking as a holy prophet of God. Jesus assures her that Lazarus will rise. And Martha, in tone that could put steel in the weakest stomach, answers, “I know he will rise. . .” The strength of her conviction almost overshadows Jesus' moment of glory: “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live. . .” We can safely assume that Jesus never sputtered when he spoke, but it is not too much to imagine that he may have been both a little surprised and greatly pleased by Martha's faith. Nonetheless, he must ask. . .

Do you believe this? Do you believe that if you believe in Christ Jesus, you will never die, and if you die, you will live again? Martha says in answer to this question, “I have come to believe. . .” In other words, not always fully convinced of your name or mission, over time I have found belief, arrived at faith, been convicted in the spirit that you are the Christ. Martha is our prophet of progressing belief, of unfolding faith. She is our patron saint of those who Come to Believe despite their anger, their grief; despite all the evidence and argument against believing; over the objections of family, friends, colleagues; and, overriding disappointment and accusation, come to know that all will be made well—even death—all will be made well. But first we must believe. We must watch what cannot clearly be seen, reach for what cannot be grasped. Only by watching and reaching do we ever see or grasp.

Martha wants to know, “Do you believe?”

Parables do not save

17th Week OT (Tues): Ex 33.7-11, 34.5-9, 28; Matt 13.36-43
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Sisters of St Mary of Namur

Jesus fell for it! His disciples ask for the meaning of the sower's parable and Jesus caves. Just yesterday, I was praising our Lord for having the proper teacherly attitude toward the use of parables. Up until today, he has resisted the temptation to dissect his stories, to take them apart for close inspection and risk killing them for the sake of ever-elusive clarity. But today his students want to know what the sower's parable “means.” They ask Jesus, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.” Jesus explains his story by matching each image or action in the parable with a parallel image or action from scripture: “He who sows good seed is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed the children of the Kingdom,” and so on. For the disciples and probably most of those reading this passage centuries later, Jesus has the last word on the meaning of this parable. And why not? It's his story, so he gets to interpret it. Even if we accept as definitive the meaning he gives to this parable, we can still ask why he gave it an explanation in the first place. Well, the Psalmist sings this morning, “The Lord is kind and merciful,” so maybe Jesus is taking pity on the metaphor-challenged. But doesn't Jesus say in earlier readings that only those who are graced with insight can understand the parables? If the disciples need to be taught the correct interpretation, does that mean that they don't have graced insight? Or is Jesus doing something here other than what it at first appears he is doing? The Lord can be very sneaky when he wants to be. . .

The disciples ask Jesus to explain the parable to them. Does Jesus do this; does he explain the parable? More or less. What he does is give them the interpretative keys to the story; he lays out for them how to give the parable meaning by giving it one meaning—the sower is the Son of Man; the field is the world, etc. So, one way of explaining the parables is to replace story elements (images, characters) with complementary elements from scripture and then work out how these elements tell a new story. The explanation that Jesus gives is not The Explanation for All Ages; it is what we could call a hermeneutical pattern, or an interpretative model. For example, the sower of seed could be the Church; the field could be missionary territories; the seeds could be fired-up catechists and their families, etc. Are their limits to this sort of interpretative model? Oh yes. I used to warn my students away from hermeneutical relativism by telling them, “There may be no one right interpretation of this poem, but there are millions of wrong ones!”

In the case of the sower's parable, Jesus enlightens his disciples with an explanation that cracks open a cosmic story, an end-time tale of how All This ends in a harvest of souls for heaven and a midden-heap of sinners for the fiery furnaces of hell. Though we might tinker with the details and shift around the storyline, what we cannot avoid in the sower's parable is the rather straightforward teaching that our choices as loved-creatures have eternal consequences. We are animals gifted with reason; set above the angels because we are free to love or not. To love as we ought is to measure our share in the divine life; to fail to love as we ought is to measure our grave for an eternal abode. With a face set in stone and a heart to match, the anti-lover will burn—maybe it will be the furnace fires of hell, or maybe it will be the scalding freeze of a deathless void. Whatever else hell may be, it is to be eternally abandoned. And the most appalling part is that it is freely chosen abandonment.

Jesus explains the parable to the disciples, but he doesn't refine his explanation into a full-blown interpretation. He gives them and us a way to understand what our glorious or inglorious end looks like. There is a choice to make. As always-loved creatures, we receive Christ's wisdom to the limits of our capacity. Augustine liked to (unknowingly) misquote Isaiah, “Unless you will have believed, you will not understand” (Isa 7.9). First comes our assent to the Good News of God's mercy, then comes our understanding of what that mercy means for us eternally. If, as Aquinas teaches us, we receive according to our natures, then make sure your nature is properly graced in belief to receive the truth of a parable—even if the details escape your less-than-poetical imagination. Remember: parables do the teaching; Jesus does the saving.

No future in parables

17th Week OT (Mon): Ex 32.15-34; Matt 13.31-35
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Sisters of St Mary of Namur

Poets use verse to hide secret messages. Everyone knows that they could just say what they mean in plain prose, but the whole point of poetry is to figure out the code—the symbols, the allusions, etc.—and then decipher the hidden message to win the prize! Once you crack the code a poet uses, all of his or her poems can be decrypted in the same way. Every time I teach poetry, I have to un-teach this method of reading poetry. At some point in the class—especially with E. Dickinson or W. Stevens—someone will snap and cry out in frustration: “Just tell us what it means!!!” Though I am moved to pity, I am also resolved to resist allowing my students to turn good poetry into a de-coder ring game. Jesus seems to share my teacherly attitude when it comes to his parables. Those listening to Jesus must be about ready to do a little shouting all their own: “Mustard seeds! Leaven! Flour! What are you talking about?!” The irony here, of course, is that Jesus is speaking in parables not to hide the truth, but to uncover it: “I will open my mouth in parables, I will announce what has lain hidden from the foundation of the world.” Like enjoying good poetry, understanding a parable is more an experience of wisdom than it is an act of intellect. It's not so much about what you know as how you live.

Poetry, prophecy, parables—all very risky ways of telling the truth. You would do a lot better with a straightforward propositional claim, or even a mathematical equation. No ambiguity, no room for getting it wrong. The future, if we are to know it, must be known clearly; otherwise, we will make all sorts of mistakes now. Of course, some say that the future is mute. Emily Dickinson declares: “The Future never spoke,/Nor will he, like the Dumb,/Reveal by sign or syllable/Of his profound To-come.” What is to come for us is not revealed by sign or syllable. Why? The future never spoke, nor will he. Notice that the parables Jesus proposes are not about the future either. They do not gesture toward tomorrow, rather they describe what the wise can already see: the kingdom of God grows, spreads, breathes life into, is infectious, multiplies. What has lain hidden at the foundation of the world is that the world's foundation is God's kingdom.

Jesus “proposed” his parables to the crowds. The wise see. Those who do not see nonetheless get a glimpse, a flash of what lay underneath. Like the seeds and leaven, the parables themselves work their way into the soil of the imagination, into the flour of the spirit and begin expand, multiply, and breath until they either propose wisdom or produce frustration. Maybe we should say that frustration is the beginning of wisdom. It could be the rough edges of a tale that rub us into seeking out more and more. . .or maybe just the half-told truths of fable that spark a quest. . .or even the odd little story about a woman and her bread dough. . .none of these are about a fictional future but a deepened present.

How does it change your day to believe for even a minute or two that the foundations of the world rest on the kingdom of God?

Not a good Sunday morning

Bad News. . .

Didn't sleep a wink last night. . .severely nauseated, vomiting. . .got up at 6am to work on today's homily for the sisters, more vomiting. . .went over to the convent and asked one of the nurses to take my BP: 174/120. She gave a nitro tablet. BP dropped a little and then went to 154/120. My pulse was 135. We phoned the on-call doctor for my doc's office. I phoned a friend of mine who is a doctor. . .waiting to hear what I should do. . .

Please, pray!

UPDATE: Doc just called. . .she said go to the ER, so to the ER I go.

Update 2.0: Back from the ER. Nothing permanently damaged. Dizziness and vomiting caused by an ear infection. . .BP was brought down with some Clonodine. Good stuff.

Thank for the prayers!!!!

Ruling as slaves from an emptied tomb

St James the Apostle: 2 Cor 4.7-15; Matt 20.20-28
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Sisters of St Mary of Namur

None of us can claim—come the end of this life—that we didn't know. We knew. How could we not? It's not in the fine print or in the interpretation. There's no need to guess or wonder. Jesus says again and again that following him is a dangerous gamble against the probability that trial and tribulation await us. That you will bear a heavy cross and find yourself nailed to it is the best bet you can make. Your cross may be intensely private or spectacularly public; you may be nailed to a physical or mental affliction or, quite literally, to an actual cross—or a prison cell or by a bullet. However you end, by whatever means you are lifted up on the cross, you will not go alone. Nor will you go in any way bound. Paul writes to the Corinthians: “We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed...” Afflicted, perplexed, and persecuted, we are nonetheless freed from constraint, despair, and destruction. So long as we “always carry about in the body the dying of Jesus,” we carry the hope of God's “surpassing power,” the treasures of a life—an eternal life—lived in Christ. But first, we must drink from his chalice “so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.” The most delicate sip is death. But what must die for us to live?

The mother of James and John pushes her sons to the front of the apostolic line, pushing past the other disciples in the hope that Jesus might secure their positions as leaders in the kingdom to come. We can almost hear the sorrow in Jesus' voice when he says, “You do not know what you are asking. Can you drink the chalice that I am going to drink?” Perhaps a little apprehensive or embarrassed, or maybe sensing that their elevation is at hand, James and John respond, “We can.” Though they believe that they are about to take their places of honor, Jesus tells them that to rule is to serve: “...whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave.” Jesus is doing more here than turning his students' expectations about inherited social power upside-down. He is telling them—all of them and us as well—that we best live a life of authority, power, and influence when we die to self in him and rise again with him to serve God by being slaves to one another for his sake. We will rule, but we will rule as slaves from a throne built on an emptied tomb.

Remember what Paul teaches the Corinthians, so long as we “always carry about in the body the dying of Jesus,” we carry the hope of God's “surpassing power.” What power we receive from carrying in our bodies the dying and rising again of Christ is not the power of princes or merchants; it is not the authority of law or money. The power we wield when we live as both tombs for his resurrected body and tabernacles of his abiding presence is the “spirit of faith,” the fire, the force, the nerve of believing, trusting, and hoping in the audacious truth that we are once again free to live as the children of his Father. From this truth, all blessings flow in abundance.

What must flow from us then? Paul points to the Psalms: “I believed, therefore I spoke.” Because we strive to live in the spirit of faith, we speak the Word and do his work as servants not kings, as slaves not masters. We are raised from a living-death to a life in Christ to work as stewards of the kingdom, proxies for heaven, prophets and priests at the altar, offering ourselves as sacrifice for the salvation of the world. We know this. How could we not? Our Lord hangs on his cross for us; he is raised from his tomb for us; he sits at the right hand of the Father for us. Though we are afflicted, perplexed, and persecuted, we are nonetheless freed from constraint, despair, and destruction. We are free to serve in the spirit of faith; and so, believing ,we speak; trusting, we work, hoping, we become hope and rule as the least of his, if we but will it.

Oppositional Conformity

Had to share this. . .

Researcher Condemns Conformity Among His Peers (NYT: Science)

“Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists.”

So says Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart, in a retirement interview with Constance Holden in the journal Science.

Journalists, of course, are conformists too. So are most other professions. There’s a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss’s shoes, and to win the group’s approval by trashing dissenters.

[. . .]

I remember when I first realized that even rebels have their need for conformity. I was teaching a freshman writing class in 1994. Several of my students had adopted the Standard Issue Grunge Uniform for College Students. They had also adopted the Standard Issue Anti-establishment Opposition Ideology (SIAOI). One student loudly denounced the frat-boy mentality of the university and went on to articulate all the talking points of the comfortable academic Left. Of course, at the time, I was delighted. But being constitutionally contrarian ,I challenged his points and noted (to my own amazement) that his dress and ideas were formed very precisely AS a way of opposing the establishment. Wasn't it reasonable to suggest that his whole outlook (and outfit) was determined by the frat boys he claimed to loathe?

In my long experience in the academic world, I can bear unflinching witness to the fact that perhaps the only group more conformist than leftist academics resides in barracks and salutes superior officers.

We are all farmers now

16th Week OT: Ex 20.1-17; Matt 13.18-23
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Sisters of St Mary of Namur

Having cleared the field of brambles and bush and dug out all the stumps and stones; and having spread barrels of composted mulch and wet undigested leaves over the never-before tilled up ground; and having taken the measure of the field with stake, string, and poor eyesight, the farmer now considers whether it is better to plant this spring's seed in neatly planned rows or to sow the seed in handfuls and let nature's chance decide this garden's most fertile design. A garden expertly rowed is kept freer of parasites and weeds. But nature's design is more fruitful, yielding more, if less perfect, fruit. Weeds and parasites need their homes too. But should it fall to the farmer to labor for the livelihoods of aphids, worms, and the contagious dandelion? How ought he to sow this season's seed? He knows that the ground is in some places rich and in others sandy; in some places there is only a lighting shading of potash coating gravel, and in others a few square feet of deep, black dirt. No matter how he chooses to sow, some of the sparing seed will multiply and blossom, and some will fall between the stones and dry brittle-dead. Knowing now what he must do, the farmer reaches into his bag of seed and begins. . .

Much like this contemplative farmer, our Creator looked upon His creation and considered the most fruitful means of planting the seeds of His saving Word. With Moses waiting on His presence at Mt Sinai, our Lord chose to sow His seed in the neatly measured rows of the Law, carving for His people a garden of commandments in stone. With the seed planted and prophets sent as gardeners to the field to pull the weeds, the harvest, in full bloom and ready for the reaper, produced twelve tribes, a nation, and a priesthood. But this abundant yield was not enough. The hard labor of the prophets and the dedicated work of the priests could not help every seed find fertile ground. The fields must be better prepared, the seed made more robust, and the work of a few given to many, many more.

Making good on His plan to increase the yield of every season's harvest, our Lord planted one seed, a single germ of His Word, in the fields of the world. Knowing that even this divine seed might fall on dead ground, He sent His chief gardener, John, to better prepare the soil. John baptized the rows with water. He watered the open ground. He watered the wilderness and the deserts. And all the while, he announced the imminent planting of the Father's single seed. And when that seed came among the fields, he watered him too. Within days, this seed produced twelve more and those twelve grew a harvest of thousands. Those thousands grew to millions and those millions grow even now to billions.

As gardeners of the Lord's fields should we be more fervent about sowing the seed of the Gospel or a field's ultimate harvest? Should we spend the days of a season weeding weeds and crushing parasites, or preparing more ground, sowing more seed? Some fields receive seed more readily in neatly planned rows. Others produce better fruit among thriving competitors. Parasites can fertilize a dull field, building the strength of the soil in the struggle to survive. However, a field left untended will go wild and produce nothing more than inedible, native fruit. As gardeners, what is the work we must do? And what do work do we leave to the spirit of God? Can we leave a dead field unseeded. Can we coax infertile soil to grow fertile seed? Can we ever abandon a field as hopelessly barren? Not this season. Not today.

Our work is the work of broadcasting the Word, flinging handfuls of ripe seed to the fields of the world. Row up rows if you like. Or sling your bagful of seeds to the wind and watch them settle where they may. You can tend the ground with water and mulch, or take it as you find it. On the day of harvest, the last task, the final work is the Lord's. It is for him to judge the quality of the fruit. Our job is to make sure the seeds are well-planted and tended to the limits of our gifts. Come evening, the farmer's reward is always worth the work of his day.