Paul vs. Jesus, Law vs. Love

23rd Week OT: 1 Cor 5.1-8 and Luke 6.6-11
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

To perfect our participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity we first come to love God as He loves us. Our ability to love God is itself a gift from God Who Is Love. The degree to which we listen to and comply with our vocation to love God by loving one another is what we call “maturity.” A more mature spirituality will be one that has better perfected the gift of love.

Now, forgive my pedantic start. But there is a point here, I promise! We have two apparently conflicting scriptural readings this morning. Paul hears that there is a notorious sinner among the Corinthians, a man living with his father’s wife. He demands that the church expel this man from the community and “deliver [him] to Satan for the destruction of his flesh…” Over in Luke, we have Jesus battling the Pharisees again over the proper understanding of the relationship between the letter of the Law and the spirit of the Law. The Pharisees practically dare Jesus to heal a man’s withered hand on the Sabbath. Of course, he does! And he asks, “…is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save a life rather than to destroy it?” Paul says that we must boot the sinners out and Jesus says that the letter of the Law is always understood in light of the greater good.

Our temptation here is to run to one pole or the other. If you will follow Paul on this issue, you will uphold the right and responsibility of the church to discipline its members using biblical and traditional measures of moral action. If you will follow Jesus on this issue, you will privilege the greater good in the spirit of the Law over a legalism required by the letter of the Law. The perversion of Paul’s position becomes self-righteousness, Pharisaical legalism in the name of purity. The perversion of Jesus’ position becomes indifferentism, a toleration of sin in the church in the name of spiritual liberty. Both legalism and indifferentism are immature spiritualities, that is, neither will help you cooperate with God’s grace in perfecting His love in you.

Recently, our bishops published an updated version of their Program for Priestly Formation. In the chapter titled, “Human Formation,” they write: “The foundation and center of all human formation is Jesus Christ […] In his fully developed humanity, he was truly free and with complete freedom gave himself totally for the salvation of the world”(74). Here is the key to our spirituality: Christ-like freedom. We will wither in sin if we fail to hold one another to basic moral standards. And we will smother the fire of the spirit in us if we lock our conscience in a legalistic coffin.

To be free, truly free as Christ is free, and therefore ready, willing, and able to cooperate with God’s gift of love to us, we cannot see our freedom as a license to do whatever we want. Our freedom came in a moment in history. We were liberated from the inevitability of death due to sin and given a renewed purpose, a new goal, a new life in Christ, to become Christ, and live with God forever. We mature spiritually when we submit our will to the law of freedom, the rule of the living Lord in our lives, and then give our lives for the good of others—sacrifice in love.

Paul insists that the sinner be expelled so that his soul may be saved. Jesus appeals to the greater good of a higher Law. Paul does not re-establish Pharisaical rule over the Corinthians. And Jesus does not sever us from the moral responsibilities of the Good. We cannot call on Paul to justify self-righteousness and we cannot call on Jesus to justify libertine abuse of moral freedom.

A truly adult spirituality then is a child-like submission to our final end, our ultimate human purpose: to be perfected as our Father is perfect—to become sacrificial Love.

"Can't get no..." (revised)

23rd Sunday OT: Isa 35.4-7; Jas 2.1-5; Mark 7.31-37
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
U.D. Freshmen Retreat, St Paul’s Hospital, Church of the Incarnation


In the late 1960’s a prominent philosopher and cultural critic wrote the following, anxious cry for the human condition: “I can’t get no satisfaction/I can’t get no satisfaction./’cause I try and I try and I try and I try./I can’t get no.” He goes on to argue that the information doled out by the media is, at best, without merit. He writes, “When I’m driving in my car/And that man comes on the radio/And he’s tellin’ me more and more/About useless information/Supposed to fire my imagination./I can’t get no, oh no no no.” The media fails us in the end. His argument ends in what can only be called pathetic mewling and a denial of the possibility of final happiness: “I can’t get no satisfaction/I can’t get no satisfaction./’cause I try and I try and I try and I try./I can’t get no.” We can’t get no satisfaction…and so, we are afraid.

And so the Lord says to those whose hearts are frightened: “Be strong, fear not! Here is our God!” Our God comes with vindication, with absolution and acquittal. He comes with divine recompense, with reward and reimbursement. The blind see. The deaf hear. The desert sand pours out water. And so He says to us, “Be strong, fear not! Here is your God!” What we need most, what we need best and soonest, what we need deeply and widely—the love of our Creator—His love is here, now, God is with us. Here is our strength, our courage, and our God.

Our philosopher and cultural critic, Professor Jagger, perfectly captures the condition of the soul frightened by the apparent absence of God. While we can say, “Be strong, fear not! Here is our God!” Those with frightful hearts can only moan and cry, “I am weak and afraid! Where is God?” And what frightens their hearts? What grabs their very being and squeezes it with terror? Death? Loneliness? Sickness? Trial? Temptation? Failure? If it is fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of sickness and trial and temptation that terrorizes your heart---be still! And know that God is here.

He could not hear, could not speak. Jesus took him away from the crowd and ministered to his lock up ears and his locked up tongue. “Be opened!” And the man heard and spoke and the crowd was exceedingly astonished. Jesus ordered them to keep quiet about the miracle, but the more he insisted on their silence, the more they witnessed to his power. “He has done all things well.” They could not be silent. Nor can we. Our silence now is vanity, a useless calm that herds us to destruction.

We live by the promises of a God who loves us. We live by the promises of a God who became flesh for us, suffered for us, died for us, and rose again so that we might have eternal life. Our satisfaction—despite the destruction, the despair, and the seduction of a nearly mad world—, our satisfaction, what fills us up with joy, is the strength of the Lord, His awesome power, His constant presence. What bodily temptation or spiritual perversion can stand against the creating and recreating power of Love Himself? What hole in your soul cannot be filled with His plan for you? What lack, what poverty can’t He remedy? What gift, what talent can’t He complete in you? And use for His greater glory?

Professor Jagger sings about a bleak and sterile landscape, an arid cultural desert, littered with the wrecks of the idolatries of self, power, and riches. We are confronted by sadistic and alien religiosities; theologies of absolute domination and public terror; televised political pomp and ceremony masquerading as peace and social justice; the destruction of human dignity by market oppression packaged as economic freedom; the collapse of basic familial structures in the name of choice and liberty; the suicidal destruction of our historical memory, our collective ability to recall who we have always been. We are forced to attend to the daily freakshow of activist clowns slyly distracting our consciences with colorful tricks while they do violence to our tradition by renaming their silly social novelties as “civil rights.” And what of the Church? Have we forgotten our promises? Our vows to be apostles? Our promises to be faithful witnesses? Have we been dithering on the playground of scandal and dissent for so long that we have forgotten just who we are and why we are here?

But even in this ruined desert of consumerist nightmares and ecclesial amnesia, we are not fatherless. To those with ears opened to hear, our loosed tongues must say to them, “Be strong, fear not! Here is our God!” The persistent witness of scripture and tradition is that despite our best efforts to remove the Lord from our lives, our best efforts to ignore Him, to neuter Him into a Platonic demiurge, to reduce Him to a cosmic process, or to loan Him out to alien religions as “Visiting Diety-in-Residence,” He remains with us. He stays right here. If the flux and flair of our culture frightens you, gives your heart pause in trusting the promises of the Father to be with us…do not be afraid! Emmanuel! God is with us! Biblical witness, traditional witness, magisterial witness, personal witness…every witness kindled by the Spirit’s fire speaks the same Word with the same Breath and repeats over and over and over: God is with us! God is with us!

What will your witness be this year? What will your words and deeds tell us about your spirit? What will you tell us about who you are as a student and missionary of the Lord? Will you open ears around you to hear the Word and loose tongues to offer praise to God? Will you serve in righteousness the poor whom God has chosen as heirs of His kingdom? Will your mercy inspire mercy? Your love inspire love? Will you be Christ?

Your life this year can be a life of worry, anxiety, stress, sickness, and unbearable pressure. Your life this year can be a life of joy, trust, peace, good health, and leisure. Your life this year can be lived in a tiny box where the only voice you hear is your own. Your life this year can be lived on the opened field where the all the voices you hear speak the Word of Life, the Word of Truth. You can be deaf and mute. You can be closed and silent. Or you can be opened by Christ to repair the ruins, to challenge the clowns, to stand up against the slow and steady crumbling of our faithful past; you can open your mouth and speak the words of wisdom, proclaiming to the crowds that God is with us and He is ready to touch ears, touch tongues, ready to open everything, all His works, to receive the Word of Christ.

Can’t get no satisfaction? Well, make the t-shirt if you must. Yes, buy the CD. Order the poster and hang it on the wall…but do not forget the promise of our Mighty Father: “Be strong, fear not! Here is your God!”

Not "once upon a time" BUT "Here with us"

Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary: Rom 8.28-30 and Matt1.18-23
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation, Irving, TX


There is no “Once upon a time…” in the Catholic faith, no “Long ago and far away…” The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the New Covenant, the Father of all creation operates in history for our salvation—dates, times, places, people, events—real history, real stories, faithful narratives of His people struggling to love Him and to be loved by Him. The Eastern Orthodox bishop and theologian, John Zizioulas, writes: “History is the sacrament of Israel’s religion.” Meaning that history, the record of God’s creative and re-creative work in His world, reveals God to us, makes Him better known to us. Through His Word from the Law and the Prophets, through His Word to Mary, our Mother, and through the revelation of the New Covenant in the Word Made Flesh, our Father brings us to Him, reels us in, and gives us new life. The celebration of Mary’s nativity is a celebration of our redemption in history—not an escape from this world in timeless myth but the blessing of this world in Christ’s birth as Lord and Savior.

OK. Why the theology lecture, Father? Here’s why: how easy is it for us to fall into the foggy mush of neo-pagan escapism, the near-Gnostic desire to understand our salvation as some sort of mystical escape from the dirty world, from the heavy stuff of living in bodies that betray our spiritual efforts, and other bodies—you people out there!—who won’t stop sinning, who won’t Do Right and make my work at getting holier easier for me! How quickly and easily we can come to think of our spiritual lives as the difficult work of ridding ourselves of what makes it possible for us to be perfected in God’s love: one another.

If we will be saved together, then we must live together in holiness and that means living in this world, in this history of God’s creation, among His works of beauty and goodness AND among the uglinesses and evils we build from what He has given us. Salvation is not about getting out of here as fast as possible. Salvation is about getting back into the family of God and witnessing, preaching, and teaching His healing Word; living every day, every hour, every minute in thanksgiving, in humble gratitude to Him for your very being, saying “thank you” for the fact of your existence, and the existence of everyone else, all of whom reveal Him to you.

Celebrating our Blessed Mother’s birth exalts her sacrificial fiat, her “let it be done to me” as a moment in history, a real event that calls out her predestined purpose, her prophetic place as the one who gives flesh to the Son. This took place. This took a place. An event with a location and a time. It took place to fulfill what the Lord had said in His Word through the prophet. And b/c it was done to her according to His Word and her Yes, the child is named Emmanuel, God-With-Us. And He is with us—in His family gathered here, in His priests, in His sacrifice of the altar, in His history, and in His Church.

If and when you are tempted by the devil of spiritual escapism—a spirit that tempts us with the false notion that we must get away from the dirt and the ugliness and sordidness of created things, especially other people, in order to be saved—if and when you are tempted by this devil, give thanks for Mary’s birth. Give thanks for her fiat. Give thanks to her for bearing Jesus and bringing the Word to us. And remember that God is with us—not “once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away,” but right now, right here loving us through His family. Loving us back to Him until he comes again.

Speak a word of healing

22nd Week OT (W): 1 Cor 3.1-9 and Luke 4.38-44
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!
When you think about being sick or being well and not doing well spiritually and doing very well spiritually, do you think about how your body feeds your soul and how your soul animates—gives life to—your body? Since the human person is a body/soul—not a machine with a ghost inside!—but a composite of flesh and bone and animated life, there must be a some basic connection between being physically or spiritually diseased or healthy. After all, it is no accident that Jesus both preaches and heals, proclaims his healing Word and restores health to the afflicted. It is for this purpose that he was sent.

Cancer, infection, catastrophic injury. Useless anxiety, wounded empathy, and all-consuming narcissism. These are all demons, all maladies who speak too often and say too much, robbing us of our ease, our fitness and vigor. But what power do they have over us when we are focused on our purpose? How can they wound us, infect us, trouble us at all when we are living the life of Christ, when we are rehearsing daily our part in the gospel drama of redemption and growing in holiness?

Jesus rebukes the woman’s fever. Pulls it out of her. He speaks directly to the source of her illness, admonishing the worry and fret to leave her. It does. She rises and serves him. And the word of her healing spreads, bringing the sick from all over. Each is cured and demons are expelled. Isn’t this the pattern of our salvation and the preaching of the Word? Do you recognize it? We are brought to Christ by someone else; we hear his Word spoken; we are healed of our sin, we rise to serve his Body, the Church; the good news spreads; other are healed body and soul—cured of disease and relieved of their demons. And Christ’s purpose is made flesh and bone, given life again in our New Life in him.

We know the sources of most of our physical ailments. Medical science is more than capable of pointing us to the various causes of bodily disease. But what causes our spiritual dis-ease? What grows in us to make us anxious, cold-hearted, self-righteous, disobedient, basically, sinful? Paul tells the Corinthians that they are not yet a spiritual people—they are still fleshy, still infants in Christ. And he knows this b/c they are jealous and contentious, some claiming to be of Paul and some Apollos. They have forgotten their start and their end, their origins and their goal. They don’t know who they are b/c they don’t know where they are going. They have failed to understand that they were made for a purpose and then redeemed to fulfill that purpose.

There is no magic here. I am not suggesting that knowing our divine purpose mystically protects us from car accidents, stomach aches, and the flu; or that we will never feel the touch of a dark spirit. Knowing our divine purpose gives us a point above disease to focus on, a goal, a signpost beyond illness and injury, a future health for which we can reach, and in reaching, grasp with God’s perfecting gifts of love and mercy. We are not abandoned to our sicknesses. Being ill—in body and soul—is never about being forsaken by God. This is our chance to surrender any allegiance to despair, any commitment to something or someone other than Christ. Being ill is the crisis of body and soul that tightens the ear to hear the Word preached, to hear the healing rebuke of Jesus. Now, follow the pattern: spread that healing Word, speak your purpose and gather the crowd around our Christ. We belong to him. We are his field and his co-workers. We are his purpose, his Body--wounded, healed, and finally perfected.

What Comes Out Matters

22nd Sun: Dt 4.1-2, 6-8; Jas 1.17-18, 21-22, 27; Mk 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital and Church of the Incarnation, Univ of Dallas

PODCAST!
Eat five fruits and vegetables daily. Drink six to eight 8 oz. glasses of water daily. Don’t skip breakfast. Eat protein and good carbs six times a day. Don’t eat after eight o’clock at night. “Fat-free” doesn’t mean “calorie-free”—read the label! Take smaller portions and chew slowly. Wear a tight belt at meals. Don’t eat alone. Green socks will distract you during meals. Eat left-handed. Stick grapefruit seeds behind your ears to rev-up your metabolism. Watch back to back episodes of the surgery channel while eating—especially when they do the eyes! Eat naked in front of a mirror. Eat with your hands. Let someone else feed you. But under no circumstances are you to allow someone else to feed you while eating naked in front of a mirror wearing green socks with grapefruit seeds stuck behind your ears! That’s just silly. And we don’t want to be silly about what we put into our bodies, do we?

We have our own food-based prohibitions, don’t we? Long lists of what we will and will not eat. Long lists of fatty foods, fried foods, sugary foods, animal-based foods, artificially sweetened foods, high-carb foods, foods made from refined flour, foods from politically suspect countries, foods from politically suspect regions of the country, foods from certain corporations, foods made by non-union workers or maybe made by union workers…all sorts of prohibitions that give breath and voice to the virtues we want to cultivate and the vices we want to kill. There is one list of forbidden foods we do not have, however—a list of naughty foods given to us by God. God says, “Graze freely and fairly and share with those who can’t.” Not a bestseller…but the rule effectively illustrates the point Jesus is making to the Pharisees and scribes.

Once again Jesus finds himself having to teach the teachers of the Law the first meaning of the Law. The scribes and Pharisees accuse Jesus and his disciples of violating the traditions of the elders when they eat without washing their hands. Essentially, the disciples are ignoring the purification rituals done before meals. Quoting Isaiah, Jesus accuses his opponents of ignoring the Father’s commandment to honor Him in their hearts. They are doing little more than offering “lip service,” literally, they are “serving God only with their lips” when they merely ritually wash their hands. It’s a show. To be seen. A show to be seen by those who expect public displays of piety, religious theatre in plain view.

In opposition to this, Jesus teaches: “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” This is not a simple reversal of conventional social values. Jesus isn’t “turning things upside down.” He is simply teaching the Law as it was given and showing now how it has matured: righteousness with God is a right relationship offered in love, accepted in total awe, and lived in the service of others. We are completed in God’s love and by God’s love as we use our God-given gifts to serve others. If you find yourself obsessed with the regulatory minutiae, the picayune procedure, the jots and tittles of public religiosity, you might want to consider again the passage from Isaiah that Jesus quotes to the Pharisees: “This people honors me with their lips but their hearts are far from me, in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.”

So, how do we honor God with our hearts and not just our lips? How do we worship Him in the true Spirit with love?

We hear in the letter of James: to honor God the Father with His Son through the Holy Spirit, we come to see that everything we have and everything we are is His gift to us. We come to see that He gave us birth by the word of truth, that we are knitted together with the every breath of truth and pushed out into the world graced as the firstfruits of His creation. We humbly welcome, we joyously receive the Word planted in us, that spirit of beauty and goodness that God completes in His love and that comes to save our souls. We are doers of this Word in the world not just hearers of it. We make His Word real, we give His word in us hands and feet, lips and tongues. We give His Word function, practicality, work, purpose, and finished goals. If His word remains in us unused, it will become a fragile thing easily broken by sin, quickly shattered by private doubt, or perhaps die from lack of charitable attention. And if we feed His Word nothing more than religiosity, mere ritual and mechanical prayer, or even worse, superstition dressed up as devotion, we risk blasphemy by using His name vainly, using His name to no purpose other than public show.

Pure religion, that is, a clean relationship with God is both interior and exterior, one leading the other and the other pushing the first: you serving others to serve God and you keep yourself undefiled by the world, unmoved by the prizes the world seeks after. Murder, theft, adultery, idolatry, folly, greed all come from within, all come from a heart darkened by a will untamed in truth and beauty, a heart closed to the Word planted in its muscle. To strengthen that Word, to bring it fresh blood and clean air, open your ears to hear, open your eyes to see; hear and see the Gospel, the whole Gospel of love that Christ preached—our perfection in obedience to the Father’s will, our completion as vigorous members of the Body, our growth as men and women in love with being servants to one another, and our joy in honoring Him who made us His people, His nation, His prophets and His priests.

To do him honor, purify your heart with a clean sacrifice of service, a spotless gift of unselfish work for someone who needs your hands for their own good. It is not enough that we carefully attend to the religious duties and the canonical obligations of being Catholics. We can certainly start there, but if we will mature beyond needing the spiritual training wheels of the Law, if we would worship the Lord in Spirit and in Truth, in the fullness of His revelation and His perfecting grace, we will seek Him, find, Him, and serve Him, for His greater glory, among those thrown out, cast off, abandoned, and shamed. If we will do Him honor as your Father and Lord, we will uncover His forgiving Word, reveal His love, and put His compassion to work for the weakest among us. On the cross, He made Himself the least among us to serve us. Now, to serve the least is to serve the best.

What goes in—food, ritual, Law—all matter but not finally. What comes out measures your soul, weighs your spirit against the promises you’ve made. Eating naked in front of a mirror takes some courage. Standing naked before the Lord…well, that takes more than courage; that takes trust…and bruises and skinned knees and dirty hands and a sunburn and some sweat. It also takes the humility to say without flinching: how may I serve?!

The moral obligation to be a well-prepared fool

21st Week OT (Fri):1 Cor 1.17-25 and Matthew 25.1-13
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, University of Dallas

PODCAST!
How did you come to the faith? What fool brought you to Christ and persuaded you to sacrifice you life for the cause of the Gospel? How did he or she do it? How did they catch you, seduce you to say yes to God? Have you really ever thought about the trip you’ve taken to this spot? Have you ever really contemplated the steps, the one after another steps that brought you here? You didn’t just land here, you know; you didn’t just tumble out of the sky, land on your feet, brush off and find yourself a Christian! If you haven’t given much thought to how you got here, I suggest you do. Start by asking yourself this question: what fool told me about Jesus?

Yes, I said “fool.” What fool told you about Jesus? Paul is clear in his letter to the Corinthians, “For since in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation to save those who have faith.” In other words, God, in His wisdom, decided to make Himself known to us in the foolish proclamation of the gospel, the foolish preaching of his disciples and not through the wisdom of the world. Those who are fools enough to believe the scandal of the cross, those brought to Life by the Holy Spirit, those whose mouths are stuffed with the Word—not a human eloquence but holy fluency—these are the ones who tell us about Jesus and we who believe their witness and have faith are saved. Not with wondrous signs. Not with worldly wisdom. But with a living, breathing faith that batters dark doubt and seduces the stoniest heart.

Who melted your icy refusal to listen to the Word? Who broke the seal on your lips, lips that now say AMEN and LORD? Who pushed you out of the darkness into the light? I ask b/c you need to give thanks. This is no so much about self-understanding as it is about lifting up the gift of gratitude and praise—given to us by God—and offering a sacrifice of thanksgiving for the fool who told you about Jesus. Let them benefit from a small offering of praise. You are here now b/c they were not afraid to speak the Word given to them by the Holy Spirit. Their courage struck the spark that set your soul ablaze.

Now it’s your turn. The five wise virgins are prepared for the coming of the Bridegroom. Patient, well-groomed, rehearsed, and eager, they wait for him and benefit immediately from their readiness. For us, being ready and willing to give witness to Christ in our lives is how we prepare for the Bridegroom, it is how we work for his arrival. Certainly a large part of this readiness for us is our academic preparation, the time and energy we spend developing the divine gift of our mind. Whether your preparation is theological, philosophical, scientific, biological, economic, artistic, or literary, you prepare to witness of the foolishness of the Cross so long as you prepare knowing and believing that what you study—the subject of your intellectual preparation—is a revelation of God from God to you, to us for our holy progress.

We are, you are morally obligated to prepare your mind to serve the Lord by assiduous study, by faithful attention to His revelation in all the arts and sciences that He has gifted you to investigate and learn, and you are obligated to share the fruits of this study with us so that we may see and hear His wisdom with you. Your witness as students and teachers is the witness of the disciple, the faithful scholar in the School of Charity, apprenticed to Christ—you are excited to learn and excited to teach.

Prepare yourself then to be the fool who tells some dark soul about Christ. Prepare yourself in the wisdom of the Cross to be the lips and tongue of the Lord’s saving Word.

Throw the bums out!

21st Week OT (Wed): 2 Thes 3.6-10, 16-18 and Matthew 23.27-32
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation

PODCAST!
Jesus to the Pharisees: Hypocrites! Whitewashed tombs! Full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth! You are evildoers, children of murderers, and hypocrites! So much for the pablamed nonsense that Jesus never condemns, that Jesus is always open to and accepting of every human failure. So much for the nancied notion that Jesus gently guides, sweetly persuades, and never, ever uses harsh words to correct error or call sin “Sin.”

Plainly, Jesus is perfectly capable and eagerly willing to bounce the stubborn Pharisees and scribes around a bit for their spiritual posing. Clearly, Jesus is perfectly capable and eagerly willing to lob a few “Bill O’Reily” grenades amongst his religious enemies. Obviously, Jesus is perfectly capable and eagerly willing to insult his opponents in order to startle them, anger them, stir them up, maybe even incite them to violence! Why? Why is he so ready, willing, and able to take these guys on with such offensive, alienating, and unhelpful rhetoric? That’s easy: he loves them.

And because he loves them he is willing to smack them around a little to make this devastating point: you are lying to yourselves and the rest of us when you say that you would not have killed yesteryear’s prophets; you are the children of those who murdered the Lord’s messengers, and you are, in fact, plotting even now to kill me! He loves them so he tells them what they will not believe. He loves them so he tells them the truth. Jesus’ “unhelpful” rhetoric, his “hurtful” speech is an instigation to repentance. And though his medicinal rant is delivered to the scribes and Pharisees, we hear it as well.

In his second letter to the church at Thessalonica, Paul writes: “We instruct you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to shun any brother who walks in a disorderly way and not according to the tradition they have received from us.” This is not the practice of “no harm, no foul” we’ve grown accustomed to the contemporary American church. This is not the anemic plea for endless dialogue that we hear these days when a brother or sister walks a disorderly way. This is not an instruction from Paul on how to set up processes for consultation on dissension or committees for discussion and feedback on reform. Rather, Paul is instructing the Thessalonians to turn out those who reject the identity of the church, those who refuse to be formed by the community of believers that they have joined voluntarily. So, throw them out and be done with it! Right?

Not quite. Teaching and preaching the truth in love is a ministry of patience. Yes, it is also a ministry of naming sin “Sin,” but it also a ministry naming grace “Grace.” And it is first and always first a ministry of proclamation, the good spiritual work of telling every man, woman, and child by word and deed that the Lord has invited them to live life with Him and that they are given every chance, every opportunity to perfect His love by exercising their divine gifts for others. Patience and charity, then, are the good habits of seeing the Biggest Possible Picture and letting God be God in His own good time.

Those among us who vandalize the tradition, who walk a disorderly way but insist on doing it among us can be hounded, scolded, griped at and about, argued with, proven wrong, and even physically removed. But the question remains: what have they heard and seen from you, for us, in the way of patience, in the way of charity, in the way of medicinal help? Those who walk apart will do so sometimes despite us or even because of us, but why will they return to us, why will they order their lives and come back to this handed-on adventure of loving God and being loved by Him? Will any of them point to you, to me and say, “Because of him, because of her I am back”?

Jesus rakes the scribes and Pharisees because he loves them. He rakes them to wake them up. He wakes them up to repentance, not punishment, to cure and to healing. We are to be doctors of the soul not judges of conscience, healers of the Body of Christ, not jailers for the Church.

Law, License, Hypocrisy

Beheading of John the Baptist: 2 Thes 2.1-3, 14-17 and Matt 23.23-26
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!
NB. I liked this homily at 5am this morning. Now, I dunno...it seems a little confused to me. Too many peices competing for too little space and time. (Fr. Philip @ 12.20pm)

Always in our struggles for holiness we are tempted to weigh too heavily on the side of the Law or on the side of License; we become unbalanced, top-heavy or bottom-heavy, and we either fall over or become immobile. The most obvious indication that we’ve given to much time and energy to one or the other—Law or License—is the presence of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is evidence for all to see that we have succumb to the temptation to take the quick and easy way out of our spiritual struggle and simply elect to either idolize the Law or idolize License. Hypocrisy is not about failing to live up the standards you truly believe in. Hypocrisy is the failure to apply to yourself the standards you apply to everyone else.

Jesus blasts the Pharisees as hypocrites because they pay very careful attention to the minutiae of the Law while ignoring the more difficult, the “weightier,” things of the Law. He accuses them of straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel, of being self-indulgent pirates. Blind to their own hypocrisy—as we often are—they cannot be reliable spiritual guides for others. The Pharisees have become top-heavy with the Law and they tumble easily at the word of a righteous man.

The Thessalonians seem to be dealing with another problem: a lack of direction, a failure in local leadership, and perhaps, some hypocrisy resulting from a bottom-heavy preference for the rule of License. Paul has to warn this Christian community not to jump at very “spirit” that claims authority to reveal secrets or get all wound up over some new letter or new gospel that shows up at their assemblies.

License rules here b/c the community is ignoring or even rebelling against legitimate ecclesial authority. Either some the Thessalonians themselves or recent converts from other places are trying to grab power and influence by appealing to new revelations about Christ, new revelations about salvation. Using false letters and false spirits, they want to undermine authentic apostolic authority with appeals to that same apostolic authority in order to set themselves up as apostolic authorities! Hypocrites!

So, where’s the balance for us btw Law and License? The balance is Freedom. And it’s expression is found in this letter from Paul: brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught; stand firm against false teaching, that is, teachings that clearly contradict the story of our salvation history; stand firm against attempts by apostolic posers to lay claim to Christ’s authority and lead us over a spiritual cliff; hold fast to the truth of the faith as spirits of dissent, disappointment, and anger wash over the church; hold fast to the beauty and goodness that the Father has revealed to us in His Son and in one another. Open your hearts to be fortified against the picayune naggings of legalistic bookkeeping spirits whom you imagine tally your sins and crank out a lengthy bills. Open your minds to be fortified against the corrosive waves of libertine spirits whom you know snatch at your reason and dissolve it in pretty of vats of sophist potions and stir it with the soft-headed rhetoric of relativism.

Freedom—the balance btw Law and License—is the gift of the ability to follow Christ to the Father and become perfect in His love. We are freed from sin, not freed to sin. When we preach the truth of the faith—even when we fail to live up to that truth—we hold fast and stand firm, avoiding hypocrisy.

To preach anything else but the truth of the faith is an exercise in self-indulgent pirating—stealing from the blind their chance to see, stealing from the deaf their chance to hear.

Idols eating dirt

St. Augustine: I John 4.7-16 and Matthew 23.8-12
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!
We’ve all had friends who work themselves into a sweat trying not to conform, trying not to be “normal.” One of my friends in my pre-Catholic days regularly outdid the most extravagant efforts of most pretentious bohemians. I won’t go into details…suffice it to say that her non-conformity involved multiple piercings, odd hair colors, lots of black clothing, and the imprudent use of peacock feathers. ‘Nuff said. When I would gently prod her about the extremes of her attention-seeking public theatre, she would defend herself by saying something like, “I hate those little 100% cotton suburban robots and their Mary Kay face paint and their stupid little lives. I can’t be them!” I never failed to point out that despite her protests to the contrary she spent a great deal of time letting these suburban robots master her life. They controlled her by example, an anti-example, perhaps, but she looked to them for instruction on how NOT to live and therefore gave them total control over how she actually lived. They were for her idols to both worship and destroy.

This is the problem Jesus tackles. Don’t call anyone on earth your Master or Teacher and don’t be called Master or Teacher. This isn’t about titles of respect, honorifics. It’s about who you will look to for instruction. Who you will follow. Who you will obey. And it’s about how others will come to follow you. How others will come to obey you. You will look to the Christ for instruction. You will follow and obey Jesus. And if you will lead, you will serve. Not dominate. Not control. But serve.

Those who put themselves on altars—or allow themselves to be put there by their followers—always find themselves eating dirt in the end. Why? Idols are caricatures. Bad imitations. And worse examples. The Psalms tell us that those who make idols and worship them end up just like them: with eyes that cannot see, noses that cannot breathe, hearts that do not beat. And since it is the job of an idol to fall, idol worshippers end up in the dirt with their god. Whether our idols are religious leaders, politicians, Hollywood stars, athletes, or the people we hate to love, they will fall; they will fail and we along with them.

If you would lead, you will serve. And you will do so in humility, in the full knowledge that everything you have, everything you are is a gift from the Father to you for you to give to others for His glory. We are given our lives by the Father through His Only-Begotten Son. As John says in the epistle: “In this is love”—the gift of our very existence is an act of love—“not that we have loved God”—not that we have done anything to merit this gift of existence—“but that he loved us”—but that He willed that we exist, that He loved us into life. And gave us each gifts of service so that “his love is brought to perfection in us.”

Lead us by serving us. Teach us in word and deed. Show us the humility that the gifts of God require for their perfection in you. Love us b/c the Father is love. And loved us on a cross to His only Son’s death. Make no idols to self-sufficiency or secular power or professional achievement or athletic prowess or intellectual ability; make no idols to poetic genius or scientific invention or musical virtuosity or artistic skill or technical know-how. Do not make idols of the Father’s gifts. Rather perfect those gifts in service. Call no one and no thing Master or Teacher but Christ. And do not be called Master or Teacher but servant—well-gifted by the Father, fully humbled, and worked into a sweat, ready to serve.

Rattle them bones

20th Week OT: Ezekiel 37.1-14 and Matthew 22.34-40
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!
Prophesy over these bones! Prophesy to the spirit, prophesy, son of man! The people of God have been saying, “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, and we are cut off.” The people of God have been saying, “Our Church is in ruins, our priests are lost, and we aimlessly wander a new desert without certain Truth, without sure teaching, without good Christian example.” Therefore, prophesy over these bones! Prophesy to the spirit, prophesy, son of man and say over these bones, “Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! Thus says the Lord: I will bring spirit into you, that you may come to life[…]O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them[…]I have promised, and I will do it, says the Lord.”

And surely He did: the birth, life, suffering, death, and resurrection of His Only Son for our redemption fulfilled this promise, bringing His people back to Him, making us a nation of prophets, priests, and kings, making us a holy family, participants in His Divine Life through His Son. And yet, with Ezekiel, we can walk the plains of the Church and see in every direction dry bones, members of the Body dying and drying out, worrying themselves raw with scandal, dissension, contests over how we will pray together, pitched battles over who and what counts as “Catholic,” and who has power and who doesn’t and on and on. Sometimes my own hands ache with anxious twisting and I think my bones will dry out worrying. Surely, our hope is lost, and we are cut off.

Thus says the Lord, “O my people[…]I will put my spirit in you that you may live!” And that spirit, the Holy Spirit, is the love that the Father and the Son have for one another, the love that breathed the Word over the void: “Let there be Light!”; the Word spoken to Moses and Aaron and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the Word spoken to the prophets—“Thus says the Lord!”; the Word spoken to Mary by an angel; the Word conceived in her womb and given to the world; the Word that knocked Paul off his horse; the Word that silenced the naysayers who ridiculed Jesus; the Word that healed the blind, the lame, the deaf, the demonically possessed, and brought the exiles home; the Word that defies Roman law, suffers Roman violence, dies on a Roman cross, and bleeds for the salvation of Rome and Jerusalem and Athens; the Word that breathes its last across the world, rips the temple veil, and re-creates the whole of creation—a New Man, a New Covenant, a new image and a new likeness.

If we will participate in this creating and recreating Word, this breath of God and the love of the Blessed Trinity, we will hear this commandment with ears eager to obey, eager to listen: You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, your soul and your mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. You shall. Not a suggestion. Not a wistful hope. You shall. That’s an imperative. A command. And it means that we hold in our hearts, our souls, our minds the whole of the law and the prophets, the salvation history of a holy people—not drying bones and wasting flesh, not hearts flabby with worry or stretched thin by anger, not minds clouded with alien philosophies and speculative theological junk, but hearts and minds eternally abandoned to God, just thrown away to His will.

Can these bones come to life? Ezekiel answers, “Lord, you alone know that.” We can answer, “Yes! Even dry bones have hope in Christ’s love. Our dry bones can love since Christ has loved us first.”

Sonship of Jesus, Queenship of Mary

Queenship of Mary: Isaiah 9.1-6 and Luke 1.26-38
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!
One week from her assumption into glory, we celebrate the Blessed Mother’s crowning as the Queen of Heaven. Why? Why do we call her “Queen of Heaven” and why do we celebrate the event?

Every liturgical celebration of the Blessed Mother is always a celebration of her Son first. I mean, we celebrate our Mother’s conception, her birth, her life, her motherhood, her suffering and her assumption into glory always in reference to her mission and ministry in bearing the Word into the world, in giving birth to the Christ for the salvation of all creation. As the handmaid of the Lord, we honor her as the Blessed Virgin. As Jesus’ mother we honor her as our Mother in faith. With Christ her Son, the King, we honor her as Queen. She is Handmaid, Mother, and Queen because Jesus is Lord, Son, and King.

Mary no more needs our honor than the Father needs our praise. Our desire to praise the Father is His gift to us for our growth in holiness. We have nothing to contribute to His perfection; we have nothing that He lacks b/c He lacks nothing. We honor Mary, a creature like us, though lifted above us, for her fidelity to the will of the Father in becoming the Mother of His Word. But our praise adds nothing to her glory, nothing to her honor in heaven. To praise Mary is to ignite in us the desire to imitate her fidelity, to follow the path she has blazed for us to her Son. As a people who once walked in darkness, we have seen a great light and that Great Light is the Prince of Peace.

Following our Mother in faith to the Great Light, Jesus Christ, is first a matter of surrender, surrendering our will to the Will of He created us in His image and likeness, surrendering who we pretend to be without Him so that we become who we are made to be with Him. The creation-rattling fiat of a Jewish peasant girl is exactly how we come to the Father: “May it be done to me according to your word.” Mary is Queen of Heaven b/c she was first the Handmaid of the Lord.

In the encyclical establishing this memorial, Ad caeli Reginam, Pope Pius XII wrote: “We are instituting a feast so that all may recognize more clearly and venerate more devoutly the merciful and maternal sway of the Mother of God. We are convinced that this feast will help to preserve, strengthen and prolong that peace among nations which daily is almost destroyed by recurring crises”(ACR 51). Right now, this is the greatest reason to honor our Mother, to offer her praise for her fiat. Can we watch the evening news without wondering if we will destroy ourselves in waves of avarice and hatred, endless repetitions of domination and vengeance, and the idolatrous worship of violence, of terror and war?

Celebrating our Mother, honoring her sacrifice, praising her gift of her life for her Son—these will get us moving on the way to peace, but it is when we follow her in her surrender to the Father’s will that we achieve the true peace of Christ, the perfect peace of absolute freedom in righteousness.

Mary brought into the world the One who broke the slavers’ yoke, the taskmasters’ rod. We start this day by honoring her surrender as a handmaid and her exaltation as Queen. Can we live the day and end it doing more than giving her honor? Can we repeat, loud and clear: “I am the servant of the Lord! Let it be done to me according to His Word!”

Living wisely on the Bread of Heaven

20th Sunday OT: Prov 9.1-6; Ephesians 5.15-20; and John 6.51-58
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Paul Hospital, Dallas, TX

PODCAST!
What does it mean for a Christian to live foolishly? It could mean living outside the church’s care, outside the historic embrace of the living tradition that guards and hands on the priceless arts of our faith’s lived-wisdom—the stories, the teachings, the creeds that we use to become saints. Living foolishly could mean buying tickets on one of the many inevitable cultural train wrecks that will litter our social landscape soon enough—the dilution of personal responsibility in a culture crazy for genetic causes; the multiplication of atomistic souls perpetually jacked into IPods, laptops, and cell phones; the ease with which death comes to be a reasonable reaction to daily inconveniences. Living foolishly could be something as “old-fashioned” as living in sin, living in defiance of the Father’s will for our lives, denying divine providence; or maybe something like living a life of unhealthy risk, constant stress and trauma, living outside rational deliberation, on the edge of chance and chaos.

We can live foolishly a hundred different ways, a thousand! But only one way to live offers us wisdom. Paul writes, “Watch carefully how you live, not as foolish persons but as wise[…]do not continue in ignorance, but try to understand what is the will of the Lord.” Living in ignorance of the Lord’s will for your life is what it means to live foolishly, to live without wisdom, without His guidance and care. A fool believes he wisely maps his life by considering all contingencies, covering all possibilities, insuring against all inevitabilities, but leaving the Father’s will off the map the fool guarantees that the biggest possible picture, the grandest scale of his life-campaign is missed entirely. Without God, without His grace we are nothing. Literally, “no thing;” we are not.

And here is where the arts of our faith’s lived-wisdom, handed on to us, are the most help. If you are Catholic, you simply cannot plead ignorance of the spiritual life. You cannot say with any integrity, with any expectation of being seriously believed: “I didn’t know about the life of wisdom! I didn’t know I had access to the treasures of our tradition!” If you make it to weekly Mass, you already have access to the priceless pearl of the Father’s revelation in the proclamation and preaching of the Word. You already have ready access to a communal life of prayer that lifts up praise and thanksgiving to God and petitions the Father with the indomitable intercession of the community of saints. You already have access to the living bread, the flesh and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, given in sacrifice for us all and eaten at his command for our growth in holiness. You already have an open door to heaven, a cleared path to your final union with God, a greased shoot straight up to the Throne!

Living foolishly with this much wisdom just hanging around is near suicidal!

When you attend Mass, properly disposed, you eat and drink of the Lord’s body and blood, taking into your body and bloody the substance of the One who suffered, died, and rose again for our everlasting healing. True food, true drink he remains in us and we in him and we come, at our end, to Life because of Him. The foolish call what we do today—this sacrifice, this familial meal of his body and blood—they call it a “mere symbol” or a “simple memorial” without objective effect, without salvific consequences. Jesus says, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life[…]the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.”

My life, your life is caused—granted, given, gifted—by the life of Christ in this sacrifice of the Mass—not mere symbol, not simple remembrance, but Real Presence and efficacious sacrifice—the folding of history by the power of the Holy Spirit so that Then touches Now and the one death for many on the cross is Here for our thanksgiving and praise. We do not sacrifice Christ again—over and over each Mass—but re-present, make present again his single sacrifice of the cross, our only means of salvation.

The will of the Father for us, our life in wisdom, is that we live together praising his Name, eating at His table, forgiving one another, outdoing one another in charitable acts, teaching and preaching the truth of the faith in love, witnessing to His mercy by seeking justice, and, quoting Paul, by “singing and playing to the Lord in our hearts, giving thanks always and for everything” in the name of Jesus our Risen Lord!

Yoked to Love

St. John Eudes: Ephesians 3.14-19 and Matthew 11.25-30
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!
We have two priestly prayers. Two prayers to the Father offered for the benefit of others by Paul the Apostle and Christ our only High Priest. Mediating between God’s people and God Himself, these two priests stand at the limit of their worlds, holding each fully, giving testimony to what will be out of what already is.

Paul, in his ministry as apostle, uses his prayer to draw the Ephesian church into the fullest possible in-dwelling of the Spirit, casting his people confidently and freely into the hands of Christ, calling upon them the sure knowledge of Christ’s love for them and looking well past the immediate moment toward their final end in a love that outshines, extravagantly exceeds mere knowing. They are, and we are, to be filled with the fullness of God!

Christ, in his ministry as Messiah and High Priest, uses his prayer to publicly praise his Father for the unique revelation of His power and mercy to the poor in spirit; speaking over the heads of the wise and learned, the Father opens the veil to show His face to the childlike—He “hands over” to His Son “all things” and Jesus announces that no one may come to know the Father except through the exclusive, the final revelation of His Anointed One, the Christ. And lest this appear to be a onerous condition, an illiberal prerequisite, Christ turns his prayer to the people and eases any anxiety about the weight of his singular Messianic revelation: “…my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” Why? B/c he’s done all the heavy lifting in the work of our redemption.

Paul prays that the Ephesians will be given the strength to understand the “breadth and length and height and depth” of Christ’s love. He prays that, in essence, that their Spirit-gifted understanding may be so complete, so completely absorbing that what is left of the human heart and the human mind is God. God alone. Love alone. Deus caritas est. God is love. This revelation of divine charity, the Father’s love for His children, is made singularly by His Christ, only by the Son, for the ultimate purpose of accomplishing in us our redemption. Along the way, we learn from his teaching and his example what it means to put on Christ’s yoke, to be guided in the rows of righteousness, to be lead into all the possibilities of peace and humility.

These priestly prayers put us squarely before the Father—ready or not!—to be taught the “hidden things.” If we come as the wise and learned to take on the yoke, that is, if we come to the field filled with information, stuffed with worldly wisdom, Christ’s yoke will only feel that much heavier. The childlike, the poor in spirit, come with a docility that radiates a readiness to be taught, an admission of holy ignorance yearning to be cured. (I can witness to the fact that this is not an attitude academics take on easily!) But it is exactly this meekness that imitates the Christ in his acceptance of the Father’s will for his life. Obedience makes his sacrifice on the cross possible and makes it efficacious. An unwilling sacrifice blesses nothing.

Ask yourself: what conditions have you placed on your acceptance of Christ’s yoke? What prerequisites must Jesus fulfill before you assent to his teaching?

What can be lighter than a meek heart yoked to Love?

The Popular Kids

St. Jane Francis de Chantal: Prov 31.10-13, 19-20, 30-31; Mark 3.31-35
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, Serra Club Mass

PODCAST!
I won’t ask how many of you were popular in high school! I was fortunate enough to find myself slugging through high school at a time in our culture when we were all challenged to perfect postmodern irony—the glib rejoinder to hard reality, the smart-alecky twist to every serious situation. We were also challenged to match pink/green/blue/yellow plaid pants with burgundy and purple Izod button-downs…but that’s a different homily! My point is that I was reasonably popular in high school b/c I was gifted by my parents with a sense of humor, a sharp enough tongue, and something like the ability to seem set back from it all, away, removed somehow from the fray, being at once engaged and separated. At the risk of sounding too therapy-ish, I wanted to be a cool kid but being a cool kid meant being distant, untouchable. To be included was to be self-excluded, and ironically, welcomed.

Among the first hints from Jesus that his gospel will not be limited to the Jews is this short passage from Mark. Teaching a small circle of disciples, Jesus is interrupted by the circle with the news that Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters are outside asking after him. Rather than jumping up to welcome his family into the circle, Jesus takes this awkward moment to demonstrate a key point of his gospel message: salvation is no longer about who your family is, no longer about one’s tribe, no longer about connections, money, race, gender, or social class. Salvation is about hearing the Word and doing the will of God.

He asks the circle: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” I wonder if we can hear that question w/o irony nowadays—I mean, can we hear that question w/o hearing an inflection, a rhetorical lilt? We can speculate that Jesus has just completed a homily on what it means to be a hearer of the Word and a doer of the Father’s will. To hear the Word and then do the will of the Father is to become a member of God’s house, a householder in His tribe, a beloved son or daughter in His family.

The question about who his mother and brothers are isn’t a glib question masquerading as a “moral lesson.” It is a test question, a convenient chance to say, “Well, just as I was saying a few minutes ago, brothers and sisters, who indeed are my mother, my brothers and my sisters?” Like any good teacher, he jumps at a chance to make a concrete point: “Here you all are! Right here! Because whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

It is the will of God that we be happy. That we be happy in Him. That we find our end, our reach, our peace, our life in His Way. Created by Him to be seduced by His love for us, we are prodded, quite nearly dragged to Him by desire—an erotic pressure, a craving barrenness for His love. We are most perfect as ourselves when we hear His Word—the Word of scripture, the Word of creation, and His unique and final Word, Jesus Christ—when we hear this Word and do His will for us.

There is no irony in our faith, no glib condescension, or knowing winking at ill-kept secrets. Who are the popular kids? Who’s in? Who gets to sit in the inner circle and catch the fireside teachings of the Messiah? Whoever does the will of the Father. And here you all are—the Lord’s mothers, fathers, his brothers and sisters. Here you all are!

The BVM: Witness, Apostle, Preacher, Queen

The Assumption of Mary: Rev 11.19, 12.1-6, 10; I Cor 15.20-27; Luke 1.39-56
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Mary the Virgin Church,

PODCAST!
The small metal crucifix I wore on the outside of my shirt drew stares. It was something foreign, inexplicable, vaguely pagan to my Baptist classmates. The bent catechism given to me by my grandmother, a life-long Methodist, was ever ready in my back pocket, a easy reach and whip of the wrist to answer the ridicule and the curiosity of my friends. Once, during a debate with my best friend about the necessity of baptism for salvation, the catechism became a weapon. When I tried to show my friend the relevant passages in the catechism about baptism, she grabbed it from me and whacked me upside the head with it!

After some few days of silence on the subject, we resumed our debate. But as a high school convert who knew little to nothing about the faith, my witness was weak, sputtering, mostly protests against anti-Catholic stereotypes and bigoted myths. The experience of being Catholic in community would come some fifteen years later. After a long, difficult stint in the Episcopal Church and after years of studying the various “-ism’s” of postmodernism in an English PhD program, at 35 I answered a call, heard as a teenager, to serve the Body of Christ as a priest. But I still needed to learn how to witness to the faith, how to be an apostle worthy of the message. School is still in session.

The assumption of our Blessed Mother into heaven is a promise kept, a vow made good by our Father. Marking this day not only reminds us of the promise of the resurrection, the promise of eternal life, it also brings us back to our baptisms and gives us a few thumps on the head to remind us that we have vowed to be witnesses to the gospel, apostles of the Word—to be those who go out and give testimony in word and deed to the power, to the mercy, to the love of Christ.

The assumption of Mary into heaven is a consequence of her obedience, her YES, her faithfulness. Elizabeth says to Mary, “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” What is the engine of our witness, what pushes us out there to speak the Truth in Love? We believe what the Lord has spoken to us will be fulfilled. If we don’t believe this, we need to shut up.

If we are not witnessing to the Word, giving testimony to the power of Christ’s love and mercy, then what are we witnessing to? What is it that sits on your heart, dwells at the center of your soul, driving you to your chosen end? There is a supermarket of attractive alternatives out there. Have no fear that you will bored with the options.

On aisle two for Catholics frightened by orthodoxy we have a wide selection of Gnostic heresies, Greek inspired mystery cults updated for the postmodern Catholic soul—cryptic, kabbalahistic devices to plumb the wells of egotistical fantasy and distract the heart with sweet affirmations and pretty lies. On aisle six we have cases and cases of discounted secularism for those Catholics embarrassed by the transcendent—boxes of materialist dogmatism, doctrinaire scientism, and rigid moral relativism. Buy two and get a case of Political Correctness free! Then in the meat section we have for those Catholics tempted by worldly triumphalism fatty slabs of nationalism, militarism, partisanship, shelves loaded with the bloody idols of violence and death and oppression, plenty of raw hatred and scraps of vengeance for sale. Finally, on the candy aisle we have religious syncretism for those Catholics who think they are excluded by Tradition and Scripture—colorful bags of chocolate covered faux Native American rituals, creamy blends of Buddhist-Christian prayer wheels, honey-roasted Jesus avatars and bodhisattvas, and nutty Mother Goddess womanrites with glow in the dark Gaia rosaries! OK, a bit of fun…but these are the eclectic fascisms of hearts that remain unconvinced by God’s truth, unawed by His Beauty, and chilled by His Goodness.

What does your heart desire? What do you want? To what do you witness?

Elizabeth greets Mary, calling her blessed b/c she heard the Word spoken to her, believed that the Lord’s promise would be fulfilled, and in radical trust, gave herself to the keeping and birthing of the Word for the world. She is the Lord’s mother in history and our mother in faith. She is also an apostle of the gospel, a preacher of the Word, and in her maternal care for our Lord, a prophet—one chosen by God to show His people how to live in righteousness with the advent of His Kingdom. She is a sign of the Church and for the Church, a blessed creature given to a life of showing her Son to the world. She is who we should be now and who we will be eventually if we believe on our Father’s Word, witness to His healing mercy, and flourish in His grace to our perfection.

And I ask again: what does your heart desire? What do you want? To what do you witness? In her Magnificat-hymn, her homily of praise and thanksgiving to God, Our Blessed Mother witnesses to the crowding generations who will call her blessed, holding up for us the great things done for her by the Almighty; she witnesses to the mercy that flows from a proper awe of His glory, the strength of his justice; she witnesses to His love of the poor and His contempt of the proud and the mighty; she witnesses to His care of the hungry, His help for His promised people, and His ageless fidelity to Abraham and all his children. Our Blessed Mother’s heart desires the Spirit of the Lord; she finds food for her deepest hunger in His service, and with gratitude pours out a lasting witness, a testimony for the generations: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord!”

Perhaps the Assumption is not so much about what we have always known and always believed—that God took Mary body and soul into heaven—perhaps the Assumption is more about what we often need some goading to do: to believe that the Word of the Lord to us will be fulfilled, to believe His promises, and in this belief, this trust, offer our promised witness, honor our baptismal vows to be Christs in the world! If our Blessed Mother is who we should be now and who we will be eventually, then we will be prepared—intellectually, physically, spiritually, sacramentally—well-prepared to stand in the public square facing down the temptations of materialism, Gnosticism, relativism, violent nationalism, all the temptations that Good Catholics wrestle with, and we will proclaim the greatness of the Lord, rejoice in our Savior, bless His Holy Name, and refuse, always refuse, to offer worship to the idols of the culture.

What does your heart desire? What do you want? To what do you witness?

What do you need from the Lord to fulfill your promise to give Him witness? What strength do you need to weaken the temptations of a culture seemingly bent on social suicide? What gift can God give you to move you to offer Him praise and thanksgiving without ceasing? What do you need to bear His Word?

What will get you ready to be Christ for others?