Happy Priesthood Sunday

Today is PRIESTHOOD SUNDAY! Be sure to thank your Pastor for all his hard work. . .wouldn't hurt to slip him a $20 on the way out the door! :-)

Will you be humble or kitty poo?

30^th Sunday OT: Sirach 35.12-18; 2 Tim 4.6-8, 16-18; Luke 18.9-14
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul Hospital and Church of the Incarnation

[Click Podcast Player to listen]

The self-righteous Pharisee brags about his prayer life, his almsgiving, praying to himself in the temple area: “O God, thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous…” If the Pharisee were magically transported to Dallas in 2007, he might come to church and pray something almost exactly like our first-century Pharisee; or he might pray something like this: “O Parent, thank you for calling me to help you live your dream for me; thank you that I am not like these other people—theologically unenlightened, politically inactive, carnivorous and ecologically ignorant, wasting time with devotionals and sacramental pieties; thank you that I am not these others—non-inclusive, prejudiced, rigid in my thinking, closed to the spirit of the day.” Self-righteousness is sold in a variety of packages, under a number of different brand names. Surely we can be self-righteous in lauding our faux piety, our public displays of sanctity. We can also be deeply, terribly self-righteous in patting ourselves on the back for our self-serving acts of enlightened politics, social justice, and “work for the poor.” Lobbing Zip-Loc bags full of fake blood at George Bush’s motorcade is as self-righteous and attention-seeking as throwing yourself on the floor in front of the Blessed Sacrament during public Adoration and wailing for your sins. Both are great performances for an audience. Both produce piety for consumption. Both call attention to behavior as a way of affirming belief. And both can be all about me and my need for recognition. What distinguishes SELF-righteousness from GOD-righteousness is the claim I make about the source of my righteousness.

At first glance, Paul, writing to Timothy, sounds very much like the Pharisee from Luke’s gospel: I am poured like a libation; MY departure is near; I have fought well, I have finished the race; I have kept the faith; MY crown of righteousness awaits ME; no one came to defend ME, everyone deserted ME. I, I, I, me, me, me. Look at what I did, am doing, will do. It’s all about ME! You can almost hear Paul, the former Pharisee, praying out loud in the temple area: “Thank you, God, that I am not like THEM!” So, what about Paul’s apparently attention-seeking confession is God-righteous rather than merely self-righteous? He freely admits, several times, “…the Lord stood by me and gave me strength…I was rescued from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil threat and [He] will bring me to His heavenly kingdom.” And the kicker, the cinch on Paul’s God-righteous prayer: “To Him be glory forever and ever. Amen!” Clearly, publicly, eagerly Paul gives full credit, full attention to the Lord. Not his own unaided efforts. Not his own good works. Not even his meager contribution to the ministry of his witness. But to God does he loudly give thanks and praise: “[It is] the Lord, the just judge, [who] will reward me on that day…” Only him? Paul will be the only one rewarded? No. He goes on to give God thanks for rewarding “all who have longed for [God’s] appearance.” And not only that but he forgives those who deserted him in difficult times.

Because we must cooperate with God’s graces in order to grow in righteous, it becomes all too easy for us to fall into the trap of believing that we are loved by God because of our good work. God loves us as our pay for doing good. When we have accumulated enough Love Credit in payment for “being good,” we are saved from Hell and whatever change is left over goes to someone else’s salvation. The nasty corollary of this lie is that we come to believe quite easily that the more good work we do, the more righteous we are. And it is not a huge leap then for us to come to believe that we do all these good works b/c of our own innate goodness, our natural kindness and compassion. There is no Bigger Lie in Christendom. Jesus says quite clearly, “I tell you, the [tax collector] went home justified, not the [Pharisee]; for whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” The Pharisee believes himself to be righteous as a result of his own good works. While the tax collector stands before God and prays, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” And that is where we find our righteousness, our rightness with God: His mercy and His mercy alone. We are made just, saved, redeemed by nothing other than God’s freely chosen act of making us just, of saving us, of redeeming us. We don’t deserve it. We can’t earn it. All we can do is accept or reject it and behave accordingly. Good works then are those works that result from our experience of the divine in God’s gift of Himself to us—in the sacraments, in prayer, in one another. Like Paul, our response is to pour ourselves out in sacrifice, to give ourselves over to others wholly and without condition, to love as God Himself loves. No easy thing. No simple matter of passion or sentiment.

Perhaps the most direct route to understanding what it means for us to love one another—and I mean here the “love of the righteous” not the sappy passion of telenovellas and romance novels—the most direct route of understanding charity is to understand its shadow: apathy—the state of “not-loving.” You might think that hate is the opposite of love. No. Hate is its own kind of passion. The opposite of love is apathy. Not loving, not caring, failing to desire the best, to will the best for another. Apathy is spiritually dangerous precisely b/c there is nothing here to convert, nothing there to turn around. Hate can be converted. Envy can be turned around. Apathy is cold, desolate, malignant. Its center is a dead heart of black ice. And when it motivates the body and soul of a child of God to act, those actions are predictably destructive. A heart devoid of love gleefully pronounces judgment on others, quickly trying, convicting, and executing offenders on little or no evidence; such a heart looks at the spiritually weak with dead eyes, seeing only fault and lack of good will; such a heart loathes true piety, God’s justice, and any authority but its own; such a heart beats against the Body of the Church, building its own altars, its own tabernacles, its own scriptures, honoring no one who walks in the way of its self-righteous self-importance. The apathetic heart is its own script, its own stage, its own star, and its own critic. And like any good prima donna imagines itself to be beautiful, well-loved, and always right in its convictions.

GOD-righteous love is antithetical to this monster. The charitable heart is painfully aware of it shortcomings, its lacks and needs—the truth of our faith freely flows through its muscles. Such a heart yearns for company, wants to be corrected in the faith, longs for holiness through obedience to the Word and the Church. A heart governed by love wants to be wanted, needs to be needed, seeks out the sinful so as to be of use to them in their working toward God. The loving heart never compromises the true, the good, or the beautiful for the impermanencies of the half-truth, the so-so, or the merely functional. Finally, the heart filled with God-righteous love never exalts itself but constantly gives thanks to God, pointing always to the Father, His Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Our self-righteousness can take the form of public liturgical pieties or public political pieties; private acts of religious judgment or private acts of secular judgment. Laying claim to righteousness based on my deeds, my words, my thoughts is the surest way to separate myself from the only source of true rightness. If you will be rescued from the lion’s mouth, cry out to God for rescue. You can run. You can hide. But the lion is faster and sneakier. It is far better to end up humbled than it is to end up in the kitty litter.

Jingle bells, jingle bells...NO Scrooges, please

The PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Wish List has been updated!

Now featuring New & Improved, Better Tasting, 100% RDA of Critical Realism. . .the sensible Christian's defense against the PoMo Virus (French strain).

Hey, look! Christmas is only two months away. . .hehehehehehe. . .hey, give me a break! If Wal-Mart can start putting out Christmas decorations in September, I can start hinting for gifts the last week of October. . .

Ummmmm. . .tasty!

29^th Week OT(F): Romans 7.18-25 and Luke 12.54-59
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation

[NB. Not recorded just yet...]

The classroom is empty. Again. Third day in a row. I walk to the departmental office and spend about fifteen minutes with the secretary trying to figure out why my students—all 320 of them in nine courses—are not coming to class. Her English is as bad as my Chinese. Finally, she takes me into the hallway and points at a small chalkboard and says, “Away, away.” Apparently, the beautifully rendered pictographs— some resembling row boats on a river of bamboo and others complex computational formulae—apparently these explain to me that my students are in Shanghai for a week, practicing their English on unsuspecting American tourists. I am illiterate and therefore incapable of acting according to the signs.

My failure as a reader of Chinese pictographs was (and still is) a matter of ignorance. I just don’t know how to do translate Chinese. The multitudes facing Jesus are in a slightly different predicament. They can read the signs shown them, properly interpreting and translating the cloud formations and wind temperature to predict correctly upcoming weather conditions. But they will not to translate and interpret properly the signs Jesus has given them, signs that point to his identity as their long-awaited Messiah. For Jesus, this is a matter of their hypocrisy rather than their ignorance.

How are these “illiterate” people being hypocritical? First, they are clamoring after Jesus, asking for sign after sign to prove that he is who he says he is. Each sign seems to demand another until he yells at them exasperated: “You generation of vipers! No sign will be given you but the sign of Jonah!” Their calls for more signs is not a desire for certainty but a lust for spectacle. Second, if their “illiteracy” is willful, that is, if they are merely pretending ignorance of the significance of Jesus’ signs, then they are indeed hearing the Word but failing to welcome the Word into their lives. And, third, and probably most frustrating to Jesus, is that their hypocrisy is an outright denial of their prophetic heritage as a priestly people. The observant Jews in the crowd have celebrated the Passover annually and know that their people await the coming of the Messiah. They know the signs. They know what to look for with Christ’s coming. Yet, still they clamor for more miracles, more evidence, more and better theater.

Paul helps us understand this a little better: “…if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me…when I want to do right, evil is at hand.” Here we have a common, human experience of confronting our disobedience: we know the right thing to do, but we choose not to do it. Evil is at hand. Not an external, demonic force but an internal desire to have our own way contra God’s will for us. Repulsed by what we are called to do in God’s will, we instead wait for another sign, clamor for yet another showing, a tastier, prettier warning.

Though we may empathize with our ancestors here, it is too late for us to feign illiteracy! We are well beyond the moment of convincing that Jesus is who he says he is. We do not have the luxury of leisurely, willful doubt. Paul, the miserable one, asks in his misery: “Who will deliver me from this mortal body?” Who will save him from his flesh, the skin and bones of his disobedience? Of course, this is a rhetorical question! Surely, Paul, converted to an apostle from his life as a persecutor of Christ’s family, converted by a direct encounter with the resurrected Christ, surely, he knows who has saved him from his disobedience. For us too, we who will come forward to eat and drink the Body and Blood of Christ in our eucharist, we too know who has saved us from our disobedience. The question for us now is: do we leave here wanting more, running after more and better signs? Tastier, prettier, more dramatic indications that we are loved by a merciful Father? What more do we need?

Is there a tastier, more beautiful miracle than the one we witness this morning?

First Born

My first attempt at a kNOt + homi(lie): Parable Dread!







Be gentle.

Everyone's Secret

29^th Week OT(W): Romans 6.12-18 and Luke 12.39-48
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory

[Click on Podcast Player to listen]

Secrets require vigilance. Keeping secrets secret requires vigilance, a studied readiness to deny information, or better hide the contents of the secret, or limit the secret’s dissemination. We can encode a secret to pass it more easily between those who know the code. We can whisper the whole secret to another in plain language, risking an eavesdropper but also insuring no mistake in the transmission. Or, to be perfectly clear, we can encrypt our secret in a parable; use the parable to teach our friends the secret; and then, trusting their good sense, their intelligence, and experience, leave the interpretation and implementation of the secret in their capable hands. To those who hear the parable, much is given and much will be required. So, after hearing the parable of the master’s house and the thief, to be sure that he is hearing Jesus correctly, and to be sure that he is being charged with being vigilant, Peter asks a very reasonable question, “Lord, is this parable meant for us or for everyone?” In answer, Jesus explains the parable.

For some time now in Luke’s gospel, Jesus has been promising his apostles a share in his kingdom. Their status as loyal friends, studious disciples, and industrious apostles has won them a special place at both the earthly and the heavenly banquet. Of course, they think this special place is at the head of the table with Christ. Little do they understand (though Jesus has said it many times) their place of honor is among the servants serving the guests. As those who will lead after the Master has left, they serve now and serve ever after. It is in rendering service as stewards, as slaves, that Jesus’ inner circle, his most intimate friends, lay claim to their inheritance. Their vigilance then is not primarily against doctrinal error or the Pharisees or the Romans or even against the Devil himself. Their vigilance is against their own anxiety and imprudence. When the Master is delayed in returning to them, it will be their faith in his promised return and their prudence as ones left in charge that will be tested. In other words, truly their status as faithful servants is tested most severely during that time between the Master’s expected return and his actual return. Here are they (and we!) most carefully examined for infidelity and sloth.

The “secret”—given to the disciples and anyone else with ears to hear and eyes to see—is openly articulated by Paul in his letter to the Romans: “…although you were once slaves of sin, you have become obedient from the heart to the pattern of teaching to which you were entrusted.” Note carefully: we have been entrusted to Jesus’ teaching and made obedient; the teaching has not been entrusted to us. Jesus’ teaching guards us against sin. Given this then, we are “freed from sin, [we have] become slaves of righteousness.” Our righteousness in Jesus’ teaching, that is, our “rightness” with the Father guarded by Christ’s teaching, satisfies that longing for freedom that is encoded in our human nature: we desire, more than anything, the divine excellence for which we were created, for which we are re-created.

Against the thieves of imprudence and sloth, especially the thief of righteousness rooted in self-aggrandizement, we are given the most powerful weapon of obedience! Paul writes that we are to present ourselves to God “as raised from the dead to life…” No longer dead in sin, we are alive—always living—in the truest, most beautiful, the best friendship possible. We are slaves of Christ, stewards of his palace, entrusted with the keys to his kingdom. And because much has been given to us, much will be required, and more and more and more.

The secret is: there is no secret. The parable is for everyone. We know the Master’s will for us. And since sin has no power over us, and since we are not under the law but purchased through His gift of freedom, we do his will as a matter of our perfection. Let him return and say to each of us then, “Blessed are you, faithful and prudent servant, you have been vigilant in your duties! Here is your reward: a broom and miles of halls to sweep.”

Items Purchased, ad experimentum

If you have sent me a philosophy/theology book in the last three months but you haven't received a Thank You note from me, please check the ITEMS PURCHASED listing for my Phil & Theo Wish List. If the book you bought for me is listed there it means that I haven't received it yet.

Also, please note that books purchased from Amazon's used bookstores usually do not come with a packing list, so I frequently get books and have no idea who sent them.

Regardless: THANK YOU for your generosity!!!

Check out my new blog venture later today. . .say, late afternoon. . .for the first of what I hope will be a series of kNOt+homi(lies). These are homilies with a postmodern flavor ad experimentum.

If only women, married folks, and lay people. . .

This just in!

Being male, celibate, and ordained DOES NOT cause child molestation. Therefore, ordaining married women and turning the Church's governing authority over to lay folks will not prevent child molestation.

Or, so the Church of England (and now the rest of us) has discovered: Anglican child abuse ignored for decades.

If only women and married folks could be teachers...

While driving all over Texas today, I heard this report on sexual abuse in the public school system several times.

And I bet I thought the same thing every faithful Catholic thought when he/she heard that public school teachers were molesting our kids: "I wonder if the media will call for radical reform of the public education system? Or, perhaps argue that women and married folks should be allowed to study for and be hired as public school teachers? Or, maybe call into the question the very idea of 'public education' at its root?"

And then I bet most of them concluded this brief fantasy in the same way I did: hysterical laughter and teary eyes.

Frankly, I'm surprised to see this much coverage. Wanna bet it's gone by Friday?

I made it...

I'm back in Irving safe and sound. . .though I did hit Texas stadium traffic on the way back in--post Cowboy game. I can't wait for that stadium to move to Arlington. The priory has one entrance/exit onto the access road parallel to 114. On game days/nights we are basically trapped by the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Fans use the access road as another lane of 114. Of course, the they don't observe basic traffic law or common courtesy, so they block the intersections-- rendering the lights useless--. . .aaarrghghghhhhhh!

NEVERMIND!

The meeting with the ILC was. . .interesting. . .no word on a decision yet. I'll keep you posted.

Fr. Philip

Not Homilies (not exactly)

Postmodern Catholic preaching! Jesus, Mary, Joseph. . .help us!

My new project: kNOt + homi(lies) : ad experimentum. . .an experiment in postmodern Catholic preaching. . .

This is a project that I've wanted to take on for some time, but I was forever letting This or That get in the way.

My intention here is to write and publish experimental homilies using the daily Mass readings. These homily-texts will be very tentative in nature, very much examples of "writing after the death of modernism."

To say the least: these will not be to everyone taste.

Just remember that we're in the kitchen now with our Homiletic Cuisinart and an exotic array of completely foreign ingredients. Will our dishes be tasty? Who knows! BUT. . .we gotta try.

Fr. Philip, OP

I AM with you always

Fractal Flesh

Ss. John de Brebeuf and Isaac Jogues: 2 Cor 4.7-15 and Matthew 28.16-20
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Serra Club Mass and Church of the Incarnation

Jesus says to his eleven friends on the mountain near Galilee, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations…” Sending them out into the world, he vows: “I am with you always, until the end of the age.” Surely his students wondered how much a thing was possible. With us how? In memory, of course. Who could forget Jesus!? With us in spirit? Yes. He had made that promise too, but what does it mean for him “to be with us in spirit”? Will he haunt us? Surely not. He can’t mean that he will “be with us physically” b/c he has told us his end. Will he abide with us as a form of Law or in prayer as his body or perhaps in our doubts. Pay attention: “I AM with you always.” Not: I WILL BE with you always. Jesus is not promising that at some future point he will be with his friends. He is telling them that right now and always he IS with them. As he is with us right now.

Paul clarifies: “We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained;…persecuted but not abandoned;…always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.” Jesus is with us always. His body, the Church—because of the surpassing power of God—is becoming Christ; in his dying and in his living, Jesus is being manifested in our mortal flesh; and we, you and I, though often perplexed by the mysteries of our rescue from sin and death, we are never driven to despair; though we are sometimes struck down, we are never destroyed. The victory of the Church of over sin and death is accomplished in the “defeat” of Christ on the Cross—the scandal that ignites our transformation into those who follow Christ to his cross. We follow him to his cross, into his death, and down under his tombstone, therefore “the One who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus,” placing us in His presence.

If we follow Christ now, die with him now, and live always in the hope of rising with him, then we must do what he did and teach what he taught. To do or teach anything less or other-than is a betrayal of, treason against the manifestation of his living and dying in our mortal flesh. And so, to all the nations we go out “baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that [he] has commanded [us].” Our success in this commission is more than a force of history, more than the accuracy of our story told over and again; our success in this assignment as mortal-flesh-transformed is guaranteed by the living presence of the one who is himself the Word Made Flesh. Though afflicted, persecuted, and struck down, we cannot fail because what we do in our mortal flesh as his Body is “not from us” but is the fruit of our God’s surpassing power, the power of “I AM with you always.”

I believe, therefore I speak: Live as Christ. Die as Christ. Rise with Christ to the Father “so that the grace bestowed in abundance” may be given again and again to more and more and more and the harvest of thanksgiving for our Lord’s life and death will “overflow for the glory of God.” Go, therefore, be fruitful and multiply! Christ is with us always!

Postmetaphysical theologies

Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida and their band, The Categorical Imperatives

Here's a partial reading list for my spring seminar: THEO5317: Postmetaphysical theologies

J.L. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

G. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine

J.-L. Marion, God Without Being

J. Milbank, Radical Orthodoxy

M. Wrathall, Religion After Metaphysics

There will be many other articles and book chapters assigned, including work from Caputo, Vattimo, Derrida, Heidegger, and many others. There will also be a few on-line articles to read such as this one.

A stillborn life of fear

St Ignatius of Antioch: Philippians 3.17-4.1 and John 12.24-26
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX


[Click on Podcast Player to listen]

Maybe it isn’t death that you fear most. Maybe there is something or someone, the thought of which or whom, clutches your gut in a vise-grip and wrings your adrenal glands dry, sending you into a hard-breathing panic—run or fight, flee or do battle! Or maybe your fear is more subtle. Not the sort of spiked shock that jolts us when a door slams in the night or when we round a street corner and there, only inches away, stands a stranger. Perhaps your fear is more intricate, more complex; a fear with some finesse—a long fear, anxious, spiced with apprehension and that not-knowing sense of a soon-to-arrive surprise, grim and dark with vicious possibilities. Imagine the terror of slowly losing control of your mind. Or the darkness of addiction. Or the daily dread that rises from a failed marriage, or an unsuccessful career, or an arid spiritual life. Imagine believing that God is abandoning you, pulling away, becoming distant and angry. Imagine hating your life. Then the fear of death seems like a welcomed wind.

Jesus teaches his disciples that they must die like a grain of wheat before they are can produce much fruit. How are they to die? Except for John, all of them are martyred—the seeds of their blood sown for the Church. Jesus means literal death, literally one must die to bear the best fruit. Our martyrs, our witnesses in death, bear this out. He also means that before death you must die to self so that what gifts you have may be used for others: “Whoever loves his life loses it…whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be.” Is there any sign for us here and now that we have lost of our life for Christ and stand ready to follow him? How do we know that we have fallen to the ground like that grain of wheat and are now ready to produce much fruit?

Are you afraid? What do fear? Whom do you fear? Is there a fiber of dread in you? Even a sliver of apprehension about who you are or what you will do or who it is you need to serve? I ask b/c fear is the soul’s signal to us that we love our lives too much. Anxiety is our defense against surrender. To be afraid is a sign that we still need control, still hope to be in charge, still want to own our future—a future, by the way, that in virtue of your baptism properly belongs to Christ alone. Jesus says, “Whoever loves his life loses it…” We have lost our lives to him. That worrying disquiet, that nervous vigilance against submitting fully to grace, the fear you feel welling up when your plans go awry, when your strategy for your soul’s progress is thwarted, that fear is your billboard announcement that you are not willing yet to be a servant. The thick hull of your seed is not yet willing to crack, to germinate, to produce much fruit.

Listen to Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the first century church in Rome, asking his brothers and sisters in Christ not to rescue him from martyrdom: “I plead with you: show me no untimely kindness. Let me be food for the wild beasts, for they are my way to God. I am God’s wheat and shall be ground by their teeth so that I may become Christ’s pure bread…Do not stand in the way of my birth to real life; do not wish me stillborn…Let me attain pure light. Only on my arrival there can I be fully a human being.”

We are citizens of heaven, so our minds must not be occupied with earthly things. Does this mean that you are to wall yourself up in a cave? No. It means that the country of your soul, the territory of your Spirit is ruled by the sacrificial love of God Himself, and no other spirit—not anxiety, not hatred, not envy or pride, no other vicious spirit—must be allowed to occupy the land of your love for Christ and his Church. Desire only to die in Christ for Christ and pray with the martyr Ignatius that you may obtain your desire.

Texas' First Red Hat?

Texas' First Cardinal?

Rocco over at Whispers in the Loggia is reporting that Archbishop Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston will be wearing a spiffy red hat very, very soon. The Archbishop's elevation to the College of Cardinals will be a first for the Church in the great state of Texas.

Congrats Archbishop DiNardo and to the Church of Galveston-Houston!

Psssssssssttt, Archbishop, if you need a good personal theologian, you know, like the Pope has one, just give me a ring, I know a jolly Dominican friar who'd make a great one. . .I'm a mean cook too!

Fr. Philip, OP