On not being sinned against

St. Josaphat: Wis 1.1-7 and Luke 17.1-6
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory

Aside from the crucifixion itself, there is perhaps no other moment in the gospels that shows our Lord’s ridiculous excess of love for us that this teaching on forgiveness. Only his love for us as he hangs on the cross surpasses the sheer magnitude of excessive love that we must muster in order to follow his teaching on daily forgiveness. If your brother sins, rebuke him. If he repents, forgive him. Repeat as often as necessary. We know this, of course! Doing it is something else. But if you think mustering the love required to forgive the same offense seven times a day is difficult, let me suggest an even more difficult way: strive to become that sort of person who cannot be sinned against, that sort of person against whom there is no offense. If charity requires that we forgive an offense, it seems only reasonable that the demands of excessive love would also push us toward becoming “inoffensible.” But then again maybe reason has nothing to do with it and what we’re really getting at here is a question about the limits of that good habit of trusting in God’s promises: the limits of faith.

The Apostles say to the Lord, “Increase our faith.” I’m sure Jesus smiles a little at this and probably thinks to himself, “Oh really? Increase your faith? Are you really asking me to expand your capacity for trusting in our Father’s promises? Really, now? Think about this for a moment: the larger your capacity for faith—the more faith I give you—the more faith you will be required to cooperate with. More faith, more work. More faith, more trust! More letting go, more just letting be.” Instead of all that, Jesus tells his apostles this: “If your faith is just the size of a mustard seed, you can uproot the mulberry tree with a word and replant it in the sea. Knowing that, do you really want more faith? Remember what I said about faith and moving mountains? You guys are having trouble with simple stuff like not putting stumbling blocks in front of one another and forgiving one another’s offenses. You want to uproot mulberry trees and replant them in the sea? And move mountains too? Tell ya what! You find a better way to put the faith I’ve given you to good use and then we’ll talk about more faith. Deal?”

Deal! Without becoming too much the cultural theorist/critic here, let me suggest a way of taking the faith we have and sharpening it like a fine-edged sword for forgiveness. Our culture, our American milieu, and we Americans thrive with a kind of Extended Wounded Ego—a sore psyche that pokes out there like a delicate nose, sniffing out offense…like French pigs rooting for truffles! How easily we are offended. How simple it is for us to be sinned against. Our eccentricities, weirdnesses, preferences, odd-ball opinions and fantasies—everything I think is essential to my ME-ness becomes an overripe fruit, too sweet, too tender, so soft and ready to be bruised by the slightest chiding touch, the most subtle word of the kind reprove that I spiral into sputtering indignation and collapse into a weeping heap. Am I exaggerating? Yea, just a little to make a point. And here’s my point: if faith requires you to tell me that I have sinned and then requires me to repent and then requires you to forgive me no matter how many times I sin…how much sharper will your faith become if you willed NOT to be offended, willed not to be sinned against? In other words, your daily work with the trust God has already given you becomes the work of building that sort of spiritual life where the sore, offensible, easily bruised ME-ness of You is emptied out, poured out like a libation (Paul says) and all that emptied space in your heart is made ready for a Larger Christ, a Bigger Jesus! How difficult is that? Very difficult. But also very necessary. Love requires it of us. . .and makes it possible.

Struggle with this: the grasp of your love is limited only by the reach of your trust in God’s promise of mercy to you. How far will His promise reach to grasp you? All the way to the cross…and back.

Pic credit

We are Christians NOT Platonists

32^nd Sunday OT(C): 2 Macc 7.1-2, 9-14; 2 Thess 2.16-3.5; Luke 20.27-38
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Paul Hospital and Church of the Incarnation

We affirm it every week at Mass. We claim to believe it as a fundamental tenet of our faith. Without it everything we hold to be true about Christ, our lives with him now and for eternity makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, this event, and the promise of its eventual repetition for us all, gave the apostles what little courage they had to hang on after Jesus’ death, the steadfastness they needed until the Holy Spirit swept through them like a brushfire and gave birth to the Church! In answer to the Sadducees’ attempt to confound his faith, Jesus teaches them and us a rock bottom basic truth of our ancestors’ faith: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob is “not a God of the dead, but a God of the living. . .to Him all are alive!” As the killer of Death, Jesus announces to anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see that the God and Father of all is Himself alive, a living and loving God; and for those for whom He is Lord and King, He is creator and ruler of the living, source and end of all life everlasting. We will say it again this morning/evening, so let me quote it to you now: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”

Without knowing it most of you are religious Platonists when it comes to what you believe about your death and your life after death. I am willing to bet that most of you believe that you are your soul; that is, who you are as a person is best described as “my soul.” My soul is who I am. And I bet that most of you believe that when you die your soul is separated from your body and your body goes into the ground and your soul travels to heaven (or to purgatory or hell). Most of you believe that eternal life is a life lived for a really long time as a spiritual entity, some sort of indestructible ghost. Immortality then is the promise of living forever as a spirit, a soul without a body, a ghost without its machine.

This false notion is the root of our sometimes obsessive disdain for the body while we are alive here on earth. Religious Platonists believe we must temper the body in order to exalt the soul. The body is a trap, a cave, an anchor holding the pure spirit down, weighing down our mournful souls who want nothing more than to be free of the flesh and soaring unimpeded back to God who is pure spirit, pure soul. How often do you lament the weaknesses of your body? How often you do attribute your sinfulness to a tempted body, your flesh enticed and conquered by the flashy but ultimately empty promises of passing disobedience? Wouldn’t we all be better Christians, more pure, just better people in general, if we did not have to contend with the appetites of these smelly, disease-prone, slowly dying and decaying bodies?

If you think this Platonism is limited to Christians, think again. Our materialist culture holds to a rather perverse version of this heresy. Being happy is about controlling the body. Diets. Exercise. Plastic surgeries. Props, potions, pills, powders, ointments, lotions, gels, needles, patches—a whole pharmacology of chemical mixtures designed to give us control of the body b/c we believe that absolute control of the body is the key to our happiness. If you think the religious zealot is hateful to the spiritually indifferent or to those who actively reject his belief, just try to talk to a true Gym Bunny or a Gym Jock. Their utter distain for your physical weakness, your lack of motivation, your ill-defined abs and flabby butt, their venomous contempt for your high calorie, high fat diet and your ignorance of proper supplementation—all of these combine in a heart so spiritually pure in its hatred for the body that these Gym Bunnies and Jocks would scare the dungeon masters of the Spanish Inquisition with their zealotry! Make no mistake: their torturous routines on those robotic machines are not about loving the flesh…no, no, the flesh must be denied, tamed, shaped, and beaten into submission. And who or what is it that must conquer these mushy muscles? The will. The wanting. The desire. Yes, yes. It is the soul. Thank God we are Christians and not Religious Platonists!

Jesus is confronted by a party of Jewish philosophers and theologians known as the Sadducees. This group of highly educated men reject the recent developments of Jewish religious thought and argue vehemently against the resurrection of the body after death. Jesus and the Pharisees, appealing more to the common people and accepting recent theological progress, preach and teach the resurrection of the dead. The question posed to Jesus about the woman with multiple marriages is designed to expose the trendy teaching on the resurrection of the dead as scripturally unsound. Think of the question as a sort of “what if” problem. The Sadducees think that Jesus is going to have to answer them in one of two ways: 1) either deny the resurrection and say that the woman is not married to all those men simultaneously or 2) affirm the resurrection and say that she is married to them all at the same time. Either way the Sadducees are proven correct in their rejection of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Jesus, being Jesus and no one’s fool, does the unexpected. He affirms the resurrection and denies that the woman is married to seven men at the same time. How? Death marks the end of this life. The resurrection is the sure sign of new life. Those who are resurrected no longer marry nor do they die. In other words, a marriage is ended at death. Once we are dead and come to see the Lord face-to-face, we no longer need sacraments as external signs of His presence and grace. We are His presence and grace!

So, what is the resurrection of the dead? Or, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it “the resurrection of the body”? If you are not just your soul but your body AND your soul, then for You to share in the divine life, for You to partake of the divine nature in heaven, You must be You, that is, your soul AND your body, whole and entire, the complete person, the completed You. Our God is the God of the living not the dead “because to Him all are alive.” With the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ, we too are made worthy to suffer, die, and rise with him. Just as he was given a body glorified and transfigured, so will we. Just as he was lifted into heaven, so will we. Just as Moses called “Lord” and just as Christ cried out “Lord,” so we too shout out “Lord!” Knowing that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord of Lord, and King of Kings is the God of the living—those who live always under His dominion!

If any of this is true for us, then we have to think carefully about how we live now. What is the moral theology of living now as dead folks who will live in transfigured glory? In other words, what does it mean for you right now to be a man or woman or child who has died with Christ in baptism, risen again to his eat and drink at his altar, and now live renewed until your natural death to rise again with him body and soul? It means we wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Lord—praying, fasting, believing, daily, hourly; working, sleeping, eating, daily, hourly; dressing, loving, feeding the hungry, daily, hourly; healing, forgiving, listening to the Word; daily, hourly waiting, waiting, waiting on the coming of the Lord; doing daily, hourly what Christ has given us to do as if we were with him now because we ARE with him now. We are with his Body now doing what we the Body of Christ does: offering to our Father thanks and praise for the gift He made of Himself to us. Our God is the God of the living not the dead because for Him we are all, always living, always alive in the Spirit that is life everlasting!

BREAKING NEWS!

The Angelicum

BREAKING NEWS!!!

I heard from my provincial tonight about my assignment for next year. . .

I will be moving to Rome to study philosophy at the Pontifical University of St Thomas (Angelicum). Upon completion of the required degrees, I will join the faculty and teach philosophy until assigned otherwise.

My thanks for all the prayers and please continue to pray for me and the Order as we preach the Good News!

Help me celebrate this good news by adding to my philosophy library! Click over to the PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Wish List and send me a book to take to Rome! (cheesy grin) Trust me: these books will get a tremendous workout in Rome. . .

Fr. Philip, OP

Catholic Dollars for Anti-Catholic Activities???

My education about the involvement of the Church in various nefarious "social justice" activities continues on unabated! Recently, I ran across several articles on the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). These articles noted that several agencies that receive the hard-earned dollars of believing Catholics are in fact often not only anti-Catholic but anti-Christian!

This weekend Catholics all over the country will be asked to contribute to the CCHD. Do your homework first!

You don't have to believe me or anyone else. . .just do a google.com search and you will find more than enough evidence to withhold your dimes and quarters. . .here's a short piece from my fav Catholic magazine, First Things:

Time for a Step Further

The criticism of CCHD is fine so far as it goes, says an old hand at inner-city community organizing here in New York, but it doesn’t go far enough. CCHD is, of course, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. In response to critics, the word Catholic was recently added to the name in order to indicate that it is, well, Catholic. The aforementioned old hand doesn’t think it means very much. He criticizes the critics of CCHD for concentrating on those cases where funding is given to organizations that directly violate the Church’s teaching, notably on abortion. The problem with that, says our old hand, is that it segregates the "life questions" from the fullness of the Church’s social teaching, giving the impression that abortion and a few other things are no more than Catholic "hang-ups" to which those receiving Catholic money need to be sensitive.

In an earlier life long ago, before he was converted to the gospel of life, our old hand was an executive with Planned Parenthood. That organization, he notes, would never dream of giving support to a group that did not back its entire agenda, and it is assumed that when a major lobbying effort is needed PP will call in its chits. Not so with Catholics. Through CCHD many millions of dollars are given each year to organizations that, while avoiding the hang-up questions, are indifferent and frequently hostile to the Church’s mission. In inner-city community organizing, Catholics provide, in addition to the funding, the great majority of the people and the bulk of parish-based institutional support.

Our old hand thinks part of the problem is with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), an effort launched more than thirty years ago by the late Saul Alinsky of Chicago, who made no secret of his strategy of hijacking the resources of the Catholic Church for his self-declared revolution. IAF is, under various names, still very much a force in community organizing around the country. But why are Catholic dioceses and CCHD so hesitant to insist that assisted programs be commensurate with Catholic support and teaching? Part of the answer is a good ecumenical impulse gone awry. In many urban areas, liberal Protestant churches are a small minority in community coalitions but exercise a large influence, often because Catholics don’t want to offend them by pressing issues such as support for crisis pregnancy centers or opposition to partial-birth abortion. Another part of the answer is that it is naively assumed that more "inclusive" groups will more impartially serve "the common good," when, in fact, any viable organization has its particular goals-a.k.a. "interests"-for good or ill.

The Catholic interest, one might suggest, is to serve the common good, as that is richly and amply defined in the Church’s social doctrine. But to insist on that requires a measure of confidence in that doctrine, and such confidence is in short supply. The World Council of Churches had the slogan "The world sets the agenda for the Church." There is an analogue in the Catholic understanding that grace perfects nature and, by extension, the Church’s mission is to support the good things already happening under other auspices. There is important truth in these claims, of course. But they are truths too easily subverted and turned to alien purposes when the Church’s people and resources are placed at the disposal of those who define the good in ways that are frequently unsympathetic to or at odds with the Church’s teaching. So what our old hand is suggesting is that the criticism of some of the more egregious abuses in CCHD funding is having its effect, and that’s good. But now it’s time to go further and make the case that the "Catholic" in the Catholic Campaign for Human Development should indicate more than the source of the monies and other resources employed. It should be an honest indicator of all the ends to which they are employed.

"Going green" = "dying on the vine"?

Bow before your new goddess!

Sean Cardinal O'Malley, cardinal archbishop of Boston, addresses a disturbing trend in his own Capuchin wing of the Franciscans. Noting that the next big chapter of the order is slated to amend its consititutions to be more "social justice, ecology friendly," he writes:

I have not seen the recommendations for the new Constitutions. I am told that there is a desire to introduce more Peace and Justice and Ecology into the Constitutions. I believe the Capuchins should be very much embodied in promoting the social Gospel of the Church. I would like to express two caveats. First of all there is the danger of a false sense of security. In other words by talking a lot about the social justice themes we might think that we are living a radical form of the Gospel Life. I see many religious communities in my country produce documents worthy of the Green Party, but they are dying on the vine themselves. Was it Saint Francis who said the saints did all the work and we get the credit by talking about them?

I have to think that group-think projects like the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, the Earth Charter, all that gobbly-goo about "the New Universe Story," and the Gaia movement among women religious is the death-knell of 70's religious life. Let's pray that we younger religious will not be fooled into worshiping at the altars of all these alien god/desses and lift up instead Christ the Lord as our unique source of life and goal in death.

We've been warned!

via Rocco

We are temples NOT flea markets

The Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome
Eze 47.1-12; 1 Cor 3.9-11, 16-17; John 2.13.22
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. When he went to the temple are he found a thriving flea market, a bazaar for selling sacrificial animals and bankers to change common money into temple cash. Seeing all of this, he whipped them all out, crying after them: “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” John notes that the disciples immediately recall Psalm 69.9: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” And the Jews, they ask for a sign. Jesus tells them to destroy “this temple” and he will raise it again in three days. Many years later, Paul, by way of questioning the alleged ignorance of the Corinthian church, teaches us that we are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells within us. He says, “Brothers and sisters, you are God’s building…If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.” How do we, the holy temples of God, turn our temples into marketplaces, into buildings that serve commerce rather than God? And, how do we drive out the unclean merchants and restore our temples to their proper purpose?

In the angelic vision, Ezekiel is shown that the temple is the center of life-giving water and fruit, the heart of the nation to which and from which the waters of the world flow, “Wherever the river flows, every sort of living creature that can multiply shall live” and there will be God’s abundance. For our ancestors in faith, the temple was more than a church, more than a place to gather. The temple was the dwelling place of the Most Holy, the physical site of Heaven touching Earth. No wonder then Ezekiel is shown the temple as a source of life and abundance! And no wonder Jesus is furious with the mercantile desecration of its holy purpose.

It is not great leap to the 21^st century and our own contemporary desecrations of God’s holy temples: how do we profane the person in name of commercial gain? How do we collaborate with those who would set up shop in our temples? Think about the ways our culture commercializes the body. Think about our ever-failing social norms for sex, eating, drinking, dressing. Think about how we lend our temples to these marketplaces, sell our finest bodies to the highest bidder at the auction of fashion and convenience. Think about artificial contraception as “family planning,” abortion as “optional pregnancy,” person as “product of conception.” Every merchant knows that marketing is all about perception, illusion, finding common ground for working together, the lowest common denominator.

For cash and the bottom-line, we are meat. For the culture of death—ruled by Mammon—we are cattle and lab rats, control groups and experiments. Those temples among us who are blind or lame or crippled or poor, they are all “targets for development goals” or “the means of measurable outcomes given variables.” What we cannot be and still be temples of the Most High is a means to anything else but ourselves. Make me a means and I quickly become an obstacle needing to be removed. Make you a means to an end and you become a tool for manipulation. Turn the human person into a product, a site of commercialization, and the body becomes a snack, a tiny morsel to be gobbled up, a temple for little more than the empty calories of our consumerist liturgies of self-destruction and denigration.

Hear Paul again: “Do you know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person…” Why? “…for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.” You are, we are temples, where Heaven touches Earth, sites of God’s abundance, moments of God’s gracious outpouring of spirit and life; we are both the source and goal of all that water, flowing in and out to feed life inside and outside our walls. Let nothing defile the holiest of God’s dwelling places: you, consumed by zeal for the presence of the Lord!

UN's New Paradigm is not Christian

from CRISIS Magazine, April 10, 2006

Facing Down the New Paradigm:
The Family Planning Agenda of the United Nations’ ‘Millennial Goals’

The Most Reverend John C. Nienstedt

This past September, 170 world leaders gathered at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York for the 60th session of its General Assembly. The media focused on President Bush’s speech on terrorism and Secretary General Kofi Annan’s struggles with the oil-for-food scandal that had recently tainted his administration.

But one thing on the official agenda did not get much media notice—the evaluation of the millennial goals, adopted by 189 world heads of state in the year 2000, which proposed to end extreme poverty by the year 2015. The September gathering hoped to evaluate progress made on the goals and to determine how best to move forward on them.

In all, there are eight millennial goals:

1. to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. to achieve universal primary education
3. to promote gender equality and empower women
4. to reduce child mortality
5. to improve maternal health
6. to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
7. to ensure environmental sustainability
8. to develop a global partnership for development.

The first seven goals concentrate on the specific strategies for eliminating poverty, while the eighth implies that it will be done by wealthy countries delivering aid, providing debt relief, and establishing free-trade policies. One of the underlying concerns behind the millennial goals—not explicitly mentioned but never far from the surface—is the question of overpopulation.

Following President Bush to the podium was the Vatican secretary of state, Angelo Cardinal Sodano, who raised the moral and ethical issues behind the program:

We cannot offer an ambiguous, reductive or even ideological vision of health. For example, would it not be better to speak clearly of the “health of women and children” instead of using the term “reproductive health”? Could there be a desire to return to the language of a “right to abortion”?

His concerns were well-founded. In late August 2005, the Vatican Holy See had to issue a warning that a document titled “Religious Declaration on the MDG’s, Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health” was being circulated prior to the September UN meeting for the purpose of broadening the terms “reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” to include abortion, contraception, and other illicit means of family planning. The Holy See raised public awareness of the initiative because it knew that—if adopted—the resolutions would strip the Church’s efforts to defend human life.

The vigilance displayed by Rome is motivated in large part by what another Vatican prelate, Javier Lorenzo Cardinal Barragán, has called the “New Paradigm” in international health care. Speaking as the president of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Healthcare Workers at the Vatican-sponsored World Day of the Sick on February 10, 2004, the cardinal sounded an alarm that this New Paradigm is completely closed to the transcendent. Refusing to acknowledge a vertical reference point, it consequently fails to give an absolute value to human life.

While recognizing that proponents of the New Paradigm do accept some notion of a divinity, the cardinal noted that theirs is but a “poetic and aesthetic god” that each individual makes up for him- or herself. This is certainly not the God of the Bible. Rather, it is evidence of a new global ethic that seeks to replace all previously known religions with a spirituality concerned with the global wellbeing of all human persons within a world order of “sustainable development”:

By sustainable development is meant a development where the different factors involved (food, health, education, technology, population, environment, etc.) are brought into harmony so as to avoid imbalanced growth and the waste of resources.

As the Pontifical Council for the Family points out, however, it is the developed countries of the world that will determine the criteria for “sustainable development” for the other nations. Thus certain rich countries and major international organizations are willing to help developing nations, but only on the condition that they accept public programs that systematically control birth rates.

In the New Paradigm, Cardinal Barragán asserts, “sustainable development” becomes the supreme ecological value. He said:

It is spiritually without God, at the secular level. Its ultimate objective is the viability of the present world, and man’s well-being in it. Practically speaking, it is a new secularist religion, a religion without God, or, if one wishes a new god, that would be the earth itself, to which the name Gaia is given. This divinity would have man as a subordinate element.... The series of values upheld by the New Paradigm are values subordinated to this diversity, which is translated into the supreme ecological value that it calls sustainable development. And within this sustainable development is the supreme ethical objective of well-being.

According to Cardinal Barragán, the grave danger of this New Paradigm is its lack of an objective standard for truth. Consensus on what to do or not to do rests on subjective opinions, which in turn gives rise to an ethic or bioethics that has no consistency.

Christianity, on the other hand, offers a “True Paradigm,” based on an objective and universal ethics. The first principle of this ethics is that human life is created by God, and from this is derived the second principle: that human life is received, not as property, but as something to be cared for. He concluded:

The human person is the synthesis of the universe and is the reason for everything that exists. Present-day biomedical sciences and technologies must be at the service of human life and not vice-versa. They are to construct man, not to destroy man.

The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are the two major forces behind the New Paradigm and its secular ethic. These institutions have allies in various Non-Governmental Organizations (referred to as NGOs), which are prominent promoters of an anti-natalist global ideology, among whose number are the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, Earth Council Green Peace, and the International Planned Parenthood Association. Their efforts have had far-reaching effects.

Questions regarding overpopulation have concerned the UN since its inception. Two years after the UN’s charter was ratified in 1945, the Population Commission of the Economic and Social Council was established to gather data on populations, to analyze the influence of population policies, and to study the interplay of demographics on social and economic factors. This commission helped to formulate a World Population Plan of Action at its conference in Bucharest in 1974, continued to monitor its progress at the 1984 International Conference on Population in Mexico City, and again in Cairo at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. It finally reviewed its overall progress at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

At first the commission was only involved in gathering and analyzing demographic statistics. But by the mid-1960s, its emphasis shifted to a more aggressive agenda in providing governments with advisory services, as well as training and action programs, including fertility planning.

While not the UN’s first International Conference on Population and Development (commonly referred to as ICPD), the 1994 Cairo conference is considered by most commentators a watershed moment for the advancement of secular forces to stem population growth in third-world countries (its action points were later incorporated into the millennial goals).

At the Cairo conference, 11,000 registered participants, representing some 180 governments, and more than 1,000 NGOs agreed that population issues must be addressed more forcefully if development policies were to succeed. A great emphasis was placed on the concepts of women’s empowerment and gender equality as the primary building blocks for population and development.

>From the language used in the formulation of the Cairo agreement, one begins to appreciate just how the issues of empowerment and equality begin to impact the moral decision-making of the persons who are said to benefit from such policies. The broad results aim at: (1) reduced mortality of infants; (2) broader life choices and opportunities for women; (3) the promotion of women’s rights; and (4) an increased financial investment in reproductive health and family planning. While apparently noble, the real results of these efforts are forced, manipulative programs to promote sterilization, contraception, and abortion—all of which are justified under a rationale for achieving peace, economic development, and social justice. Nowhere in the official language do you find the UN documents acknowledging the negative fallout from these radical anti-natalist policies.

The 1994 ICPD in Cairo was followed up by the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in September 1995. During the drafting of the conference’s Platform of Action, the influence of NGOs took on a decidedly pro-feminist perspective. Commenting on the outcome, Robert H. Bork observes:

At the Beijing conference, for instance, the word “family” was not to appear in the Platform. Instead, the word “household” was used. The significance of this is to be found in the feminist insistence upon use of the word “gender” [referred to 216 times in the text]. There being five genders [i.e., man, woman, lesbian, gay, and bisexual], unions or marriages involving any gender or genders are legitimate. These unions are called households. The traditional family is then presented as a household, just one form of living arrangement, not superior to any other. Indeed, since feminists view the family as a system of oppression, and since feminism contains a large lesbian component, the marriages of men and women are often seen as morally inferior to unions involving the other three genders.

Given such a political context, it was no surprise that the Beijing conference also pushed for greater expansion of legalized abortion as a legitimate method of family planning.

In February 2005, the Beijing +10 conference (i.e., ten years after the Beijing conference) drew governmental and non-governmental delegates to New York City to review the implementation of the action items agreed to at the original conference.

The United States delegation—now pursuing the pro-life position of the Bush administration—created a great deal of controversy by proposing a resolution that affirmed that the Beijing documents “do not create an international right to abortion.” The delegation hoped to draw attention to the pressure that had been placed on member countries by courts, legislatures, and NGOs to change abortion laws in accord with this supposedly agreed upon international “right.” The amendment failed on the grounds that it was unnecessary. This was tragically untrue. In July 1999, the UN General Assembly itself adopted proposals to curb the world’s population growth by means of greater “access” to abortion. The proposal was hailed by pro-abortion groups as “a giant advance beyond what was agreed to at the landmark 1994 UN population conference in Cairo.”

After last year’s meeting of Beijing +10, pro-life NGOs were barred by UN officials from speaking to or lobbying member states at the preparatory sessions for the Millennium Summit +5 Conference held this past September. At the same time, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the National Youth Network for Reproductive Rights, and Family Care International (all abortion proponents) were invited to speak to the participants. Many believe this change of approach reflects the displeasure of UN officials with the interventions of the United States and the Holy See representatives.

Speaking to the general secretary of the World Conference on Population in 1974, Pope Paul VI said:

All population policies and strategies, in the judgment of the Holy See, must be evaluated in light of the sacredness of human life, the dignity of every human being, the inviolability of all human rights, the value of marriage and the need for economic and social justice.

Surely each person and couple has a responsibility to the local and world community; but to see all progress as dependent on the decline of population growth betokens shortness of vision and failure of nerve. Economic aid for the advancement of people should never be conditioned on a decline of birth rates or in participation in family planning programs.

Not surprisingly, in 1996, the Vatican suspended its annual donation to UNICEF, citing evidence of the organization’s involvement in abortion and pushing contraceptives on teenagers. A study released in 2004 by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute cited numerous documents in which UNICEF appears to endorse abortion or to have sent funds to groups that market the RU-486 abortion pill.

In its 1994 reflection Ethical and Pastoral Dimensions of Population Trends, the Pontifical Council for the Family advised caution when reviewing the information on demographics produced by population-control programs. The council listed a number of specific practices that should be actively challenged by the Church and
her members:

1. the many attempts on the part of the “population crises ideology” to influence international agencies and governments
2. invoking so-called new “women’s rights” while underestimating a woman’s vocation to give life
3. invoking environmental questions in an excessive or improper way to justify coercive population control
4. the attempts to spread abortifacient products such as RU-486 in developing countries
5. the promotion of sterilization
6. the distribution of anti-life technologies, such as the intrauterine device
7. violating the absolute and inalienable rights of individuals and families
8. abusing moral, intellectual, and political power
9. promotion of drugs, pornography, violence, and the like.

The council urges Christians and all people of good will to educate themselves on the many ways the population-control movement uses the media to project economic and demographic statistics that are both simplistic and inexact. Professionals should be encouraged to provide correct information that both rejects a fear of life and respects the human person and the family. Governments must oppose false concepts of reproductive health that promote different methods of contraceptives or abortion; they should instead promote respect for a woman as wife and mother.

The “anti-baby” mentality, so characteristic of population-control programs, refuses to acknowledge God as the sole creator of life, and thus contributes to the culture of death. This is the New Paradigm that rejects the notion of a transcendent God and reduces moral decision-making to the realm of subjectivism. As Pope Benedict XVI has proclaimed, this kind of relativism is the challenge to the gospel in the 21st century, and it will require the efforts of every Christian to overcome.

In the words of Pope Paul VI, “You must strive to multiply bread so that it suffices for the tables of mankind, and not favor an artificial control of birth…in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.”

---

The Most Reverend John C. Nienstedt is the bishop of the Diocese of New Ulm, Minnesota.

UN Development Goals and abortion

Quite coincidentally I've bumped into the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals three times in the last two weeks. All three times have been in Dominican publications or on Dominican websites. I have to confess that I don't pay much attention to the U.N. And what little I knew of the U.N.'s development goals, I dismissed as little more than expensive utopian socialist engineering.

It wasn't until my O.P. brothers and sisters in the Peace and Justice biz started cooing about the MDG's that I did a little research and discovered that. . .surprise!. . .the MDG's contain several innocuous "goals" that when translated into Real-Life Language mean "guaranteeing free access to contraception and abortion on demand."

The really disturbing thing here is the number of Catholic universities and colleges that have signed on to the MDG's w/o much critical engagement with the context and long history of the MDG's. You have to do a little digging to discover that, for example, Goal #5--improving maternal health care--is really just a way of disguising universal abortion rights and free access to contraception. The meat of the goals is found in the implementation reports and by carefully reading the "Reservations" issued by signatory nations. Several predominately Catholic nations have signed onto the MDG's but have publicly stated that they will not interpret Goal #5 to include abortion or contraception.

This sounds like an excellent topic for Catholic bloggers to tackle! No doubt faithful Catholics need more info and better teaching on the Church's social justice ministry. . .but it doesn't seem to me that MDG's is the way to go.

Devil in a giftbox

31^st Week OT(M): Romans 11.29-36 and Luke 14.12-14
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory

The clock is ticking down to Christmas Eve and my mom and I are in some nameless store full of the same stuff that gets stuffed into every other nameless store at Christmas, and we’re both staring holes in our gift lists, hoping, praying that the long line of names will somehow magically shrink or just disappear; but, if anything the queue of hungry gift-getters seems to get longer with each gift we buy and our frustration and aggravation grows as we come to the firm conclusion that we are no longer Shopping for Gifts but Hunting for Sacrifices to throw into the growling maw of the idol of seasonal expectation and social niceness, sacrifices meant to appease some distance deity of mercantile exchange, a god or goddess who feeds on the living impatience of the ungifted, the stress of the holiday procrastinator, and the anxiety of the absent-minded. You are freed from this monster when you realize that you are no longer looking for gifts for people you love and respect but shopping for merchandise to exchange with those most likely to present you with a wrapped box at a holiday party or family event. Your “gift” is really just a hedged bet against the almost certainty that Bob or Sue or Bill or Jack will hand you Something. You had better have Something to hand back. The moment you let go of the idea that gifting has anything at all to do with exchanging, you are free from the slavery of the holiday shopping goddess.

This notion that gifting is a species of exchanging is not limited to Christmas present-giving. We find the temptation to appease the goddess of exchange in most of our social doings. Jesus is invited to one of these doings and takes the opportunity to teach those gathered a little lesson in the true nature of gifting. He tells his Pharisee host and the other guests that a truly gracious dinner, that is, a God-graced banquet, will not be attended by friends, family members, and wealthy neighbors—those, in other words, who can and will invite you to their place in return. The truly God-graced banquet will be packed full of the poor, the crippled, the lame, and blind—those, in other words, who cannot and will not invite you to a dinner party in exchange for your initial generosity. Though you will not be invited to their place for dinner, you will be “blessed indeed…because of their inability to repay you.” This is soul of the gift.

This is one of Jesus’ more straightforward teachings on the nature of generosity. Not too far underneath or too far behind this teaching on gifting is another teaching on the nature of our salvation. Deeply seated in the Jewish religious imagination is the ritual power of exchange, gifts changing hands under the terms of a covenant. Gifts are given to God in the temple to strengthen belonging, to maintain purity or to reestablish purity, for healing and health. From the creature’s side of the covenant nothing divine is free. The New Covenant is a theological, philosophical, spiritual coup, overthrowing the older means of belonging, purifying, and healing. As the perfect gift, we are given Christ on the Cross once. There is no exchange. Our Father, as the wealthy host, has invited us—the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, the sinful—has invited us to His banquet with no expectation of receiving anything in return. What could we give God in return for His gift of Himself? The only possibility is for us to bundle ourselves up into His gift of Himself and give ourselves back in Christ. And so you are here to add yourself, we are here to add ourselves to the sacrificial offerings of the altar, placing ourselves under the hands of Christ’s priest as the priest prays, “Lord, send your Spirit upon these gifts that they may become for us the Body and Blood of our Lord, your Son, Jesus Christ.” Though we are not worthy to receive the Lord into our house, we are made worthy of His irrevocable gifts, His irrevocable call, made worthy by His mercy.

Walk out that door this morning having offered yourself as a gift to the Father, fully prepared and empowered to invite to your table all those who cannot repay your gift to them: the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.

"God Remembers" climbs a tree

31^st Sunday OT(C): Wisdom 11.22-12.2; 2 Thess 1.11-22; Luke 19.1-10
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul Hospital and Church of the Incarnation

Do you daily, hourly seek to see who Jesus is? This is a good definition of hope, isn’t it? When you hope, you seek to see who Jesus was, is, and will be. For us, redeemed creatures that we are, for us, living in us, is a beastly longing for God. A caged need that roars out for our Lord, reaching for him, yearning for the totality that is He Who made us and re-makes us. Knowing that He is there and knowing that He makes it possible for us to be with Him only sharpens the aggravated need, edges the fine steel of our wanting. That knowing, that knowledge of His presence and the keenness we feel in moving toward Him, that is what we call Hope. But I wonder: for how many of us is hoping a kind of gambling? Think how you use the word “hope.” I hope my paycheck has arrived. I hope the children are OK. I hope the doctor’s report is good. Hopefully, the car is fixed. Hopefully, I made an “A” on my paper. Is this really hope? Or, is it “crossed-fingers-wishing-on-a-star-where’s-my-lucky-charm-so-I-can-rub-it-and-increase-the-odds-in-my-favor” thinking? How often, when you hope, are you actually doing little more than wishing yourself good luck? Christian hope, that is, that sort of hope that Christians experience in Christ and that sort of hope that we live by, grow in, and die with, is never a gamble, never a wish, never a spell for luck. Hope is our gnawing hunger for God, a hunger we KNOW will be satisfied.

“Zacchaeus…was seeking to see who Jesus was;…so he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus…” Christian hope—our longing for Christ—is what pushed Zacchaeus up the tree; hope is what pulled him up into the branches to see who he needed to see. And what’s important for us to remember about Zacchaeus is who he is; that is, not only his name, his short stature, and his need to see Jesus, but his place in the Jewish scheme of things as well. He is “a chief tax collector and also a wealthy man…” Zacchaeus is doubly damned as a sinner by his neighbors because he has betrayed them by working for the enemy, and because he has grown rich in his chosen, traitorous profession. Only lepers and pagan temple prostitutes were considered more sinful! And yet, he seeks to see who Jesus is.

Do you daily, hourly seek to see who Jesus was, is, and will be?

Who was he, is he and who will he always be? The Book of Wisdom tells us that “before the Lord the whole universe is a grain from a balance…a drop of morning dew…” However, despite our smallness, in spite of our insignificance before Him, “[the Lord has] mercy on all, because [He] can do all things; and [He] overlooks people’s sins that they may repent.” If Zacchaeus knows this, if he knew his scripture and if he knew and believed that Jesus is his Lord, then climbing that sycamore tree is sure sign of his hope. Zacchaeus knew and we must learn that “[The Lord] love[s] all things that are and loathe[s] nothing that [He] has made; for what [He] hate[s], [He] would not have fashioned.”

Why must we learn this? Simple. If you believe that our Lord hates what He has fashioned, including you and me, then your hope will always be gamble. Your spiritual life will be full of good luck rituals, charm bracelet prayers, and magical thinking. You will turn every corner tensed, expecting a nasty, divine surprise. You will go to bed every night believing that your hateful god will take the opportunity to punish your laziness, to strike your sinful heart dead. You will look at your family, your friends, your fellow Christians and see nothing but walking, talking occasions of sin, breathing temptations that plague your worried attempts at finding favor, finding love in God. And you live a life that daily, hourly makes a lie out of the truth of our Father’s self-revelation to us: “…you spare all things, because they are yours, O Lord and lover of souls, for your imperishable spirit is in all thing!” All things! Including your family, your friends, your fellow Christians.

Do you daily, hourly seek to see who Jesus was, is, and will be? Do you daily, hourly seek to see Jesus in your neighbors, your roommates, your parents? If not, why not? Is it that your neighbors, roommates, parents are all imperfect? Or, is it that they are pro-abortion, homosexual, divorced, adulterers, liars? Or, is it that they do not share your theology? Or pray as you do? Or share your devotional practices, your sense of social justice, your indignation with the belligerent Bush administration, or your disdain for the culture of death Democrats? Or, is it because you have not yet come to the truth of your creation and your re-creation? Do you not seek Christ in yourself and others b/c you cannot see beyond your sin, hear over your own keening for your disobediences? Why would you allow any of these to spoil your hope, to mess with your beautiful God-graced passion for the Lord? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever!

If you are worried that this seeking Christ in self and others will lead to a libertine license to sin, will open the floodgates of approval for sin, listen to the rest of Wisdom. Our Lord’s imperishable spirit is in all the things He created, “therefore, [He] rebukes offenders little by little, warns them and reminds them of the sins they are committing, that they may abandon their wickedness and believe in [Him]…!” Our Lord does not forget His creatures. He does not forget that we are His creatures and that we share His image and likeness. In fact, Paul tells the Thessalonians, that he, Paul, and his ministers will pray for them so “that our God may make you worthy of his calling and powerfully bring to fulfillment every good purpose and every effort of faith…” Does this sound like a deity ready, willing, and able to stomp on you at the first sign of disobedience? No! And not only NO! but God is ready to “make you worthy of his calling.” Isn’t it the case that our rotting anxieties about sin, our worries about offending God are really just a disguise for a lack of hope? Aren’t we really worried about the sins of our neighbors, our children, our roommates b/c we are distrusting of our Father’s promise of mercy for ourselves? How ironic would it be if you put yourself in Hell because you spent your life worried about sin and failed to hope in Christ!?

Zacchaeus climbs the sycamore tree because he “was seeking to see who Jesus was.” Because he acts out of his longing for Christ, his hope for the Father’s love, Jesus calls his name and says, “…come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house.” Zacchaeus climbs down and “receives [Christ] with joy.” And what do the self-righteous do? What do those whose hope is a gamble, those whose hope is a lucky star, what do they do then? “When they all saw this, they began to grumble…” And rather than run away in shame or hide his face in disgrace, Zacchaeus, confident in his Lord’s word and his own repentance, gives half his wealth to the poor and makes restitution four times over for his extortion. Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house…”

Do you daily, hourly seek to see who Jesus was, is, and will be? Do you daily, hourly seek to see Jesus in your neighbors, your roommates, your parents and friends? If so, then prepare to receive the Lord at your table; prepare to entertain him among those in most need of his mercy. Your hope is working for your perfection and Christ is coming to dinner! If your hope remains a wishing-star or lucky charm, then memorize this prayer from scripture: “Lord, you love all things that are and loathe nothing you have made; for what you hate, you would not have fashioned…But you spare all things, because they are yours, O Lord and lover of souls, for your imperishable spirit is in all things!”

Oh, and couldn’t hurt to pray that prayer while climbing the nearest sycamore tree…

MacRae/Austin Wedding

Nuptial Mass: MacRae & Austin
Song of Songs 2.8-16, 8.6-7; Apoc 19.1, 5-9; John 2.1-11
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Ann Catholic Church, Coppell, TX

We are just before that moment when the bride and groom knot their love together in a sacramental vow—a tremendous instant of joy, long-anticipated and hope for, a moment of bright glory for Michael and Melissa, and for us all. What better moment then to preach about death? The singer of the Song of Songs sings to her beloved: “Set me like a seal on your heart, like a seal on your arm. For love is strong as Death, jealousy relentless as Sheol.” Love is as strong as death. A primitive fact, a most basic conclusion, death is beyond common; it is necessary. We must die. Death’s strength lies in its inevitability, its relentless coming to us, coming at us, and always finding us to win against all of our hesitations and anxieties and fevered denials. Death wins. For a little while, anyway. Love’s strength is as primitive, as basic and common and just as inevitable. Love comes to us, at us, and always wins against all of our doubts and fears and foolish dissents. Love overwhelms our sensitive passions, consumes the mind’s virtues, converts the emotions, and lays permanent claim to any soul strong enough to stand up in its lightening “flash of fire.” How much stronger, how much more powerful and dangerous and unrelenting then is that same love found twice and tied together for a lifetime?

“Love no flood can quench, no torrents drown.” As strong as death, love endures.

If you are here this afternoon for a fairy-tale wedding or a good sentimental cry or to get your romantic memory stoked until the next nuptial Mass comes along, I truly hope you are deeply disappointed. Nothing we do here this afternoon is fairy-tale, or sentimental, or romantic. Nothing we do here is about catalogs or invitations, caterers or florists, family or friends, not even the choir or the priest! What we do here this afternoon is about Christ and his Church. We are here to witness, to see with our own eyes, Michael and Melissa’s determination to be for us a sacrament of Christ’s love for his bride, the people he has won for the Father. We are here to say “amen” again and again in support of their ministry to one another as husband and wife, and to us as brothers and sisters in Christ. We are here to stand with them as they begin their lives together as apostles and priests, prophets and kings. We are here because we are happy to be invited to this wedding feast, the feast of this union and the feast of the Lamb who redeems us all.

At Cana, Mary reports to Jesus that the good wine of the wedding feast has run dry, “They have no wine,” she says. Jesus, being the good son, says, “Woman, why turn to me? My hour has not yet come.” Now, you can just see the look on Mary’s face. That look mother’s get when a son gets a sassy mouth. No doubt she pinched her lips just a bit, took a deep breath, and said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Jesus proceeds to change six stone jars of water into high quality wine and thoroughly impresses the steward of the house. He says to the bridegroom, “…you have saved the best wine till now.” You have to wonder why this scene from John’s gospel is suited for a Nuptial Mass. Other than its setting at a wedding feast, what makes this episode pertinent to a wedding? John notes: “This was the first of the signs given by Jesus: it was given at Cana in Galilee.” To mark his entry into a public ministry of teaching, preaching, and healing, our Lord chooses a wedding feast, the party after the formal liturgy to stake his claim on divine sonship. What does he do? Yes, he changes water to wine. Yes, he shows everyone his power. But what do any of these have to do with a wedding? Jesus announces his public ministry, staking a claim on his divine sonship by changing that which we need simply to live into that which we need for living well. He transforms the law of stone into the law of love; he transforms the temple sacrifices into the one sacrifice of the cross. The nuptial celebration is transformed into a sign of his coming into his Sonship and serves as the inauguration of his wedded life with the church! This is what makes what Michael and Melissa do here today a sacrament, a sign that points to and makes present the salvific love of Christ for his Church.

In love, Christ says to his Church as Michael says to Melissa, “Come then, my love, my lovely one, come…show me your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet and your face is beautiful.” And Melissa, in love, says to Michael as the Church says to Christ: “My beloved is mine and I am his. Set me like a seal on your heart, like a seal on your arm. For love is strong as Death…the flash of it is a flash of fire, a flame of the Lord himself!”

Though Michael and Melissa are obviously the first beneficiaries of this sacrament, their benefit is a boon for the rest of us as well. We do nothing alone in the Church, we do everything with everyone else. Besides being well-dressed and pretty, our task this afternoon is to say “amen,” it is so. Yes, it is so. And by saying “amen” we bind ourselves in service to this marriage. The newly baptized have a sponsor. The newly confirmed do as well. Priests and bishops rely heavily on the support of those who witness their ordinations. And we offer our company to the dead as we send them on their way. Michael and Melissa do not need us to make perfunctory liturgical noises. They do not need us to drink up their wine and eat their food. They need for us to see them as married, bound together in one flesh; they need us to support them as one flesh and offer ourselves in service to their ministry as husband and wife among us. Therefore, say “amen” and mean it!

Michael and Melissa, remember: Deus caritas est. God is love. Nothing overwhelms that Majesty. Nothing overtakes that Glory. There is nothing created that commands the power of re-creating love, nothing created that quenches the fire of His Holy Spirit. There is no one in this chapel this afternoon who will tell you that marriage is easy, that marriage is trouble-free and simple. No one here is going to guarantee you that you won’t go to bed angry or get up some morning disappointed or that money will be plentiful and that the children always be bright and happy. No one here is that foolish. But we are foolish enough to tell you that when you put Christ’s love first and then love one another through his love for you, you will endure. Mussed up, maybe. A bruise here and there. A few wounded feelings perhaps. But you will endure. And you will endure because you will cling to one another in the storms, even when you yourselves are the tempests. One storm does not a weather pattern make.

Let this verse from the Song of Songs remind you of what you have, what you have given today: “Love no flood can quench, love no torrents can drown.

The end(s) of death

All Souls: Wis 3.1-9; Romans 6.3-9; John 6.37-40
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Serra Club Mass

Nothing created can haunt our dreams or peak our curiosity or awe our spirits with the same deep horror and dread as a single thought of death. Well beyond our immediate fears of pain or trauma—the mechanics of dying—there is that dark point of closing away a life: shutting off the lights of feeling, thinking, acting; the dimming eclipse of memory, intelligence, passion; that unknotting of a body-soul in death that frees us for our final flight to the Father. To surrender to our end, to yield our time (such a small portion to cling to!), to die—releasing, unburdening, freeing—is our last act of peaceful trust; this moment is the Must of our dying well: you will die. But how? Not “by what mechanical means”? But “by what grace, what gift”?

The souls of the just are in the hands of God and no torment shall touch them…they are at peace.

When the foolish look upon those who rest in the hand of God, the Book of Wisdom says, the dead seem dead; their passing from life to death looks to be an affliction, utter destruction. The foolish are not foolish because they fail to understand our best arguments for the immortality of the human soul. The foolish are not foolish because they cannot see beyond their methods, their labs, their experiments. Not even are the foolish foolish because they simply refuse to assent to the revelation of God. The foolish are foolish and believe and teach foolish notions because they will not trust the Lord; they will not to begin in His love and come to wisdom as a destination through love: “Those who trust in Him shall understand truth, and the faithful shall abide with Him in love…” The foolish will not trust; they will not abide in love, and so, the unknotting of the body and the soul in death can to them be nothing more than a disease, an affliction, some dread occasion to be avoided.

If the foolish “know” death to be a disease, utter destruction, what do we as the trusting family of the Father know about death? Paul reminds the Romans that long before our body-souls unknot, we are washed in the waters of baptism and in being so washed, we are also “baptized into [Christ’s] death.” My death will not be my own. Neither will yours. Our deaths will be Christ’s death. Indeed, “we were…buried with him through baptism into death…” But we were not baptized just to die. We were baptized into his death, buried with him, “so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.” What the foolish will not to see, not to trust in and therefore fail to understand is that “we have grown into union with him through a death like his, [so] we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.” That which leads the foolish to see death as disease is done away with: our slavery to sin. We are absolved and freed and brought to die not a natural death, but a Christ-like death, a death that can only bring us to live with him forever.

Jesus teaches the crowds: “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and I will not reject anyone who comes to me…this is the will of the one who sent me, that I should raise [what has been given to me] on the last day.” For us to die then is not a matter of leaving life behind but a matter of coming to Christ in trust as the Father wills us. His gift to us is not necessarily a painless end, a joyful end, a quiet or even a celebratory end, but an end to Ending; that is, his gift to us is a death like Christ’s death, both a conclusion, a drawing closed and a start, a beginning again. Or, even better: death for us is our lives in Christ now extended into the Father’s perfect, glorious love. Jesus says that it is the will of his Father “that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may eternal life…” What disease, what affliction or trauma or grave misfortune can bring you in love to a life in Beauty and Truth? None can. Only the fool believes otherwise.

Remember the faces of your dead today, but do not mourn them. They are not here with us. They do not live in your hearts or in your photo albums or even in your most vivid memories. What is left of them for you here and now is merely a haunting, an afterimage, the thought of a ghost. Their immortality has nothing to do with hard won glory or infamy or trial. Like you and me, they were made for immortality, called to live beyond the death we live in the unknotting of body-soul. Their immortality, our immortality is the Father’s gift, a grace He gives to any of us who sees and hears His Son, believes in him, dies and is buried with him; anyone who nurtures holiness, avoids evil, spreads his gospel, does good work in his name, and trusts; anyone who stores up faith in the promises of the Father first and lives in Him, anyone who dies like Christ dies, Jesus says of him, “I shall raise him on the last day.” Today, children of God, is that last day. What then do you fear? What do you hope for beyond what God Himself as promised? His grace and mercy are with us, His holy ones.

Mimi Jaksic-Berger: Photo credit

Polish Your Mirror!

30^th Week OT(W): Romans 8.26-30 and Luke 13.22-30
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory

[Click Podcast Player to listen]

Along with “are you saved?” and “have you accepted Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior?”, I grew up hearing, “If you were to die tonight, do you know where your soul will spend eternity?” As a religiously indifferent teenager and an Episcopalian college student, I found these questions more than just annoying; they were intrusive, simplistic, and downright insulting. Not only did these questions pry into my spiritual life, but they presumed the truth of an entirely alien theology as the judge of my spiritual destiny! With solemn indignity, I would answer these religious-bottom feeders: Yes, I’m saved; I’m baptized. No, Jesus is not my personal Lord and Savior; he is the Lord and Savior of the whole Church. Then I would glare for a moment and stalk off…quickly stalk off before they realized that I had left the last question—the question about the destiny of my immortal soul—unanswered. That question got too close to the preening heart of my superficial Gen-X Episcopagan spirituality.

On his way to Jerusalem, someone asked Jesus, “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” Let’s notice a few features of this question: 1) it is addressed to Jesus as “Lord”—the questioner is recognizing Jesus’ authority to answer questions about salvation; 2) rather than asking “how many will be saved?” or “will great numbers of people be saved?”, this Someone sets up the question so that Jesus can use the image of the Narrow Gate—not all will have the strength to make it through; and 3) by using the word “saved,” this Someone is prompting us to ask: “saved? saved from what?” This word always evokes for me images of life jackets being thrown to passengers who were swept off the deck of the cruise ship during a storm, or all those news stories from the 90’s where puppies or kittens or children were rescued from wells or sewer drains—the helpless shown mercy in their peril and freed from impending doom by those who dwell in safety. Not a bad way to think of being “spiritually saved,” but are we painting on the largest possible canvas in the shop here? No, we’re not.

Jesus is teaching us that his salvation is more than mere rescue from eternal peril. By offering us his saving hand, Christ is doing more for us than simply offering to pull us back from the edge of the devil’s bottomless Pit; he is, in fact, making it possible for us to be returned to the Father as perfect creatures, freed from sin, wholly and entirely renewed and refreshed, and intimately bound in the flesh and blood of His Anointed One, the Christ. Our rescue reclaims us for the Father, but we are not simply returned to our pre-disaster state; we are made new, given new garments, washed clean, and welcomed as guests at the wedding feast. So, we strive to enter the Narrow Gate…

. . .and the question arises again: who gets through? Jesus does not describe the person who gets through nor does he number those who get through nor does he issue a password or a secret handshake. What he does do is send his Holy Spirit to the Church,. Paul teaches us, “The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness…” Why? “…[Because] we do not know how to pray as we ought…,” so the Spirit advocates with God for us. How? “…the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.” When we ourselves are unable to pray, the Spirit prays for us (instead of us), interceding for us before the Father. We are guaranteed then that when we pray in the Spirit, all the Father sees in our hearts, while searching us with His divine light, all the Father sees in us is His Spirit and His intentions for us shining back at Him. Though we ourselves do not shine out His glory, we polish the mirror that reflects it back. That mirror is the baptized Christian, living faithfully by grace, striving for holiness in good works, loving as Christ loved us from his cross, and coming to the fruition of a life soaked in mercy.

The brighter your mirror, the wider the gate to the Party. Your name is on the Guest List. Therefore, the more you look like Christ in this life, the less chance there is of the Heavenly Bouncer bouncing you into the street when your turn in line comes. Primp, perm, powder, and preen—above all, polish, polish your mirror, so that nothing from you shines back to the Father but His beautiful face.