3 yrs in Rome not a waste

Finally!  I'm going to get to put those three years in Rome to good use. . .

. . .teaching Intro to Modern Philosophy at Notre Dame Seminary in the spring.

And yes, I'm going to sneak in a bit of philosophy of science too.  Sssshhhhhhh. . .
___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Condoms not food?

Her response, "That's right.  There's too many of you and you might use up the resources I need for my vac-cay on the Riveria."

from:  Catholic Memes
___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ---->

Corded, wooden, 20 decade rosary???

[NB.  Thank you all for the suggestions.  I believe I've found my replacement rosary.]

Snagged my habit rosary on my desk and broke the cord!  It's reparable and being repaired, but a backup rosary would be prudent. . .

Anyone know where (online) I can get a 20 decade corded olive wood rosary?

I've seen places where custom made rosaries are available, but they're too expensive ($120 +).

Any suggestions?

___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Mother of Sorrows: she knows the Way

Our Lady of Sorrows
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

The day after we exalt the Holy Cross—that Roman device for torture and death—we remember Mary's sorrow. She stands at the foot of the cross while her only son bleeds away his life, and Simeon's prophecy made many years earlier is fulfilled, “. . .you yourself a sword will pierce. . .” The image of Mary's heart pierced with a sword is the image of a mother's grief, the image of any mother's sorrow at the suffering of her child. Simeon's prophecy—delivered in the temple when Jesus was just a boy—must have seemed strange to Mary at the time. Even stranger is the reason he gives for her sorrow. Your heart will be pierced, Mary, “so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” She must've wondered, “How can my grief reveal what's in the hearts of others?” Jesus answers this question from the cross when he says to his mother about the beloved disciple, “Woman, behold, your son.” And to his disciple, “Behold, your mother.” The sword that pierces Mary's heart is the sin of the world, the rejection of her son and his sacrifice on the altar of the cross. Her grief is a mother's grief for the suffering of all her children. 

The Blessed Mother has long served as a template for the Church in the world; that is, when we hear her say to Gabriel, “May it be done to me according to your word;” when we witness the strength of her resolve in the face of opposition to her son's mission; when we see her motherly devotion at the foot of the cross; and the honors given to her by the Father, we see how the Church best lives and works in the world. Mary is more than just a model for the Church. She gave birth to the human body of the Christ 2,000 yrs ago, and the Church is his human body 2,000 yrs later. Mary is the mother of the Christ and his Church. She is my mother and yours. While she mourns the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross, she also mourns the sins of his disciples; she mourns for him and his Church as we are persecuted, ridiculed, and rejected; and she mourns for those who will not see, will not hear his Father's offer of mercy. Our Lady of Sorrows could well be called Our Lady of Compassion b/c her pierced heart loves all those who have separated themselves from God and those who have received His mercy and yet remain disobedient. Her compassion shows us our sin, shows us where we have strayed from the faithful way. 

If Mary is the Mother of the Church and our model for faithful service, then the Church too must be compassionate toward those who have separated themselves from God. She must also show compassion for those of us who have been adopted into God's family and yet remain disobedient still. We could see this necessary compassion as a weakness, an indulgence of an entitled child's willfulness. But we must remember that the Via Dolorosa, the sorrowful way, is not an easy path for most of us. Jesus is unrelenting in warning those who would follow after him that the powers of this world would stop at nothing to divert, distract, and destroy our progress along the way. In fact, by the world's standards, Jesus is a total failure. He was executed as a criminal, a heretic. And now those who follow him live as signs of an absurd contradiction: they stand for the possibility of redemption from sin and against the inevitable victory of darkness. Like our Mother, the Church's heart is pierced with compassion and mercy so that she might be a living sign, a sacrament of salvation, for all those who suffer, all those who remain in sin. Ask Our Lady of Sorrows to reveal what's in your heart. Ask her to show you the way to the altar of the cross. She's been there. . .many times. She knows the Way. 

 ___________________

 Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Coffee Cup Browsing

Pay close attention to para. 10. . .it reveals why B.O. threw the American video-maker under the terrorist bus and why the media have contorted themselves to distract the public with an Attack Romney Sideshow.

Fr. Dismas Sayre, OP achieves apotheosis as the first Religious Cyborg. Congrats.

A brief review of Dinesh D’Souza’s, 2016: Obama’s America.  I've not seen the movie, but I basically agree with Reno's assessment of B.O.'s ideological commitments.

. . .but how do you know we're not really just a computer simulation?  This used to be an undergrad bull session question.  Now?  Not so much.

Incite hatred of Christians:  Free speech.  Incite hatred of Muslims: Hate speech.  Why?  Incited Christians don't blow the haters to smithereens.

Just so we're clear:  those embassy attacks were planned long before that goofy anti-Islam Youtube vid appeared.

Archbishop Gomez cleans house in L.A. . .well, it's a start.
___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Is there a seraph serpent in your life?

Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

At the center of our faith, at the root of the Church stands an absurdity: the Cross. Used for centuries by the Romans to execute the scum of the Empire, the cross is an instrument of suffering and death. That we exalt such a bloody tool of oppression is peculiar. But what makes the cross truly absurd for us is that it is not only a gruesome torture device but it is also our only means of salvation. Much like a scalpel cuts the flesh to remove a tumor and exacts a price in blood to heal the patient, the Cross too exacts its price to save the sinner. For us, for all of God's creatures, that price was paid in full by the blood of Christ. We are healed free of charge, and so we gather this evening to honor the cross of our salvation and to give God thanks for His abundant mercy. Our Lord says, “. . .just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” We believe. And we lift him up, trusting in his promise of life eternal! 

God's people begin to gripe and moan in the desert, "Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in this desert, where there is no food or water? We are disgusted with this wretched food!” They've forgotten their lives in slavery under Pharaoh and they've forgotten that the Lord rescued them. He sends serpents among them. Many are bitten and many die. They repent and Moses intervenes on their behalf. God offers them healing through an image of the very thing He used to punish them: the serpent. When those who are bitten look at the image of the serpent, they are healed. Thus is set in the minds of God's people the memory that an instrument of punishment can also be a tool for redemption. And thus are we shown that pain, suffering, and death—so obviously useless to the world—can be a way back to God if we travel The Way with repentance in faith. We have been rescued by Christ from slavery to sin. And the way across the desert to perfection is long, hard, and dry; often w/o much nourishment; without much shelter; or a chance to rest. And we are all prone to some whining, a little “woe is me.” And when our complaining gets to be too shrill or too a bit too self-pitying, we might find the occasional seraph serpent waiting for us, ready to bite. A reminder that so long as we have something, anything to lose, we have yet to surrender wholly to God. 

Paul's magnificent hymn on the Incarnation in his letter to the Philippians is a catalog of all that the Son of God surrendered for us so that we might free of sin: “He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, . . .he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” If God can love us so fully, so completely that He sends His only Son to pay the price for our salvation; and if His Son can love us so fully, so completely that he willingly empties himself out, makes himself obedient to the laws of death and dying, and then dies on the cross for us, then can we—the sole beneficiaries of his death—lay claim to anything as our own, most especially our very lives? We belong to Christ as his brothers and sisters and as his servants. Everything is his and his alone. If there is a seraph serpent in your life, a biting temptation, or poisonous sin waiting to strike you down, this might be b/c you have failed to enjoy the absurdity of the cross and cling still to something or someone who belongs to Christ. Empty yourselves in surrender so that Christ might fill you with his own thanksgiving. On this most absurd of feasts, look upon the cross and give God thanks for your salvation! 

___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Lift High the Cross (A Sunday Homily)

[A Sunday homily for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross from 2008. . .this one has never been preached.  Our Sunday Masses in Rome were celebrated in Italian, so I never presided at one or preached at one.]

Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Convento SS. Domenico e Sisto, Roma

Go out, come back. Leave and return. Go out, come back. Exit and enter. Egress, ingress. Exitus, reditus. We are made, and we return to our Maker. How? The Cross. The cross of Christ Crucified is the via media, the middle way from God and the middle way back to God. From God: creation. Back to God: re-creation. Being made and lost, we cannot return to God without God. He set in history—human events, the human story—the means for our return to Him: Christ on the Cross, crucified as one of us, fully human and fully divine—a bridge from here to there. Jesus says to Nicodemus: “No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man.” And Paul writes: “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, […] emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, […] he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” Now, we should hear the familiar refrain of our salvation: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” And so we are saved from the eternal return to nothing from nothing; we are made perfect as our Father is perfect; “being merciful, [He] forgave [our] sin and destroyed [us] not.” 

We say: amen. Or do we? If we accept this gift, we say: amen. And then what? Carry on as before? Do we as please? Live in constant regret that we killed God? Try to make a sacrifice worthy of the gift? The poet, Christian Wiman, in a poem titled, “Hard Night,” asks the same question this way: “What words or harder gift/does the light require of me/carving from the dark/this difficult tree?” What words or gifts does the Cross require of us? Paul writes that the coming of the Christ and his obedient death on the Cross, moved God to exalt His Son and to “bestow on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend […] and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord…” No other words. Let your tongue confess. There is no harder gift to give than the gift given on the Cross. Bow your knees at his name. And then what? It’s not so certain, is it? Once we have confessed the Lordship of the Christ and bent our knees to his rule, what we do next is no certain thing. With the Gift of the Cross in hand, we might worship it, take it around in procession, put it to work for our health and wealth; we might be embarrassed by its necessity or feel imposed upon to react with faint gratitude. Have you ever thought that there had to be a better way? Another way to achieve your eternal life? Something less bloody, something not quite so gruesome? Have you ever been angry with Pilate, the Jewish leadership, the mob that shouted, “Crucify him!”? Perhaps praying before a crucifix, you felt a dangerous rise of bile and wanted nothing more to do with the cruelty of a god who needs blood to love? Or perhaps you felt a dark fear that once we settled in your heart the gift of a bloody sacrifice, you would never be the same again? 

Yet another poet, John Ashbery, writes, “…all was certain on the Via Negativa/except the certainty of return, return/to the approximate.” If we are afraid of the Cross, this is what we fear most: to walk the via media of Christ’s crucifixion means accepting the inevitably of joining him on the Cross. Peter, in a fit of fear and false love, denied the inevitability of Christ’s defeat and, in turn, pushed against the necessity of his own crucifixion. Jesus, knowing the certainty of his Father’s Via Negativa, pushed back, “Get behind me, Satan!” Even then, he was empty, obedient to death, and ready to die on the Cross. Perhaps we show our deepest gratitude to Christ by emptying ourselves, being obedient to death, and preparing ourselves to die in his name. Perhaps. But what does this mean for tomorrow? For today? Sitting in a room, cases packed, shoes neatly tied, waiting for martyrdom? Nothing so quietistic as all that! Paul says that we should bend our knees and confess Jesus as Lord. Walking this path of worshipful praise cannot be good exercise if we fail to do what Christ himself did: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick. Add to this preach the Good News of God’s mercy and teach what Christ himself taught and we have beginning for our gratitude, just the barest start to what must be a life given over wholly to the path of righteousness. That’s a lot to fear. Especially when you know that the one you used to be will not be found again. At most you might think to “the return to the approximate.” But why? 

Look at Moses and God’s people in the desert. “With their patience worn out by the journey, the people complained against God and Moses…” Not only are we made and made to return to our Maker, but we are rescued from death by the death of Christ on the Cross and expected then to prepare ourselves for following him to the Cross, obedient to death, bending the knee, confessing his name, and waiting, waiting, waiting for his return to us so we can return to Him. Has our patience worn out from this journey? Do we complain against God and His Church? Our desert is not getting smaller or cooler or less arid. Our days are no shorter. Our nights no brighter. Moses wanders and we follow. And our patience, already silk-thin, rubs even thinner, waiting on the fulfillment of the promise the Cross made in God’s name. While waiting, what do we do? Some of us persevere, walking the Way. Some of us withdraw to wait. Others walk off alone. Still others erect idols to new gods and find hope in different, alien promises. Some let the serpents bite and thrill in the poisonous moment before death. Perhaps most who were with us at first perish from hearts stiffened by apathy, what love they had exhausted by the tiresome demands of an obedience they never fully heard. Not all the seeds will fall on smooth, fertile earth. If those who walked away or surrendered or succumbed to attacks on the heart, if they are out there and not here with us, what hope do we have of going forward, of continuing on to our own crosses in the city’s trash heap? We exalt the Cross. And they are not lost. Never, finally, lost. Unless they choose not to be found. 

We exalt the Cross. Lifted high enough and waved around vigorously enough, even those lost will find it. Even those who, for now, do not want to be found, may see it and be healed, if they will. But they will not see what they must to be healed if those of us who claim to walk the Way do so shyly, timidly, quietly. The Way of Christ to the Cross is not a rice paper path that we must tip-toe across so as not to tear it. Or a shaky jungle bridge over a ravine that we must not sway for fear of falling. Or a bed of burning coals that we must hop across quickly so as to avoid blistering our feet. The Way of Christ to the Cross has been made smooth, straight, and downhill all the way but nonetheless dangerous for its ease. There’s still the jeering mob, the scourge, the spit and the garbage, and there’s still the three nails waiting at the end. But this is what we signed up for, right? It’s what we promised to do, to be. Our help is in the name of the Lord. Bend the knee. Confess his name. Do so loudly, proudly and do so while doing what Christ himself did. Otherwise, who will find us among the jeering crowd, the spitting mob; who will see the Cross if we fail to lift it high?

___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans!  ----->

"Sorry. . .people of America!"

At this moment. . .it is vitally important for Americans to remember that the terrorists who kill in the name of Islam do not represent every Muslim.   The loons of Westboro Baptist Church do not represent all Christians.  The LCWR does not represent all religious women in the U.S. nor do they speak for every Catholic.  Nor do the Occupiers represent 99% of Americans.

Every identifiable group--religious, racial, political, etc.--has its loose screws, its hot-heads, its fringe elements.   These outliers cannot be allowed to control our response to the group as a whole.

This isn't wimpy liberalism; it's simple rationality and charity. 

___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Suffer well to be holy

23rd Week OT (W)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

We easily recognize Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. This is Luke's version, the version where the blessed are starkly contrasted with the cursed. “Blessed are you” vs. “Woe to you.” No serious follower of Christ hopes to be among the cursed, and no one lands in their company by accident or through ignorance. Jesus preaches his famous sermon from the mount—probably many times in many places—so that no one may later claim, “But Lord! I didn't know that I was suppose to be holy! I thought just being a nice guy was enough.” In logical terms, being nice is necessary but not sufficient when pursuing holiness. The Lord's invitation to each of us to begin a pilgrimage toward a holy life is given a more modern translation by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council. From their document, Lumen gentium, we read, “Fortified by so many and such powerful means of salvation—[the sacraments],—all the faithful, whatever their condition or state, are called by the Lord, each in his own way, to that perfect holiness whereby the Father Himself is perfect”(11). Thus we are called; thus we are warned. 

Let's be clear in our own minds what it means to be holy. Holiness is not about piety; that is, you can behave piously and remain comfortably among the accursed. Who was it that described the Pharisees, in all their pious finery, as “white-washed tombs”? Nor is being holy about morality; that is, you can successfully avoid every immoral thought, word, and deed that tempts you and still remain entrenched among the accursed. Does Jesus ever bless a good moral act in his sermon on blessedness? Nor is being holy about assenting to the truth of dogma or doctrine; that is, you can memorize the Catechism and the Bible, recite them both w/o error in front of the Holy Father, swear you believe every word, and still find yourself playing among the accursed. Even the Devil can quote scripture. Having said all that, being pious, morally good, and orthodox are all necessary to growing in holiness but none of them (nor all of them together) is what it means to be holy. Holiness (blessedness) is principally about how we choose to suffer—that is, how we choose to understand and act on the pain and deprivation we experience while separated from our Father. Who does Jesus say is blessed? The poor, the hungry, those who mourn, and those who suffer for the sake of his Name. 

And why are these folks blessed? What's so holy about being poor, hungry, mournful, and persecuted? There's nothing especially holy about any of these conditions as such. What's special about being poor, hungry, etc. is that each of these states in life offers the ones who endure them the chance to see beyond their earthly limitations and rely completely on the loving-care of God. They are given a clearer vision of what it means to be humble before the Lord than those who might rely on their wealth and good name for comfort. The Council Fathers note that we are all called to holiness regardless of our state in life or the condition of our lives. Any one of us might choose to suffer poorly and attach ourselves to the bottle, the casino, the needle, or some other false god. Or we might choose to avoid pain and deprivation by causing others pain and depriving them of their due. True holiness entails genuine piety, righteous words and deeds, and right belief about the faith. But the next step beyond these necessities is choosing to throw ourselves completely and w/o hesitation on the loving-care of God. We call this abandonment to divine providence humility. The truly humble are already among the blessed. 

_____________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Diagnosing our fears

Besides sweating away several gallons of fluid during the Issac power outage, I spent some time re-reading William Barrett's Irrational Man.  

May I suggest that faithful Catholics do the same?  (At least parts one and two)

Why?

Barrett traces the roots of the West's existential crisis and identifies nihilism* as the source of our deepest personal and cultural anxieties.  B.O.'s 2008 campaign directly addressed these anxieties with an appeal to superficial Hope & Change.  And we bought it.  Well, most of us did anyway.

I'm not suggesting that you read Barrett as a matter of political science but as a plausible diagnosis of what's happening to us as a freedom-loving nation and God-fearing culture.

Many of the political developments in the last half-century arose out of our collective fear of personal annihilation (physical and spiritual), a need for security now that we've sequestered God away from the public square.  The academy's assault on the intelligibility of truth and the rise of the National Security Nanny State push us further and further along the road to serfdom.

I'm not suggesting that philosophical existentialism gives us a solution to our cultural anxieties.  Far from it.  Historically, existentialism served as a diagnostic tool not a treatment regime.  

The only well-documented treatment for the crippling fear of nothingness is God.  While the Nanny State has always failed--will always fail--God does not and cannot fail. 

*Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. With respect to the universe, existential nihilism posits that a single human or even the entire human species is insignificant, without purpose and unlikely to change in the totality of existence. According to the theory, each individual is an isolated being "thrown" into the universe, barred from knowing "why", yet compelled to invent meaning.  The inherent meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism, where one can potentially create his or her own subjective "meaning" or "purpose". Of all types of nihilism, existential nihilism gets the most literary and philosophical attention. 

 ___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Coffee Cup Browsing

And our descent into the Abyss continues. . .can't say we weren't warned!

Coming to the U.S.: your job or your faith.  Your choice.

An alternative remedy to curing dissident clergy/religious:  sue them for fiduciary malpractice.

ObamaCare described in one (long) sentence.

Rare photo of one of my fav poets, Emily Dickinson.  NB.  Ignore the intentionally provocative headline.  It's a product of 90's feminists inventing history to push an agenda.

This looks oddly familiar. . .didn't something like this happen when Jimmy was Prez?

Russian female choir sings "By the Waters of Babylon" (Ps 137). . .Beautiful!

Religion is an inherently public practice.
___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Novena for Religous Liberty

Fr. Frederick L. Miller, Professor of Systematic Theology at Mount St. Mary Seminary in MD has written and published. . .

A Novena to the Mother of God for the Nation

The novena addresses our Blessed Mother and begs her to intervene with her Son for the protection of our God-given religious liberties.

You can download the novena in pamphlet form and print it out.

By Sept 29th (the first day of the novena) I hope I will no longer be this awful Envy-Green color!

___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

On not forgetting that we have an Enemy

A 9/11 note from Instapundit:

And here’s a passage from Lee Harris’s Civilization And Its Enemies.

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe …

They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

I would add:  When a society loses the ability to remember its past--discards its grounding in history--and lives its God-given freedom as an entitlement, that society has put a loaded gun to its head.  The 9/11 terrorists pulled the trigger. And we're still cleaning up the mess.

___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Interpreting the Bible

In our Intro to the Old Testament class this morning, we'll be reading and discussing the 1994 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, "The Interpretation of the Bible."

This means I get to use my favorite $15 theological word, hermeneutics.

Ya know, it's the small things in life. . .

___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->

Love is always a public act

23rd Week OT (M)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Our English translation of this gospel really doesn't capture an important element of the event it describes. What at first reads like a standard “Jesus vs. the Pharisees in the synagogue” story is actually much more complex. This complexity is brushed over by the way the translators chose to translate the manner in which the Pharisees observe Jesus and the man with the withered hand interacting. Our version reads, “the Pharisees watched him closely.” Older versions do a better job: they were “spying.” To describe their behavior as “spying” helps us to understand the question Jesus asks of them, “. . .is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” Jesus will do good on the Sabbath by healing the man's hand; while the Pharisees do evil on the Sabbath by spying and plotting evil. Jesus will save the man's life; while the Pharisees conspire to take Jesus' life. The more fundamental contrast here btw Jesus and his enemies is the contrast btw secrecy and publicity. When following the first commandment of love, Jesus holds himself (and us) to a higher standard of public behavior. Loving or failing to love are always public events. 

The basic theological difference btw Jesus and the Pharisees comes down to how they answer the question: how do we become righteous?; that is, by what means do we enter into a right relationship with God? The Pharisees teach that entering into a right relationship with God requires that we studiously observe the Law. Jesus doesn't disagree. But he does teach that “observing the Law” requires much more than simply “following the rules.” In order to observe the Law faithfully, we must go underneath the Law, seek out what motivates its rule and regulations, and align ourselves with the living spirit of the Law. What's the one commandment that grounds all the others? The originating rule that motivates all the rules? Love God, self, and neighbor first; then, all the other commandments may be properly observed and righteousness obtained. In fact, love first and then observing all the other commandments comes naturally! And note: there is no way to follow the first commandment of love secretly or privately. Loving God, self, and neighbor is always public, always a public testimony to one's righteousness. 

If following the first commandment of love always entails public acts that witness to your right relationship with God, then your public behavior must be worthy of the one who died to make that relationship possible. Paul writes to the Corinthians about a man in their church who's taken up with his father's wife. It's not clear if this woman is the man's mother or step-mother; regardless, it's an incestuous relationship—a sin that even the pagans of the day condemned. Paul urges the church to toss this guy out so that he might repent and be saved. By tossing him out of the church, the church will also prevent his sin from corrupting the whole body. This is a medicinal move, a cure meant to spare the man and the church from eternal death. The man's public behavior does not give testimony to his right relationship with God; in fact, it does just the opposite: it bears witness to the fact that he is not aligned with Love and threatens—by example—to leaven the church with “malice and wickedness.” Keeping his sin private might stall public scandal, but an injury to a part of the Body is an injury to whole Body. Heal one part, the whole is healed. 

Jesus publicly violates the Law of the Sabbath in order to obey the Law of Love, thus teaching the Pharisees and us that the rules flow from Love as a means for us to love publicly. Just as the Pharisees fail to love when they plot evil on the Sabbath, so the man in Corinth fails to love by sinning. The cure—for the Pharisees, the man, and for each of us—is repentance, confession, penance, and the healing word of God's mercy. 

___________________

Follow HancAquam and visit the Kindle Wish List and the Books & Things Wish List

Click on St. Martin and donate to the Dominicans! ----->