No strength in flesh, no hope in anxiety

2^nd Week of Lent (R): Jer 17.5-10 and Luke 16.19-31
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation (Alternative Spring Break Pilgrims’ Blessing)

PODCAST!

What’s wrong with seeking and finding our strength in flesh? What could be more real, more immediate, more readily available than the helping hand or the generous heart? Seeking and finding our strength in the flesh—in our own hearts and minds and bodies, in our own humanity and communities—this seems more than just the obvious answer; it seems like the only answer to our weaknesses! We turn to one another in service, in generosity, trusting in compassion and endurance. And we often find in our most desperate moment of need, at that instant of near panic in the face of overwhelming hardship—what? Neglect, abuse, cruelty, cold criminal hearts, disdain for others’ needs, blaming those in need, a rationalization for inaction, and weak, weak flesh. Of course, we also find heroic generosity, self-sacrifice, zealous service, and compassion. And here we find the Lord and His hope.

Jeremiah says that comfortable flesh—the cold, stingy heart wallowing in abundance—is cursed. Why? Well, where is the hope of one who finds his strength in passing flesh? Where is his trust? What more can he hope for, long for, than more comfortable flesh and a smaller heart grown colder in meanness? Let me give you a simple analogy: you fall off the deck of a cruise ship. One sailor throws you a standard life jacket connected to a long nylon rope. Another sailor throws you a life jacket made of cardboard and connected to a long string of paper clips. Now. It is entirely possible that both could save you under near perfect conditions, but knowing the composition of both jackets, the effects of water on paper, the strength of paper clips hauling your wet weight, which jacket do you choose to save your life? The standard one, of course! But spiritually speaking, how many of us consistently choose the cardboard jacket b/c it’s more fashionable or the person tossing it to us is better looking or b/c we do not trust the one throwing the life jacket that will save us?

Do I really need to tell you that placing your trust in the flesh and your hope in the world is both foolish and vain? Look at the Rich Man in hell. Where is his hope? Easy answer: where was his treasure? Look at Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom. Where is his hope? Easy, again: he had no treasure in the flesh but dies covered in lesions. Where does he die? And this is probably the most poignant moment in the gospel today…he dies lying at the rich man’s door! At the entrance to fleshy abundance, a door to comfortable safety, Lazarus dies wanting nothing more than table scraps. Having everything, the rich man dies wanting everything and now he pleads for a drop of water. From Lazarus. Who died at his door hungry.

Here’s a question for the ASB Pilgrims: where is your hope? Where is your trust? What is it that you think you’re taking to Peru? Shoes? Baseball caps? School supplies? Building skills? Do you think you’re taking Jesus to Peru? He’s there already! What are you taking? What will you leave? What will you bring back? Are you ready to see Christ revealed to you in a three year old orphan? A gangly teenaged boy? A middle-class Sunday school teacher? A grouchy airport clerk with a distaste for Americans? In one another?

We’re not going to Peru to save the Peruvians. We going to Peru to meet Christ. Our gift to the Peruvians is our love, our attention, our fellowship in Christ, our willingness to work side by side. They are letting us serve them. And that’s their gift to us.

Take Christ with you. Leave Christ there. And bring him back. No flesh—American or Peruvian—can be your hope for blessing. God alone is our help, our drop of water in a thirsty desert.

PLAYBILL: "O, Wounded Me!"

2^nd Week of Lent (M): Daniel 9.4-10 and Luke 6.36-38
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory

PODCAST!

When I know that it is time for me to forgive, I resist. My grip on the hurt tightens. The hurt is like one of those egg layers from the Alien movies…those creatures that attach themselves to your face with a long, reptilian tail snaking around your throat. Try to remove them and they squeeze your throat until you surrender. Oftentimes our injuries, our wounds do the same. Try to remove them by forgiving their source and they tighten, squeeze. They dig in a little deeper and attach themselves to bone.

Somehow it feels good to pick at our scabs, to stroke our wounds and feel them hurt us all over again. My salt seems to burn a little sweeter. And how wonderful it is to discover that having been offended we now have power over our offender; we hold him or her dangling by the toes! There’s that tasty threat of vengeance or exposure. Not to mention the perverse delight of replaying the wounding over and over again for full effect. A sort of feedback loop where each rehearsal of the injury gets more and more vivid, brighter and louder; the details take on an epic cast, a Broadway drama starring Me as the victim. With top billing and my own dressing room, why would I choose to end this production of “O Wounded Me!”?

Besides the obvious advantages of being the victim, aren’t we just a little afraid of forgiveness? Just a little anxious about giving or receiving forgiveness? What does it mean to forgive someone who’s hurt me? Am I saying that he or she didn’t hurt me? That it was OK? Is forgiveness an implied permission to do it again? Am I telling my offender that I am weak? Does forgiving mean forgetting? Who do I become if I forgive? The hero? The saint? Jesus teaches his disciples that “…the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” So, the question is: what do you want forgiveness to be? Wiping the slate clean? A small start toward reconciliation? A grudging gesture just to keep the peace? A pro forma ritual to save face? The measure will be what you want it to be. And it will be exactly that for you when it comes time for you to be measured.

So, “give and gifts will be given to you.” This isn’t about a quid pro quo gift exchange; it’s about learning how to receive a gift as a gift. Gracefully. Full of grace. It helps to know who you are as the receiver of the gift! Look again at the sinners from the reading in Daniel. Who are they? They are wicked, evil rebels; disobedient servants, shamefaced traitors to God; they are base criminals. And despite all of this…their own description of themselves, by the way!...despite their wretched state, they can call on God’s compassion and forgiveness. Knowing yourself to be a sinner and calling on God’s mercy anyway is exactly how you learn to receive the forgiveness of others. And to give it. To be asked to forgive is a humbling moment. To forgive is even more humbling. To forgive as I would be forgiven is an act of total dependence on God. It is all about looking over the questions, through the objections, around the hurt and fear, and staring straight into the face of Christ on the cross and knowing that I cannot waste one lash, one nail, one thorn on another second of self-indulgent drama. Pampered wounds never heal.

Those egg laying creatures from the Alien movies eventually die, releasing their choke hold and falling from your face. But before they do, they plant a monster in your gut. In time, the monster explodes from your chest in a spray of blood and bone. And it runs off to create more monsters…

Forgive and be forgiven before your monster finds its way out.

On a mountain closer to Jerusalem

2^nd Sunday of Lent: Gen 15.5-12, 17-18; Phil 3.17-4.1; Luke 9.28-36
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital and Church of the Incarnation

[NB. No PODCAST for this homily...I couldn't get the recorder to work at Mass!]

Lord! It is good that we are here! Here in your house. Here in your desert. With you and your family. With the Spirit and all the possibilities of your Love. But why are we here, Lord? In this desert: without, leaving behind, giving away, going further and further toward that bone-dry waste, in this desert of fasting and prayer? Why are we here? Jesus went into the desert to be tempted by the Devil. He went so that he could be tempted, tested against his knowing who he really is, tested against his trust of the Father, his patience, his willingness to walk the bloody, sorrowful way to the Cross. The Devil started small, where most of us fail, with our stomachs, and then he went Big: power, prestige, wealth. Jesus calls on the Word and teaches the Devil. Jesus does not so much resist the temptations as he skillfully turns them upside down and reveals their goodness. Nothing wrong with bread. Nothing wrong with worship. Nothing wrong with calling on our guardian angels. There is nothing wrong with any of these per se if they are divinely ordered and used for their proper ends. The Devil gets his righteous lesson, but remember how that gospel reading ends: “When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from Jesus for a time.” For a time. And that is why we are here! The Devil’s back.

Lord, it is good that we are here. Here in your desert. With you and your disciples. All your students and friends. We are fully awake and ready to hear, fully awake and ready to listen—a bit nervous, a little frightened maybe, but we’re here. We see Moses and Elijah and Jesus in their glory and we hear them talking with Jesus about his exodus to Jerusalem. We offer to build shrines in honor of the prophets, but we do not know what we are saying. The cloud comes and the shadow darkens the sand and we all hear the voice from the cloud: “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” And everyone is silent……….are we fully awake? Can we be silent?

What does it mean to be “fully awake” and to be “silent”? Notice that Peter, John, and James see the glory of the three men before them once they become “fully awake.” Having fallen asleep while Jesus prayed, they awake to this glory and say, “Master, it is good that we are here…” Being fully awake in Christ then is not simply a matter of not being asleep. Being fully awake is a matter of attentiveness to Christ’s presence, a focused effort toward seeing and hearing and listening to Christ every minute, every second of your day. Being fully awake is being alive with the Spirit, electric white and dazzling! Can you confess that it is good that you are here? Here in this house? Here in this desert? Here with us?

Being fully awake is also about being completely aware of what would make us into fools, that which pulls us away from Christ and pushes us toward a truly empty desert. Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, warns against the “enemies of the cross of Christ.” These enemies run to their own destruction, worship their appetites, and revel in what brings them shame. They minds are possessed by “earthly things.” You’ve heard me call out these “earthly things” before, all those “ism’s.” It’s become a litany for me. In fact, I’ve made it into a real litany.

A Litany Against the Enemies of the Cross of Christ

(Please stand)

Let us pray: “Lord, your servant Paul warns us against scratching our itchy ears with alien philosophies and foreign religions; he also warns us not to conduct ourselves like those who are enemies of the Cross of Christ. Clear our hearts and minds and keep us fully awake so that we may hear your Word as we pray: Save us, O Lord!

From…

…the pride of materialist science and all its future Frankensteins… Save us, O Lord!

…the gluttony of petite bourgeois consumerism and fashion and war…

…the greed of corporate and governmental irresponsibility and the nanny State…

…the lusts of Hollywood, its minions in TV and radio and the idolatry of celebrity…

…the sloth of self-help psychobabble, New Age junk, and religious syncretism…

…the envy of Enlightenment “freedom” and the prison of reason without God…

…the wrath of secular diversity, tolerance, and moral anarchy…

Save us, O Lord from these enemies and keep us fully awake. In Jesus name. Amen.

OK. A bit a fun. But I hope my point is clear: to be fully awake is in large part to be fully aware of what the faith is and isn’t, what defines us and what pretends to define us in order to destroy us. Our citizenship is in heaven, true, but right now, we live down here, and in the meantime, we have to be awake to our personal enemies, our daily temptations, and the enemies that work on a much larger scale. Lent, the desert, is where we go to confront these enemies head on! And there we will find the Lord already victorious.

We’re fully awake. Now, what does it mean to be quiet? Being quiet is not just about being noiseless. There’s silence, of course; but there’s stillness as well. Waiting. Not being tensed to spring into action. Not being ready to race or hurry. In fact, being quiet means being fully awake and completely empty, empty of an all-consuming Self, empty of disobedience and capital dissent; empty of inordinate desires for prestige, power, and advantage over others; empty of despairing, self-loathing, and resentment. Being quiet in the desert is about slowly shuffling your feet in the walk to Jerusalem—no proud marches; no eager skipping along, racing to the end; no arrogant stomping in defiance of authority; just humble walking. In silence. Fully awake. Without. And with Jesus.

The Devil is here too, of course. He left for a time. He’s back. And that’s why we’re here in the desert: to meet the Devil so that we can be tempted; and we’re here to see Christ in his glory and to listen. So, let me ask you: do you run from temptation? Why? Are you afraid of sinning? Or are you afraid of what might tempt you? I mean, do you fear what you desire? Do you think fear is enough to drive away something as powerful as desire? Or does fear sweeten desire, pushing it into the forbidden and the inscrutable, thus turning a mere temptation into an obsession? Fighting temptation is pointless. That battle is won already. You are free; you do not have to sin. So, don’t. Look carefully at what the Devil is tempting you with. He will always tempt you with an apparent good. Look at the temptation. What’s good there? What has the Liar twisted? Untwist it. Find the Good and give God thanks for that Good. Turn an occasion of sin into a grateful event!

Master, it is good that we are here…with you, with each other. On the mountain, he showed us his heavenly glory and pointed us to Jerusalem. So, one foot in front of the other. One step, one step. And the cross comes closer…clearer, louder, rougher. And the enemies collect as they always do. Stand firm. Stay awake and be quiet. Keep watch in silence, ready to hear and see and obey his Word.

The cross pulls us to Jerusalem. Easter morning is dark still.

WAKE UP! and Be Quiet

2^nd Sunday of Lent: Gen 15.5-12, 17-18; Phil 3.17-4.1; Luke 9.28-36
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Women’s Retreat for U.D. Seniors (Vigil Mass)

PODCAST!

Sssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Listen. Hear that? That thumping silence? The quiet of being attentive to nothing at all? That vacuum, that bare blare of Empty is the sound of God in the desert with you, His spirited breath, held for a moment, waiting for you to be quiet, to be still and settled, to be fixed on every possibility that His Word might create. Ssssshhhhhhhhhhhh! Would you clamor and clang and squeal and miss what He has to say to you? Are you fully awake?

If you are to be transfigured by your time in the desert, you must be fully awake and quiet. And not just “without noise” but also without hurrying, without pressured racing and competition, without distracted calculation and cautious deliberation. You must be Without. Entirely empty of envy, pride, desire for applause, desire for honors, desire for power; entirely emptied of self-pity, self-hatred, self-congratulation; emptied of self-righteous assurance, contagious despairing, and you must be emptied of our culture’s soul crippling scripts for women, those vacuous dramas of prince charmings, princess brides, the abused but dutiful wife, the mother eaten alive by maternal myths of all-consuming sacrifice. If you are to be transfigured by your time in the desert, you must be fully awake and quiet.

Full awake and quiet. Ssssshhhhhhh! The cloud speaks: “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” Jesus was then alone and the disciples fell silent and did not tell anyone about what they had seen. And their silence about this miracle doomed the church. Their selfish silence thwarted the spread of the gospel; it destroyed any chance the apostles would have of casting the seeds of the Good News onto fertile, Gentile soil. Right? The Way died when Peter, John, and James sealed their lips in conspiracy and refused to talk about the Christ in his dazzling whites. NO! They were silent in the face of being told directly by the Father Himself that Jesus is His Son. Somehow, silence seems like the appropriate response to that revelation! They talked later. And often. And all over the Gentile world. And until they died as martyrs they spoke of the Chosen Son and the power of his fiery Spirit and the necessity of turning from rebellion and disobedience and turning to love and mercy. And because of their awed silence and then their obedient preaching, we can say with them: “Master! It is good that we are here!”

If you are to be transfigured by your time in the desert, you must be fully awake and quiet. Thomas Merton writes, “The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else […] The desert therefore is the logical dwelling place for the man who seeks to be nothing but himself—that is to say, a creature solitary and poor and dependent upon no one but God, with no great project standing between himself and his Creator”(TS, 5). To be asleep, spiritually, is live in a dreamland where you are liberated from all social constraints, all social commitments, all familial ties; to live in a dreamland where you are in control, where you define your truth and your limits, and where you pick and choose how you will moved by those around you. To be asleep spiritually to be foolish about speaking to God as an equal, treating Him like Santa Claus, trying to capture Him with small things like words or pictures or music or science. You are sleeping if you dream that God loves the Good Girl more. That He races to the rescue of the most pious first. That He treasures as indicators of your humility and obedience your obsessiveness, your self-doubt, your dark self-image. What project stands between you and God? What layers of sticky illusion cling to your waking and keep you stupored?

WAKE UP! Sssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Listen: stand firm in the Lord. He will bring all things into subjection under him, including you and me. We will all be transfigured. Even now: we are changing. One step in front of the other. Over the sand. Over the dunes. Into the desert of Lent to be tempted. To know your weak spot, the weakness that will call the Devil to the fight that will clean your heart for sacrifice. Stand firm. And walk. And walk and walk and walk to the Cross. Knowing that he waits there. Waits for you, for us, for the nails and our healing.

‘Til then, imitate the stars: shine, wait, and be as still as light.

Stoking the fires of Gehenna

2nd Friday of Lent: Ez 18.21-28 and Matt 5.20-26
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Serra Club and Church of the Incarnation

PODCAST!

The third century martyr, Cyprian, said it best: “God does not receive the sacrifice of a person who is in disagreement, but commands him to go back from the altar and first be reconciled to his brother, that so God also may be appeased by the prayers of a peace-maker. Our peace and brotherly agreement is the greater sacrifice to God…” The sacrifice of the Mass is a sacrifice that makes our peace with God. If that sacrifice is spoiled, in some way tainted or injured, then we are not offering to God our first fruits, our best. And what, exactly, are we offering anyway? Finest wheat? Spring lamb? No. We are offering to God what God Himself has said he truly wants as sacrifice: a contrite heart! A heart burned clean of resentment, vengeance, nursed hurt, anger, pettiness, willful disobedience, murder, self-righteousness, judgment, any sort of rank wickedness. The pure victim of this sacrifice of the altar is your heart laid bare to God, open and free, without the blemish of a foul motive, and cleaned from any contention or disagreement. The fires of Gehenna are stoked with the wooden hearts of those who will to not turn from their childishly nursed hurts and petty resentments. How sad to burn for a lack of a will to love.

Add your broken heart to Christ’s sacrifice! Add your doubtful heart, your mournful heart, your anxious heart…add your joyful, thankful, peaceful heart to the sacrifice and add them for the good of others. But keep your unrepentant heart until you find the will to crack it open and do what is necessary to be reconciled to your brothers and sister in Christ. Jesus cannot be clearer: “…if you bring your gift to the altar, and there you recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” Odd, isn’t? Notice that Jesus says, “if you recall that your brother has anything against you…” He didn’t say, “if you recall that you have anything against your brother…” The burden of a faithful man or woman in Christ is to be first in seeking out reconciliation not just waiting for reconciliation to just show up. Jesus is laying on us a righteous obligation beyond being merely open to reconciliation; he is telling us to search for those with whom we have malfunctioning friendships and make them right.

Are you having trouble finding the Good News in any of this? I hope not! First rule of the Christian life: Jesus will not require of us anything that he is unwilling to give us the grace to complete. The Good News of today’s gospel is that in the Holy Spirit, carried above the death-dealing sins of hatred and anger, we are gifted with the fiery graces of Christ’s love to burn our hearts clean, wash away the ash, clear the air of smoke, and to see with crystalline clarity all the bonds we must mend in order to offer to God those same hearts as acceptable victims for the altar. There is nothing we must do that we can do without Christ. He is our advocate and guide, our servant and Lord!

If you are impeded in your task of heart-washing, let the Psalm remind you: “If you, O Lord, mark iniquities, who can stand?” If our Lord kept notes on our sins, if He added them up like columns of debits, which of us would long stand under the accumulating bill? We are weak alone. We are strong together. We are invincible with Christ. No, we are more than invincible! We are victors already. Put that victory against iniquity to work: seek out those with whom you have an “against” relationship. Be reconciled. And come back to this altar with your contrite heart, stand open and free before Christ, ready for the sacrifice that will change who you are into Who He Is.

May your righteousness surpass the angels and the saints.

Righteous Verbs for Jesus

1^st Week of Lent (M): Lev 19.1-2, 11-18 and Matthew 25.31-46
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!

First, “be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” Being holy has something to do with being just; that is, to be like God—holy—one must also be righteous: in right-relationship with God, neighbor, and self. Being a just person and acting justly means to be and act out of your lived, daily “bumping into” God. What God tells Moses to tell us about righteousness is starkly simple: love your God and your neighbor as you love yourself. And He repeats: “I am the Lord.” Here is a seal on the instruction, a stamp of authority and authentication so that we know that this is an original promise of friendship, the real-deal telling of how our Father’s creation is ordered and how we are to fit into it so that we will prosper in His wisdom. If you will be holy, you will be just. If you will be just, you will love: love God and love neighbor as you love yourself. As you walk among the rocks and bones of Lent, ask yourself: how do I love myself? Is this how I am to love God and neighbor? Pray then: Make me holy as you are holy, Lord!

Second, “your words, Lord, are Spirit and life.” What our Father teaches us about the order of His creation and our right-relationship with Him and what He has made is Life; that is, what we call “life” is an ordered creation—not an accident, not the byproducts of a random confluence of fortuitous events. We are made, crafted and set among the beauty of God’s handiwork. His Word—Wisdom, Christ, pure, refreshing—from nothing, from no-thing-at-all made Everything there is: arrayed, synched, choreographed, scored and meticulously performed. His creation is decreed, precepted, commanded, ordinanced, and enduring; perfect for the animating fire of the Spirit. And that Spirit, pure and refreshing, brings us wisdom, rejoicing, enlightenment, justice, truth. Ask yourself: how do I understand myself as someone made, someone crafted for a purpose? How do I understand myself as a body-soul fashioned by Love Himself to love as He does? Pray then: Lord, let the words of my mouth and the thoughts of my heart find peace in your order, a home with your Spirit and Life.

Finally, “sheep to my right, goats to my left.” My poet’s mind is reeling from all these nouns—Justice, Holiness, Spirit, Life, Truth—and I’m starting to wonder if perhaps God is really a nineteenth-century German philosopher! Order, Law, Decrees! No, not a German philosopher but a Jewish carpenter and so the words of Life are verbs: give, welcome, clothe, comfort, visit, feed, heal, teach, love. These verbs enact the nouns of creation, giving the stone-names their souls! We do not welcome the stranger just to welcome the stranger. We do not feed the hungry just to feed the hungry. We welcome and feed and visit and teach b/c when we do these for the least of God’s creatures—the poor—, we do them for Christ. To do anything else is to definitively exclude yourself from communion with God and the blessed forever (CCC n. 1033). To do anything else is to place yourself outside the order, the very nature of God’s creation. And you are saying: I hate myself. And God. And everyone else. That is no life at all. No spirit at all. It is Death, freely chosen, and darkness forever. Ask yourself: what are my “righteous verbs”? What am I doing this Lent to act on my Father’s command to love and to be just and to be holy as He is holy? Pray then: “Lord, I want to be among the truly righteous, show me the hungry, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned and give me your Spirit to be for them your Living Word, to serve them as you did.”

Amen.

A Christian Amazon.com

I just discovered this site this morning. I highly recommend it. There's an excellent Catholic section under the Categories drop-menu and they have an extensive (and up-to-date) selection of academic books. Check them out!

What do you want from the Desert?

1^st Sunday of Lent: Deut 26.4-10; Romans 10.8-13; Luke 4.1-13
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Luke Parish, St. Paul Hospital, Church of the Incarnation

[Fair warning: this is a strange one...I dunno...]

PODCAST!

People of God! Where are you this morning/evening? Where are you? We stepped into this desert three/four days ago, looked up at the sun, put the first foot in front of the other, said a prayer of thanksgiving to God, and set our hearts and our feet on Jerusalem. The cross is there, somewhere. And Jesus. No. No, he’s here with us…somewhere, isn’t he? Yes. Yes, he is…somewhere. The sand is scratchy and hot. The wind is brittle dry and stinging loud. The first fast of this “going into the desert” was good, wasn’t it? The plan and promise was there; the spilling-over-wonder at our blessings, the nearly painful longing to please God with our small sacrifices, just one day’s offerings. Even the desert is bright and daring watching it from home, from settled comfort, and abundance.

You watched the desert, expecting this Lenten trek and you wanted…you wanted…something. Someone? What? Think back! Go back and see it! Ash Wednesday is like a barge on the church calendar, plowing through ordinary time to arrive like a liturgical bully at the dock of the altar. No sweet hymns. No decorative treats or cute secular totems. Just ash and a reminder: you are made from ash and to ash you will return. From dust to dust. At that moment, with that memory: what did you want? Now, what do you want? You need to know this. The desert knows. I mean, the time you spend these next 35 days or so wandering the desert of the spiritual life, what you most desire, that which we need most will come to you. And not necessarily in a form or fashion that you will recognize. Lent is not about avoiding temptations. Lent is not about fasting or prayer or being good. Lent is about wandering into the emptiness, the vanity, the wreckage we have made of our spiritual lives and finding one more time the stalwart presence of God, the inexhaustible workings of the Holy Spirit. Seeking and finding the face of Christ.

These forty days are a countdown for detachment, for unplugging. Lent is a time for us to detach from all the teats of our poisoned culture and to stop sucking at the breasts of market-tested nihilism and brand-name conformity; to stop the sewer-flood of Hollywood-funded debauchery and sadism into our homes; to speak the gospel Truth to the dark powers of “might makes right” moralities; to witness against the suicidal, all-you-can-eat buffet of liberal religious candy our children are fed daily...even in our Catholic schools. Lent is a time for you to remove your lips from the honeyed breasts of genetic science and its Faustian promise of near-immortality. You will live forever but not by murdering a child; you can be beautiful forever but not at the price of harvesting our children like melons.

Lent is a time for you to calculate with cold reason and a clean heart your commitments in this world. Where are you bound? To whom do you owe your money, your livelihood, your dignity…your soul? Who owns you? What ideas possess your mind? What passions fuel your heart? What images cloud your vision? What do you worry about and why? Here’s the question with which to examine your conscience before confession: exactly how would anyone know Jesus owns me body and soul?

Know the answers! You must. Because the desert knows and the desert will tell. The desert will tell the Devil and he will color in those drab images, season those dull fumes, stoke the fires of weak passion. He’ll parade your desires, sharpened and concentrated, parade them before you, lying to you, pampering you, telling you how much you deserve what you cannot possibly need and only vaguely want. When those ashes were traced on your forehead…at that moment, what did you want? Mercy? Forgiveness? Love? To be seen as pious? You will find it in the Lenten desert. But will your desires look like gifts among all that scarcity?

Pay careful attention to the gospel. Jesus went into the desert to pray, right? No. He went into the desert to fast, right? No. He went into the desert to start his new diet? No. Of course, he prayed and fasted. But he didn’t go into the desert to do those things. Rather he “was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days to be tempted by the devil.” He went to the desert so that he could be tempted. The devil tempted him with food, power, and worship. Jesus refuses each in turn. He quotes scripture and dismisses each temptation as a mere shadow of what His Father offers. The devil offers Jesus illusion, impermanence. And he will offer you the same. And you will accept his offer unless you understand with near perfect clarity and will what you want, what you desire as a faithful follower of Christ.

Lent is not about avoiding temptation. Lent is about walking the hot sand of deprivation so that what tempts you worms its way to the surface. Discomforted, what tempts you selfishly proclaims its own praise, shouts it own name. Not yours. And then you know the truth: you are not your sin; you aren’t even the sum total of all your sins! Yes, you’ve fallen, given in, even welcomed Rebellion and Disobedience into your life. Praise God then that Lent is about clearing the wreck of your worldly life so that He Who moves you at your core, rises, speaks His name with authority, claims your soul, and makes your life among the things of this world a tireless prayer, a breathless hymn, and an inexhaustible fiat! This is more than a mere reminder of who’s in charge of your Christian life; it is a renewal of the bond of affection between Father and child, the rediscovery of an unshakable peace and infallible grace.

One foot, then another. The sand swirls. The desert is liquid hot, waving fumes above the dunes. We’re just four days in. Where are you? Where is your eager fast, that laughing prayer of praise? Evaporated already? No worries. Jesus is here with us. Not just somewhere but here. He’s with us here and now, and he waits for us at the cross. We choose to follow him. We picked up his cup. Shared his blessing. Ate his flesh and drank his blood. We’re more than his now, more than students or friends. We are his flesh and blood. The desert knows this. It will collect its tempting spirits and whisper to us of power, hunger, self-righteousness, revenge, violence, the many poisons we seem so eager to swallow. Listen carefully with the ears of Christ to the bargains and deals, the attempts to haggle and posture. And then what? Fight? Resist? No. Why? Why would you fight? Don’t fight the Devil! Why would you fight a defeated foe? Do what Christ does during his Lenten fast: call on the Word, confident in a victory already won, and teach this fallen angel who you are!

Don’t waste your forty days dieting. Spend this time in the desert ruthlessly paring away your allegiances, brutally assessing how you contribute to the preaching of the Word, to the spreading of the Gospel. What do you want, child of God? When you received your ashes and were told that you are mortal, what did you want to find in this Lenten desert?

How eager are you--exactly--to find the cross?

Fasting vs. dieting (Round One)

Friday after Ash Wednesday: Isa 58.1-9 and Matthew 9.14-15
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation

PODCAST!

[NB. The preacher preaches to himself first…]

More on fasting, uh? Well, it’s only right since it is Lent and all. But you’d think that we would have the whole fasting/contrite heart thing down by now, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s not a difficult concept. It’s not like trying to grasp double predestination or the state of the soul before the general resurrection or the mystery of the theological Trinity. It’s just fasting. Don’t eat as much as you usually do and do this because it helps you to stay focused on what’s important in your growth in holiness: your total, undiluted, raw dependence on God for absolutely everything. Of course, we also fast to show honor, obedience, the strength of a beggar’s heart, humility in need, gratitude in abundance, sorrow and grief, solidarity with the suffering, a heart turned from sin and rushing to the Lord in tears.

Brothers and sisters, fasting w/o true contrition and true repentance is called Dieting. And the Lord wants us to understand the difference between the prophetic act of fasting and the often-times vain act of dieting. The Lord tells the prophet Isaiah to say to us: “Would that today—Friday, February 23, 2007—would that today you might fast so as to make your voice heard on high!” You bow your head like a reed and slob around all day in sackcloth and ashes! “Is this the manner of fasting I wish […] Do you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?” So how do you fast today so as to make your voice heard on high? Isaiah cries out full-throated and unsparingly, like a trumpet blast: release those who have been imprisoned unjustly! Untie their yokes. Set free the oppressed. Share your bread with the hungry. Shelter the homeless. Clothe the naked. Help your own. Fast as the Lord wants you to fast! And your innocent verdict will go before you and God’s glory will come behind you and when you call on His name for help, He will say, “Here I am!”

So, will you fast or will you diet? Jesus says that we cannot fast so long as the Bridegroom is with us. Is he with us? Well, no. He departed for the throne and sent us his Holy Spirit. So, we can fast and mourn his absence. However, he’s with us now. Present because we are more than two and gathered in his name. He’s fully present in the Eucharist. So, we cannot fast or mourn. The Bridegroom has not been taken from us! Isn’t this the Christian life exactly? We are called to be prophetic witnesses, to stand up and shout out the truth of the gospel victory of sin and death. Yes, Christ is gone from us. And no, he is here. The battle is won and it is not yet fought. This is what it means to live in the meantime of God’s plan for us: we free the unjustly imprisoned now b/c they have all been freed by Christ in his victory. Their imprisonment is doubly unjust.

Dieting will not help them. Dieting will break no yokes, cancel no debts, fill no empty stomachs, nor will dieting free anyone from Satan. In fact, Satan counts on us spending this Lenten season dieting. It’s his best time of year for ripe self-righteousness and hypocrisy. John’s disciples and the Pharisees are worried about Jesus’ liberal band of party animals—why aren’t they fasting like we do?! Jesus says, in effect, “Don’t worry. They are my disciples and they will fast when I am gone.” We know what that means; what it means for his friends to drink his cup, to carry his cross, to die preaching and teaching the Good News of God’s mercy. Our Father wants a humble and contrite heart. Not a diet plan. He wants obedience and service. Not mumbled prayers and luke-warm sentiments. He wants laborers for his Lenten and His Easter fields. Not religious dilettantes and mystic wannabes.

Take your diet. Turn your heart and mind to the service of God in humility. And change that diet into a fast worthy of your soul! Thirty-eight days and counting...and the cup is yours is bear...

"WASH YOUR FACE!" --Jesus

Ash Wednesday: Joel 2.12-18; 2 Cor 5.20-6.2; Matthew 6.1-6, 16-18
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!

What does the Lord want from us? He wants now what He has always wanted: the sacrifice of our contrite hearts. Keep the burnt offerings, the bulls and rams, the incense and flowers. He wants your heart, split open, artfully arranged, freshly washed and anointed; your heart repentant, rueful, intensely sorry, and wounded by love. He wants your clean heart and mind placed on the altar, freely given, offered up in praise, turned forever to His will for you. God wants your fasting, your weeping, your mourning; He also wants your feasting, your laughter, your joy. He wants a heart rent top to bottom in true sorrow for your sins, so rend your garments if you must, but know that torn garments, smudgy foreheads, and dour faces, though signs of a proper contrition, are not contrition in themselves. It is better to be truly contrite and happy about it than to be faking contrition and hiding behind public displays of piety!

Playing at religion is a very dangerous thing, brothers and sisters. God wants our hearts and minds; He wants us to return to Him whole and entire. Do you think He can’t see through the layers of religiousy junk we sometimes slathered over our miserly souls? Do you think He can’t smell the failure of our public piety, or the rank odor of desperation in that good work we did to curry favor before Lent? Jesus himself could not be clearer than he is this morning: give alms in secret so that only the Father knows you give; pray in secret so that the Father may properly repay your trust; fast privately without being gloomy, without neglecting your appearance; anoint your head and WASH YOUR FACE! Do you think the Lord is going to smile on your grand sacrifice of walking around with ashes smudged on your forehead today? Tell me what a great witness that is and I’ll tell you to do it everyday!

Here’s your proper public Catholic witness on Ash Wednesday: first, wash your face in all humility and resist the Devil’s temptation to strut around as a “Proud Catholic.” Then look to the Lord in the desert. He goes out from the crowds. Away and into the desert. He withdraws to be with His Father. And finds himself confronted by the Devil and his lies. With what would you confront the Devil in the desert? How would you repel his seductions and deflect his temptations? Jesus is God. You aren’t. Would you fight Satan with false piety? Theatrical religiosity? Would you ward him off with some sort of amulet or spell? Let me suggest that there is no fight with the Devil when one’s heart is truly contrite, filled with grace, given over wholly to the Father as a sacrifice of praise, and lifted up on the altar.

Why am I being so hard on the public witness of piety? I know from personal experience the seduction of believing that I am accomplishing something good for God by playing at being religious. Jesus is also worried about us and how easy it is for us to confuse show and substance. This is an acceptable time for us to be truly reconciled with God, but that reconciliation is done through a heart and soul converted to God’s law of love not a smudge of ashes or a much-discussed fast or a grand gesture of almsgiving. If your day to day life at work or school or the office fails to give a faithful witness to God, then a dot of dust or an unusual bag of carrot sticks for lunch won’t change minds. In fact, more than anything, without a daily witness of true service that dot of dust says, “I’ve decided to trot out my religion today for your consumption. Isn’t it cool?”

Yea. That’s what Jesus died for. Cool. Fortunately, we have forty days to figure this out. Forty days to live intensely in the presence of the Lord. Forty days to sit at his feet and learn humility. Forty days to learn to be happy and purged, joyful and emptied. Forty days to cleave our contrite hearts, stoke the fires of sacrifice and offer our very selves to him. So, wash your face and clean your heart.

Deep and Wide: stretch pants and morality

7^th Sunday OT: 1 Sam 26.2 (et al); 1 Cor 15.45-49; Luke 6.27-38
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Luke’s, St Paul’s, Church of the Incarnation

PODCAST!

It’s been years in the making. And I’ve waited a long, long time, but with a little nervousness, I’m ready to confess something publicly: it’s time for my extreme makeover! Do you watch these shows on cable where crews of highly trained professionals descend on some poor soul’s house or wardrobe or car or hair or makeup? And then they spend the next hour ripping the unfashionable apart; destroying the old and installing the new; rouging every pale spot, spackling every wrinkle, painting every ill-colored curl; new art, new flowers, a new couch, tighter jeans, a sparkled halter top, and witchy-poo pointed boots…you know the shows, right? OK. Well, I’m ready for my makeover. Let’s contact the renovation crews and tell them we have an emergency case: an ample Dominican friar with a wardrobe from the Deep and Wide section of the Burlington Coat Factory and no budget for shoes. We won’t mention the ragweed facial hair or the tree-climbing possum toenails. Even professionals can be creeped out!

Paul teaches the Corinthians that the first man, Adam, “became a living being.” He was a natural man, of the earth, earthly. The “last Adam” became a “life-giving spirit.” He was a spiritual man, of heaven, heavenly. In the order of creation, the natural man came first, then the spiritual man. Adam then Christ. And just as we are creatures with bodies, we are earthly. And just as we are creatures with souls, we are heavenly. We bear the image of dust and the image of light. As rational animals, human persons, we are bodysouls. We are not bodies that contain a soul. We are not souls trapped by flesh and bone. We are persons created in the image and likeness of God. We live our lives in a world created to praise the Creator. So our moral choices are not just spiritual, not merely theoretical. Our moral choices are given flesh. And Christ has a claim on that flesh.

With what do we love our enemies? How do we do good for those who hate us? Why would we think to bless those who curse us instead of cursing them back? And why would we waste our time with God in prayer to pray for those who abuse us? What honor is there in allowing ourselves to be libeled, assaulted, persecuted, and reviled? What grace is there in giving to everyone who asks; lending without expecting repayment; loving our enemies and serving them? What dignity is there in forgiving wrongs, failing to judge justly criminal transgressions, failing to uphold the Law? The honor, grace, and dignity of doing these apparently ridiculous things is easy to see: you are the children of the Most High and he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked; therefore, be merciful, just as God is merciful. After all, before our baptismal makeovers, we stood outside ungrateful and wicked, wanting in, wanting mercy.

Paul’s teaching to the Corinthians gives us a way of thinking about our salvation history, that is, the way we have come to understand the story of our relationship with God. Our lives as redeemed creatures begins with Adam in the Fall and ends with Christ in Heaven. Adam loses eternal life. Christ restores it. Adam loses God’s justice. Christ brings us mercy. Adam falls never to rise. Christ falls to rise again. We fell with Adam in sin and we will rise with Christ in grace. And it is because we live and move and have our being in God’s presence that Jesus sets for us these seemingly impossible moral standards.

He makes these outrageous claims on our freedom and happiness precisely b/c we are being perfected in the Spirit of God. Jesus is calling on his disciples back then and on us now to live right now as if we were already in heaven, already perfected, already standing in the unmediated glory of the Father enthroned. When Jesus asks us to love our enemies, to give whatever is asked, to bless without condition, he is looking at us to see through us to the End, demanding that we do not wait until heaven arrives to live as his brothers and sisters. He is demanding that we be merciful now. That we be generous now. That we be loving, forgiving, untiring in service, grown hoarse in prayer for those who hate us...now not later, now not whenever.

Jesus was no fool. He was human like us in all things but sin. He knew the temptations of pride, excess, anger, of selfishness and disordered desire. He knew the temptations of the flesh, the spirit, the heart and mind—all those demons that claw and gnaw at our resolve, at our determination and courage. He knew then and knows now that what he is asking of us is likely beyond our strength, beyond the widest stretches of our control. And so, he gives us two incentives, two helps in bringing our bodies and souls back on the path of his Way: 1) he points out what those who do not follow his Way are capable of and, 2) he gives us a concrete measure of holy success.

For the first, even the sinner, a lost one, loves those who love him. Returning love for love is no supernatural feat. And neither is it any special spiritual accomplishment to do good to those who do good for you. Anyone can do that. The sure sign of God’s grace, the sign that His blessing on you, is loving those who hate you, doing good for those who wrong you. There you have a sign of radical holiness! For the second, Jesus tells us to ask ourselves this: how would you have others treat you? Be careful! The measure you use to treat others will be the measure Christ uses to measure you. In other words, you will judged by the standards you use to judge others. If you persist in judging others harshly against a rigid law of purity, well, don’t be surprised when you are denied mercy in the end and judged in exactly the same way. And Jesus doesn’t mean here that you are to ignore another’s deadly sins b/c you don’t want your own sins pointed out. It is merciful to admonish a brother or sister in sin. The point is to refrain from judgment, that is, to resist making a final determination of guilt and punishment. Leave that for the one who knows the human heart inside out.

We have all received an extreme makeover. Our transformation from Adam to Jesus, from fallen man to risen Christ, is the ultimate makeover, the Final Do-Over. Though we stand at the bottom of Christ’s demands on our moral lives, looking up at what he has called us to, we are capable of climbing, capable to reaching and grasping perfection b/c he has gifted to do exactly that. Christ wants us with him in heaven, so why would he set for us a standard below perfection? Why would he ask us to do that which we could do without him? His life with us and his death for us completes us, makes us whole and entire, healed creatures perfectly motivated and energized to be the sons and daughters of the Father. We cannot be alone; we are never abandoned.

As you work at meeting Christ’s demands on your body and soul, choose your moral measures carefully. Make sure they are all both deep and wide. Given eternity, a generous cup is far more comfortable than a stingy one.

Deny, take up, follow, repeat

6^th Week OT (F): Gen 11.1-9 and Mark 8.34-9.1
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Serra Club and Church of the Incarnation

PODCAST!

One voice, speaking to the crowd, says clearly: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow Christ. This is one voice, speaking with authority and grace, teaching those called to service how to be and do what they are being called to be and do. This is an instruction on saving one’s life. Here we have the adult directions on how to apply the salve of Christ’s one voice, one teaching to a life beset by the demands of our culture’s spiritual Babel. Cutting through the din, the smoke and mirrors, the lies and half-truths of this world’s religious marketplace, Christ’s single voice teaches a powerful truth: if you want eternal life, you must lose this life for his sake and the sake of the Gospel. How?

Deny yourself. This does not mean deny the existence of the Self. We are not Buddhists. “Deny yourself” means to refuse to yourself those things that tend to feed your disordered sense of yourself as the center of the universe. This means refusing the vice of selfishness—the bad habit of placing personal needs and wants above others’. This doesn’t mean starving yourself so that your neighbor might eat six times a day instead of three, but it does mean shaping your life around the imperatives of abundance and generosity: relieve suffering, replace lacking, repair damage and do all these out of your abundant blessings. To deny oneself is to dethrone ego, to topple the monument of Self and let others claim the riches of our lives just as we claim the riches of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

We can lose our earthly lives for Christ and his Gospel by denying ourselves and by taking up our cross. Surely this means picking up some heavy burden and carrying it to our deaths. Surely this means gracefully bearing under the weight of some duty or command. Yes. Very likely. But keep in mind that the cross for Jesus was a tool of execution. The cross for Jesus meant death. The cross for us is a tool of salvation. For us, it means life. Not necessarily a care-free, duty-free, burdenless frolic, but it must mean both a weight and a freeing, to be loaded down and to be set free. What burden can you pick up to lighten your spiritual load? Think always in terms of your gifts—what am I good at? What brings me joy? What am I called by God to be and to do for others? What burden can you take on in service to another? Before you’re done here, your cross must be about self-emptying sacrifice and steady hope. If not, you’ve walked the way of sorrow for nothing.

Follow me! Come after me. Get behind Christ. Put the butt end of your cross in the rut his cross has left in the hard packed clay and walk with him. No caution. No hesitation. No caught breaths or startled wincing. Where can’t you go in the shadow of his cross, in the way of his footsteps, behind his broken body, following his trail of blood to the altar of Golgotha? Following Christ is more than being good. It is more than being comfortably charitable and nice. Following Christ is doing what Christ did. Being who Christ was and is and will be. Following Christ is ending up where he ended up—on his cross, disowned, dead so that others might live, but also assured of a new life, assured of an eternal life. What would you give in exchange for your salvation? What is your soul worth? Our Father gave us his only Son for our salvation. And He thinks our souls are worth the suffering and death of that only Son.

Those voices of our spiritual Babel chatter about nirvana or enlightenment or self-actualized potential. The one voice of Jesus says, “I call you my friends. And I will die for you. Come. Follow me.”

Translation Wars?

I’ve had a few emails asking me to comment on the “translation wars” raging in the English speaking Catholic world. I’m not sure I have anything new to add to the discussion, but here are some thoughts:

1. There is no inherent contradiction in having liturgical language that is: beautiful, functional, and orthodox. Only translation ideologues insist on privileging one of these to the detriment of the others. The current translation of the Missale strikes me overly functional, not very beautiful, and dodgy with regards to orthodoxy (can we all say, “Semi-Pelagian?”).

2. I’m not sure a slavish translation of the Latin text is going to get us an English text that is broadly useful in the American church. Don’t get me wrong: I want an accurate translation…but I also want a translation that is not going to be overly decorated and unintentionally funny. Theological accuracy and clarity are more important than beauty; but, again these are not mutually exclusive.

3. The debate over using “theological terms” (i.e., consubstantial) strikes me as absurd. American Catholics are well-educated and willing to learn. Put three lines in the bulletin explaining the theological terms and move on. To claim that we shouldn’t use theologically accurate language b/c folks might not understand it is insulting. Let’s challenge Catholics to rise a little above their current understanding of the faith. Why is that a problem?

4. The Vatican’s call for the development of a “sacral vernacular” (Liturgiam authenticam, n. 47) is a fantastic idea. This is an opportunity for a meeting of the minds—theological, practical, pastoral, creative, etc.—in the creation of a “dialect” for Catholics to use in their worship. Two extremes seem wrong: using marketplace language in the liturgy or using overly elevated or decorated language. What would a sacral vernacular look like, I wonder? Surely an accurate translation of the Latin Missale would be a good start…but we risk making the Mass sound like a bad parody if we don’t adjust some of the more florid repetitions and obscure concepts.

5. For those who complain about a distinct language for worship: given the reality of multiple daily languages (work, home, friends, colleagues, superiors, etc). why is a language for worship so odd? I mean, any given person in the country is required to function within several languages in order to succeed. We move easily between the language we use at home to the language we use at work to the language we use with our boss. Why not a language that marks out the liturgy as something distinct? Granted: these are not languages per se, but they do constitute different ways of construing and managing daily circumstances.

Well, for what it’s worth…comments?

Making Cain's sacrifice

6^th Week OT (M): Gen4.1-15 and Mark 8.11-13
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!

Tim and I enjoyed the philosophical banter that undergrads seem to enjoy. We solved many of the world’s most difficult philosophical problems sitting in that cafeteria over eggs and coffee. But here’s where we parted company: Tim put his logic and the need for empirical evidence above his need to fall in love with Christ. He would not step off, trusting, into the logicless glory of faith and take on the eyes of Christ to see his world, returning, inevitably to right reason and good sense but reason and sense now directed to one end with one purpose in Christ: union with God. I wouldn’t do this either, mind you, but I knew I should, and I wanted to, but while Tim waited for the machines of logic to grind out his arithmetical proof of divine existence, I floundered somewhere between an urgent desire for God and a fear of throwing myself into a Love with no obvious boundaries. Tim’s faith in calculative logic and my weak courtship of both agnosticism with good liturgy and outright fundamentalism earned us each a punishment. I became a High Church Episcopalian. And Tim became a lawyer.

Will I go so far as to say that Tim and I were latter-day brothers, following Cain and Abel? No. But I will say this: the sacrifices we brought to the altar in worship, though radically different from one another, were both comparable to Cain’s offering. Neither of us would put our lives on the altar. Neither would budge on the central question that requires a leaping YES into Love. We held back our first fruits, our choicest pieces, and withheld from God the very sacrifice that would have brought us the wisdom we seemed to desire. We would not make our lives holy by giving them up in service to Christ. We hesitated because we needed more from him—better evidence, tighter logic, a stronger feeling of purpose, a message or memo, some sort of guarantee delivered personally by God that our ultimate sacrifice would be rewarded to our satisfaction. We held back waiting for a sign. In the meantime, we settled for comfortable substitutes, non-threatening alternatives; namely, various academic “—ism’s,” paper ideologies that mimic the faith but fail to strike at the heart the way the Word will. Truth will sear the toughest muscle.

Now, I know I heard Jesus sigh more than once during those years. With the Pharisees he sighs at their stubborn hearts “from the depths of his spirit.” He is truly exasperated with their unwillingness to accept the most obvious indications of his identity. They wait for one sign after another, another prophecy to be fulfilled, another “pointing to,” another witness from the ages. And Jesus asks, “Why do you seek a sign?” The answer is obvious! But his real question is: why won’t you believe? Why won’t you trust? No amount of evidence will guarantee the truth if there is no trust. Think: do you trust your husband or wife, brother or sister, best friend, do you trust these people in your life b/c you gathered sufficient evidence and logically concluded that they are trustworthy? Did you watch for signs to indicate their worthiness? Do you hold back fully trusting them in order to test their integrity? When is does the test end? When will you decide that the evidence is compelling? If you don’t trust, you have no measure to rein in suspicion, no border to mark off paranoia. If you will not trust the Lord to keep His promises, to bless your life, to forgive your sins, then you will flounder btw needing Him and pushing Him away.

Cain brought his second best to the altar of God. He gave his brother’s life to the thirsty soil—a sacrifice to Rage. Since he did not trust God, he could not give himself to God. And he too received a just punishment. If we will be in that boat with Jesus, our first sacrifice will be our trust—no need for signs, no tempting God with requests for miracles. We know b/c we have first believed!

In praise of curses

6^th Sunday OT: Jer 17.5-8; 1 Cor 15.12, 16-20; Luke 6.17, 20-26
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Luke’s Parish, St. Paul’s Hospital, Church of the Incarnation

PODCAST!

Praedicator primum sibi praedicet!

How can we be cursed? Let’s count the ways! We can be cursed with an inattentive spouse, rebellious children, busybody in-laws, impatient creditors, sickly and lazy co-workers, an over-stuffed schedule, a small salary, bad insurance coverage, no retirement plan, insomnia, depression, binge-eating, binge-drinking, another form of emotional illness, another form of addiction, repair bills, tax bills, grocery bills, tuition bills, car payments, house payments, and so on and so on. We can also be cursed with spiritual apathy, a hard heart, a weak will, an easily fooled intellect, a bag of vices and not many virtues, a love of money and all the seven cardinal sins. So, we can be cursed physically, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, financially, and domestically. And how does this happen? How do we end up cursed? Jeremiah says, “Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the Lord.” When we expect our blessings to come from the flesh—other people, other flesh—we, in effect, turn from God and look to a creature to give us what only the Father can give: abundant, fertile blessings, everything we need to live and thrive. Blessings may come through other flesh, but they always originate with God—He is the only source, even if one of us might do the heavy lifting.

If I were to ask you to name your blessings, to call out the great things that God has done for you, how many here I wonder would call out: God has blessed me with poverty! God has blessed me with hunger! God has blessed me with mourning and tears! God has blessed me with hateful neighbors who exclude and insult me! How many here could lift up their curses in thanksgiving and praise God for their troubles? Are you prepared to give God thanks for your failures, your diseases, your daily crashes and crippled faith? It is no easy thing to celebrate weakness, destitution, illness, emptiness, and despair. It is no easy thing to lift your eyes to heaven and say, “Thank you for my trials, Lord, thank you for my suffering!”

No doubt you are thinking about now: Father is cracked! He’s gone off the rail and is running on his last rim! Not at all. I’m preaching the gospel. And sometimes that means starting with the strange and racing head-long into the stranger still. Jesus teaches the Twelve that all those we routinely think of as cursed—the poor, the hungry, the mournful, the despised—all of them are, in fact, blessed with riches, satisfaction, laughter, blessed by the Christ of the Father and made holy in their imperfection. Jesus plainly teaches his apostles that on the day we are excluded and insulted and denounced for his name’s sake, we are blessed. And so, on that day we must “rejoice and leap for joy…!” In other words, we must give God praise and thanksgiving for how we have suffered, how we have failed, how we have been injured and diseased. And not only that—we must thank Him for our enemies, for those who made us suffer, for those who injured us or dis-eased us.

This is the Way of Perfection: to surrender to God wholly, entirely, now and forever, your curses and blessings, your health and your death, your goods and all your debts; to submit your strength, your courage, your stamina and grace, all of your mistakes, successes, your warts and your shiny smile, your wallet or purse and checkbooks, your children, grandchildren, and anyone else you love: place them and place yourself under the eternal strength and sheltering love of the Father, trusting and hoping in His Word to us—Christ Jesus—that we are freed in His grace, perfected in His love, and brought to Him in His power and glory. And that no VISA bill, car payment, nosey mother-in-law, surgery, or toothache possesses the power to poison the blessings that come from His hand to your heart, if (if!) you love…and love excessively, wastefully, painfully all that and those you have willed (up to now) not to love. Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is in the Lord!

Defending to the Corinthians the truth of Christ’s resurrection, Paul writes, “If for this life only have we hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.” In other words, by saying that Christ did not rise from the dead on the third day, they are saying that they do not believe in a life with Christ in heaven. Paul says that this is a pitiable waste of hope if this life is all we get. Why hope at all? Why trust? Paul’s question is powerful. If all we get is what we have and the few years left, then hope and trust are pointless existential exercises in self-delusion. They serve merely to numb our twitchy consciences with promises of pie-in-the-sky. Religious distraction and empty P.R. for Church, Inc. But Paul reasserts what he knows to be true: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” To trust that this is true defines us; I mean, to hold that Christ was resurrected from the dead is an investment we make into helping God shape us, giving us form and function and planting ahead of us a seductive end, an attractive goal. We trust and we flourish. We hope and we shine. When we trust and hope to the end, we live with Him forever, rejoicing and leaping for joy!

On easy days, trust and hope are, well, easy—sometimes doing as little as avoiding distrust and hopelessness is enough. And that may be enough for awhile. But at some point that spiritual sloth will have to erupt into an apostolic purpose, an evangelical movement toward actively praising God and giving Him thanks for your blessings and then going out to use your gifts, your blessings to help someone else, to bless someone else with what you yourself have been blessed with! Jeremiah tells us that those so blessed will be like trees planted next to a stream: evergreen leaves, carefree blossoms and fruit—even in drought years the leaves and blossoms and fruit will come abundantly! This tree’s beauty and bounty are best shared not hoarded, put into service not left to rot. It is the cursed bush, the barren desert shrub that stands in a lava waste—a salty, empty soil—that dries, cracks, stands without blossom or leaf or fruit: this is the heart that has turned from God!

Keep your hearts rich and pliable, strong and generous by surrendering to the Lord with joy and rejoicing. Give thanks for blessings and curses. Yes, even curses! How else will you turn that which threatens your heart into a benefit, a salve? Do you imagine yourself fighting the realities of day to day misfortune and willful failure by yourself? How will you fight? Willpower? Your personal goodness? Good luck. The longest spiritual tradition of our catholic church tells us that total surrender to the will of the Father—complete obedience—, a prayer life of constant thanksgiving in praise, and persistence in making a sacrifice of our service for others will transform what curses us into what blesses us. Fight the curse without God and feed it. Give thanks to God for the curse and starve it.

One last question: will you suffer those curses in silence, or will you open your lips, proclaim the Lord’s praise, and give Him thanks for everything you have and everything are?