Empty to be Filled

26th Sunday OT: Ezk 18.25-28; Phil 2.1-5; Matt 21.28-32
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Convento SS. Domenico e Sisto, Roma


Think about standing in line before the Pearly Gates and seeing in front of you the IRS agent who audited your taxes and ruined you financially; the infamous Hollywood Madame who kept a client list and caused the downfall of several prominent politicians and televangelist; the German serial killer who butchered his victims, stored their bodies in his deep-freezer, and on occasion thawed out a piece or two for dinner. Imagine these folks ahead of you in line and think about how they might have gotten where they are. Tax collector, a prostitute, a serial killer. We could add several others: the HIV-AIDS infected man who intentionally sleeps with other men to spread the disease; the bankers and portfolio managers whose greed helped cause the current economic disaster; political leaders in countries all over the world who starve, torture, murder their citizens for power; the list could go on, and so the line into heaven could get longer and longer. But the question here is: seeing these people ahead of you in line, you have to wonder, how did they get here? Such profoundly evil people in line to heaven. How?

The quick and easy answer, of course, is God’s grace. But that’s not much of an answer because no one is in that line without God’s grace. What does it mean for a serial killer or a avaricious banker to experience God’s grace, repent of his sin, and find himself in a line to heaven? Remember our question from last week: are you envious of God’s generosity? Man’s capacity to receive God’s grace is not limitless. However, there is no limit to God’s generosity. Limitless grace poured into a limited vessel means one thing: overflow; assuming, of course, that the vessel is indeed filled. But for a sinner to be filled requires a certain awareness that he/she is empty in the first place.

Is this the point that Jesus is making about the son who refuses to work but then repents and does as he is asked to do. Having refused to work, the son is ripe with disobedience, rigid with refusal and dissent. Being so far from his father’s will, he is keenly aware of being lost. That despair drives him back to his father’s will and saves him. The other son, accepting his father’s will, eagerly agrees to work but fails to follow through. His disobedience is compounded by deceit. Believing himself to be filled with his father’s will, he is not “empty enough” to repent. He coasts, if you will, on his initial good will, believing that this is sufficient to save him from his father’s wrath.

How do serial killers, corrupt politicians, prostitutes end up in heaven with you, the righteous son or daughter? If they end up there, they do so first because the absence of the Father’s will hurts too much to ignore. How long can a creature turn from its Creator and not feel the yawning emptiness of desire denied? To be created is to have purpose. We are purpose given flesh and spirit. You cannot NOT be what you were made to be for very long and fail to feel the corruption of your refusal. To repent of your refusal is like a tremendous rebound, the further you stretch away from God’s will, the harder, the faster, the tighter the comeback! A glorious SNAP! right back into the will of the Father.

Standing there in line with the other sinners, all of those who recognized the emptiness of their disobedience and repented, you can look around you and see some of the infamous wretches of history. If they are there, they are there because they figured out that they are limited vessels, overflowing with the limitless graces of a loving God. The ones you are not likely to see standing in line are those who believed to the end that they were vessels once filled, always filled, and needing nothing more from God than His push for their own initial yes, they pursue other, smaller desires. Having taken a sip of His grace, they believe their thirst is quenched and drink no more.

Is there a better definition of hell?

Are you jealous of God's generosity?

25th Sunday OT: Is 55.6-9; Phil 1.20-24, 27; Matt 20.1-16
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Convento SS Domenico e Sisto, Roma


We’ve all heard the joke about St. Peter welcoming a group of people from different denominations into the Kingdom of Heaven and then sneaking them past a room full of Catholics (or Baptists or Mormons, etc) and telling the new arrivals as they near the room, “Be quiet. They think they are the only ones here.” Har, har. Chuckle, chuckle. Isn’t it silly to think that only members of your own denomination are going to heaven? Isn’t it silly to think that only members of your own religion are going to heaven? In fact, it probably is silly, or even slightly prideful to think so. Does this mean that everyone will go to heaven? No. Does this mean that can go to heaven despite our denominational membership? Yes. Does this mean that we don’t need to be members of the Body of Christ to go to heaven? Absolutely not; it means nothing of the sort. So, why is it silly to think that only Catholics, or only Baptists, or only Methodists are going to heaven? Well, as our Lord clearly states in this morning’s reading from Isaiah, “…my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways…As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” Given this, let’s ask of ourselves the question the landowner puts to his whiney workers, only make it a question to us from our Lord, “Are you envious because I am generous?”

What does it mean to be envious? Our Lord blesses all of us with certain gifts that He then nurtures in order to move us closer to Him. His love in us is perfected as we use His gifts to serve others. So long as we are using our gifts to serve others, His love is being perfected in us. The constant temptation, of course, is to covet the gifts of others, to envy their blessings and pine for the gifts we do not have. As I lust after your gifts, I ignore my own and God’s love is not being perfected in me. Envy is one of the easiest means the Devil has for distracting us away from our charitable duties. Not only do we serve his ends by failing to serve one another, we fret away in envy, allowing the seed of our Lord’s love in us wither from inattention. For the Devil, it’s a two-fer, two sins for the price of one.

What do we mean by God’s generosity? By nature, God is diffusive Goodness; that is, what God is is Goodness in limitless abundance, diffused without diminishment across His creation. We are attracted to His perfection so that our imperfect nature might be made whole. That it is even possible for us to be made whole in His perfection is His gift of Himself to us. This gift of human nature perfected in the divine was made flesh in Christ Jesus. Think of it this way: Jesus is who we will be if we accept the gift of his sacrifice for us; Jesus is who we were made to be if would only use our gifts in the same way that Jesus gave (gifted) his life for us—willing, sacrificially. The Cross of Calvary and the Empty Tomb of Easter are the fulfilled promises of a generous Father who knows no limits to His abundance. God is not generous; His is Generosity per se. Being generous is not what God does; it is Who He Is.

So, what does it mean then to ask, “Are you envious of our Lord’s generosity?” This question is a direct challenge to and a rebuke of the stinginess of spirit exemplified in the whiney workers who complain to the landowner about the pay they receive for a day’s work. Why do the latecomers receive the same pay when they have not done as much work? What’s the real complaint here? We’ve worker longer, so we deserve more pay. The landowner’s response is just: “My friend, I am not cheating you. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what is yours and go.” This parable is usually read as a rebuke to the Jews who complain that they have done the work of following the Law and now the Messiah pops up and offers the Lord’s mercy to any and all regardless of whether or not the latecomers have fulfilled even one obligation under the Law. The landowner (God) justifies his generosity, “What if I wish to give this last one the same as you? Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?” As members of the Body of Christ, are we ready to say to the Lord, “No, you may not do as you wish with your gift of salvation. We’re earned ours; they haven’t.”

If this sentiment rises in our hearts even for a moment, we need to ask again, “Are we envious of the Lord’s generosity?” Now, does this mean that our Lord will save everyone? No, it doesn’t. It means that the possibility of salvation is universal. No one is excluded from the invitation to become a member of the Body. If our Lord’s generosity reached into the freed will of every person and compelled acceptance of this invitation, then we could say that we are not free. What has been made absolutely clear to us is that the Body of Christ was raised from the tomb on the third day, resurrected and ascended, he sits at the Father’s right hand. Also made perfectly clear to us is that the Body of Christ, the Church, will be raised on the last day; resurrected and ascended, she will sit at the foot of the throne in heaven.

Our Lord has every right to be jealous of our love. We tend to wander now and again, and His jealousy reminds us not that He is petty, but that His love is necessary for our eternal lives. Though God is jealous of our love for Him, we cannot be jealous of His love for us. By nature, our God is Love and His love, that is, God Himself, is diffusive. How do you hoard God? How do you “stock up” on God and ration His love for His creatures? You don’t! And if you try, you will fail, and you will fail with dire consequences. Are you envious that our God is generous? If so, then you are wallowing in a bit of dangerous irony, dwelling rather cynically in a very shallow, self-righteous puddle. We must be diffusive of the Love that saved us, or we must get out the way…

Can good Catholics dabble in New Age practices? (Revised)

In this post I want to offer what most Christians believe to be the very basics of our faith. By way of comparison, I will offer as well the New Age/neo-pagan revision of these beliefs, concluding that the two are incompatiable in a single spirituality. For those Christians who may be considering engaging in some sort of spiritual practice that might be suspect, I offer a series of questions at the end to help you decide whether or not any particular practice is compatiable with the faith. This comparison and my questions are of necessity incomplete but nonetheless a good start. Also, as a Catholic priest, one shouldn't be surprised that I have written from a decidedly Catholic perspective.

I. Christian Basics

GOD: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, all this is seen and unseen…” GOD is. No predicate the human mind can discover or invent, no predicate that the human tongue can pronounce or garble can follow the verb “is” in that sentence and be absolutely accurate. In fact, “GOD IS.” God is not a being, the sort of being that possesses existence as a quality. GOD is BEING, per se. Paradoxically, God is wholly Other and intimately Father; He is Absolute Distance and Necessary Love. In more traditional terms, God is both utterly transcendent and personally immanent. Given this, Christians cannot think of their Creator as The Watchmaker Who Makes and then abandons what he has made, or as Earth Spirit, our planet as a god. The Watchmaker image denies God’s immanence in His creation. The Earth Spirit image denies God’s transcendence.

CREATION: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. . .and saw that it was good.” Christians prejudice the description of all the things around us when we call these things collectively “creation.” By definition a creature is something that is created, that is, made by its creator. A wedding cake is a creation of the pastry chef. We do not find wedding cakes growing naturally in the forest. Cars are designed and made by engineers. We do not dig up new cars like we would potatoes. Creation, the whole universe seen and unseen, is a creation, designed, made, and sustained by its Creator, God. Creation cannot be its own Creator. This follows logically. That which is created cannot be its own creator since it would first have to exist in order to create itself. That which does not exist cannot cause itself to exist because it would have to exist first in order to be a causal agent. Given this, Christians cannot believe that creation is its own creator. All of creation is necessarily dependent on its Creator, utterly contingent, wholly and completely gratuitous. Creation is worthy of our care because the Creator called His creation “very good.” However, since “goodness” applied to creatures makes sense only in reference to Goodness Himself, Christians cannot worship God’s good creation as they would God Himself.

CHRIST: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ…who for us men and our salvation… was crucified…suffered, died, and was buried and rose again…” For Christians, Christ is understood simultaneously in three different ways: Christ the Anointed One (both human and divine), Christ the Event (the coming), and Christ the End (the coming again). Christ the Anointed One is both human and divine, fully man and fully God. He is the Word spoken at creation (“God said…”). He is the Word made flesh (“Born of the Virgin Mary…) and He is the final and unique Self-revelation of God (“And the Word was God…”). The coming of the Christ into human history was an intervention, a breaking into both our lives as humans and into the stories we tell about our lives. He came for a very specific purpose: to offer us the chance to be reconciled to the Father and to live with Him eternally. To accomplish this purpose, he suffered for us, died for us, and rose again in order to make it possible for us to follow him back to the Father. He not only shows us the way back, he is the Way Back. And not only is he the Way Back, he is right now who we will be once we are back: both human and divine, immaculate spirit and resurrected flesh, perfectly human. Given this, Christians cannot believe that Jesus is merely human, or merely divine, or only a teacher/prophet/sage, or that he is one of many saviors sent by God. Jesus Christ is final. He is unique. And his is the only name given under heaven and on earth of our salvation.

To sum up: Christians believe that God is wholly Other and intimately present and working in His creation, a creation that is entirely dependent on His will to exist. Christians believe that the Jesus Christ is the only means of salvation for creation. No other god, prophet, sage, teacher, or savior can offer God’s human creatures the intimate relationship necessary to draw us to Himself.

II. New Age/Neo-Pagan Revisions

Typically, the New Age movement rejects these ideas and replaces them with what amounts to pantheism, that is, a belief that God is His creation, that creation is not only holy but divine, and that Jesus is one savior among many who make it possible for us to find ultimate happiness and peace.

Since the beginning of the Church at Pentecost, Catholics have embraced some combination of these false teachings in order to do what Adam and Eve wanted to do in the Garden—make themselves gods without God. The serpent offered our first parents the knowledge they needed to bypass the laws of their Creator so that they might join the divine pantheon without His assistance. Since that time, various “Gnosticisms” (salvation by knowing how) have plagued the Church. These Gnosticisms are easily identified in the Church today: the rejection of the finality and uniqueness of Christ by overemphasizing his “cosmic” character and by turning his incarnation into an archetypal event that has happened many times before and after the birth of Jesus; the rejection of the apostolic Church as Christ’s living body in an attempt to diffuse the authentic witness of the apostles so that personal experience becomes the sole criterion for the truth of the faith; the rejection of the historical character of the Christ event as essential to determining the nature of the Church herself, that is, by rejecting the historical facts of Christ’s life (that he was a man, that he was a first-century Jew, etc.), New Age Catholics foster false teachings such as the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood and that the primacy of Peter among the apostles was merely an organizational convenience; the rejection of the Church’s liturgical heritage in favor of syncretistic ritual, novelty for the sake of novelty in sacramental practice, and an emphasis on the sacred feminine that borders on goddess worship (for example, the so-called “Sophia Christologies” of feminist theologians and the insistence of these feminists that the Church embrace inclusive language when addressing God in liturgy, “Our Mother who art in Heaven…”).

Most all of the religious practices of New Age Catholics are in some way a rejection of the proper relationship between the Creator and His creation. Believing that they will make themselves into gods without God, these folks embrace any number of liturgical practices that focus their intellect and will on themselves, making themselves into their own end. In other words, they worship themselves as already divine but fundamentally ignorant of their own divinity. Liturgical worship then becomes a matter of “coming to know” themselves more fully as always-already divine. Of course, this sort of Gnostic salvation creates a class of Fully Knowing Christians who are enlightened in their divinity. And, predictably, this elite class chafes at the authority of the Body of Christ when taught the truth that they are not enlightened but rather darkened in their rejection of the faith.

III. Discernment Questions

Given all of this, how does a faithful Catholic avoid New Ageism in his or her spiritual journey back to God? Ask these questions:

1). Does this practice clearly embody the proper relationship between myself as a dependent creature and God as my creator? Am I being taught to see myself as divine rather than good and holy?

2) Does this practice require me to reject the historical facts presented to me in scripture and tradition? (e.g., does the practice require me to reject Jesus as both fully human and fully divine incarnated as a first-century Jewish man?)

3). Does this practice lead me outward to God, or inward toward myself? (NB. A properly Catholic practice might lead you inward to God but in the end God is always both immanent and transcendent; that is, God is not found solely “inside me.”)

4). Does this practice have a reputable history in the long tradition of the Church herself, or is it something recently invented, cobbled together from other traditions, or merely an updated Gnostic practice rejected in the first four centuries of the Church?

5). Does this practice require me to involve myself with “spirit guides” or “energies” that lay claim to an existence apart from God as Creator?

6). Does this practice require me to reject as fundamental to my created nature my dignity as one made in the image and likeness of God Himself? Or to reject in another person his/her dignity as a creature of a loving God? (e.g., any practice that requires you to reject your embodied spirit as male/female, or violates human dignity by making the person into something easily killed, enslaved, neglected, etc.).

7). Does this practice ask me to ignore God’s providence by seeking answers to questions or seeking after insights into my future through divination?

8). Does this practice ask me to worship other gods or make created things into idols? (e.g., some forms of meditation, yoga, healing all rest on false notions of the body/spirit relationship and require a certain amount of willful negligence of one’s Creator).

9). Does this practice assume my accomplished divinity and then ask me to become more aware of this divinity as a means to salvation/enlightenment?

10). Does this practice explicitly make Jesus Christ the only mediator between myself as a member of the Body of Christ and the Father, or does it require me to place someone else or something else between me and my Creator? (e.g., some forms of “dedication to the Blessed Mother" dangerously push this essential spiritual truth, that is, some prayers in private liturgies explicitly require the believer to acknowledge the B.V.M. as the savior.)

11. Does this practice rely solely on the power of God to achieve His desired end for me and with me, or does it require me to believe that I am capable of manipulating God through ritual or prayer? (e.g., some forms of popular devotion border on the magical in practice, "guaranteed never to fail novenas")

12). Finally, does this practice require me to understand my blessings and gifts as self-made, or am I encouraged to give thanks to God for all that I am and all that I have.

IV. Conclusion: Obedience

This list of questions could go on for several more pages. These are a few of the essential questions to get you started. The best way to avoid New Ageism in your spiritual practice is to obey the Church, that is, to listen carefully to the teachings of the Church and submit yourself to the long wisdom of our mothers and fathers in the faith. This is not some sort of “blind faith,” but rather the practice of humility and trust. Before rejecting a teaching of the Church as false or harmful, ask yourself this question: “Am I smarter, wiser, holier than 2,000 years of God’s saints?” And even if you still find yourself wanting to reject a teaching of the Church, rather than assuming that the Church is wrong and that you are right, assume for the sake of argument that you have misunderstood the teaching and seek after clarification. In my experience, people who have rejected the Church have done so not because they disagree with what the Church actually teaches but because they have failed to understand the Church. I am reminded of the example of a young man who approached me one time and informed me that he had left the Catholic Church because his roommate’s Bible Church pastor had shown him that Catholics worship Mary, a practice condemned by the bible. He was shocked to hear me say that the Catholic Church also condemns the worship of Mary as idolatrous. Without first understanding the Church’s teaching, this young man left the Church not because he disagreed with the Church, but because he failed to understand.

UPDATE: If you would like for me to answer a specific question, I will do so briefly in the combox. Unfortunately, email/comboxes are not the best forum for protracted spiritual direction. If your question is a little more involved, go ahead and leave it in the combox and I will either answer it or refer you to a source for more info.

While you're here, you might as well check out my U.S. WISH LIST and/or my U.K. WISH LIST (scroll down the list for the philosophy books) and help a friar out with the books he needs for classes this academic year! (I know, I know. . .shameless. . .but my book budget is VERY small this year! Tom, I saw that!) :-)

Oh! And the Sunday homily is almost done. . .I'm a little behind in my work. . .we start past tense Italian verbs tomorrow and I'm not sure I know the present tense all that well.

My Occult Past (such as it was...)

What I want to do with this post is point out an ancient theme in the life of the Church that shadows her ministry of teaching the apostolic faith. To do this, I want to tell a bit of my story (a VERY small bit) as a kind of witness to what happens when we give ourselves over to the relativism of the zeitgeist. My goal here is not to denounce or condemn but to inform and caution. This post is written specifically for Christians who are either dabbling in New Agey ideas and practices or those thinking of doing so. This post is not intended to persuade those who have left the Church for various occult practices to return to the Church. Nor am I offering here a systematic philosophical critique of occultism/neo-paganism. I am writing as a Christian priest for Christians who are tempted by a darker side. . .

Was I involved in the occult? Yes. How much so? More than most, not as much as some. Basically, I was an observer and a sympathizer but never a practitioner; that is, I was an avid reader of occult books and an eager audience for occult ideas, but I was never initiated into any occult group nor have I ever really participated in any occult ritual. At most, I can be faulted for attending a few Wiccan Circles at Halloween and invoking angels as a kind of magical power. The worst thing I ever did was become an expert Tarot card reader.

My interest in the occult was always a conscious rejection of Christ. During my years of occult interest I was an Episcopalian, mostly fallen away, but nonetheless fully aware of my baptismal duties and readily admitted to communion in the Church as a confirmed member. Nothing in my family background or schooling or childhood would have predicted an interest in the occult.

My earliest memories of the occult revolve around an near obsession with the TV shows Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. Nothing exactly dark and loathsome there. However, the idea that it was possible for me as a human to manipulate matter with my will alone was very, very compelling. Now, I never believed that the kind of magic done on those shows was really possible. But they stoked my imagination and lead me to further studies.

As a teenager I played with a Ouija Board with one of my friends. We did all the things that kids do to scare themselves—looked for ghosts, chanted “Bloody Mary” in front of the mirror, etc. My first inkling that this sort of thing might be dangerous came when I read a second-hand book on demonology. Is this stuff really, really real? This book scared me just enough to push me into a deeper curiosity and further research. By this time I had been introduced to the Catholic Church on a class trip to Mexico. All of the sacramental elements of the Church were on full-display in the Mexican Baroque churches we visited, especially the National Cathedral. Our Lady of Guadalupe grabbed me in Mexico City, and I had a profound conversion experience at 17, feeling powerfully the call to be a priest. Never having been to Mass or confession or anything else remotely Catholic, this experience of being called to priesthood was confusing and scary.

I decided to become Catholic. My parents objected, though not very strenuously. I became an Episcopalian simply because the Catholic Church in my university town looked like a Quaker meeting house—brick box, no sacramentals, glass doors. Unfortunately, the Episcopal Church at the time (early ‘80’s) was slavishly following the zeitgeist and slowly abandoning its apostolic heritage. With the irregular ordination of women into the priesthood (something I fully supported) and the revision of the 1928 Prayer Book (again, fully supported), the Episcopal Church became a church given over to restrained liturgical experimentation and utilitarian morality. I was enthralled to modern philosophy and postmodern critical theory (feminism, Marxism) and the Episcopal Church gave me nothing solid to hang on to during this bumpy time. It was easy to stay in the Church and worship the zeitgeist. So I did.

The one occult practice that I became very good at was Tarot card reading. It was something of a game for me at first. I would bring my deck to a party and sit in the corner doing card readings for my friends and colleagues. As I did it more and more, it became more and more necessary for me to do it. Two events lead me to see the danger of the practice. One of my Episcopalian friends asked me if I could do a reading through her for her brother; in other words, she wanted me to read her brother’s future without him present. I agreed. I didn’t know her brother. Didn’t know she had a brother. So, I read the cards. What the cards said was exactly on target. Her teenage brother was having an affair with a married woman and the husband knew. Her brother was in danger of being seriously injured or killed. My friend was so horrified that I knew this through the cards that she stopped speaking to me for months. Another incident happened while I was at a party. One of my married friends was having an affair with a married man. I knew this and thought nothing of it. When I read her cards, they told me that she and her fellow adulterer were going to get married. But before this happened her husband would die. She was freaked out to say the least. What I didn’t know at the time was that wedding plans were underway and that her husband was indeed dying. These two incidents caused me to put the cards away. I haven’t touched them since.

Another frightening incident occurred years later when I was at my lowest. While working in a psych hospital in the last 90’s I had two radically different spiritual influences in my life: a Wiccan roommate and a charismatic Protestant supervisor. My life was in shambles. Emotionally and spiritually, I was a disaster. Clutching at any and every spiritual fashion that Barnes & Noble put on its “spirituality” shelf, I drifted from Wiccanism, Druidism, angelism, various kinds of divination, esoteric Christianity, anything but the Real Thing offered through Christ.

During a particularly low period, I came home one evening from work and my Wiccan roommate began to question me about my spiritual life. This was very odd because he was always “open to the diversity” of all spiritualities and encouraged my exploration. When I remarked that his questions were annoying and inappropriate, he told me that earlier that evening he came out of the bathroom and saw a dark cloud hovering outside my bedroom door. The cloud moved away from my door and toward him. He said that he cast a “banishing spell” on the cloud several times and it drifted away outside the house. I was incredulous, of course. He was worried nonetheless and “blessed” the house with salt and incense, etc. Whatever, I thought.

The next morning, I went to my second job and my supervisor (the charismatic woman) pulled me into her office and started pelting me with questions about my spiritual life. Déjà vu. I answered very vaguely, not wanting to know of my interest in the occult. She grew frustrated and blurted out that I was under attack by demonic forces. This woman is insane! Then she told me that she and her prayer group were engaged in spiritual warfare against dark forces trying to influence the local population, and that I was a central target. Needless to say, I was more than a little dubious. She told me that during their prayer group she had a clear mental picture of me being attacked by a black cloud in my home. I asked her when this happened. She said: yesterday, Sunday. The same day my roommate saw the cloud outside my door. I became so rattled that I had to leave.

About a year later I left the Episcopal Church and became a Catholic. After a failed attempt to join what I now know is a dissident Catholic religious order, I moved home and continued working in a psych hospital. There I injured my back and got a staph infection from a patient in the injured disc. I spent two months in indescribable agony. Finally, my doctors discovered the internal staph infection (something rare I’m told) and they began treatment. For seven weeks I administered I.V. antibiotics through a PIC line inserted in my arm and running internally to my heart. It took almost seven months for me to recover fully. My infectious disease doctor told me that I was very lucky to be alive after going more than two months with an internal staph infection! Apparently, staph destroys heart valves. Anyway, during those two months I was completely dependent on my parents for everything—feeding me, dressing me, putting me to bed—I was nearly paralyzed by the pain. The humility of that experience returned me to a desire for Christ and his Church. That’s another story.

I joined the Dominicans in 1999. Being on the inside of the Church as a religious has opened my eyes to a number of problems that I recognize from my days as a fan of the occult. Everywhere, I see religious, priests, the laity giving themselves over to radical feminism and Earth worship; theologians preaching Gnostic doctrines like pantheism and pagan mythologies; the profession of various kinds of utilitarian-situational ethics in the public square; Catholics teaching pro-choice, sexual libertinism; various kinds of syncretistic liturgical theology (a dash of Hinduism here, a pinch of Native American religion there, some Wiccan rituals as decoration); but the final straw for me was then and is now the prominence of “social analysis” in among the “peace and justice” crowd in the Church, an analysis that was nothing more than Marxism in vestments. I should know. I was professed Marxist for years, and I am very familiar with the primary and secondary literature. There is also a superficial interest in postmodern philosophy and critical theory that informs some of the biblical research and instruction in the Church’s seminaries. Again, one of my areas in my doctoral studies was postmodern theory. I know it when I see it. And I know from personal experience what it does to one’s allegiance to the possibility of knowing and acting on objective truth.

Now, I have to say here something that some of my readers won’t like every much. There is nothing wrong on the face of it with being required to read texts that oppose the Catholic faith. I taught an entire seminar on post-metaphysical theologies using thinkers who would never darken the door of a church much less a Catholic Church. Categorically, I am NOT opposed to the academic pursuit of truth. What bothers me is that this stuff is often taught uncritically and presented as compatible with the Catholic faith. There is a difference between reading texts that oppose or deny the truths of the faith in order to “know the enemy” and combat him and being required to read these texts as a replacement for the faith. I firmly believe that most of those who read and believe these texts understand themselves to be believing Catholics in good standing with the Church. I’m not suggesting some evil conspiracy. Like me years before, they have been lead down a primrose path into a garbage heap. And frankly, I have done a poor job of challenging these tendencies, preferring stubborn resistance and polemic to good old-fashioned Dominican disputation. My unease is wholly my own creation.

Then I was despondent that I had left my postmodernist occult life behind only to find it again in the Church. As I grow in the faith, I see less and less of this sort of thing among my immediate peers (professors, younger priests, religious, and laity) but more and more in the Church at large (diocesan chanceries, retreat centers, etc.). We have all seen the websites of religious orders and dioceses that feature one sort of New Age-Gnostic practice or another. It’s out there in the Church as it has always been. But that it has always been there is no reason not to call it by name. For those Christians interested in mediation, bodily prayer, ritual, esoteric philosophy, mystical theology, revelation, and the holiness of the feminine, you won’t find a deeper treasure box than the Church. Keeping in mind the questions I presented in the post on New Agey Catholicism, it is entirely possible to live a good Christian life thoroughly steeped in the mystery of God’s love and in His “hiddenness.” If you choose to spend your time denouncing The Rules or finding loopholes in the rules, then I would suggest that you are as legalistic as the hierarchs you denounce. It takes a lawyer to challenge a law-giver head-on and find the way out of a merely legalistic attempt to control.

My goal here is not to point fingers or denounce but rather to give those who think they need help the help they need to avoid these pitfalls. I tell my story as a way of saying, “I’ve been there.” You may see “demons” as nothing more than the dark side of human consciousness or as truly fallen angels. Fine. Regardless, we are tempted by something or someone to deny the truths of the faith and to seek after our own divinity without the help of our divine Creator. This was Adam and Eve’s mistake. Don’t make it yourself.

Lift High the Cross!

Exaltation of the Holy Cross: Num 21.4-9; Phil 2.6-11, John 3.13-17
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?

Can you be corrected?

23rd Sunday OT: Ez 33.7-9; Rom 13.8-10; Matt 18.15-20
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Convento SS Domenico e Sisto, Roma

Priests and religious of long experience will tell you that long after celibacy and poverty have become routine for them that obedience remains the most difficult vow to honor. We can get used to not having just one person in our lives to love intimately, and we can get used to relying on the community treasury for basic needs. However, who among us ever truly becomes accustomed to relinquishing a stubborn will to the authority of another? If anything, we get more willful as we grow older, watching those with authority over us become suspiciously less and less interested in our welfare. Or so it seems. Or so the voice of that sneaky spirit of rebellion whispers to us when we are told something we do not want to hear. What do we say? I’m an adult! I’m well-educated and entitled! I know best for me! I have rights, you know! You are just as bad if not worse! That exertion of self, that pretense of individual autonomy rising in pride against a promise made long ago. And because we are being perfected and not yet so, we need to be reminded of the wisdom of humility. Constantly reminded. The foot cannot walk without the ankle. Nor the ankle bend without the leg. Nor the leg without the knee. And so on. So, a good working definition of humility might be: the submission of one’s body and soul to the necessity of playing well with others. In other words, as Christians we don’t get to take our ball home and refuse to play just because we don’t like the rules of the game. We’re in this game together (like it or not) and sometimes that means (like it or not) that we have to hear that we aren’t playing well with others. That is a message, I dare say, that 99% of us will refuse to hear. And just as many will refuse to deliver.

Despite our discomfort in delivering such a message and despite our anger at hearing such a message, deliver and hear we must. The Lord tells Ezekiel, “If I tell the wicked, ‘O wicked one, you shall surely die [for disobeying me],’ and you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked from his way, the wicked shall die for his guilt, but I will hold you responsible for his death.” My hand may thrust the knife into my enemy’s heart and do so because my enraged brain sends the order; however, I am held responsible for his death—I am, body and soul. Me. Not just my hand, not just my brain. And when I am brought to justice for murder, it is perfectly reasonable for the law to ask: who knew he was capable of murder? Who failed to teach him the value of life? Who failed to speak out and dissuade him from this heinous crime? The law will call this “culpable negligence.” Our Lord will call it “a failure to love.”

Paul, in his letter to the Romans, referring to Christ’s teaching on the greatest commandment, writes: “Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. . .Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.” Taking Ezekiel and Paul together we can see that love and obedience are inextricably bound together. Love without obedience is mere affection leading to raucous license. Obedience without love is mere compliance leading to belittling deference. Love with obedience is fraternal correction done well. This why Jesus, all too aware of our fragile egos and nonetheless painfully aware of the consequences of our failure, allows for the elaborate process of calling another to obedience in love: first, one on one; then, one with two or three more; then one with the whole Church. If the Church cannot extract obedience in love from the dissenter, then “treat him as you would a Gentile or tax collector,” that is, treat the stubborn one like an unclean stranger or a traitor to the family. This is not cruel. It is responsible. If you doubt this, read Ezekiel 33.7-9 one more time.

Reflecting on why fraternal correction is so difficult to deliver and receive, I am forced to look carefully in the mirror. I won’t claim to be an average American Catholic since most Catholics aren’t Dominican priests. However, my stubborn will was trained in the modernist assumptions of a working class family complete with highly individualized notions of the person and consumerist definitions of freedom and liberty. Years of education and the religious life itself have done much to inform my intellect about the problems I face as a stubborn mule, but they have done little to move my will. What does Paul say, “I do what I do not want to do. . .” Essentially, the problem is this: when confronted with fraternal correction I immediately argue myself to two conclusions: 1). the person correcting me is not qualified to correct me because he is sinful too, and 2). I refuse to listen because my corrector is motivated by ___________ (fill in the blank with “envy,” “control issues,” “personal dislike,” “political enmity, etc.) and therefore he is not correcting me in love. In one fell swoop I have committed two sins: presumption and lack of charity. And the dry well I have dug for myself gets deeper and deeper.

That explains why I don’t hear correction well. Why don’t I deliver correction well. Basically, I distrust my own motives and fear that the one I am correcting will point them out to me. Who wants to hear the ugly truth about one’s prejudices? There’s also the danger that the other guy will rebut with a correction of his own. And that correction might be true! Ouch. Like most of you, I do not want my autonomy violated by a dubious correction, and I certainly don’t want my freedom restricted by someone with an agenda that fails to take love into account. . .even if what my corrector is trying to tell in love me is true. . .maybe especially if what he is trying to tell me is true! My experience tells me that it is truly the extraordinarily holy person who can deliver and hear a correction without the sins of pride and rebellion stirring up a devilish and over-the-top reaction. Alas, holiness is required of us. For better and worse, we are nothing without love and we cannot grow in holiness without obedience.

Paul’s wisdom is our salvation here: “Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another. . .” Said another way, possess no debt except the debt of love that you owe to those whom you have promised to love. Alone, we are nothing. Together we are Christ, made one body in one baptism for the preaching of the Word. The discipline of humility that comes from fraternal correction is made possible by and strengthened by a closed mouth and an opened heart. Difficult? Not at all. It’s almost impossible. But if this life in Christ were easy we would have no need for the Church, no need for one another.

What tempts a saint?

22nd Sunday OT: Jer 20.7-9; Rom 12.1-2; Matt 16.21-27
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Convento SS. Domenico e Sisto, Roma


None of us will blame Peter for his outburst. Jesus has just finished telling his friends how he must suffer and die at the hands of his enemies in Jerusalem. And how, after he has been dead and buried for three days, he will rise again. Peter, the Rock of the messianic faith and keeper of the kingdom keys, pulls Jesus aside and rebukes him. Peter rebukes Jesus! Peter denies the truth of Christ’s impending passion, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” For our own love of Christ, none of us will blame Peter for his unfaithful outburst; however, Jesus not only faults Peter for his passionate denial, but returns his rebuke with a curse: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.” Jesus names Peter “Satan.” Adversary. Accuser. He also names Peter “Obstacle.” Scandal. An obstructing stone on the path. Not for the last time does Peter fall for a demonic temptation. If you were asked to pick out the temptation that traps Peter, what name would you give it?

In a prose poem his translator* has titled “[The temptation of the saint],” Rainer Maria Rilke meditates on an unnamed painting of an unnamed saint tormented by lust. Rilke, describing the saint in agony, on the verge of surrendering his battle against temptation, writes, “His prayer is already losing its leaves and stands up out of his mouth like a withered shrub. His heart has fallen over and poured out into the muck. His whip strikes him as weakly as a tail flicking away flies.” Why has this saint fallen? Rilke does not say. His meditation on the painting concludes with a meditation on the contemporary usefulness of paintings such as this. He notes the two extremes of our longing for the divine: “I could imagine that long ago such things happened to saints, those overhasty zealots, who wanted to begin with God, right away, whatever the cost. We no longer make such demands on ourselves. We suspect that he is too difficult for us, that we must postpone him, so that we can slowly do the long work that separates us from him.” Longing for God and zealous, we start with God, unready; or, longing for God but anxious, we defer and break ourselves with work and worry.

Which is Peter’s principle fault? Eager and too quick? Or fearful and delaying? When Jesus rebukes Peter for his unfaithfulness, he says, “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Peter must have stared at his Master with complete incomprehension because Jesus turns to the other disciples and explains, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Is this what Peter fears when Jesus reveals his fate in Jerusalem? Is Peter quailing at the inevitable pain and desolation of not only losing his beloved Master to their enemies, but knowing first hand what it the scourge and the nails feel like? Peter surrenders the Lord’s passion before it has begun. Unlike the saint in Rilke’s painting who surrenders after a great battle, Peter surrenders at the first sign of trouble. Peter’s rebuke is heated but it comes out of a “heart fallen over…”, a heart fatally wounded by created love rather than a heart eternally healed by the Creator’s love. Peter does not think as God does.

What would you name Peter’s temptation? Pride could work. Fear. Yes, fear plays its part. How about ignorance? He is tempted to rebuke Jesus without knowing the Father’s mind? Yes. Could we say that Peter has been inordinately distracted? Remember: Jesus does not say that Peter has been an obstacle for Peter. Nor does Jesus say that Peter has accused Peter. Jesus clearly rebukes Peter for obstructing his path to the passion that the Father has ordained. Peter has accused Jesus of lying. God has ordered the Passion. How then can Peter exclaim: “God forbid, Lord!”? To Jesus, Peter is Satan, accuser, adversary; to Jesus Peter is a scandal, an impediment. Peter is distracted by his created love, his natural affection and loyalty to the man, Jesus; forgetting entirely, even for just that moment, that this man he loves so furiously is also the Son who must suffer and die. Jesus will not be distracted, and so he turns to instruct his friends—with Peter’s anguished denial still ringing in his ears—that to follow him means not only loving him as Master but becoming him as Christs.

We might say that Peter is both eager and too quick AND he is anxious and delaying. In his love for Jesus he is eager to see him triumphant over his enemies. But this is not the triumph that the Son has come to bring. Now, knowing that his Master is fated to suffer and die, Peter, in a fit of anxious terror, elects postponement of the inevitable for his Master and for himself, and he succumbs to the distraction of his all too human love. This is why the Lord must be so fiercely clear with the other disciples in prophesying for them what lies ahead of them as his friends. Make no mistake, brothers and sisters, as Paul will later write to the Romans, we are called in baptism “to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, [our] spiritual worship.” We must love as God does—sacrificially, wholly giving over—and not as man does—possessively, longing for completion.

In the first paragraph of his prose poem, Rilke surveys the painting of the saint writhing in temptation, noting that works like this one, these “strange pictures,” make the ordinary things of our counted days “stretch out and stroke one another, lewd and curious, quivering in the random lechery of distraction.” Having confessed his own anxieties about the difficulties of surrendering to divine love, preferring instead to postpone with arduous spiritual labor the inevitable union, Rilke acknowledges that delay in work is no relief: “Now,…I know that this work leads to combats just as dangerous as the combats of the saints…” Isn’t this what Jesus prophesies for all of us who will reach down, heft up a cross, and walk behind him to suffering and ignominious death? Our devotion is never simply about zeal or comfort, heated assent or cool contemplation; our devotion, the devotion that grounds us to offer our bodies as spiritual sacrifice—as Christ himself did—that devotion is always the denial of self, resistance to and defeat of the temptation to see oneself and one’s imagined needs as the index of Life’s Book. Peter attempts to distract Jesus with his immature love. He throws before Jesus an undeveloped chunk of affection, a glob of emotion. The point of Peter’s rebuke is to draw attention to his own despair at losing Christ to pain and death. Peter makes Peter the point of reference; he shouts his unwillingness to take up his cross and follow Christ to his.

What “random lecher[ies] of distraction” cause you to withhold your sacrifice? What distractions betray your conformity to this present age? How daily, hourly do you fail to be transformed by God’s love and thus fail to be renewed? Do you pull at Jesus’ cloak, hoping to keep him from pain and death? Or do you push him ahead of you, carrying your own cross as he carries his? How do you postpone following after the Lord? Perhaps, like Peter, you hope to deny the inevitability of having to follow him by denying that he must first lead.

Get behind him, Satan! You cannot obstruct what is.

*from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke; ed and trans. by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage International, 1989, 105.

Never Forsaken

21st Sunday OT: Is 22.19-23; Rom 11.33-36; Matt 16.13-20
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

Convento SS. Domenico e Sisto, Roma


We say to the Lord this morning: “Lord, your love is eternal; do not forsake the work of your hands.” We do not say this because we believe that the Lord might forsake us. We do not say this because we doubt that we are the Lord’s handiwork. Nor do we say this because we believe that the Lord’s love is limited by the timepieces of His creation. We say “Lord, your love is eternal” because—though we know that this is true—we must hear it said with our own tongues for only by tasting the words will we come to live the truth that we speak! We beg the Lord, “Lord, do not forsake the work of your hands”—though we know He would never forsake His promise to us—we beg because we must feel the steel of His promise in our mouths, the cold, metallic resolve of the ordering Word, the First Breath, the finality of our Lord’s enduring guarantee. What we know, we pray: “We give thanks to you, O Lord, with all our heart, for you have heard the Words of our mouths”—the Word You Yourself placed on our tongues “because of Your kindness and your truth!” What we know, we pray: “When he opens, no one shall shut; when he shuts, no one shall open.” Peter opens his mouth to say, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” and when he shuts his mouth, the Lord opens his own to say, “Blessed are you…whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” And so, we are loved forever. And so, we are never forsaken.

We should celebrate on this twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time, the teaching office of the Church, embodied in and employed by he who sits in Peter’s Chair. After all, our Lord says to Peter that he is the rock of the Church, the foundation stone of the Body that will grow into history and produce the great saints (and sinners!) of our western civilization. Our Lord is not speaking metaphorically or symbolically when he says that he will be with us always. His promise to abide with us to the end is best understood as a promise to found, concretely and in perpetuity, a living organism; a breathing, growing entity capable of bringing to it constituent members the stuff of everlasting life, all that which nourishes, cherishes, and sustains holiness and hope. At the head of this Mystical Body is Christ himself, drawing all parts and pieces of creation to him, elements known to the Body and some unknown, seducing and attracting any and all who will perk up an ear to hear the gospel of mercy, or blink open a blearied eye to peek at the glory Christ reveals—the invitation to come to the feasting table is a broadcast not a telegraph, made on an open-mic not a secured line, directed to the milling crowds and not just the favored few, to bring all who will come and not only those who fit.

And all those who come in answer to our Lord’s open-handed, open-hearted broadcast of “come-one, come-all” flavor the Body with a distinctive diversity, an exciting assortment of faces, tongues, customs, rhythms, textures, and for this catholicity we are deeply grateful. As we watch the Lord’s face multiply in his Church, we see him come more sharply into focus as he reveals himself through his creatures. Each beautiful face exposes Beauty Himself. So, it is no wonder at all that we are tempted to celebrate this abundant diversity as a good end in itself, to raise up this bounty of variety and make it the point of the Church, the purpose of Christ’s Body in the world. But if we succumb to this temptation—to glorify the human diversity of the Church for the sake of diversity—we overlook entirely that which attracts and binds the diversity of the Church: the emphatic YES of each beautiful face, each rhythmic tongue, each soul, seduced and delivered to the perfecting love of Christ. It is the commitment of our YES to Christ that unites us as a Church, not the variety of our packaging, not the impermanent assortment of skin and hair and speech but our willed participation in the permanent unity of love, Love Himself.

How difficult would it be for us as creatures of body and soul to live together in the unity of Love Himself without a Body to ground our common spirit? In other words, given what we know to be the case about ourselves as sinful persons, how difficult would it be for us to live together without a concrete expression of God’s love for us? Surely, we have the historical events of the Passion and the empty tomb of Easter Sunday. But none of us now were there then. We have the witness of scripture, the eyewitness accounts of what happened at the moment when the Father revealed His enduring love for us on the cross. Yes, of course, and surely scripture lives with us, but it with US that scripture lives. Our committed YES to the love of Christ is certainly given the gravity of history and the excitement of scripture, but concretely how do we live day-to-day with our YES? How do we make history now? How do we make scripture alive now? If our history is to be more than tall-tales and our scripture more than those tall-tales written down, there must be a living tradition, that is, a breathing, growing body of “that which is handed on.” That Body is the Church and the Church is where our committed YES is held in trust, unpacked in its fullness, suited up, put to work, and elaborated to be handed-on to the next set of beautiful faces and rhythmic tongues.

In handing Peter the keys to the kingdom, Christ not only makes Peter and his successors stewards of the heavenly household, he also founds the rock-bottom slab of the Church, the Body to be energized at Pentecost with the coming of the Holy Spirit. Christ establishes, institutes; he plants and provides nourishment and care for his emerging Body. At the proclamation made by Peter that Jesus is the only Son of the Living God, Christ reveals that the Father Himself has made Peter privy to what has until now been a secret. And now that the disciples know, and now that Peter has been confirmed in his office, Jesus assures his friends that “the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against [my church]. Do you hear the psalmist singing, “Lord, your love is eternal”? Do you hear Isaiah prophesying, “When he opens, no one shall shut; when he shuts, no one shall open”?

Christ’s promise to be with us forever is not a symbol or a sign or a metaphor. His promise is a Church. Founded on Peter and the revelation the Father Himself gave to Peter. Binding and loosing, the Church, through the office of Peter, teaches the faith; that is, what it is to believe and what we are to believe. We know our God’s love is everlasting. And so, we are loved forever. And so, we are never forsaken.

Access Denied

20th Sunday OT: Is 56.1, 6-7; Rom 11.13-15, 29-32; Matt 15.21-28
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Convento SS. Domenico e Sisto, ROMA


Foreigners! Gentiles! Annoying, unclean women! Ah, I feel right at home. Throw in busloads of Sweaty Tourists, gaggles of Midget Nuns, schools of Language School Students, and fleets of Highly-Primped Twenty-something Chauffeurs, and you would have much more than the foreign yet fertile fields of St. Paul’s evangelizing —you would have Rome in August! Rome in August always means unbearable heat, odd odors on the streets and alleys, lots of bared skin, and the shouted music of broken Italian spoken with Babel’s accents. Rome in August (perhaps more than any other month) also means beggars. Hundreds of beggars. Everywhere. With bambini and without. Dangerously bent grandmothers. Sweet, newly-minted mothers. Men who would have made John the Baptist look tidy and clean. Beggars everywhere. And why not? I mean, why should souvenir hawkers, gelato scoopers, and tour guides get all the euros available in God’s Town? These beggars—the legit and not-so-legit—raise a question for me that the Canaanite woman in Matthew raises for Jesus. Paul raises the same question by speaking the Word to the Gentiles in Romans. However, it is Isaiah who begins this line of questioning for us with a simple declaration: “The foreigners who join themselves to the LORD…all who keep the Sabbath from profanation and hold to my covenant, them I will bring to my holy mountain.” Our Lord’s Word this morning brings us to contemplate access, admission: who gets to hear and see and touch the Lord? Who gets to eat and drink at the Lord’s table? As preachers of His Word, to whom do we preach most readily? And most tellingly, to whom do we refuse to preach?

Jesus goes into Tyre and Sidon for a little rest and like an American tourist snapping pics of the Trevi Fountain, he is hounded by a woman screeching at him, “Have pity on me…have pity on me…” Rather than listing off all the ailments and physical afflictions of her many, many bambini, this woman yells at Jesus, “My daughter is tormented by a demon.” And like most of the American tourists visiting the Trevi, Jesus ignores the woman; “[he] does not say a word in answer to her.” No doubt Jesus too has discovered that if you speak to the beggars they will follow you, demanding a bounty for your daring. The disciples, sick of this demanding woman, her screeching and carrying on about demons, go to Jesus frustrated and say to him, “Send her away…”

Now, this is the moment in the story where the question of access/admission is carefully balanced. Jesus says to the disciples, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” Imagine Jesus carefully watching to make sure his students are listening. The woman comes forward and pays Jesus homage, saying, “Lord, help me.” Jesus, still watching his less-than-generous disciples, repeats for the woman what he had said to the disciples, only this time he uses much harsher language: “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” If the disciples were scandalized by this, Matthew doesn’t note it. But we should note: the house of Israel is composed of the children of God, the Jews; everyone else, especially Canaanite women, are dogs. Beloved children have access to the Lord’s table, unclean dogs do not.

Let’s dispense immediately with the ridiculous claim that this story is about a “marginalized woman of color teaching Jesus a lesson about radical inclusively.” Creatures teach the Creator nothing. Jesus and the woman, however, do manage to teach the disciples that access to the Lord’s table is about trusting in the Living Word and not about one’s lineage, nationality, or relative status according to the Law. The Canaanite woman is made a child of God by her faith! In her humility, she asks for help and then testifies that any help she receives will be a gift and not an entitlement. Jesus rewards her faith by giving her her greatest desire: “…the woman’s daughter was healed from that hour.”

Let’s admit up front that more often than not we are the disciples in this story. We’re the ones wanting to protect Jesus from harm, to prevent others from defiling him or abusing his name. We will set ourselves outside the tent as guards against the unworthy, as gatekeepers against the annoying and the merely curious. With stout arms crossed across our proud chests we are vigilant against the unclean dogs sniffing around for hand-outs; those who have not earned an audience by showing loyalty; those who would waste the Lord’s time with trivialities; obviously, as his only loyal disciples, we are best selected as his secretaries, his guards, his watchers. Occasionally, we may even have to protect him from himself. Imagine if he wanted to do something stupid like sacrifice his life in order to save everyone! Everyone! Not just the deserving, the observant, the righteous, and the clean, but just anyone who might accept his invitation to join his eternal table. Oy! What a mess. Sometimes we might have to protect Jesus from Jesus. Sad but true.

And other times we might have to protect friends and family from the truth of the Word. Of course, what we are really protecting is our comfortable relationships, our prized friendships. Just as we sometimes do not preach the whole gospel of Christ’s saving grace in order to protect Jesus from Jesus, so sometimes we skip over the hard parts of the gospel because they tell us what we do not want to hear, demand from us what we do not want to give. Maybe we fail to preach the whole Word because those to whom we are preaching share with us an ideological agenda that we know is nothing like what the Lord has spoken to His prophets or to His Church. Our timidity in the face of possible aggressive opposition in effect denies access to those who need to hear the Word preached in its entirety. Or perhaps we leave out what we know our audience does not want to hear so that the applause at the end will be louder, longer, and more appreciative of our talents. Regardless, we might as well tell the Canaanite woman, “Yea, dogs do get scraps from the table but dogs also get kicked out the back door! Now get outta here!”

Normally, we ask questions about access/admission to resources in terms of who has the resources and who doesn’t; who distributes and who receives; and who gets what and why. Our questions this morning—to whom do we preach and to whom do we refuse to preach?—can be understood in these terms as well. But let’s frame these questions in terms of our commission from the Lord, vowed to in our own baptisms, to preach his Word to all nations, teaching everything that he taught, and baptizing all the willing in his name. As baptized Christians and preachers of the Word, we are not little McJesus franchises marketing and selling McGrace and McSalvation. We are not Christ-Marts or Jesus.com’s or Messiah, Inc. We do not own God’s grace. We do not market God’s grace. We do not buy or sell God’s grace on the NASDAQ or the NYSE. In no shape, no form, no fashion, have we ever, do we ever, or will we ever control the distribution of God’s grace to His people. Our vowed task is much more difficult: by our daily obedience to the Word and our faith in God manifested in the world, to all who will see and hear we are to bear witness to the abiding effects of God’s grace in our lives, living lives of deep charity, quick mercy, and enduring hope. Whoever sees your faithful witness, hears your faithful witness will have access to the Lord’s Word precisely because as you witness—as you bear out testimony—you manifest the Spirit of the Lord. He is there. Right there. With you. Shining out and drawing in any who will see, any who will hear.

Isaiah reports that the Lord said to him for us to hear: “Observe what is right, do what is just; for my salvation is about to come, my justice about to be revealed.” As you walk out of your house each morning, ask yourself: today, who will see and hear the Lord’s salvation because of my witness? To whom will I reveal the Lord’s justice?

Toothbrushes and Whales, oh my!

16^th Week OT(M): Micah 6.1-4, 6-8 and Matthew 12.38-42
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory

[NB. This is my Last American Homily. . .]

Up for the second time last night and headed to the bathroom in that staggering daze just after waking, I was shown a truth about my world I had never thought to question. There just about three feet from the floor, hovering in mid-air, is a small glowing object. I stare for a moment, without my glasses, in the dark, and think for just a second or two that perhaps the Lord has sent an angel to tell me something amazing. As I contemplate this greenish-yellow glow, thinking about revelations, dreams, visions, and prophecies, I am suddenly struck by the truth of what I am seeing, nearly felled by a revelation about my world I had never thought to question; but there it is, as plain as the shine of a full moon in October, there it is in plain view, and I realize with a nearly blinding clarity: my toothbrush glows in the dark! Then, just being me, the question arises: why would anyone think to make toothbrushes glow in the dark? Stumbling back to bed, I chuckle myself to sleep wondering what we would all look like if our teeth glowed in the dark.

Strictly speaking, my “vision” of the glowing toothbrush was a discovery not a revelation. Its discovery was accidental and has no mean meaning beyond what I can give it in a homily about seeking after signs of God’s presence. As a divine sign my glowing toothbrush fails what we can call here the “From Test;” that is, my toothbrush shining in the darkness on the sink cannot be said to be “from” God. And though we can rightly say that anything made is made by a creature who in turn is created by the Creator and reveals his/her Creator as a creature, we cannot say that a glowing toothbrush made by a creature reveals much about God. Signs point the way and make present that which they signify. Divine signs point the way to God and make His presence knowable to those who desire to know Him.

The scribes and Pharisees are understandably both curious and worried about Jesus’ claims to be the Son of God. They approach him and make a reasonable request, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” Traditionally, those claiming to be “sent from God” provide signs that point to God’s presence and make Him knowable. These men are educated, pious, intellectually curious, and therefore rightly seek some indication from this rabble-rousing preacher that he is who he claims to be. Show us a sign. Jesus’ response is unexpected and harsh: “An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it…” We have to wonder why Jesus is being so stubborn. We know he is capable of miraculous deeds. Why not show these men what they need to see?

Jesus says that no sign will be given to them “except the sign of Jonah the prophet.” Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and nights, so the Son of Man will be “in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.” Jonah is expelled from the whale and goes on to preach repentance to the decadent citizens of Nineveh. They repent and return to God’s favor. So Jesus too, expelled from the grave and risen from the dead, will be a sign to the scribes and Pharisees and a sign to us that Jesus is indeed who he claims to be. Jesus goes on to add that on the day of judgment, “the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation and condemn it, b/c they repented at the preaching of Jonah…” Needing no other sign than the earnest preaching of an honest prophet, the citizens of Nineveh return to God.

Living here on the edge of the end of the first decade of the 21^st century, can we be counted an “evil and unfaithful generation” seeking after signs? What signs could we seek? Crying statues? Marian apparitions? Bleeding Hosts? Yes, all of these and many more. But do we need these signs? We do not. We have a magisterial Church, her Eucharist, a divine guarantee against defeat, and pews packed with priests, prophets, and kings. All of these speak with one voice to say what is good and what the Lord requires: “Only to do the right and love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Cutting Both Ways

Bl. Kateri Tekakwitha: Isa 1.10-17 and Matthew 10.34-11.1
Fr. Philip Neri Powell
St Albert the Great Priory

Think twice before opening your door to a prophet wielding a sword. That could be a fortune-cookie fortune, or a Jewish proverb, or even a bumper sticker for your Volvo. Wherever you might read it, it is sound advice. Prophets by nature are dangerous people. Often they not only tell us secrets we do not want to hear but they perform in ways we do not want to see. They expose our sins; speak in weird parables; interpret dreams and nature wonders; they are almost always dirty, unnecessarily hairy, and not well-dressed. They rave and gesticulate wildly, sometimes cursing and calling down destruction on our lives. Prophets are indeed dangerous b/c like their more modern counterpart, the poet, they are mad. It comes with spending too much time in the desert listening to God. So, imagine if you will one of these guys showing up at your door late one night, wielding a sword and shouting your repentance. What do you do? The smart ones among us, call the police. The brave sneak around back and turn the water hose on him. The truly foolish open the door and invite him in. Being ourselves fools for Christ, we glory when he hear Jesus say to his Apostles: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword.” Do you reach for the doorknob, the phone, or the hose?

We have been reading scripture long enough to know that Jesus is prone to these outrageous declarations, shocking pronouncements designed to smack us in the face with the hard reality he is preaching. If nothing else, Jesus refuses to dilute the strong wine of his gospel, to mix his wild message of divine mercy into a sweet pabulum. Almost nothing he teaches is easy for us to swallow whole. His lesson to the Apostles this morning is no exception: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me…whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me…whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” That sound you hear is the pounding of a prophet’s sword hacking away at our easy complacency. There is no peace, no worldly peace to be enjoyed once you have opened the door to this sword wielding prophet from the mountain. Get out the Glade air-freshener and draw a hot bath. He’s here to stay.

Though Christ’s message is freely given and hard to hear—a gift of eternal life to all who receive it—there is a price to pay. Not a price to pay before enjoying his peace, but a consequence to choosing to let him into your home. What could be divisive, violent, or seditious about a message of mercy, love, and forgiveness? Whether your heart is set on violent vengeance, or simply nursing petty wounds; or, whether you enjoy others being indebted to you, or live like a leech on someone else’s fortune, Christ’s presence in your home means choosing another way, another path to walk. Old habits of accounting grievances or racking up scores to settle must be abandoned in favor of choosing the good for your friends and enemies alike. Old habits of living with the privileges of rank and wealth, living on the harvest of those you see as less than worthy to live with you, these habits have to be turned toward service. The consequence is a home destroyed, a home turned outward and upside-down. Swords cut along both edges.

Jesus tells his Apostles that when one receives a prophet because he is a prophet, one receives a prophet’s reward. John the Baptist’s head was served to Herod on a platter. Peter and Paul received their reward nailed to a cross. Other prophets waste away in prison, or find their reward at the barrel-end of a gun. Maybe a prophet’s reward is not worldly peace but martyrdom. No one likes a prophet. They tell us things that we do not want to hear. Of course, Jesus also tells his Apostles that when one receives a righteous man because he is righteous, one receives a righteous man’s reward. Is this any better than a prophet’s reward? Not really. Rarely do the truly righteous find a comfortable reward in this world. The righteous are no less annoying than prophets and they are often persecuted for their stubborn refusal to compromise.

Where does that leave us? Do we reach for the doorknob, the phone, or the hose? Whichever you choose, reach with fear and trembling. The sword cuts both ways. And it always cuts.

On Being Tractors for the Lord

15^th Sunday OT: Isa 55.10-11; Rom 8.18-23; Matthew 13.1-9
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Paul Hospital, Dallas, TX

Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled! Do we hear but do not understand? Do we look but do not see? Have we closed our hearts to God’s Word? Do we refuse to understand? Will we be converted? Will we be healed? Jesus says to his disciples, “But blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear. Amen, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it. Hear then the parable of the sower…Whoever has ears ought to hear.”

Sitting on a boat in the sea, Jesus teaches the crowd standing on the shore with a parable. A sower of seed sows seed. Some of the seed falls on fertile ground and some on rocks and among thorns. Some of the seed takes root in shallow soil. Some in deeper, richer earth. The seeds that fell on deep, rich soil grew to produce fruit thirty, sixty, a hundredfold. The seeds that fell among the rocks and on shallow ground were easily scorched by the sun, or torn up because their roots were weak. Whoever has ears ought to hear: if your heart is deep and rich, the seed of God’s Word will flourish and produce a great harvest; however, if your heart is made of stone or covered with shallow soil, the seed of God’s Word will not take root. Water the seed of God’s Word planted in your heart or the sun will burn it dry. And come harvest time, you will have nothing to give back to the Lord.

The Lord God says to Isaiah, “…my word shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.” And so Jesus says to his disciples, “…blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear.” Do we hear but not listen? Do we look but do not see? Have we closed our hearts to God’s Word? No, we have not. We see and listen and our hearts are open to receive he whom the Lord has sent as seed for our harvest. But do we understand? After Jesus finishes his parable, the disciples approach him and ask, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” The disciples must be thinking: why not just say you mean; plainly, clearly say what you mean? Why not do what the farmer on his tractor does—just give them a straightforward, easy to understand description of what happens when the Word falls on fertile hearts, on dead hearts, on tumultuous hearts? Jesus says, “[I speak to them in parables] because knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted. To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Not exactly agricultural science or nature’s art! The disciples are privileged to know something more about the mysteries of how we are rescued from sin and granted eternal life. They are more than by-standers on the shore; they possess more than curious ears hearing a story told from a boat. And so do we; as his disciples right now, so do we.

What do we see? Hear? What do we understand? As disciples of the risen Lord, we can see the evil one coming to steal away the seed of the Word from those who refuse to understand his Word. As disciples of the risen Lord, we hear those who receive the Word with praise and thanksgiving, but who never allow the Word to take root in their stony hearts. As disciples of the risen Lord, we see and hear those with thorny hearts, hearts ruled by anxiety and the lure of riches, we see and hear them receive the Word but then choke the seedlings of the Word with compromise, worldly contentment, and sin. How do we see and hear all of this? How do we understand? Because at one time or another we ourselves, the disciples of the risen Lord, till stony, shallow, sun-scorched hearts, soil deadly to the Word that Lord would sow and nurture if only we were better farmers, better disciples.

The farmer plows and plants year to year. Each year as the earth tilts to spring, the fields are tilled and planted. Each year the harvest grows and produces fruits. Some years are better than others. Some years are flooded or burned. Eaten by insects or frozen solid with ice. But each year the farmer plows and plants; each year the farmer sows what he has and waits on the weather. Are we any different? The cycle of plowing and planting and producing good fruit might seem futile, even cynical given the vagaries of weather and time. But we know as the disciples of the risen Lord is that “…creation awaits with eager expectation…in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains…and we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” Our faith is not a gamble. Our faith is not two dice thrown on the chance that salvation comes with a pair of sixes. We hope! And the chances of circumstance and time cannot diminish the expected fulfillment of the promises of God. Nothing touches our hope. Nothing dries out our faith.

Of course, we fail. Of course, our hearts grow cold. Sometimes we spread the rich soil of our soul too thin and the Word cannot take root. But one year is not like another. Each year is a new year for plowing and planting. Each day is a new year. And today, this year, the Year of St. Paul, is our day, our year to plow deep and plant recklessly, excessively, expansively; to do what Paul did and go out as apostles to world we live in and the world we have never seen to plow and plant and offer to God the harvest of His Word. The Lord says to Isaiah, “Just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down and do not return there until they have watered the earth…so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth…” And so Jesus says, “To anyone who has, more will be given…” As disciples of the risen Lord, we have the most we can have and more will be given. We see what the prophets longed to see. We hear what the righteous longed to hear. If we will understand with our hearts converted, we see and hear even more. But if we do not share, if we do not ourselves plow and plant, what we have will wither and die. The harvest of the Word is not ours to keep, stored up in barns and stocks; but rather, His to freely give and ours to distribute.

Paul walked and sailed the known world to plow men’s hearts and plant the seed of God’s Word. He was questioned, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and eventually crucified. And yet, he says to the Romans, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed to us.” As disciples of the risen Lord, we are baptized with that same spirit of revelation, washed clean in the same waters that freed Paul to be the apostolic farmer of the Word that he was. And so we too wait in hope, listening to the groaning of all creation, waiting on the redemption of all the Lord’s work, plowing and planting every seed of the Word we have received, and rightly expecting a harvest to frighten the world!

Farming is hard work. Long days, summer heat, fickle rain, even more fickle markets. There are no guarantees in farming. The worms and locusts may be thick this year. The weeds high and strong. The tractor may be old and often broken. The prices meager. But when farming is all you have, all you do, everything you are, you farm and you farm with the vigor and determination of a zealot. As disciples of the risen Lord, we have vowed to be zealous farmers, passionate plowers of the human heart, and planters of the Lord’s mercy and love. Nothing touches our hope. Nothing diminishes our faith. Not opposition, not scorn, not persecution or trail. Not even death. So, get on that tractor—endure the heat, ignore the markets, suffer the price, and plow the world! Plant the seed!

The Lord waits on His harvest.