Getting to the Point: Christmas

Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts

Sunday, January 17, 2016

This Week in Madonna House - January 10-16

This week in Madonna House began with a splash. Last Sunday we celebrated our monthly Byzantine Rite Liturgy, observing the feast of the Theophany in place of the Western Rite Baptism of the Lord.

It is the same mystery being commemorated in both feasts—Christ plunging into the waters of the world to claim them for himself and bless them, identifying himself with us in our lowly human state and in that the Trinity being revealed in the voice of the Father and the descent of the Dove.

The Byzantine Liturgy is very beautiful on this feast, which ranks in their tradition among the principal feasts of the year. After the Divine Liturgy itself there is a special blessing of water with a beautiful long prayer that involves a cross being plunged into the water three times, and the celebrant blowing on the waters in the form of a cross, evoking the moment of creation.

Then this specially blessed water is sprinkled on the congregation and on the four walls of the church, symbolizing the entire universe being blessed. After this, we process together to the Madawaska River where a crucifix is thrown into the waters, symbolically blessing all the waters of the earth. This too is a common tradition in the Christian East.

It was a bit of a challenge this year, since last weekend we had the traditional ‘January thaw’ – lots of rain and above freezing weather, all of which made it very slippery and slushy underfoot. But no injuries.

After all of that we enjoyed our usual Sunday, and then happily entered Ordinary Time the next day. The great seasons of the year are wonderful and beautiful and joyful here… and we are all quite happy, thank you very much, to get back to more plain living afterwards.

Our unstable climate seems to have finally decided that it is, in fact, winter, and so after the weekend rain it went back down to normal seasonal temps and a nice blanket of snow falling. The men have been able, then, to finally get in operation the outdoor skating rink off of the tea dock. Hockey games and the like are the recreation activity of choice for our young guests and younger staff.

The guest numbers went up for a little while over Christmas… and then they went right back down. We are a quiet little house right now. If any young adults find themselves at a bit of a loose end this winter, why not come to Madonna House and have a spiritual adventure? We have room!

This time of year the work really is pretty much keeping the place maintained and going. There is always snow to shovel, wood sheds to fill, meals to cook, laundry to do. One job that is a hidden part of our winter is processing the wool from our sheep. Every day a few of the women are down there, cleaning, ‘picking’, carding, all to prepare the fleeces to either be sold to local crafts people or for our own people to then dye and spin it for sale or to make our own handicrafts, themselves sold. It is all about the missions, of course, as the proceeds from everything we sell go to the poor through the work of our shops.

Well, really we are in such a quiet and ordinary time of year that I hardly know what else to say. One of our priests accompanied by an MH lay man are giving a retreat to thirty-plus men this weekend, something we have been doing yearly for quite a few years now. On a personal note, I have a few such things coming up in the next weeks, so my life has suddenly become all about that—preparing talks and such things.

But really, this time between the end of Christmas and the beginning of Lent is one of the most quiet and ‘normal’ times of year for us (so much so that it is quite unusually normal, if that makes any sense). In the midst of it all, do know that we are offering all our work and prayer for the glory of God and for the needs of our troubled world at this time. God bless you all!

Sunday, January 10, 2016

This Week in Madonna House - January 3-9

This week in Madonna House was another week of festivity, as we continued our way through the twelve days of Christmas. Last Sunday we celebrated Ephiphany; today we wrap up the season with the Byzantine celebration of the Theophany.

We have a multiplicity of customs for both these feasts. On Epiphany we have the ‘kings’ bread’, a sweet bread for brunch shaped like a crown. In three of the loaves a coin has been hidden, and over the course of brunch three people find the coins. They are the ‘kings’ of the feast, but of course in typical MH style we flip that on its head. Their kingship is expressed by their service to the community, and so each of them is to spend an hour before the Blessed Sacrament praying for the rest of us.

At supper there are two customs. First, chalk is blessed and our door lintels inscribed as follows: 20 + C + B + M + 16. The year, interspersed with what are either the initials of the three wise men Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior, or perhaps the Latin words for ‘Christ, bless this house’.

The symbolism is that the Magi set out on a journey which led them to find the Lord. Every time we pass through a door we are going on a ‘journey’, even if it is just from one room to another, and so we pray that all our journeys this year become pilgrimages bringing us closer to Christ. The custom is of German and Polish origin.

At supper also the kings show up in person (three of our men guests dressed in sumptuous royal robes and crowns) to bring us gifts from the Christ child. These gifts are words that we really do believe to be words from God to us for the year. For myself, it is amazing how often my Epiphany gift really is a meaningful word of God to me. This year I got ‘radiance’.

So that is Epiphany, and I will tell you all about our Theophany customs next week. Otherwise it is the typical post-Christmas season—working our way doggedly through the left overs and the supply of cookies we all worked so hard to bake, and enjoying the decorations which we leave up until after today’s feast.

Our numbers are depleted, both as quite a few guests left after New Years, but also as a wicked flu is making its way through the community. Fortunately it is a ‘low’ time of year in terms of work needs—right now it is just a matter of keeping food on the table, wood in the stoves, and clean clothes on our backs.

Winter came, finally, with our first real cold temperatures of the year. Monday it was – 30C. Mind you, it is pouring rain as I write this, but that is supposed to change dramatically tonight. Get your ice skates on – the world is about to turn into a giant rink!

Now with all this beautiful liturgical stuff, the biggest event of the week was in another venue entirely. And that is that, after twelve years of generous and faithful service, Mark Schlingerman concluded his term as director general of the MH lay men. Larry Klein began his four-year term on Wednesday, with Patrick Stewart filling his shoes as the local director of the men at the training center. If you have a spare prayer or two, you could pray for these three men as it is a major time of transition for each of them personally and for the whole laymen’s branch of MH.

Beyond that, the work has been as I said, pretty much maintenance of the place. The men have been much taken up with ‘winter’ – snow shoveling, plowing, dealing with the thaw of the last two days (flooding is always a danger when this happens), and keeping the wood sheds filled. We have a small ice rink just by the main house in a swampy area. The weather has not cooperated so far to make it work as a rink, but the current melting and subsequent freezing should put it back aright. Ice skating and hockey are favorite winter recreation here.

Beyond that, hard to know what else is going on! Please know that in the midst of all our celebrating and the ordinary life of work and prayer that intersperses it, our world and each one of you is in our prayers continually. As Ordinary Time begins tomorrow, let us walk confidently through those doors, and find the Christ child awaiting us wherever our footsteps bear us this year.

Saturday, January 2, 2016

These Weeks in Madonna House - December 20-January 2

Well, I'm back! I thought I would resume blogging for 2016 with a recap of what all has gone on in MH the last couple weeks of 2015. It has been a very packed and rich time, indeed.

Of course when this column was last posted, Fr. Pat McNulty had just died, and we had not had the funeral yet. So that is where I begin. Fr. Pat was a big man; it was a biiiiiiiig funeral. One sibling, his wife and son were able to come up from Indiana, along with some close friends of Fr. Pat's from his home diocese. Quite a few Pembroke diocesan priests came--Fr. Pat was very much out there in the diocese all his years in Combermere, and was both well known and well respected. He had a real gift for supportive friendship with his brother priests.

And many, many local people came. For a man who was a poustinik, Fr. Pat got around a lot, and made friends everywhere he went. He had a remarkable ability to connect with just about anyone on a personal level and forge solid bonds of affection and regard with just about anyone, regardless of their religion or lack thereof or just about anything else. So they came... in large numbers, they came.

Funerals at MH are quite different than funerals elsewhere, so I have been told. There is mourning and grieving, of course. But there is also a lot of faith in the promises of Christ, in resurrection and eternal life. And lots of warmth and affection for the body of the deceased person - we do believe in the resurrection of the body, so we treat the person with great reverence and care in their final journey to the grave.

Fr. David Linder had the wake service, with Fr. Blair Bernard doing the eulogy. Fr. David May had the funeral. All three of them, in their own ways, paid great tribute to this great man who truly was a unique presence in MH and a gift to our community these many years. A festive reception and (later) supper followed. Another MH tradition -- the memory night, where we share stories about the person -- is waiting until some time in the new year.

Meanwhile, all of this put us severely behind the eight ball in terms of Christmas preparations. MH is a do-it-yourself community, and so all of the funeral work from the preparing of large platters of meats and vegetables for the reception to digging the grave was done by ourselves. We don't hire caterers. And so, we only had a few days for all the last preparations for Christmas.

We wait until the week before Christmas to do the decorating, so that was the major push. And we did decorate, lavishly, beautifully. Lights everywhere, the whole dining room transfigured by strings of lights throughout it, and of course an immense Christmas tree dominating the room. We did simplify one traditional decoration, the international doll table. This very old custom in MH is meant to symbolize the Mystical Body of Christ--men and women of all nations gathered together by the Christ child. It is a large collection, and a lot of work and time to put up. So this year they simply put out the dolls from countries that have dominated the news lately, countries that are in special need of prayer--Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, various countries of Africa--along with the flags of other countries that we did not have dolls for.

It was all hands on deck, though, in those days before Christmas, especially for the kitchen and the decorators. But we pulled it off, and so had a beautiful, lovely Christmas time. Midnight Mass began with the 'posadas' - a custom derived from the Mexican Americans we serve in Arizona, where at the end of the carolling before Mass a group go outside the chapel and 'are' Mary and Joseph knocking at the door seeking entry. We are the innkeepers inside the chapel and initially rebuff them, but finally repent and open the doors of the chapel to allow them in, baby Jesus in arms, who is then enthroned in the manger. And from there, Midnight Mass begins.

What to say about the next days? Feasting, feasting, and more feasting! We take a few days off both at Christmas and New Year's, with a relaxed schedule. People can get up when they want, make their own breakfast in the kitchen as they like it, when they like it, and as often as they like it. And there is free time, lots of it, to visit, to rest, to go on hikes, to cross country ski (well, eventually, when the snow finally arrived a couple days ago!), or to skate (well, not yet, as the conditions are not yet there for our little ice rink).

We have singing and other entertainments at supper - just about anyone can get up and do anything, so long as it's Christmas-related. Musical talent is preferred, but not strictly required! And of course the meals have been prodigies of delight, delicious food coming forth from the kitchen in a seeming unending stream (although I sense we will be back to plainer fare shortly...). For those wondering, my butter tarts turned out quite nicely, and I have been asked for the recipe several times.

Three of our people went to the CCO Rise-Up in Montreal, this wonderful celebration of young faith and mission that is organized by that great group, with a 'table' for our MH apostolate. They came back yesterday, tired but happy from the experience.

Beyond that, it's hard to know what to say. Of course lots of guests arrived to share all of the above with us, new friends and old both. And the liturgies each day have wonderfully unpacked the whole depths of the Christmas mystery, as we journeyed with Stephen, the Holy Family, the Holy Innocents... and on to Epiphany tomorrow, of which I will write next week!

But that's about it for now, I guess. From our community and from this poor little blogger, we do wish you a very happy and blessed New Year, and may all of us in 2016 seek the Lord and spend our days in His presence and love. Regular blogging will resume on my normal schedule Wednesday.

Thursday, December 24, 2015

If You Can't Find Christ...

Well, a very Merry Christmas to you all. This will be my last post for the year 2015, as I customarily take a bit of a break from blogging between Christmas and New Years.

I would like to share my 'Christmas present' from God this year - I generally ask the Lord for a word for the big seasons and feasts of the year, and He generally has something to say to me, somehow. This year my present came early, some weeks ago, and I have been pondering it ever since.

It is, Adeste Fideles. Traditionally the title of the carol is translated as 'O Come, All Ye Faithful', but any first year student of Latin knows that's not quite right. The Latin verb for 'come' is venire, and the imperative would be Venite Fideles.

This is 'adeste', which means something quite different. It is the Latin verb 'adesse' which is from the verb 'to be' and is literally 'to be towards'. It is rightly translated as 'to be present, to be here'. When a teacher in Latin class is doing the roll call, the students respond to their name with 'Adsum' - I am here.

So, 'adeste' you faithful ones. Be present. Be here. Christmas is so busy, so very, very busy. In MH this year it got even busier what with Fr. Pat's death and funeral this week. But it's always something, and so much of what it is, beautiful as it all is with the fancy food and the sparkly decorations and the visiting and frolicking... well, it's all very good and proper and right.

But... adeste. Don't forget to 'be towards' what the whole thing is about. Be present... to what? To the Christ child. To the mystery. To God made man for us. To the manger, Mary, Joseph, the ox, the ass, the star, the shepherds. To the story, but it is no pious fable, no made up mythology. It is all true, it all happened, and it continues to happen in each one of our lives. He is present - are we?

I still hope to write about Fr. Pat McNulty at some point - his was a life worth memorializing. But a key story of his life and his relationship with Catherine Doherty seems relevant to what I'm trying to say here. Warning for mild vulgar language in this story - if you are offended by such, stop reading here.

In 1968, Fr. Pat crashed and burned in his parish ministry, and came up to MH to recuperate. Catherine put him in poustinia three days a week and sent him to the farm the other three days. So after a few weeks of this, he came down on Sunday. Fr. Pat was a man of volatile temperament and blunt direct speech, and was working through a lot of things at this point. So he sits at Catherine's table at brunch and promptly explodes at her. "I have a parish back in Forth Wayne going to hell in a handbasket, and here I am up in Canada shovelling horse shit! What good is that supposed to do?"

Catherine looked at him with great compassion and kindness, reached out and took his hand and simply said, "Father Pat, if you can't find Christ in the horse shit, you won't find him anywhere."

This became the transformative word for his life. We think we have to go here, go there, do this, do that. We have to 'Come' if we are 'Faithful' - go somewhere else, have our life be something else, if we are to find Christ. This is, well, it's horseshit! Christ came here. That's pretty much the whole point of Christmas. Christ is here, Christ came to where you are and where I am. We don't have to go looking for him; He came looking for us. Adeste! Be present to the mystery of your own life, in all its mess and murk and mire. God is lurking in there somewhere.

Now yes, you and He together might start cleaning up the place a bit together at some point. But that is the whole point of mercy, which is more than just a Jubilee Year to celebrate and then forget. He has come to us in the exact situation of our exact life as it is lived exactly right now, before we get it all cleaned up and shipshape for him. If I could ask for one Christmas gift from the Lord for all the people in my life, my directees especially, but all of you, all of us, it is that we could learn to trust that, rejoice in our poverty, and simply relax a bit and rest in God's love, present in our lives as they are today.

He is in the mess and the mire. He was 2000 years ago and He is now, for you and for me. Adeste Fideles, and a have a very Merry Christmas on account of it.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Works of Mercy: Ransoming the Captives

“O come, O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.” I am going through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy each Wednesday on this blog, and have come to the one work of mercy that I truly have no direct experience with (it was bound to happen). Namely, to ‘ransom the captive’.

Well, no experience of it in its direct literal sense, anyhow. Historically it seems to date in this formulation from earlier legal and social systems when people needed to be bought out of slavery or other related forms of imprisonment and bondage. While human slavery still exists, those working in the field of human trafficking have cautioned against directly intervening in this way, as it actually just fuels the market for those engaged in the modern slave trade.

In modern times this work of mercy is sometimes updated to ‘visit those in prison.’ Well, that’s fine… if you can. Personally I have spent my entire adult life pretty much in Combermere Ontario where there are no prisons anywhere nearby. And one cannot just waltz into a prison to visit the prisoners, either. The modern jail system is a complex bureaucracy; there are procedures to go through.

Now, there are those who are called to do prison ministry of some sort or another, and all I can do is take my hat off to such people—it is a great work of mercy indeed, to extend a helping hand to those who are in such straits. But if any such people are reading this blog, they know an awful lot more about all that than I do, since it is simply outside of my experience and (barring a dramatic change in venue in my life) will continue to be so. And if anyone reading this blog is feeling called to engage in prison ministry, then you’d best be talking to those who know how to go about it, i.e. ‘not me!’

When I started this series I was determined to not go in a metaphorical direction with any of the works of mercy: feeding the hungry means putting a plate of actual food in front of an actual hungry person. But here, since my own experience is nil in the matter and in fact it is a pretty specialized type of ministry, I would like to reflect on some of the extended senses of this ransoming and this captivity.

The truth is, it is a very important business, this ransoming of captives. God came, as our beloved Advent hymn tells us, precisely as ‘redeemer’, as ransom for the nations. The human condition absent God’s redemption is precisely imprisonment—we are all prisoners of our own guilt and sin, and ‘liberation’ is the great work of God on our behalf.

We must not despise and condemn those who have spent time in prison, as we are sadly wont to do in our culture. Yes, we have to have a legal system, and people who commit serious crimes must be jailed. Of course. But there is no ‘us and them’ about this, like people who have done time in prison are some lower type of humanity to be viewed with scorn or suspicion upon their release.

We are all ‘criminals’, in the deeper sense of the matter. All locked into whatever our patterns of sin and compulsion are, until the Redeemer ransoms us. The whole mystery of Christmas, so soon upon us, is about this, not about fluffy snow (and a good thing for that, this year) or reindeer or bags of presents or… well, whatever the secular culture thinks it’s about.

It’s about God coming to liberate His people, and coming to do this in the strangest way possible—by becoming one of them, by identifying Himself with us, in lowliness, meekness, hiddenness and great compassionate mercy.

If we look around our own lives, we are bound to be able to see a few people in our immediate circle who we can recognize as ‘prisoners’ in one way or another. People in the grip of addictions, or intractable mental illness. People stuck in cycles of destructive behavior that hamper and constrict their lives. People who are simply severely limited by one thing or another, unable to really change their circumstances for reasons good and bad, real and perceived.

Well, go visit those people! Be part of their lives! Be compassionate, as God was and is compassionate to you when He came to be part of your life! Sometimes we really want to fix people, and when we can’t fix them we cut them out of our lives like a wart being excised from our bodies. But so many people cannot be ‘fixed’ that way, and there can be terrible loneliness for such people when person after person walks away from them. That can become a type of imprisonment all of its own.

And so it is Christmas, soon, the feast of the great Visitation of God to all us prisoners, the great ransoming of God of all captives. Let us be mindful in this feast of those still languishing in prisons literal and metaphorical, and see what we can do to alleviate their suffering and mitigate their isolation.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

This week in Madonna House - January 4-10

This week in Madonna House was mostly characterized by one thing and one thing only, and that was sickness. The flu, which of course has been rampaging around North America, has rampaged around MH with considerable velocity. It is a doozy of a flu this year, and right now in MH everyone except for a few hardy souls is either getting over it, coming down with it, or in bed with it. Such is the nature of our community life, our best efforts at hygiene and sterilization of dishes and such notwithstanding. We live closely together, and an air-borne virus is going to have its way with us, no matter what we do.

What this has meant in terms of our communal life has made for a very quiet week. We have had sleep-ins each morning, basically cancelling morning prayer and beginning our communal day with breakfast. We have had early nights each night, giving those who need it the option to go home after supper dishes and get some extra rest. We are an exceptionally small community right now, anyhow, with hardly any guests staying with us, so the overall effect right now is a very quiet rhythm of life. Of course, in the midst of all that meals have to be prepared, snow shovelled, laundry done, cows milked, wood chopped, and the like—life goes on, just at this more basic level perhaps, with less extras.

We did somehow in the midst of all this illness scrape together a celebration of the feast of the Epiphany last Sunday. This is a feast redolent with symbolism and rife with customs for us. Because of illness and the funeral of Fr. Duffy which immediately preceded Epiphany, we did simplify our customs, but we managed to pull them off nonetheless. We have the tradition of the three coins—normally hidden in a lavishly decorated sweet bread, but this year simply hidden under three plates in the dining room—which are then found by three random people in the community. Where this custom exists traditionally, the person finding the coin would be ‘king for a day’. In MH, we know that kingship means service, and so those three people are charged with the service of intercession, and make a holy hour to pray for the community at some point in the day.

We also have the custom of the Epiphany gifts. The three kings brought gifts to the Christ Child; we take this to the next step and understand that He came to bring us gifts, too. So at some point on the feast (this year, at brunch), the three kings (three of our young men) came to distribute the gifts the Child has for each of us this year. This gift is a virtue, a quality, a Gospel word of some sort or other, which we are to take as a gift given, meditate on, and look to practice as the year goes on. I have personally been amazed at how apt these gifts are each year, how they truly are a word from God each year for me and for many. This year for example, I got ‘prudence’, which the good Lord knows is a gift I stand in need of.

Finally, we have the custom in MH of blessing the door lintels on Epiphany with a special blessed chalk. Our lintels, as visitors to MH remark on throughout the year, are marked with the current year, plus the initials C, B, and M. These can stand for the traditional names of the three wise men Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior; they can also stand for the Latin phrase Christus Benedicet Mansiorem – may Christ bless this house. Our understanding here is that the journey of the magi was a pilgrimage to find Christ. Every time we pass through a door way, even to go from one room to another, we are on a journey of sorts, and our prayer is that all our comings and goings throughout the year become a holy pilgrimage, a constant seeking and finding of Christ in the midst of our lives, in sickness and in health, in ordinary tasks and quiet labor, and in extraordinary circumstances of joy and sorrow as well.

So that has been our week in MH—tomorrow we celebrate it all again in the Byzantine feast of Theophany, but I will tell you about all that next week. Hopefully the flu will have run its course by then, and there will be a little bit more going on here for me to report!

And, of course, in the midst of it all, we in MH are keenly aware of the world and its troubles right now, the violence in France and the terrible problems we all face at this time. Know that we are lifting up the world in prayer through it all, and especially praying for a miracle of peace in our poor troubled times.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Epiphany at Madonna House

Happy Epiphany! In Canada the feasts that fall during the week tend to be moved to the nearest Sunday, so we are celebrating the feast of the Epiphany, the revelation of God’s saving plan to the world, today.

In the Eastern churches today is Theophany which corresponds to our Baptism of Christ feast next Sunday. The Church has always woven together the three events of the magi, the baptism, and the wedding feast of Cana as a unified whole showing forth the scope of Christ’s self-revealing. The best summary of it is in the antiphon for the Benedictus at Lauds:

Today the Bridegroom claims his bride, the Church, since Christ has washed her sins away in Jordan’s waters; the Magi hasten with their gifts to the royal wedding; and the wedding guests rejoice, for Christ has changed water into wine, alleluia.

Time and space collapse here into one event, one great outpouring of love and joy as Christ weds himself to all humanity personified in the Church, an act of union that is filled with the joy of the Spirit.

This is a feast that in Madonna House is surrounded by customs and traditions. It is a rich, rich feast.

After our Sunday liturgy, celebrated with as much beauty and joy as we can muster, we gather for brunch. On the table are sweet breads baked to resemble crowns. The ‘king’s bread’, besides being tasty, contains a surprise.

There are three coins hidden somewhere in the breads distributed among the tables. When one of the coins is found, that person is ‘king.’ But in Madonna House we know that a king is called to be a servant to the people, and so the three people who find the coins express their kingship by spending a hour in adoration praying for the community.

At supper that night we have the blessing of the door lintels. Chalk is blessed by a priest, and special prayers are said, and then the main door lintel of our dining room is marked with the following: 20 + C + B + M + 14. The year, the crosses, and the letters CBM, which alternately refer to the traditional names of the three kings Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior, or to the Latin Christus Benedicit Mansiorum: Christ, bless this house.

Chalk is taken away by the various houseparents and department heads and virtually every doorway in MH is marked with the Epiphany blessing. A simple custom, but how deep in meaning it is! The wise men were on a journey to Bethlehem, to see the child. It was a journey to truth, and to adoration. When we bless the doors of our house we are asking that every journey we take, whether it is across the country or the world or the yard, be a similar journey—that we seek Christ in all our comings and goings, and that the end of each journey be adoration of the Child.

We’re not done with Epiphany customs yet, though. Next, the kings themselves come to visit us—three of our guests dressed up in royal regalia. Having left their gifts at the manger, they bring us gifts from the Christ Child—each of us receives a word on a little slip of paper appropriately decorated in some Epiphany style, which is to be our word from the Child for this year. It may be a virtue like generosity or meekness, or a spiritual gift like joy or peace or atonement, or something along those lines.

Personally I have always found these little gifts to be very meaningful, a genuine gift from the Child to me that has proved quite relevant in the year following. So that’s our Epiphany here, folks. We join you in rejoicing in the feast and celebrating it. Don’t forget to do something fun today, in honor of the wise men and the revelation of God.

Meanwhile I am travelling this week down to Long Island NY to give a retreat to seminarians down there. I hope to keep up the blog, but if I disappear, that’s why. And if so, God bless you and I will talk to you next week again.