So much has happened in the past couple of weeks in MH that I couldn't cover it all yesterday. Mamie Legris' death and burial merited a post all to itself. But meanwhile there was Holy Week, Easter, and a whole host of related seasonal events.
On the work front, the farm is dominated by the bleatings and cavortings of baby lambs, the cutest little creatures God ever made. We are having an unusually good year with the lambs, with many triplets and even one set of quadruplets being born and enjoying a high survival rate. This is a reflection on the care and skill of our farmers who truly pour their lives into the work of feeding this family.
Speaking of pouring, the maple syrup season is underway, albeit slowly and hesitantly. It has been unseasonably cold so far, and the warm days needed for sap flow have for the most part failed to materialize. So we'll see - the likely thing is that it will be a short season as temperatures are going to sharply increase over the next week, which will make the trees bud out, at which point the sap no longer produces a palatable syrup.
The gardens are moving forward, however, with greenhouse lettuce being planted along with other greenhouse plants. The winter bush work of harvesting trees for firewood and lumber is over--now comes the long work of moving, splitting, stacking, filling wood sheds, and so forth that takes up a lot of our men's time.
But all of that is mere backdrop to the real 'work' of these days which was the celebration of the holiest season of the year. Adding to the usual beauty of the Triduum this year was our having a catechumen among our guests, a young woman who was baptized and confirmed at our Easter Vigil. Her journey into faith, combined with Mamie Legris' journey into eternity, made our Easter here almost too rich to bear.
Those familiar with our MH customs know what we do here. On Holy Thursday we arrange our dining room tables into a 'banquet hall' format, with table cloths and festive centers, for the 'Supper of the Lamb'. This is not a seder meal, but does draw on elements of that Jewish ritual. At the beginning of the meal a whole roast lamb, mounted on a cross-shaped frame, is solemnly processed through the dining room to the strains of Psalm 136. There are readings and prayers, highlighting the theme of Christ the Lamb who was slain for us. Then we feast, richly and beautifully, on lamb, bread, wine--a deeply symbolic and most joyous agape meal. At the conclusion we read a long excerpt from the farewell discourse of Christ in John's Gospel. And of course we celebrate the evening liturgy that is familiar to every Catholic, complete with foot washing and solemn Eucharistic procession.
Good Friday we breakfast on hot cross buns, symbolic of the sweetness of the Lord's cross, and sup on a fast meal of plain boiled potatoes. We refrain from ringing bells (a loud 'clacker' is used in their place), lighting candles, and so forth. In addition to the 3:00 service of the Lord' Passion we celebrate the Byzantine service of the Burial of Christ, in which the lamentation over Christ's death repeatedly is broken by joy in his impending resurrection, and in which the epitaphion, or burial shroud, is carried in solemn procession through the chapel. At the end of this service all present go 'into the tomb' with Christ to await the resurrection, processing under the shroud and blowing out their lit tapers, as they are now with and in Christ and do not need their light any longer.
Holy Saturday is a day of furious activity in preparation for the feast (actually all the days are that, as the preparations for these meals and liturgies and the decorating of the house are monumental tasks). At Lauds we sing a beautiful Byzantine hymn - 'The Lord awoke, as one asleep, and arose, saving us,' that has such beauty and power in it that some of us consider it a high point of the liturgical year.
But of course the real high point is the Vigil itself. We seem to have opted in MH to do all seven Old Testament readings (as the priest celebrating the Vigil said in explanation, "What else do we have to do?"). The liturgy of baptism and confirmation was stunningly beautiful in its essential simplicity. I am the spiritual director of the woman who was baptized, so had the immense privilege of administering those sacraments to her - a moment of awe and sacred delight, about which I can say very little, really.
After the Vigil, we celebrated with a festive late night supper. Our Russian Easter foods of paska and koolitch (a sweet cheese confection and a special Easter bread) were consumed in large quantities (note my use of the passive voice in this sentence!). And so it went - a joyous happy celebration of Christ's victory and gift of new life.
The normal Easter days off were shifted on account of Mamie's funeral, and are occurring today and tomorrow. And... that's the news for now from here! I am travelling today and tomorrow to the great Canadian prairies, as I mentioned yesterday, but do plan to keep blogging as much as possible (it is a busy week coming up, mind you, so I make no promises). And to all of you a happy Easter Octave and a blessed season of light and mercy.
Showing posts with label baptism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baptism. Show all posts
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Taking the Plunge
Understand
what it means to give oneself away. To strip oneself of one’s freedom out of
freedom; and out of love no longer to be free or to be lord over oneself; no
longer to be able to determine where the journey will take you; to surrender oneself,
to deliver oneself over to the series of consequences that carry us off in a
direction we did not want—where to?
You
leap down from a high cliff. The leap is freely made, and yet, the moment you
leap, gravity leaps upon you, and you
tumble exactly like a dead stone to the very bottom of the gorge. This is how I
decided to give myself. To give myself right out of my hand. To whom? It did
not matter. To sin, to the world, to all of you, to the devil, to the Church,
to the Kingdom of Heaven, to the Father… I wanted to be the one given away par
excellence.
The
corpse over which the vultures gather. The Consumed, the Eaten, the Drunk, the
Spilled, the Poured Out. The Plaything. The Worn Out. The one squeezed to the
very dregs. The one trod upon to infinity. The one run over. The one thinned to
air. The liquefied into an ocean. The Dissolved.
This
was the plan; this was the will of the Father. By fulfilling it through
obedience (the fulfillment itself was obedience), I have filled the world from
heaven down to hell, and every knee must bend before me, and all tongues must
confess me. Now I am all in all, and this is why the death which poured me out
is my victory.
Reflection – Well, they did it! Yesterday, in a simple
ceremony, three young people—a woman, a layman, and a priest—made their first
promises of poverty, chastity, and obedience in Madonna House. They ‘took the
plunge’, jumped off that cliff, handed themselves over to gravity, as it were.
Did, in short,
what Jesus did. As von Balthasar so well and aptly describes in this passage.
‘Delivered over to a series of consequences that (perhaps) we did not want.’
Isn’t this what every married couple do when they make their vows? Or every
priest on his ordination? Or every consecrated person? And for those neither
married, ordained, nor consecrated, there is a serious adult choice that comes
to you at some point or other, to hand oneself over to the mystery of love and
of Christ in life, too, that is no less total and real.
We live in a
world that is so deeply averse to all that, so self-protective, so guarded. Get
married, but if it doesn’t ‘work out’ as you planned, get divorced. Or if you don’t
like the idea of that, just don’t get married at all. The divorce rate is
falling, but that is mostly because more and more young people just are not
bothering with marriage at all.
To be given
away, to be used up, to be at least a faint echo of this total love and total
gift with is Jesus—this has never been easy, and perhaps really there have
always been few takers of that divine offer. But today there is more and more a
culture of selfishness which positively encourages people to put themselves
first and avoid any kind of ‘being used up, consumed, spilled, worn out.’
But when we
avoid this, we avoid Jesus. We avoid the victory of Christ in our lives. We
avoid the grand adventure of love and sacrifice, heroism and nobility, fearsome
risks and awesome rewards.
Someone said to
me yesterday, in a completely different context, that in life you pay the fees,
or you pay the fines. This seems like a pretty profound statement to me. In
other words, we wear ourselves out loving as Christ loved, or we wear ourselves
out taking care of ourselves and protecting ourselves from life. Either way, we
end our lives worn out—it’s just that one way is an ‘entry fee’, if you will,
into the glorious kingdom, and the other is a punitive fine for a life
misspent.
But really, the
focus is on neither fees nor fines—the focus is on Jesus. What Jesus did. How
Jesus loved. His love spilled out, consumed, eaten, drunk, used but never used
up, worn out yet perpetually new, dissolved yet never any weaker, never any
less. This is why we marry ‘until death do we part,’ why we promise poverty,
chastity, obedience forever, why we embrace priestly consecration as an
indelible character, why we say yes to baptismal consecration and build our
lives on it.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Mercy in This World
On
the other hand, water flowing from a spring is a symbol of all life, the
symbol of life. That is why the early Church laid down that baptism had to be
administered by means of ‘living’ water, spring water, so that Baptism could be
experienced as the beginning of a new life.
In
this connection, the Fathers always had at the back of their minds the
conclusion of the Passion narrative according to John; blood and water flow
from the opened side of Jesus; Baptism and Eucharist spring from the pierced
heart of Jesus. He has become the living spring that makes us alive (cf. Jn
19:34f). At the feast of Tabernacles Jesus had prophesied that streams of
living water would flow from the man who came to him and drank: “Now this he
said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive,” (Jn 7:39 ).
The
baptized man himself becomes a spring. When we think of the great saints of
history, from whom streams of faith, hope, and love really came forth, we can
understand these words and thus understand something of the dynamism of
Baptism, of the promise and vocation it contains.
Spirit of the Liturgy, 222-3
Reflection – Well, yesterday was all about death and
drowning and the high drama of plunging into the Red Sea with Christ, being plunged into the waters by
Christ so as to die and be raised up with Him.
Today it’s all about
life. Christianity is not a death-cult, but a spring of living water rising up
from the very depths of this abyss into which we are plunged. We die with
Christ, yes, but so as to rise with Him.
This whole image of a
spring is so telling, so beautiful. The image is not of a torrent, a cataract,
a waterfall, but a spring. Something homely, something we can stoop at to drink
and be slaked. Something that is for us, for our life, geared to our need.
This is the way of
love in the world. The cost may be high; the violence of the Cross and the
totality of renunciation required may be extreme, but it is all so that this
gentle spring, this flowing river of love, hope, joy, peace, faith, kindness, may
flow from Christ’s heart through our hearts to the world’s heart.
Leonard Cohen sang in
his Song of Bernadette that Our Lady came to tell us that “there were
sorrows to be healed and mercy, mercy in this world.” And it’s like that. We
are meant to become vehicles, vessels of God’s mercy in this world. Because
there is all this other stuff in us—selfishness, judgment, greed, anger, lust,
etc.—well, we have to be drowned and killed and all that extreme dramatic
stuff.
But it is all for the
sake of mercy, all to become a clear channel, a conduit, a spring flowing out
(peace is flowing like a ri-i-ver…), a steady stream of water flowing out to
all the sorrows of the world. And there are so many sorrows in this world.
Where is the Middle East heading now? So many dead children, so much
hurt and rage, no end in sight by any human reckoning. Where are the wealthy
nations of the world headed? Do we have any concept of the kind of economic
depression the world may well be headed towards? At least in the 1930s society
was still largely agrarian, and most people had practical skills to fend for
themselves in hard times. It’s all going to get very hard in years ahead, I’m
afraid.
There are sorrows to
be healed. Will we be mercy in this world? Will we allow God’s mercy to flow
through us to our brothers and sisters? They will need it; they do need it. I
forget the saint who said, “If you wish to be a channel, you must first be a
reservoir.” If we wish to give mercy, we must receive mercy. If we want our
lives to be streams of faith, hope, and love flowing out into a parched desert
world, we must receive and welcome and cherish these gifts from God.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Drowning
Of
the four elements in antiquity—water, air, fire, and earth—the first three are
all symbols of the Holy Spirit, while the earth represents man, who comes from
the earth and to the earth returns. Fire and air in the form of breath are
present in many ways in the symbolism of the liturgy, but only water, which
comes from above and yet belongs to the earth, has become, as the primordial
element of life, sacramental matter in the strict sense.
The
Church’s tradition discerns a twofold symbolism in water. The salt water of the
sea is a symbol of death, a threat and a danger; it reminds us of the Red Sea , which was deadly to the Egyptians, though the
Israelites were rescued from it. Baptism is a kind of passing through the red
Sea. A death occurs within it. It is more than a bath or washing—it touches the
very depths of existence, as far as death itself. It is a crucifying communion
with Christ. This is precisely what is signified by the Red Sea , which is an image of death and resurrection.
Spirit of the Liturgy, 221-2
Reflection – Tomorrow Ratzinger will continue with the
second symbolism of water as symbol of life. Here we look at water as death,
and hence as a sacramental element, a sign of the giving of the Spirit.
Uh… wait a minute.
Isn’t the Spirit the giver of life? Isn’t that what we pray in the Creed every
Sunday, believing in the Holy Spirit, ‘the Lord, the Giver of Life’? How is it
that the death-dealing properties of water are taken up into the sacramental
meaning of baptism?
It is easy and
tempting to give the obvious answer about Jesus’ death on the Cross and our
entry into that death. Of course that is the correct answer; the trouble is
that the words have become so shop worn with use, so familiar to us, that they
pass over the surface of our mind too quickly and we move on to other things.
WediewithChristorisewithhimsowhat’sforbreakfast.
We need to stop and
ponder this a bit more deeply. Water is a symbol of death, and so it is a
symbol of the gift of the Spirit. The Spirit gives life, but this life comes to
us in the form of a death. We need to take hold of this, we modern Christians.
There is so very much ‘prosperity Gospel’ Christianity afoot in the land and in
our churches. It is not just Joel Osteen and the mega-churches of the American
South. The whole idea that Christianity is all about ‘being your best self’,
that it is some kind of program of self-improvement, self-actualization,
self-perfection, that God’s grace is some sort of spiritual beauty treatment
(Extreme Makeover: Salvation Edition!)—all of this is so superficial, so inadequate
in light of the life and death, death and life dynamics at play here.
God does make our life
better, but first He kills us. We are drowned in the Red Sea so as to pass through to the other side, a
wholly new person. It is not about becoming ‘my best self’ – it is about
becoming an entirely new creation, according to God’s good pleasure and design.
While this is
precisely, essentially, and really what happened when I was baptized at ten
days old (I remember it like it was yesterday…), it is also the whole dynamic
of Christian life in this world. And we need to know this. Life in Christ is
not some kind of triumphal march from strength to strength, a clear and steady
upward journey towards my becoming more and more the person I desire to be.
Or rather, it is that…
but to my eyes, my emotions, my senses, my deep inward spiritual sense, it
seems like a plunge into the abyss of darkness and death, a constant going down
into the waters, a constant drowning and resurfacing, drowning and resurfacing,
until the final passage where I see Him face to face. And if we don't know that this is how it is supposed to be, that this is what baptism initiated us into, if we think it is all supposed to be and look like 'glory, glory, hallelujah!', we will get very discouraged.
It is not about
becoming ‘my best self.’ It is about becoming His best self in me, and the
price of that is total on my part, as it was total on His part. Baptism, the
simple homely ceremony of dunking a baby in a basin of water with a few sacred
words, communicates the heights and depths, the terrible anguish and the
sublime hope of the whole Christian life, and we need to ponder that if we are
persevere in following Him.
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