Getting to the Point: faith

Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Works of Mercy: Praying For The Living and The Dead

And so we come to the end of this series on the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. I have been trying in this series to put our focus, truly, on what the Year of Mercy is all about—it is not about all the pastoral questions that have dominated Catholic social media this week around marriage and divorce and who can or cannot receive communion.

It is not that this is unimportant stuff—of course it is. And I fully intend to weigh in with my own thoughts on the matter… assuming I ever get around to reading the exhortation. I have simply been too busy this week to be able to get to it.

But as interesting and important as all this stuff is… it is not the focus of this Year. Shouldn’t be, anyhow. The focus of the Year of Mercy is meant to be how you and I can make God’s mercy more visible, more tangible, more known in the world. And that is done, not by endlessly chewing over controversies that may or may not have too much to do with us directly in the final analysis, but by being merciful ourselves to everyone.

And so we come to the last spiritual work of mercy, to pray for the living and the dead. This is without question the most mysterious of all the works. To put a bowl of stew in front of a hungry man is obvious. To offer consolation to a suffering soul is not easy, but also not too mysterious. And so it is with all the other works of mercy—they may be difficult or easy, according to our natural gifts and talents and supernatural charisms. But they are not terribly mysterious, really. Teach someone something. Visit someone sick. Help someone out one way or another.

And… say a prayer for them while you’re at it. And here we pass into the realm of mystery. Because of course prayer is simply lifting them up into the care of God and His Mercy. Prayer is asking God to show mercy to His people, and leaving them at the feet of Christ.

It is a profound mystery of faith, intercessory prayer. If there is any action we perform that is more a blind act of faith, I don’t know what it is. God is hidden from us—we do not see Him, hear Him. Not normally, not in the ordinary course of events. And our prayers fly from our lips and our hearts… into this hidden mystery. Into the abyss that is the human ‘experience’ of God in this life.

There is nothing else we do that is more strictly a matter of faith. We do not see our prayers reach the throne of God. We do not see God bend His ear to our prayers. We certainly do not see Him answering our prayers, not in any way that would satisfy any normal demand of evidence. It is all a black, dark mystery locked in the mystery of God’s hidden ways with us.

And yet… we pray. Well, we should pray, anyhow. Prayer, besides being an act of faith, is also an act of humility. It is acknowledging that I really cannot help anyone in the final analysis. Not really, not as they need to be helped. I can do this and that, be it cook them a meal or teach them a course, listen to them and (I hope!) give good counsel.

But that is not what people need. Not really, not entirely. What we need is… well, what do you think? Personally, I don’t really know. But He does. So at the end of the day (and hopefully the beginning and the middle of it, too) we lift them up to God. Lord have mercy. God bless him, God help her. Your will be done in their lives. Your love be triumphant in that one, in this one. Have mercy, Lord, have mercy.

This is the work of mercy, both mysterious beyond the others, but also I believe effective and powerful beyond the others as well. In the end, it is God’s mercy we all need, not my mercy or yours. His mercy (we, well, pray) flows through mine and yours, but it is His that ultimately is the healing of humanity.

So… as we pass through the rest of the days and weeks of this Year of Mercy, let us strive to refer everything finally to the mercy of God, and above all let us pray for one another, for all suffering people, for our enemies should we happen to have any, and for all men and women, living and dead. May God’s mercy win the victory in every human life and bring us all to the eternal feast of mercy awaiting us on the other side of the veil.

Friday, January 15, 2016

Do You Have A Personal Relationship With Jesus Christ? Well, DO YOU, HUH, HUH???

O God, you are my God, I seek you,

my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you,

as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,

beholding your power and glory.

Because your steadfast love is better than life,

my lips will praise you.

So I will bless you as long as I live;

I will lift up my hands and call on your name.

My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast,

and my mouth praises you with joyful lips,

when I think of you on my bed,

and meditate on you in the watches of the night.

For you have been my help,

and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.

My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.

But those who seek to destroy my life

shall go down into the depths of the earth;

they shall be given over to the power of the sword,

they shall be prey for jackals.

But the king shall rejoice in God; all who swear by him shall exult,

for the mouths of liars will be stopped.

Psalm 63

Reflection – And so we come to one of the pivotal psalms of the whole psalter. This psalm has such a central place in Christian worship that its importance can hardly be overstated. It is the first psalm at Lauds for Sunday Week One of the psalter, but this means that it is prayed on virtually every major feast day of the Church year, and for each day of the Octaves of Easter and Christmas.

It is chock full with imagery that for a Christian are sacramental, Christological, and pneumatological (uhh, that’s a big word for ‘referring to the Holy Spirit'). There is water and thirst, so baptism. There is hunger and feasting, so Eucharist. There is the shadow of God’s wings, so the Spirit, the Crimson Dove. There is the King, so Christ.

But all of this is in the context of a great personal love and delight of the believer in God. If you want a Scripture that is all about having a ‘personal relationship with Jesus Christ’, to use the modern parlance, this is the one for you. Pray this psalm out loud, mean it, take it to heart, really meditate on its verses and its imagery, and you will begin to awaken a personal love for God and for Jesus Christ in yourself. His Word can do that for you, and this Word in particular can do that for you.

What does it mean, anyhow, to have a ‘personal relationship’ with God? I have to be honest and admit that I don’t really like that phrase, for reasons that I’ve never been able to fully articulate. There’s something about it, and especially about the fact that it is often presented as being the most important thing possible, the very question on which hinges our whole faith life, that makes me uneasy.

I think it is because in our culture of sentimentality and feelings first, it translates to having all sorts of appropriate emotions about Jesus Christ on any given day. Myself, I have never been able to summon up appropriate emotions about any subject on any day (I seem to be wired a bit differently from most people that way), and even if I could, I simply refuse to believe that the health of our spiritual life is contingent on having the right emotional response to God. It just makes no sense to me.

But a personal relationship with God seems to me, in its better meaning, to mean precisely what this psalm says: knowing our poverty, knowing that we are dry and weary land indeed, that we hunger and thirst and need… and that there is One and One Alone who can meet that need, who can make our life fruitful, who can fill us. And from that knowledge of our poverty and knowledge of His fullness, our hearts and minds turn to Him, simply, continually, naturally.

We gaze upon Him in the sanctuary (great psalm to pray at Adoration!), His praise is on our lips (Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!), we think of Him in the night (pray the name of Jesus on those nights when sleep eludes you), and sing of Him (whether you can carry a tune or not).

Not because we are all emotional and wrought up about God, but because, well… because we believe this stuff is true. Like… really, really true. Not some nice idea or the power of positive thinking or foolishness like that. Truth. Him. Real. God. That kind of thing. And this psalm is one of the great masterpieces of inspired Scripture, one of the great ways to express and foster that faith in ourselves, and that is why the Church has made it such a prominent part of its common prayer, and why we should make it part of our personal prayer lives, too.

Saturday, December 5, 2015

God Fixes Everything

Deliver me from my enemies, O my God;

protect me from those who rise up against me.

Deliver me from those who work evil;

from the bloodthirsty save me.

Even now they lie in wait for my life;

the mighty stir up strife against me.

For no transgression or sin of mine, O Lord,

for no fault of mine, they run and make ready.

Rouse yourself, come to my help and see!

You, Lord God of hosts, are God of Israel.

Awake to punish all the nations;

spare none of those who treacherously plot evil.

Each evening they come back, howling like dogs

and prowling about the city.

There they are, bellowing with their mouths,

with sharp words on their lips—for “Who,” they think, “will hear us?”

But you laugh at them, O Lord; you hold all the nations in derision.

O my strength, I will watch for you; for you, O God, are my fortress.

My God in his steadfast love will meet me;

my God will let me look in triumph on my enemies…

Then it will be known to the ends of the earth that God rules over Jacob…

But I will sing of your might;

I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning.

For you have been a fortress for me and a refuge in the day of my distress.

O my strength, I will sing praises to you, for you, O God, are my fortress

the God who shows me steadfast love.

Psalm 59

Reflection – Well, another week, another terrorist attack dominating the news. As we have been moving through this difficult section of the book of Psalms—the ‘gloomy 50s’, I’ve been calling it—the world has itself moved through some gloomy times, the ‘bloodthirsty’ have indeed had their moment lately, ‘prowling about the city’.

I found it bizarre that the visceral response of at least some in the face of this recent attack was to lash out with anger and contempt at those who were praying for the dead and their families. Even as the bodies were still warm and surgeons were attending to the wounded, even as the survivors and their families were publicly asking for prayers, some in the media found it appropriate to sneer that ‘God can’t fix this’ (an actual full page headline from one New York tabloid) and to tell people of faith to shut up because ‘we are the problem’ (an actual quote from a respected senior journalist).

Well, we won’t shut up, because God indeed can fix this. Yes, we cannot only pray or, worse yet, mouth empty platitudes about prayer while not even doing that. But we have to be very clear. There is a spirit of violence and death at loose in the world right now. Now the media does hype things up, and statistically we are still more at risk of dying in a car accident than a terrorist attack… but nonetheless this is real, this is happening, and it will continue to happen, a great evil of our time.

And the greater evil yet is the fear and anger these things stir up in people. Only a miniscule percentage of the population will ever be killed or injured, or even have a close family member killed or injured, by a terrorist. But there are shock waves—spiritual and emotional—that rocket forth from these things, and let loose upon the land all sorts of things we have to guard against. Anger, hatred, fear, anxiety, vengefulness. And in that, vulnerability to politicians playing on those emotions who may possibly not have our best interests at heart (not to mention any names, but it rhymes with Funnelled Rump).

And this is what God ‘can fix’, not to mention His consoling love for the grieving and His mercy in welcoming the fallen into His kingdom (I don’t expect journalists to understand much about those matters). We have to know that our security is not in electing some idiot with bad hair who promises us he’ll take care of the whole thing with his ‘best people’. Our security is in the Lord and the Lord alone. Yes, there are things we have to do about ISIS, and they are not nice things, not pleasant things. Nobody should welcome those things.

But we do not have to give in to fear, anger, panic, unreasoned hatred, vengeful bitterness. Why? Because our safety, our security, the sure hope of our life and the assurance of the victory of good over evil, light over darkness, truth over falsehood, is in the Lord and not in flesh and blood. In the final ascendancy of heaven over hell, love over hate.

Oh, God ‘fixes’ us, all right. He affixes us on the path of freedom and truth, the path of Gospel love and merciful care for our brothers and sisters, out of which we can make the right choices about our difficult world situation. To pray, and in that praying, renew our commitment to Christ and to His Gospel, is not an empty exercise, but is the heart of the matter, that which alone provides a path of light and peace in our troubled war-torn world. So let’s keep praying, and thinking, and loving, and serving, according to what Our Lord has given us and what His Spirit prompts us to do.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Going Through the Magical Door

Thursday is ‘Mass Day’ at this blog – we are going through the Mass, bit by bit, to see how it is the very pattern of Christian life, how everything we need to know about how to live the Gospel is found within the liturgy and its rites.

The last two weeks we talked about the core symbols of the Mass – bread and wine taken to the altar and given to the priest. We have established that ‘bread and wine’ symbolically encompass the entirety of human life, and that the altar and the priest symbolically mean Christ in the Paschal Mystery, Christ offering Himself to the Father for the world. So we bring all of ourselves and give it to Him in His great act of love and redemption.

How do we do that? The Mass shows us how. The first thing the priest does with the gifts of bread and wine is to thank God for them. ‘Blessed are you, Lord God…’ The form of these two prayers of thanksgiving over the bread and wine is the Jewish table grace, the berakah prayer. Before anything has happened to the bread and wine to make them no longer bread and wine but Something More, we give thanks to God for what they are – fruit of earth and vine, work of human hands.

As in liturgy, so in life. We too are to become Something More than what we are; we too are to become in a sense Eucharist for the world. In fact, in baptism and confirmation and in the life of grace we who are in Christ already are becoming that. But antecedent to that transformation into the supernatural, before we turn our attention to what is becoming and what will be, we must give thanks for what is.

This little berakah rite which is so familiar to regular Mass attendees highlights the one practice that (in my view) above all others opens us up to the action of grace, to the work of God to make us into all that He desires us to be. And that is, simply, gratitude.

Whatever there is in our life that is painful and burdensome, unjust and afflicting, every last one of us reading this has so very much to be thankful for. Life itself, whatever degree of health we possess, the presence of food and shelter, clothing. The people we have in our lives—yes, nobody is perfect and if we really want to we can dwell continually on just what is wrong with each one of them… if that brings us joy and peace. Does it? Or we can thank God for all that is good and true and beautiful in each person in our lives.

And… well, so much. I am truly blessed to live in the wilderness where we are surrounded by God’s created beauty on all sides. Birch trees and fir trees, deer and streams and fields. But hopefully everyone has some amount of that natural beauty of earth, water, and sky somewhere around them. A daily reminder to give thanks at the inexhaustible bounty of God expressed in the fruitfulness of the earth.

And then… oh little things. Like Jesus. The Eucharist. The Bible. Salvation. Forgiveness of sins. Eternal Life. The Church. The ability we all have to love to some degree anyhow, to choose what is good at least some of the time. You know – little trivial things like that. Maybe we could remember to thank God for all that stuff from time to time!

When we talk about thanksgiving and gratitude it is so easy to shy away from it somehow – ‘yes, but I have a lot of trouble in my life. I have problems. You don’t know how hard my life is!’ No doubt. And gratitude is the door—it’s almost like a magical door, truly, like the wardrobe in Narnia or one of those sorts of tales—that opens up the action of God, releases the power of the Spirit to strengthen and heal, guide and direct, correct and raise up, show the way through and give the grace for whatever those troubles and sorrows are. Ushers us into a world where all things are possible and beauty indescibable awaits us around every corner.

And if you really want to get wild with it, thank God for the troubles and sorrows themselves. Not for the actual evil being done (that would be silly and heretical), but for the distress and burdens it causes you. Because somehow in all of that God’s permissive will is working something you cannot see right now, but that is bringing you to a deeper good, a deeper blessing and joy than you could have attained through a life of ease and bliss.

We bring our bread and wine—the good, the bad, the ugly of our life—to Christ the Great High Priest. And the first thing we do to enter into his transforming grace is to thank Him for every bit of it, for all He has already done, already given, already worked in us. This sets the stage, then, for the work He will do in the Eucharist itself and in us, to complete this good work of His according to His perfect and merciful will.