I found that video referenced in the previous post. Here it is - more than worth a watch, if anything should go viral, this should.
Showing posts with label martyrdom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label martyrdom. Show all posts
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Monday, May 18, 2015
The Gift of Courage
In this week
before Pentecost, we are going through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, so as to
stir up our desire for God and our openness to all He wants to do in our lives.
The gifts of the Spirit are, essentially, given to us by God in baptism so that
we are enabled to live the divine life in our human flesh.
The second
gift is that of fortitude. This can
be understood as strength or courage. It is a simple fact, isn’t it, that we
have to be strong and brave in this life? Even if our own lot in life is not filled
with terrible dangers and travails, there is no one whose life is so charmed
that they do not need fortitude. Particularly if you set yourself to live a
good life, to do what is right and just, to be a lover of God and of man, you
need strength. The good path is rarely the easier path.
And there is
a natural virtue of fortitude which is available to anyone, part of our
God-created, God-imaged humanity. And we need that natural fortitude to do just
about anything that takes a bit of effort, anything that comes with a cost. A
weak-willed person who has no fighting spirit whatsoever is not going to be
able to do much of anything at all—sooner or later there are obstacles to
overcome, difficulties to surmount.
The gift of
fortitude is quite different from the virtue, though. Natural fortitude
strengthens us in the battle to achieve the reasonable
good. The good we can see is possible, that while it may be far off and
fraught with difficulties we nonetheless know is attainable. I suppose one of
the most obvious examples of that reasonable good is the enormous effort and
work that goes into raising a family. It is very hard, and demands everything
from the man and woman who essay it, but it is nonetheless a reasonable thing
to do—if you simply keep going day by day providing, protecting, and teaching
the children God gave you, you have a reasonable expectation of producing a
bunch of more or less functional adults. But it certainly takes fortitude to
persevere in that work.
The gift of
the Spirit of fortitude picks up, however, where natural fortitude leaves off.
That is, it strengthens us for the unreasonable
good. When there is no good outcome in view, when life stretches ahead of
us as a bleak vista of endless grey days and arid landscapes without relief,
when death itself is looming, when our plans and hopes all seem to have failed,
and we are left simply with our commitment to whatever vows and promises we
have made to God and man, which no longer seem to hold any joy or life for us,
only bare fidelity—that is when we need the gift of courage.
This gift,
then, shows itself most beautifully in the witness of the martyrs. When there
is literally a knife at your throat and all you need to do is deny Christ to
keep your head attached to your shoulders, and you instead cry out the name of Jesus,
and die—this is fortitude in its most supernatural expression, its most
beautiful and radiant effulgence.
Well, we
know this is not some distant historical reality in our world today—it is
happening now. Martyrdom is part of the Christian experience of the 21st
century, wondrously. While the evil being done to our brothers and sisters in
so many countries of the world is terrible, and we should grieve for the evil
doers, at the same time we really do need to recapture the joy and glory of
martyrdom that was the hallmark of the early Church.
Our brothers
and sisters killed for Christ are flying up to heaven, you know. And it has
always been the case that the blood of the martyrs is the seedbed of faith—their
deaths are the most powerful weapon there is precisely against the hatred and
zealotry that killed them.
It is
spiritual fortitude that makes all this possible. And makes it possible for all
of us to persevere in less dramatic and violent circumstances as well. To stay
in a marriage when it has become very difficult, or the priesthood or in
religious life when the joy of it has fled or become elusive. To forgive
enemies when there seems little profit in it for us. To go on loving in
situations where it is not reciprocated and seems to do little good.
Whenever we
are called to fidelity beyond rational calculation or reasonable expectation,
that is when the Spirit must come to our aid with the gift of courage, of
strength, of fortitude. And that fortitude comes from that which the Spirit
gives us in essence—the knowledge of God, of His love, His fidelity, His own
total gift of Himself, out of which we can and indeed are mysteriously impelled
to give our whole selves to Him by living and if need be dying for His sake.
We can’t go
looking for martyrdom, nor do most of us want to. But today we can go looking
for where our fidelity to God pushes us beyond what is reasonable, what is ‘fair’,
what makes sense to us. And, in the current parlance, ‘leaning in’ to that and
so tapping into this infinite reservoir of strength that is not ours, but His,
and rejoicing in it.
Monday, March 2, 2015
The Lord Heard the Voice of Their Pleas
To you, O Lord, I call; my
rock, be not deaf to me,
lest, if you be silent to me,
I become like those who go
down to the pit.
Hear the voice of my pleas
for mercy, when I cry to you for help,
when I lift up my hands toward
your most holy sanctuary.
Do not drag me off with the
wicked, with the workers of evil,
who speak peace with their
neighbours while evil is in their hearts.
Give to them according to
their work and according to the evil of their deeds;
give to them according to the
work of their hands;
render them their due reward.
Because they do not regard
the works of the Lord or the work of his hands,
he will tear them down and
build them up no more.
Blessed be the Lord!
For he has heard the voice of
my pleas for mercy.
The Lord is my strength and
my shield;
in him my heart trusts, and I
am helped;
my heart exults, and with my
song I give thanks to him.
The Lord is the strength of
his people;
he is the saving refuge of
his anointed.
Oh, save your people and
bless your heritage!
Be their shepherd and carry
them forever.
Psalm 28
Reflection – Another Monday, another
psalm. This one is a classic example of a typical genre of psalmody—the cry for
help in desperate circumstances. There are many such in the psalter, a reminder
that the psalms were not written by powerful people in a place of mastery, but
by a small beleaguered tribe surrounded by stronger tribes, more often than not
at war or threatened by war from them.
We cannot
read a psalm like this today without thinking of our brother and sister Christians
in the Middle East particularly, living literally with a knife at their throats
from the terrorism and barbarous violence of ISIS. We can, and must pray for
our fellow Christians who are facing persecution and martyrdom in large
numbers.
I have never
been fond of the use of the word ‘persecution’ by Christians in North America
to describe our current situation. To have someone say something nasty to you about
your faith, or to be surrounded by a cultural ethos and messaging that it
antithetical to ones faith is unpleasant, for sure, but it is not persecution.
Persecution
is having your church burned down by a mob, having to flee your village or your
country at the threat of your life, having your throat slit and your head cut
off. That is persecution, not simply someone being rude to us about our
beliefs.
On a lower
level it is also being forced out of one’s job for one’s beliefs—for example, one
of the drafters of the new proposed ‘conscience’ policy for the Ontario College
of Physicians and Surgeons suggested that doctors who have moral objections to
providing or referring for abortions should simply not practice medicine. So
far this policy has not been adopted, but if it is adopted, in essence faithful
Catholics and others whose religious or moral beliefs forbids abortion will not
be allowed to be doctors in Ontario.
So this
psalm has its place in our lives, even though we really must be clear—we pray
this psalm in union with and as an intercession for those members of the Body
of Christ who are actually facing death for their beliefs. And in that praying there
is a great call to faith and hope. The 21 men who were killed, for example, and
who have already been declared martyrs of the faith by the Egyptian Coptic
Church, have indeed won a great victory, have indeed been delivered from the
hands of their enemies.
The Lord
heard their cry for mercy and help, and came to their rescue, not to save their
mortal lives, true, but to establish them in his kingdom forever. And this
perspective is necessary for all of us—what it means to be delivered from evil
and to triumph over those who would harm us. Our victory over the world and
over evil is our perseverance in faith, hope, and love—not some passing
temporal success.
So… let us
pray for one another and all those who are facing terrible danger and suffering
on account of their faith for any reason, that we may all keep faith with the
God who keeps faith with us. Amen.
Saturday, June 28, 2014
What Does the Word 'Pastoral' Mean, Anyway?
Now it is
an outstanding manifestation of charity toward souls to omit nothing from the
saving doctrine of Christ; but this must always be joined with tolerance and
charity, as Christ Himself showed in His conversations and dealings with men.
For when He came, not to judge, but to save the world, was He not bitterly
severe toward sin, but patient and abounding in mercy toward sinners?
Husbands
and wives, therefore, when deeply distressed by reason of the difficulties of
their life, must find stamped in the heart and voice of their priest the
likeness of the voice and the love of our Redeemer.
So speak
with full confidence, beloved sons, convinced that while the Holy Spirit of God
is present to the magisterium proclaiming sound doctrine, He also illumines from
within the hearts of the faithful and invites their assent. Teach married
couples the necessary way of prayer and prepare them to approach more often
with great faith the Sacraments of the Eucharist and of Penance. Let them never
lose heart because of their weakness.
Pope
Paul VI, Humanae Vitae 29
Reflection – In the controversy and difficulties
around the encyclical, and around the current discussions in the Church
regarding the indissolubility of marriage, the word ‘pastoral’ is commonly used
as a sort of contrary to ‘doctrinal’.
There are the
doctrines of the Church and the call to teach them, but then there is the need
to be pastoral, and these two things are seen as quite opposed to one another
by some. And so in the face of people who genuinely do have difficult
circumstances, even tragic circumstances, the pastoral response is to more or
less discard the doctrine and let people do whatever they want. To be a loving
and merciful pastor means either consciously or unconsciously choosing not to
teach people what the Church’s doctrines are, or counseling them to ignore
those doctrines in their lives, and this has been the model of much ‘pastoral’
care in the church of the past fifty years.
Well, it is
deeply incoherent. It is either based on the conviction that the Church’s
teachings are entirely untrue (in which case why bother being Catholic at all
then?), or that ‘truth’ is somehow a bad thing, a heavy burdensome thing. And
this attitude is profoundly unchristian in a way that cannot be exaggerated.
‘You shall
know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.’ The Lord Jesus says it, and
this has to be the fundamental understanding of pastoral theology in the
Church. We are always to be merciful, always kind, always to proclaim the ready
forgiveness of God to all of us who are sinners, always entering into the real
struggles and real burdens of people’s lives to do what we can to lift those
burdens.
But never at
the expense of truth. Never sacrificing our faith in what is true, good, and
beautiful out of a misguided compassion. Never telling people, implicitly or
explicitly, that there can ever be a set of circumstances so extreme, so
difficult, that it justifies breaking even a single commandment of God. The
Church is nourished by the blood of the martyrs, many of whom died over what
seem like very small things—refusing to burn three grains of incense to Caesar,
for example.
We are all of
us called, frail sinners that we are, to that degree of heroic fidelity and
obedience to God, at whatever cost. The ‘sheep’ of the pasture are called to be
shepherds laying down their lives with great nobility of spirit and courage.
And it is the true pastoral spirit of the Church, not to lead people into an
easier and less heroic way of life, but to call people to the heights of
sanctity and heroic charity.
And so with
the issues of contraception, openness to life, chastity, and a true
understanding of what marriage is and why it is indissoluble (namely, because
Christ Himself declared it to be so, and we have not one bit of authority to
negate His words), there is a great need to be merciful and kind, gentle and
patient, deeply loving, not least because people have been so poorly taught by
the pastors of the Church in the last fifty years and there is so little real
understanding of the Church’s doctrine.
But all the
kindness and mercy, patience and compassion and love, must be ordered towards
calling people into the heroic path of faith, into a genuine discipleship of
life where we follow the Crucified One so as to be crucified with Him, so as to
rise with Him, so as to reign with Him. These are the ‘green pastures and still
waters’ to which the Good Shepherd wants to lead his sheep.
And that,
then, is the real pastoral love and pastoral care that bishops and priests
especially are called to exercise in the Church, but all of us, really,
according to our own gifts and station of life.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Advent - Season of Growth in Light
OK, this will be my last post concerning our MH Advent customs, mostly because after today we get waaaaaaay too busy with our immediate Christmas preparations to manage any additional 'customizing'.
Today, though, is St. Lucy. Happy feast of St. Lucy - Luciadagen, if you are Swedish. She was a martyr of the fourth century of the Diocletian persecution, whose fama sanctitatis spread to Rome and from Rome to the whole Western Church.
There was something about a young woman whose name means 'light', and who is commemorated near to the Winter Solstice, that captures the imagination of the Christian people, and so multiple customs surrounding St. Lucy have developed over the years.
In Madonna House, Catherine Doherty introduced some of these European customs to us North Americans. One of the things she saw as a European living in the new world was that many customs and traditions had been lost or weakened, and that religious culture was more and more confined to what we did in church. The home was radically secularized, and this is of course a recipe for disaster. So in the early years of MH, she went out of her way to find and introduce various domestic church rituals for us, to recapture the sacred quality of the Catholic household.
St. Lucy is a perfect example of that. We are neither Swedish nor Croatian (for the most part!), but those are our customs here.
From Sweden, we have the young girl (one of our guests) come in the morning into the dining room with a crown with lighted candles, bringing us sweet coffee cake. Lucy, the harbinger of the Light of the World, brings light and sweetness into the winter darkness.
From Croatia, we have the planting of the St. Lucy wheat. Seeds of grain are planted in a small pot on this day, and tended and watered for the rest of Advent. By Christmas, the shoots of wheat are about six-eight inches high, and the pot is placed at the manger. Christ the light of the world is also the Bread of Life, and even in the dark and cold of winter when nothing is growing in the earth, this wheat is growing in the darkness and warmth of the womb of Mary.
Simple customs, childlike as all good customs should be, and carrying within them great symbolic spiritual meaning. St. Lucy's day comes in the heart of winter, a week away from the darkest day of the year, and often in a time of great coldness. It happens to be -20 Celsius here today. In the dark and in the cold, there is light and life. There is growth and renewal. There is sweetness and joy.
And so it is in our lives, although we often don't have the eyes to see it clearly. The darkest, coldest, and most barren seasons we pass through can be, once we are through them, times when the roots of Christ were plunged most deeply into the frozen earth of our hearts, and where his light, in fact, shone most brightly to give us the light we needed.
It is when there is nothing else to see by that Christ shines as the truest light. It is when there is nothing else to eat that the Eucharist is known as the true bread of life. It is when there is no other life that God's life becomes most fully ours. And it is when the full bitterness of life floods our senses and sours our digestion that the sweetness of the Gospel begins to attract us.
And all of this, of course, is precisely what the martyrs of the Church lived out. Lucy, of whom we truly know so little, died for Christ because she knew that to live for Christ was the only life that was truly alive. His light and sweetness were, for her, worth dying for.
And so as we munch on our coffee cake and enjoy the little girl with the candles in her hair (we invented the whole notion of the 'Girl on Fire' you know), and plant our little wheat seeds, we gracefully plunge into the very heart of the Christian mysteries, all wrapped up in homely customs that anyone can do. Happy Lucy day - may its light shine deeply into your heart.
Today, though, is St. Lucy. Happy feast of St. Lucy - Luciadagen, if you are Swedish. She was a martyr of the fourth century of the Diocletian persecution, whose fama sanctitatis spread to Rome and from Rome to the whole Western Church.
There was something about a young woman whose name means 'light', and who is commemorated near to the Winter Solstice, that captures the imagination of the Christian people, and so multiple customs surrounding St. Lucy have developed over the years.
In Madonna House, Catherine Doherty introduced some of these European customs to us North Americans. One of the things she saw as a European living in the new world was that many customs and traditions had been lost or weakened, and that religious culture was more and more confined to what we did in church. The home was radically secularized, and this is of course a recipe for disaster. So in the early years of MH, she went out of her way to find and introduce various domestic church rituals for us, to recapture the sacred quality of the Catholic household.
St. Lucy is a perfect example of that. We are neither Swedish nor Croatian (for the most part!), but those are our customs here.
From Sweden, we have the young girl (one of our guests) come in the morning into the dining room with a crown with lighted candles, bringing us sweet coffee cake. Lucy, the harbinger of the Light of the World, brings light and sweetness into the winter darkness.
From Croatia, we have the planting of the St. Lucy wheat. Seeds of grain are planted in a small pot on this day, and tended and watered for the rest of Advent. By Christmas, the shoots of wheat are about six-eight inches high, and the pot is placed at the manger. Christ the light of the world is also the Bread of Life, and even in the dark and cold of winter when nothing is growing in the earth, this wheat is growing in the darkness and warmth of the womb of Mary.
Simple customs, childlike as all good customs should be, and carrying within them great symbolic spiritual meaning. St. Lucy's day comes in the heart of winter, a week away from the darkest day of the year, and often in a time of great coldness. It happens to be -20 Celsius here today. In the dark and in the cold, there is light and life. There is growth and renewal. There is sweetness and joy.
And so it is in our lives, although we often don't have the eyes to see it clearly. The darkest, coldest, and most barren seasons we pass through can be, once we are through them, times when the roots of Christ were plunged most deeply into the frozen earth of our hearts, and where his light, in fact, shone most brightly to give us the light we needed.
It is when there is nothing else to see by that Christ shines as the truest light. It is when there is nothing else to eat that the Eucharist is known as the true bread of life. It is when there is no other life that God's life becomes most fully ours. And it is when the full bitterness of life floods our senses and sours our digestion that the sweetness of the Gospel begins to attract us.
And all of this, of course, is precisely what the martyrs of the Church lived out. Lucy, of whom we truly know so little, died for Christ because she knew that to live for Christ was the only life that was truly alive. His light and sweetness were, for her, worth dying for.
And so as we munch on our coffee cake and enjoy the little girl with the candles in her hair (we invented the whole notion of the 'Girl on Fire' you know), and plant our little wheat seeds, we gracefully plunge into the very heart of the Christian mysteries, all wrapped up in homely customs that anyone can do. Happy Lucy day - may its light shine deeply into your heart.
Monday, November 25, 2013
The Serpentine Ways of Faith
As long
as we are sheep, we overcome and, though surrounded by countless wolves, we
emerge victorious; but if we turn into wolves, we are overcome, for we lose the
shepherd’s help. He, after all, feeds the sheep not wolves, and will abandon
you if you do not let him show his power to you.
What he
says is this: “Do not be upset that, as I send you out among the wolves, I bid
you be as sheep and doves. I could have managed things quite differently and
sent you, not to suffer evil nor to yield like sheep to the wolves, but to be
fiercer than lions. But the way I have chosen is right. It will bring you
greater praise and at the same time manifest my power…”
The Lord,
however, does want [us] to contribute something, lest everything seem to be the
work of grace… Therefore he adds, “You must be as clever as snakes and innocent
as doves.” But, you may object, what good is our cleverness amid so may
dangers? How can we be clever when tossed about by so many waves? However great
the cleverness of the sheep as he stands among the wolves—so many wolves!—what
good can it accomplish?..
What
cleverness is the Lord requiring here? The cleverness of a snake. A snake will
surrender everything and will put up no great resistance even if its body is
being cut in pieces, provided it can save its head. So you, the Lord is saying,
must surrender everything but your faith: money, body, even life itself. For
faith is the head and the root; keep that, and though you lose all else, you
will get it back in abundance.
The Lord
therefore counseled the disciples to be not simply clever or innocent; rather
he joined the two qualities so that they become a genuine virtue. He insisted
on the cleverness of the saint so that deadly wounds might be avoided, and he
insisted on the innocence of the dove so that revenge might not be taken on
those who injure or lay traps. Cleverness is useless without innocence.
St.
John Chrysostom, Homily on Matthew,
from Office of Readings,
Reflection – The Office of Readings of the Church
regularly delivers up gems like this for our consideration – this one is coming
up on Thursday of this week. It is funny—even though it’s right there in
Scripture, in the Lord’s own words, I don’t think I have ever meditated at any
length on the call to imitate the snake. Doves and sheep and the birds of the
air and flowers of the field, yes, but ssssnakes? Yuck. I’m not from a part of
the world with lots of poisonous snakes, so I have no great fear of them, but
like most people they’re not my most favorite animal.
It’s this
whole business of prudence, isn’t it? That’s what John Chrysostom means when he
says that cleverness and innocence together yield a genuine virtue. The virtue
is prudence. To be all precise and scholastic though, it is specifically the
virtue of infused prudence. Acquired prudence—simple human prudence—is the
virtue by which we figure out how to get what we want, the common sense
attitude to life that considers our goals and makes good practical choices as
to the means to those goals.
Acquired
prudence is a virtue, as it is a genuine perfection of our humanity to be able
to carry out the plans we have hatched. But it is a very limited virtue, as
those plans might be wrong, might be in fact harmful to ourselves or others. A
prudent bank robber might be a successful bank robber, and we all enjoy those
clever heist movies where the dashing
criminal pulls off the big job… but at the end of the day, he’s still a
thief, and a thief is a lousy thing to be.
Infused
prudence shows us how to attain the goal that is not of our own devising, but
is the true goal of our humanity, and that is heaven and eternal life. And that
is the cleverness of the snake united to the innocence of the dove. To desire,
earnestly and truly, to be with God and to enter that communion of love: innocence.
To be clear-eyed, thoughtful, careful, and (dare I say) almost cold-bloodedly
determined to do whatever it takes and sacrifice whatever is needed to attain
that goal: clever snake, you!
It is called
‘infused’ virtue because it is only possible to have it if God gives it. To
someone not in the grace of God, it is sheer lunacy to sacrifice money, health,
position, freedom, or one’s own life for the sake of faith. Why lose the cold
hard currency of this world for something you can neither see nor touch nor
smell nor eat nor lie down on? But this is the clever snake of the Gospel, the
serpentine path of faith in the world.
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