Keating

The Eucharist stands at the core of Catholic imagination and practice. It is the reaching out and down through time of the mystery of Christ’s salvific self offering in and through the ministry of the priest from within Christ’s own Church. This offer of salvation is such that the bride of Christ is invited to respond in love, vulnerability, and trust at the deepest level of Her being. When fully conscious of this offer the Church, like Mary, is stunned into silence, contemplating all these things in her heart. He died for the Church and yet, through signs, Christ left a way to always and everywhere access His act of love so that the salve of its truth might anoint Her. If the Church’s vulnerability before this gift is real, then participation in the Eucharist changes Her moral character over time. It is said that the Eucharist is the place where salvation is offered, and so it is; but is the reception of such salvation by priest and people a conscious appropriation of its healing power or simply a rubrically correct executed act of worship? All worship of God is virtuous but without the love of participants, we know that liturgy can remain an inert reality barely welcomed into the heart. The healing known in the Eucharist is one that Christ grants through His power and our faith. Christ is a healer, “‘Lord, if you wish you can make me clean’ Jesus said, ‘Of course I will it’” (Mt 8:1- 4). Are we eager recipients of the gifts He wants to give us? This personal question is one appropriate to spiritual direction, but on occasion it must be asked both in the forum of worship and in the forum of speculative reflection. In so doing we seek to enlarge our imagination and open our mind to new ways of engaging in study of God’s revelation. With ever more accurate darts of love the Holy Spirit opens our consciences before God so that deeper and more effective healing can occur; at times His coming is so pure that it causes us to have pain and recoil at the level of intimacy God wishes His Son to achieve in our being. We recoil at our own needed medicine because it will bring about a change, and sin wishes no change to occur. Sin pathologically clings only to the endless boredom of repetitive daily features of the interior life: constant rehearsal of our sinfulness, continued recollection of personal inadequacies, denigrating thoughts about the imperfections of neighbors, resentment toward the mundane horariumof each day, bathing in negative thoughts and moods, existing in cynicism and all manners of interior desires bent on disorder, greed, lust, envy, pride, sloth, anger, and gluttony. All of these desires weigh us down from within and become the signature upon the letter which is our face. The blood of Christ courses through us to heal the mind of its errors and ideologies unless we have simply reduced worship and its content to an ideology itself; then we have entered the biblical realm of hardness of heart. For those who have the courage to approach the founts of healing, the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the interior life begins to lighten. His Presence, His Mysteries, and the hope they bring within our souls begin to define the day rather than the boring exchange between the dreary dominating ego and the wispy enthusiasm of affected optimism. Something greater than the mantras of self-help gibberish and post-modern syncretism is demanded if spiritual healing is to occur. An encounter must occur. We must be seized with the Presence. In this Presence, perhaps dramatic at first, perhaps not, we appropriate meaning, love, and healing at ever expanding levels of integration throughout our life. The Eucharist is the encounter with Him Who does not will anything but mercy and healing. Such an encounter is by its nature ordered toward the healing of interior suffering and, at times, physical cure. We cannot be in union with Christ at the Eucharist without receiving the effects of His virtue, His power to heal, mend, restore. We are attracted to so much in these short days of living, but the attraction to the Eucharist is the one desire that sets all other attractions within proper proportionality. Without the desire to have Christ’s mysteries lived over again in us by way of the Eucharist, the passing age (Rom 12:1-2) will have more effect upon our interior life than eternity, opened up for us in the Paschal Mystery. In the lives of very simple Saints like Venerable Solanus Casey, OFM.Cap., we find this intrinsic connection between the virtue of thanksgiving and healing. Solanus had a renowned gift of healing, but with each healing he connected the recipients to three prominent ends: the need to be grateful, the necessity of attending the Eucharist, and a promise to amend one’s life. In other words, the healings and cures connected the person to the entire Christian mystery and, therefore, separated them from magic (see, Michael Crosby, Solanus Casey, NY Crossroad, 2000. p.121ff). The Eucharist plumbs the very depths of sin and all human action that leads to the lack of hope bred by sin and evil. In and through the cross, represented at the Mass, the believer is healed of the fear of death, but also begins a journey wherein the blood of Christ heals the power of death’s attendants: sin, despair, hate. All such healing is a received healing, not a magic trick simply born of manipulating spiritual power. The true model for any spiritual or physical healing is expressed in the story of the ungrateful lepers (Luke 17:11ff). In this story of healing, Christ points out that only the foreigner came back to give thanks to God. Christ wills that no one be foreign to him, no stranger; He wills only to call persons His friends (Jn 15:15). This friendship is entered by participating in His death, which becomes healing prayer (Joseph Ratzinger, 49). For these friends, moral and spiritual healing will come; even cures will come if they are associated with the Paschal mystery. Those who are not healed by the Eucharist or the intercession of Saints, such as Venerable Solanus Casey, either failed to connect to the Mystery or must be seen to have been given a special vocation to bear suffering while preserving their interior intimacy with Christ. This latter vocation was, in fact, Solanus’ own. While dying he filled the hospital room with praise and concern for the salvation of others, even as he prayed for more suffering so as to help bring others to salvation. In the end, he was tortured by his decaying body yet stayed connected to Christ and to others in need. (His last words were, “I give my soul to Jesus Christ”; “I am offering my suffering so that we all might be one. Oh if only I could live to see the conversion of the world” (Crosby, p.146)). Solanus was known to have attended two or three Masses a day, and the depth and level of his personal prayer life is legendary (Crosby, p.113). He was available to those who needed him in charity as Porter of the monastery and available to the mystery of Christ inhabiting him during deep and prolonged mystical prayer. In true Eucharistic healing, prayer becomes life itself, a participation in the Divine life as shared by Christ. We can see this principle in Venerable Solanus’s prayer life. This “life” dwells within us and heals our affection for sin and sees us through death’s door to life eternal. Will prayer become the principle of life for those who worship at the Eucharist? As then Cardinal Ratzinger reminded us, it is not mortal sinners who share in the sacrifice of the Eucharist but only the reconciled; therefore, the affection and residue of sin is what is being healed at the Eucharist, as well as any ‘weakness” or venial sin. “The Eucharist is not in itself the sacrament of reconciliation, but in fact it presupposes that sacrament. It is the sacrament of the reconciled, to which the Lord invites all those who have become one with him; who certainly still remain weak sinners, but yet have given their hand to him and have become a part of [the Lord’s] family. That is why from the beginning the Eucharist is preceded by a discernment” (Joseph Ratzinger, God is Near, p.60). So in this sacrament of the reconciled, we are invited to go deeper into the Presence of the Lord, to appropriate this Presence, to never leave this Presence but invite It take up residence within them, thus furthering the healing of affection for sin and strengthening us in our weakness so that we become what we have welcomed into our hearts. What Newman said of his hope for his personal prayer life, we say in the context of the Eucharist as source: Will we come to learn to love that which will occupy us for all eternity? We can answer this question because the “energy of the HOLY does not operate by giving us ideas about Christ but by PURIFYING our hearts FOR HIM” (Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, 1988, p.67, capitalization added). The work of the Spirit must be met with a vulnerable faith so as to receive the truth of who Christ is from within the poverty of our being. “He must increase; I must decrease” (Jn 3:30). What is being received here is a healing that is a purifying power and not essentially a reconciling power because, as noted above, we ought not, and apparently cannot, enter fruitfully into the Eucharist while at the same being against the truth (i.e. in mortal sin) of its very meaning as the Divine Son’s self gift. This is why atonement, understood as repairing or healing the wound, is an apt meditation. In mortal sin we are closed to grace. Once repented, we need to repair or undergo therapy of the affection for sin, receiving new affection from the Mystery of the Eucharist itself. St. Francis de Sales notes the following about the effects of participating in the Eucharist, “Your great intention in Communion should be to advance, strengthen, and comfort yourself in the love of God. You must receive with love that love alone has been given to you…If worldly people ask you why you receive Communion so often, tell them that it is to learn to love God, be purified from imperfections, delivered from misery, comforted in affliction and supported in weakness… Tell them that two classes of people should communicate frequently: the sick that they may be restored to health and the healthy lest they fall sick” (Introduction to the Devout life (NY. Image, 1989 ed. p.118). Christ’s own power and authority elicited the truest approach that we all must take toward liturgical healing when the centurion uttered his humble cry of confidence in light of Jesus’ own majesty. “Lord I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof…but only say the word and my servant will be healed” (Lk 7:7). Only a regimen of interior examination could have led the centurion to such humility. In our time there is a presumption in favor of personal worthiness. This disposition allows us to forgo any claims that repentance might have on us in light of our present sins and so all are bid to come forward to “entertain” the Presence of God in our “house.” To receive the healing of sinful affections, we must be in line with the truth about our interior state and seek reconciliation where necessary. Then the grace of God can work upon the residue of sin that exists in the memory and affect (Mt 5:27-28). Further, if we look to Colossians 3:1-17, we can see the whole sweep of the Eucharist and its healing power upon human interiority. Here we see the rich invitation of the Christ to enter His Mystery and become a new self (v.10). This new self is aware that, to receive such newness of life, forgiveness is first to be received (The Eucharistic Penitential Rite); then, the fruits of having such venial sins forgiven can be received as the peace of Christ (v15). We are also bid to let the Word in its richness dwell within us (v.16), and then the invitation goes out to all that such a peace and such an indwelling should characterize all that we do (v.17) in ordinary living (the Eucharistic dismissal rite). This gift of indwelling by the Christ, and our receptivity toward it in purity of heart, are factors that cause any healing gifted to us by the Eucharist. The healing of sinful affections may happen at such deep levels as to escape our capacity to articulate our real needs. God answers our groans, our sufferings, with the silent coming of the Holy Spirit…instilling within us the reality of Christ living His Mysteries over again in our lives. Our groans, our pain, our need for healing is met by the silent power of Love itself taking up residence within us. Our free “yes” meets the free gift of the mystery of Christ’s Passover, reaching “depths not touched by the wounds death has inflicted on us”; thus in this HOLY COMMUNION we are healed in peace, not with emotional upheaval or storm…but as quietly as the epiclesis (the renewing Spirit) itself (Corbon, p.71-2). The Mystery of the Eucharist conspires to bring us back to the heart, where all salvation is first received and where the battle to eliminate affection for sin is waged. The Latin word recordari is an apt expression for the effect the Eucharist has upon the soul. The self offering of Christ brings us back to the heart, which is whatrecordari means (John 14:26). When we celebrate the Eucharist, we are bid to remember on one level; on another level, though, we are bid to welcome healing. To remember, to be brought back together in the Lord, is the work of the Eucharist. This is counterpoised against our sinful desire to disassemble before the Lord by driving ourselves into loneliness through our choices against the truth and dignity of the human vocation. The Eucharist bids us not to go back to Egypt in slavery but to remain in the Presence, remain reconciled, remain in communion with Life itself, and thus enter ever more deeply into the healed life. Specifically, when we accept the “gift of life” or the Holy Sprit, our healing in the Eucharist has already begun. God “no longer acts alone”, like at the beginning of creation, but seeks our cooperation through faith…in order to receive the gift we are called to entrust ourselves to the mystery of Christ’s presence and self offering among us. (Corbon, p. 59). It is in this divine self giving and the positive human response to accept such love that healing is known. Trust, vulnerability, rapt listening, integrity all precede the fullness of healing; otherwise God could incorrectly be seen as entering a magic relationship and not one of human freedom and fullness. We must present ourself in such a way that Christ can enter our heart with truth. And such a way of presenting ourself is encapsulated in the virtue of humility. We, as a believer, approach the mystery of salvation and growth in holiness as if coming before a wise healer, “To whom shall we go, Lord, you have the words of everlasting life” (Jn 6:68). These words themselves begin to heal because we realize in their utterance the weight we have been futilely carrying in trying to heal the self. Such is impossible. As Ignatius of Antioch noted, the Eucharist is the “medicine of immortality” (Ignatius of Antioch as quoted in O’Connor, The Hidden Manna, San Francisco, Ignatius, 1988, p.17). Participating well, we will receive what we need to make it through death’s door and come to everlasting life. Only in the regular celebration of the Eucharist can we come to see clearly that we are meant to be ministered to by He who not only heals and restores but opens up the eschatological gift as well. This healing of affection for sin is simply the foretaste of what immortality will encompass: a heart purified to participate in eternal divine love. When Eucharist becomes a habitual disposition of our lives, we are receiving the new covenant, the divine power that raised Christ from the dead. Such power is now shared with Christ’s Church as His gift. As St. Claude La Colombiere wrote, “You must give us your own heart, Jesus. Come Lovable heart of Jesus. Place your heart deep in the center of our hearts and enkindle in each heart a flame of love…O holy Heart of Jesus, dwell hidden in my heart, so that in the end I may live with you eternally in heaven.” All present healing is a conspiracy of divine grace that sets up the right conditions, enabling us to host the Heart of Christ within our heart. There is no better description of what the Eucharist entails. It is the welcoming of all that Christ is into our hearts so that His Heart might transfigure ours under the power of and through his divine character of obedient love. Such a created interior environment heals our broken hearts, hearts so broken that without such divine intervention they would continue to display affection for sin. St. Gregory of Nyssa associated the Eucharist with a “remedy” for sin, noting that Christ’s body is stronger than death (O’Connor, p.34). In desiring to be healed of affection for sin, we must establish a relationship with the body of Christ. Thus we see the power of devotion to the Sacred Heart in and around devotion to the Eucharist. In a spiritual way, we must unite our heart, who we are, with who Christ is, not just as an idea but in His body, both glorified and ecclesially. We do this by means of what our bodies do. We worship, and we give over ourself in concert with Christ having done the same for us out of the power of His heart. In so doing, we pass beyond the self by means of sharing in Christ’s own crucifixion and resurrection. We will be healed of our ego by offering it up into the self offering of Christ upon the cross. As Thomas Dubay has noted, “the taproot of all healing is one’s deep love and intimacy with the Lord” (Deep Conversion, Deep Prayer, p.75). Do we love Him enough to enter Histransitus? At the Eucharist we realize that the Lord may be loved in all the circumstances of our life: sickness, health, failure, success, fear, courage. The Lord has entered death; so now no reality is void of His Presence. In this way, we rejoice in maintaining openness to the healing Presence of Christ, not simply during worship but as the truths of worship come to abide within us over time. Since the intimacy with the Christic Mystery lives in us, the intimacy remains and the healing is received throughout our days. Dubay further states that “the healing of our deepest wounds comes from contemplative intimacy with the indwelling Trinity, and the deep conversion that makes such intimacy possible” (Dubay, p.77). Only a contemplative intimacy can continue to receive the healing benefits of the Eucharist throughout the day. When the Eucharist’s power is treasured in our heart as truth, then by the Spirit, healing marks our character as the norm and not simply as an occasion. In a sense, as the healed or reconciled participants of the Eucharist, we become charismatic; we stand now to only further the kingdom and share the communion with Christ that we have graciously been given and received (see Lawrence Hennessey, The Spirituality of Priestly Identity, Chicago Studies, 2006). The healing by the Eucharist then is not simply to comfort the individual who receives such affection from God; it is also meant to be the food upon which the public figure Catholic citizen is bid to consume so that he or she may be faithful in giving public witness to Christ the Savior. As Edith Stein noted, “the greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night. For the most part the formative stream of the mystical life remains invisible” (The Hidden Life, 1992, p.110). The Eucharist that heals the heart’s affection for sin by its communion with the Sacred Heart is the “formative stream of the mystical life.” Such a life, however, is only measured for good by the service it renders to the world in charity and works of justice. The Sacred Heart is given at the Eucharist so that the healed heart of the Church can bear that same Holy Heart to the world in service. This witnessing to the Person of Christ is in gratitude for the healing He has rendered to all who fall under the weight of disordered affections. We can be assured that we can receive the healing remedy for the spiritual disease we are affected by: sin (STIII, q.61, a.1, c).

The South is in My Blood!

Continued reflections on LK 10:25 from last night's study, via Pope Benedict XVI's 'Jesus of Nazareth'.

There is a lot to be said for reflection when one reads. In fact, there is nothing to be said without it. The last time I was reading Jesus of Nazareth I found it awesome in the closest etymological sense of the word. Which was the antithesis of what I thought the first time a read it, I think I even called it 'not very profound'. Again, however, I am struck speechless and left with joy after reflecting on its contents: the Gospel.

It's ironic, really. I had wanted something akin to Ratzinger's Curia days but instead I got his "personal search for the face of Jesus". I had wanted dissertation, I received parable. It makes sense because dissertations make use of scientific (in the classical understanding of the word) structures bolted on to the deposit of faith and we usually judge them by their fidelity to that original deposit. What is more, faith doesn't demand the full reigns of man's intellect when we study theology, instead, they are shared and reason is able with some liberty to ascent with its own wings, so to speak. How else can we speak of error in the Church, other than this liberty? This is all very different when God speaks. God being the source of revelation and reason. How does God speak to humans?

Parables.

How more elementary can one speak to another than by way of analogy? By way of something one already experiences and knows of. Really, elementary in the true sense of the word -- examples are used primarily, but not exclusively of course, when the level of reasoning is in such a state of disparity. Either an expert to a novice, or an adult to a child, etc.

A few thoughts on the nature of parables: First, they assume we are both aware and unaware of the content or ground of our experience. 'Through a glass darkly' to quote St.Paul. Second, they assume some continuity between that which is being taught and that which is yet unknown. There exists a bridge, however faint it may or may not be.

So, off the bat we are already told something about our nature when God speaks of His! He speaks in parables: we are children. He speaks in parables: He is transcendent (above us). He speaks in parables, He is immanent (with us). He speaks in parables: we are able to know and love him in our everyday life!

To know God in this world? Ok, but to know God via this world? Amazingly, I think I live a life of example. This is a very Charles Williams moment for me -- 'this is thou, neither is this thou'. The world is wrapped in mystery only if it is wrapped by God.

Pope Benedict is wise to criticize all those Christians who expect God to bring to them anything other than Himself. Those nominal Christians do not deserve God if they demand anything other than Him. Two errors on different ends of the spectrum come to mind; the Protestant 'communities' that demand prosperity from God and the 'Catholics' that demand liberation from poverty. In one Christ is a good stock broker, in the other he is Karl Marx. In neither is he God. That one is materially rich or poor has no bearing on what Christ is or gives. It is always the same--Himself. 'God became man so that man may become God'. We would trade life in the Blessed Trinity for anything it seems, and do so at our own demise, cf. the Commedia. We just don't know what is ultimately good for us, we live in a world that is a secondary good, that was poured from the fount of God's love, and in a way we naturally think of this good as the primary good since we are born into it. However God has never been silent! Especially in the covenant He made through Christ -- all excuses are gone. It is in this sense that I read von Balthasar's notion:

The correct view and explanation of reality, therefore, is based neither on the human mind nor on the soul, which with their anxiety have been the actual object of most recent research; the true standard and guarantee is, rather, the Word of God, which speaks about mind and soul and their anxiety. This is our guarantee that we can gain some distance from the feverish questioning of the modern soul; from its culture, which is supposedly decadent and doomed to destruction; and from its religious anxiety and religion of anxiety, in which, paradoxically enough, the attempts to cure the patient venture into the disease and collapse into one with it, as if it were an unalterable fact to be accepted as a matter of course.

Summed up, we are anxious in this life because we are made to be son's of God. That internal locus will forever drive us back to the love that created us, as one is reminded in the first paragraph of the Confessions, 'Our hearts our restless until they rest in Thee'. How do we do that? How are we to ever achieve this task, von Balthasar time and again through my reading of him points that the answers are always in scripture. In the Word. God has answered everything. Their truly are answers and they will always demand faith, nothing less was demanded of Christ himself when he was carrying out the will of the Father. It is the nature of love both Here and There to be faithful.

As a segue, then, I would like to write about the only way a parable should be read--by faith. Benedict states it, there are a 1,000 reasons not to believe a parable, but only one to believe it. Always though, we choose not to believe the reality of a parable because we are selfish and God always demands that we give ourself. Cf. Mtt 13:13, Isa 6:9 -- that is what's meant of hardness of heart. As a proviso to all the faithful, I would say our age makes the parable even more demanding. We all insidiously subscribe it seems to one degree or the other to the prevailing philosophy of relativism and subjectivism. This is a constant battle for the faithful of our age. God cannot really be expected to have a say in the real matters of our life because there is no exhaustive proof for God and only what can be empirically proven can be counted as decisive. Everything else is relegated to the sphere of 'preference'. Thus God becomes a book we like to read and are at liberty to put back on the shelf at our own leisure -- it is unreasonable, of course, that God should make demands on reality -- he is not real. Nietzsche is right to attack this form of Christianity it is itself irrational and a crutch for people who have other gods. Much lesser gods. There are so many problems with that philosophy, on its own terms, much more than can be taken up here. Cf. Thomas Aquias, Summa Theologica, Ps 95:5 -- they have failed to see God in the world!

Parables show us that Jesus shines forth in our everyday life! He shows us the real ground of our experience and the true direction our lives must take. The only thing one needs to make sense of parables is faith. What does this mean? It means parables are God expressing his own mystery to us. People must reflect on the nature of God. Knowledge of something so high can only but demand the whole person for a requisite to understanding. This is why God stresses repentance. We always want to say no and keep to the chains of our ego. This knowledge requires that we break the chains of the "I" and enter into life as it really is outside our, little, little, constructed personal world. 'My weight is my love' says Augustine, the more I love myself the more I am closed off from everything and everyone around me. The more I love God, the more I am open to receive more than I am, to be raised up.

Finally, on to the question.

And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?

And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

Jesus uses a common example for that day in age. The roads were, and still remain to this day, a target for  thieves in the Middle East. This very fact deterred me from traveling to Mauritania when I was in Morocco. So, here we have here Jesus talking about salvation in terms of this world. Salvation? Life with God. 

Second we have the Priest and Levite, both professionals and experts themselves in salvation, walk past their fellow Jew. 

However, the Samaritan makes the beaten man his neighbor. He doesn't have to. One will remember that the Kingdom of Israel was divided and Samaritans were those who during the Babylonian exile mixed with other races and were considered heretics for a lot of reasons. They were mixed Jews who believed in the same Torah, they of course were the same tribe up until the exile. Jews did not consider them neighbors, nor did Samaritans. We have here an antecedent form of the reformation.

So, what we have here then is the Samaritan going outside the law for no apparent reason. Blood is also unclean and looked down upon in Judaism in general, cf. ritual cleanliness. But Christ says the Samaritan was profoundly moved by the sight of this suffering man. The original Hebrew has the connotations of the love a mother has for a baby within the womb. Something that cuts to the soul. 

It is Agape. Agape has incinerated the barriers of these two people. The Samaritan does not consider what he must do but rather is moved by love, his heart is wrenched open. It is soul touching. 

Benedict points out that the question of the parable thus switches here. It is no longer about the 'other', 'who is my neighbor?' It is about Me. Who am I neighbor to? Christ answers that you are a neighbor when you regard the other person as yourself.  The foreigner makes himself his neighbor "he makes himself one whose heart is open to being shaken up by another's needs". 

This compassion the Samaritan has felt has broken the "if you give, I'll give" social contract. It is very Christological, Mtt 19:30, 5:5.

How does this tell us anything of God? The Church Fathers help...

God is showing us his face in the parables. The Samaritan is Christ himself. Utterly foreign to us and without obligation to help us. The beaten man is none other than Adam the first man, stripped bear of his glory and left half wounded. Christ brings us salvation by a totally unmerited act of love. Breaking the boundaries of man and God, he brings himself to us! the clean to the unclean. The wine and oil that the Samaritan tends to the wounds of the man are the sacraments of the Church, the Inn he takes the man to the Church itself. Finally, he pays the cost -- all of what the man's fall costs. 

We can understand how God loves when we troll the depths of it ourselves by participating in the 'flash' of pure soul touching love. So quick it seems but when it does touch down it incinerates all that doesn't matter in life. 

What must I do to be saved, Lord?

Go and do likewise -- Be another Christ. Follow Christ and we will live with him. It takes faith, does it not? Faith and surely the courage the Priest and the Levite did not have in having passing by. What courage love demands to go above. When we have the courage to love like Christ heaven touches down.

Songs for Agape

This is French Quarter by The Delta Spirit who I will be off to see in Seattle Friday! They know how to live. This was written when Matt and Jon took off for a few weeks to help the relief effort after hurricane Katrina.

French Quarter, quarter to four
The town is empty like a nuclear war
The levee broke on Pontchartrain
I'm feeling blue like John Coltrane
Well, its fine baby
Oh I swear its fine, lover

Carpetbagger tried to fix my house
Low baller tried to put me out
At least I got my gospel stomp
My house fell into the swamp

Well, I need somebody to help me out
I've lost it all but I've got my health

You, you oughta know
They've been kicking me around
And I don't want to lose my own home
It ain't no joke; I was raised in this town

The south is in my blood
Its in the mud
They were clearing out my house
But I teared it all down to the stud, all this love
Is what's fixing my house, fixing up my house

I ain't no refugee, I'm a person can't you see
Lord, I'm humbled from what I see
Oh you are the one who will build me up
I've lost it all but I've got your help

You, you oughta know, they've been kicking me around
And I still don't want to leave my own home, it ain't no joke
I was born in this town; the south is in my blood
Its in the mud, they're clearing out my house
And tearing everything down to the stud
All this love is gonna fix up my house; fix up my house


Oh you, you oughta know, I've lost everything
But I still have my soul, and my home, I believe in you

You, you oughta know, I've been kicked around
But no way I'm gonna give up my home, it ain't no joke
I've been born in this town, the south is in my blood
Its in the mud, you'll be clearing out my house
You're ripping everything down to the stud, all this love, is gonna fix up my house
Fix up my house!

How shall we repay?

From the Detailed Rules for Monks by Saint Basil the Great:

What words can adequately describe God's gifts? They are so numerous that they defy enumeration. They are so great that any one of them demands our total gratitude in response. Yet even though we cannot speak of it worthily, there is one gift which no thoughtful man can pass over in silence.

God fashioned man in his own image and likeness; he gave him knowledge of himself; he endowed him with the ability to think which raised him above all living creatures; he permitted him to delight in the unimaginable beauties of paradise, and gave him dominion over everything upon earth.

...How, then, shall we repay the Lord for all his goodness to us? He is so good that he asks no recompense except our love: that is the only payment he desires. To confess my personal feelings, when I reflect on all these blessings I am overcome by a kind of dread and numbness at the very possibility of ceasing to love God and of brining shame upon Christ because of my lack of recollection and my preoccupation with trivialities.

Brenden Contra Mundum

At certain intervals in our lives it is without doubt that God lays before us certain catalysts that cause our hearts to illuminate having found something that we know to be truly transcendent and meaningful; punctuating our youth with his fragrance so as to always reference it. For myself, it was the beauty of the form in the via affirmitiva. This 'way', of course, is timeless. It is the Incarnation. It's the beauty of the Incarnation; the spirit of the dogma that the early church fought so hard for against the Gnostics and Arians. Shown to me by Dr.Barry Craig, my life has been a constant reflection on the implications of the incarnate logos. Cardinal Ouelette said of von Balthasar that he had “illuminated my mind and my heart.” My words can only echo that of Cardinal Oulette's when I speak of Dante. What is more, it is not strange that my words parrallel Ouelette's since they are reflections on the same mystery, in von Balthasar's own words, "If there were no such thing as the resurrection of the flesh then the truth would lie with gnosticism and every form of idealism down to Schopenhauer and Hegel, for whom the finite must literally perish if it is to become spiritual and infinite. But the resurrection of the flesh vindicates the poets in a definitive sense: the aesthetic scheme of things, which allows us to posses the infinite within the finitude of form (however it is seen, understood or grasped spiritually), is right."


So, I think it is fitting that two years ago I set off to start a blog only to post the initial passage of the Commedia. I am really looking forward to putting 'to pen' much of what I have been thinking and reading about lately. Having said that, I must quote Balthasar again in saying "let the kind reader refrain from weighing every one of my words with a gold-scale. Let him rather pick a nugget here or there, if he comes across one."

And finally, bear in mind that the questions raised here are viewed from one perspective, reflecting my specific interests as I make sense of the particular daily content we are all forced to baptize.

Midway on our lifes journey, I found myself in dark woods--the right road lost

...to tell about those woods is hard--so tangled and rough and savage that thinking of it now I feel the old fear stirring. Death is hardly more bitter. And yet, to treat the good I found there aswell, I'll tell what I saw. Though how I came to enter I cannot well say being so full of sleep whatever moment it was I began to blunder off the right path.