Lin Wilder's Blog, page 8

Memorial Day and Covenants: Good and Evil

View of a veteran saluting the flag of the United States.Memorial Day and covenants

Memorial Day officially kicks off summer: It’s the season of beach parties, barbeques and hot dogs. Too often, only as afterthought, those who gave their lives for this “great experiment,” are remembered. More on that excellent phrase in a moment but first some background.

Memorial Day began during the Civil War. According to the Library of Congress, southern women decorated the graves of dead soldiers long before the war’s end. June 1, 1861 may be the first such grave to be decorated in Warrenton, Virginia. In fact though, more than twenty-five cities lay claim to being the originator of Memorial Day or Decoration Day.

So, amidst the hamburgers, ribs, chips and beer, reflection and honoring those men and women who died for this still splendid country of ours surely can fit into the celebration. On that note, it is impossible to ponder those who gave their lives for the American ideal without returning to the origin: the Civil War. Somewhere between two and five percent of Americans died in that war. For today’s population, that’s 6.5 million. No writer’s vivid imagination can approach even a conception of those four blood-soaked years for those who lived and died in them.

But one man did. Abraham Lincoln knew evil, coming perilously close to assassination before making it to Washington . Until reading The Lincoln Conspiracy, I’d never heard of the Baltimore plot. “There’s a secret on this train,” is the first sentence of an engrossing historical novel that feels like today’s news, jam-packed with poisonous, dangerous invective between Democrats and Republicans.

Miracuously, Lincoln survived that conspiracy, living long enough to steer the nation through four years of horror.

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysberg Address 

sobers even 21st century citizens with words whose heft need no superlatives, emoticons or modifiers.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln

A great experiment in good and evil

Although former Attorney General Anthony Barr gave his Notre Dame law school speech five years ago, it’s worth bringing to our attention again. Since it’s a long read, I’ve extracted a few bullet points:

The framers of the constitution ” never thought the main danger to the republic came from external foes. The central question was whether, over the long haul, we could handle freedom. The question was whether the citizens in such a free society could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary for the survival of free institutions. Edmund Burke summed up this point in his typically colorful language.“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put chains upon their appetites…. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”So the Founders decided to take a gamble. They called it a great experiment.They would leave “the People” broad liberty, limit the coercive power of the government, and place their trust in self-discipline and the virtue of the American people.In the words of Madison, “We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves…”This is really what was meant by “self-government.” It did not mean primarily the mechanics by which we select a representative legislative body. It referred to the capacity of each individual to restrain and govern themselves.

I added the phrase a great experiment in good and evil because that descibes the choices of our nation and our citizens: do we choose good or evil?

Barr incited progressives

within and outside of the religious traditions with his searing indictment of the consequences of immorality: ennobling abortion, same-sex marriage and promiscuity. His sober recital of the facts are compelling:

In 1965, the illegitimacy rate was eight percent. In 1992, when I was last Attorney General, it was 25 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. In many of our large urban areas, it is around 70 percent.

Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.

As you all know, over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses. That is more casualities in a year than we experienced during the entire Vietnam War.

I will not dwell on all the bitter results of the new secular age. Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery. And yet, the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy.

William Barr

And yet a number of Catholics and Christians considered the speech a “threat to democracy.”

What’s the relevance of covenant?

Lincoln’s language and that of the framers of the US Constitution is religious: Unapolagetically reverent and pious. These men were practical lawyers, businessmen and merchants who knew better than to deny our sinful nature. Unlike us.

Leil Leibowitz’s recent relection, Renewing the Covenent prompted this reflection on Memorial Day and covenants. In his article, Leibowitz’s defintion of covenant aptly fits the ideals that our forefathers wrote into their great experiment. And serves as creed to us, the covenental remant.

The author’s defintion of covenant is compelling:

A covenant… is all about change—you enter into it in order to grow and become the best version of yourself. It’s a big and joyous leap of faith…As the Hebrew name for America beautifully suggests, we are a covenantal nation. A shining city on a hill (John Winthrop got that right), we fought a war in 1775 and cast off tyranny’s yoke so that freedom might ring throughout the land. We renewed the covenant in 1861, when we took up arms against those who argued that freedom for some requires shackles for others. We did it again a century later, when the Civil Rights Movement sought to make us adhere to the principles upon which this great nation was founded. Look at the dates. These renewals of the covenant occur every one hundred years or so. We are heading toward another.

Renewing the Covenent

What can we do?

A great deal, it turns out. If we take the time to reflect, that is. Although politics and the position of presidential candidates matter, they aren’t the people who change hearts.

It’s us who will do it while waiting in line in the supermarket, not reacting to someone who cuts us off in traffic, smiling and quietly radiating the radical goodness of redeemed sinners.

A young newly ordained priest we knew while living in California spoke about holiness after daily Mass. He and another seminarian spoke about the friend’s experience at a parish.

How was it?” Fr. David Allen asked his friend.

“Interesting, I enjoyed it.”

“Did anything happen that surprised you?”

“Yes, the parishioners at the church kept asking me how I’d gotten to be so holy, so content with silence.

“What did I do?

“How did I pray?

“What prayers did I say?

“And there wasn’t anything I could say that I did.

“In fact, I do nothing! Nothing at all…

“I just love Jesus…the more I love Him the more I want to love Him- it’s like an addictiion!”
Fr. David looked at us and said, “Holiness can’t be taught, it must be caught.

“We all know about addicts, right? ‘I need a fix! Now. It’s all about the drug. How about our drug being Jesus?

Holiness Can’t Be Taught

Jonathan Cahn’s radical goodness expresses in two words that facts and words don’t change hearts. We can’t argue people into loving God.

The post Memorial Day and Covenants: Good and Evil appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

Where Did Jesus Go?

Salvador Dali 1958 Ascension of Jesus- courtesy phillip chiripop

Where did Jesus go: Come Holy Spirit!

I became a new creation that Thursday evening in early September at Saint Benedict’s Abbey. The journey had been arduous and long, but I’d finally found home. After receiving the sacraments necessary for full communion in the Catholic Church, I was not the same person.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. It was no metaphor: I had no doubt that I was truly reborn.

But the intrusion of the world, passage of time and spiritual laziness eroded my awareness–conviction and trust. Hence, over the fifty days of these glorious grace-filled days of the Easter season, my daily prayer, Come Holy Spirit! is ardent: Come Holy Spirit! Fill the hearts of your faithful with the fire of your love and they shall be created. And you shall renew the face of the earth. It is through your Spirit that you instruct the hearts of your faithful. Grant, we beseech you that through your Spirit, we may be truly wise…

I believe with all my heart and soul that He renews the face of the earth each day, through you and me.

Where did Jesus go when he ascended into heaven? Maybe I should title this Part ll of last week’s reflection because I turn to N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope once again:

I am repeatedly frustrated by how hard it is to get this point through the thick wall of traditional thought and language that most Christians put up….

…to see the death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong. It is colluding with death. It is conniving at death’s destruction of God’s good, image-bearing human creatures while consoling ourselves with the (essentially non-Christian and non-Jewish) thought that the really important bit of ourselves is saved from this wicked, nasty body and this sad, dark world of space, time, and matter!

The point is this. When God saves people in this life, by working through his Spirit to bring them to faith and by leading them to follow Jesus in discipleship, prayer, holiness, hope, and love, such people are designed—it isn’t too strong a word—to be a sign and foretaste of what God wants to do for the entire cosmos. What’s more, such people are not just to be a sign and foretaste of that ultimate salvation; they are to be part of the means by which God makes this happen in both the present and the future. That is what Paul insists on when he says that the whole creation is waiting with eager longing not just for its own redemption, its liberation from corruption and decay, but for God’s children to be revealed: in other words, for the unveiling of those redeemed humans through whose stewardship creation will at last be brought back into that wise order for which it was made…

Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and Mission

Get rid of our adolescent notions

of Jesus throttling through space, exhorts Monseignor John Essef’s in his podcase, Where is Jesus? A Reflection on the Ascension, affirming his Church of Engand colleague Wright’s insistence that too many misunderstand the Easter message. His remarks are stark and strident:

“The only capacity we have is sin.”

“Why is the world the way it is? Because we have not gone inside ourselves to find him within our hearts.”

“Love is the greatest power in the world, greater than any nuclear bomb”

“We focus on the horror of who I am rather than the beauty of who He is”

Where is Jesus? A Reflection on the Ascension – Building a Kingdom of Love with Msgr. John Esseff – Discerning Hearts Podcast

“But we’re not theolgians, bishops or priests.”

“We’re just lay people.”

Right, that’s all we are. On our own, we can do nothing, only sin. But we are NOT alone. The Holy Spirit has marked us with the seal of eternal life…our Baptism is God’s most beautiful and magnificent gift.

Writing about Saint Athanasius, the only bishop who stood against the Arian heresy, Saint John Henry Newman wrote this: “Perhaps it was permitted, in order to impress upon the Church at that very time passing out of her state of persecution to her long temporal ascendancy, the great evangelical lesson, that, not the wise and powerful, but the obscure, the unlearned, and the weak constitute her real strength. It was mainly by the faithful people that Paganism was overthrown; it was by the faithful people, under the lead of Athanasius and the Egyptian bishops, and in some places supported by their Bishops or priests, that the worst of heresies was withstood and stamped out of the sacred territory.”

The Feast of “Get to work!”

Using very different language but emphasizing N.T. Wright’s message, Bishop Robert Barron calls the Ascension, the feast of “Get to Work!”

Let’s understand what he taught the apostles. The Kingdom of Heaven is here….we redeemed sinners must apply our gifts, talents and treasures to work for the glory of God.

Just 18 minutes, this is good stuff.

Lord, why don’t you do something?

I heard this song on the radio a few weeks ago. It’s lyrics slammed into my psyche.

Those months, maybe even years, after my conversion to Catholicism, people were drawn to me…the zeal that poured out of me of course, wasn’t me, but the Spirit. One day, a waitress at a diner we’d occasionally frequent, stared at me.

After a few seconds, I met her gaze and smiled. Shaking her head in embarrassment, she exclaimed,

“I want what you have!”

Just so, these lyrics,

I woke up this morning
Saw a world full of trouble now
Thought, how’d we ever get so far down
How’s it ever gonna turn around
So I turned my eyes to Heaven
I thought, “God, why don’t You do something?”
Well, I just couldn’t bear the thought of
People living in poverty
Children sold into slavery
The thought disgusted me
So, I shook my fist at Heaven
Said, “God, why don’t You do something?”
He said, “I did, I created you.

I did, I created you.

The post Where Did Jesus Go? appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

Death, Hope, Heaven: What Are We Here for Anyway?

Concept of the life after death.Death, Hope, Heaven, What are we here for, anyway?

In my pre-Catholic ‘pagan’ years, I worried about death. Mostly because I feared standing before a God I did not think I believed in and explaining why I had wasted knowledge, understanding, and time. After twenty years as a Catholic, I would like to think that anxiety gone. Unfortunately, I think it’s merely changed its shape. Which is why a book called, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, has excited me so much that I am compelled to write about it.

One could object, validly, to my exhortation that ‘what we do matters,’ as self- evident. After all, we do things with the expectation that we can make a difference. Author Bishop N.T. Wright claims, however, that what we do today-right now-has significance, importance in the kingdom Christ will build on earth during the last days.

An arresting thought, even transformative, isn’t it?

Several years ago at a February funeral, Abbott Cyprian at the New Camaldi Hermitage in Big Sur, California, gave the homily for our friend, Father Ray Roh. This loner of a priest, a bit of a curmudgeon, in fact, exemplified the radical theology described in Surprised By Hope.

“I researched on line and found no other monasteries with the name of The Risen Christ. None in the world,” commented the Abbott.

Indeed.

My husband and I knew Father Ray only well enough to glean the barest facts of his life. He had been a parish priest in the Nebraska. After a few years, he felt the call to a monastic life and became a Benedictine monk at a monastery in New Mexico.  That Benedictine profession morphed into a decision to found the Monastery of the Risen Christ in San Luis Obispo, California, amidst more than a little controversy, perhaps even opposition. These few facts obscure the anguish of decisions made with too few facts, of facing the realities of institutional politics, of doubt, disappointment and loneliness: The life, in short, of a follower of Christ.

In his homily about Fr. Ray, Abbott Cyprian had time to allude only briefly to the “radical theology” of Wright’s book:

“We (The Churches) have diluted Jesus’ Resurrection to one event. And a happening which has been limited to one day each year. Forty days of Lenten preparation leading to Easter Sunday. When Monday dawns, we’re back to the tedium of our life.”

Wright not only refutes this notion as wrong, he shouts at us to Wake Up! 

What I want to suggest, with great temerity, is that in the resurrection one is given the beginnings of a new knowledge, a new epistemology, a new coming-to speech, the Word born afresh after the death of all human knowing and speech, all human hope and love, after the silent rest of the seventh-day sabbatical in the tomb….Jesus’s resurrection summons us to dangerous and difficult tasks on earth.

Rather than the passive, tepid Christianity that informs much of contemporary Christian culture, we Christians are called to ‘be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.’ We are obligated to treat our bodies as ‘temples of the Holy Spirit’ rather than material shells which weigh us down and deprive of us of God’s real home, the spiritual one.

Throughout his book, Wright hammers at the Gnosticism and dualism

that has infected Christianity since the Enlightenment. ‘The world is bad and getting worse’, ‘our job is to suffer the evil and aim to get to heaven.’ ‘All matter is corrupt, we will be happy only when we discard these bodies and become pure spirit.’ Lies which distort and deprive us of the Truth.

A scholar in the gospel and letters of St. Paul, Bishop Wright relies on his extensive Pauline scholarship to underscore his message: We are here to work as the hands and hearts of Christ.

Most of us, whether atheist, agnostic or Christian, believe our actions matter…that what we do or say can make a difference.

But the sheer immensity of problems can make us shy away. Accept our powerlessness and adopt a type of passive resignation that poisons and permeates our soul. Take the problem of homelessness for an example. A favorite political football. One with which I have more than a little personal experience. Over a period of a few years, while we lived in northern Nevada, my husband John and I conducted our own forays into the streets of Reno to gain some understanding of the shelters and the people who live on the streets. And we concluded that the main problem is sobriety: Those who stayed out of the Reno shelters did so because they refused to stop drinking or getting high on their drug of choice. Rather than give money to fuel the addiction, we supported a program that helps these people get sober.

Poverty, addiction and homelessness

are gigantic social problems. Those cold Sunday mornings when we drove to fourth street where the homeless in Reno hang out to hand out hot coffee and fresh donuts didn’t solve the crisis that drove these men and women to the streets.

It was a small thing. Of late I have become aware that small things are what we are given. Each day, each moment. If, as author Wright declares, I can stay awake, I’ll be able to perceive what I can do, if anything. Because I know and trust that if it’s good, it’s God’s grace.

God knows me and calls me by my name.…
God has created me to do Him some definite service;
He has committed some work to me
     which He has not committed to another.
I have my mission—I never may know it in this life,
     but I shall be told it in the next.

Somehow I am necessary for His purposes…
     I have a part in this great work;
I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection
     between persons.
He has not created me for naught. I shall do good,
     I shall do His work;
I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth
     in my own place, while not intending it,
     if I do but keep His commandments
     and serve Him in my calling.

Therefore I will trust Him.
     Whatever, wherever I am,
     I can never be thrown away.
If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him;
In perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him;
If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.
My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be
     necessary causes of some great end,
     which is quite beyond us.
He does nothing in vain; He may prolong my life,
     He may shorten it;
     He knows what He is about.
     He may take away my friends,
     He may throw me among strangers,
     He may make me feel desolate,
     make my spirits sink, hide the future from me—
     still He knows what He is about.…
Let me be Thy blind instrument. I ask not to see—
     I ask not to know—I ask simply to be used.

Some Definite Service-John Henry Newman

Consider reading this powerful bookIn fact, here’s a free PDF of N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church.
A book I’ve read three or is it four times? Link to PDF

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How Do They Do It?

Be happy. It drives people crazy. How do they do it?

“You have two children, don’t you?”

The casual question prompted an unnerving reply. “Yes, I had a son who died at thirty-seven and a daughter who died at forty-one.”

Homilist, Pastor Eric Ritter at Tuesday’s six AM Saint Matthew’s Church question, “How do they do it?” was implicit.

“How do you lose your children?”

“Your freedom?”

“Or your health?

Without anger, hatred, resentment, or depression? Accepting horrific losses with charity, exuding happiness to those they encounter?

“My faith, Father, my faith gets me through everything.”

Thinking of Father Eric’s powerful anecdote of the heroic acceptance of suffering, recalls two women from the last century. And a letter from the first.

Catholic convert and former Jewish atheist Edith Stein is one of my friends in heaven. Not just because of her towering intellect but her steadfast resolve to find the truth.

Despite a mind filled with anxiety and doubt,the woman who would become St. Teresa Benedicta, Carmelite nun and Auschwitz martyr, faced her fears and made the trip to Gottingen. Rather than encountering a woman bereft of hope, desolate and incapacitated with grief, Edith Stein met instead, a woman of courage and profound faith.  Edith was “awestruck by Anne���s courage and loving submission to God���s will, which seemed to manifest the power of Christian faith.”

“This was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it … it was the moment when my unbelief collapsed and Christ began to shine his light on me – Christ in the mystery of the Cross.”

The walls of our unbelief

A Radiance in the Gulag

Sister Nijole Sudunaite was two years old when the Soviet Union absorbed her country and packed 38,000 Lithuanian leaders, intellectuals and peasants to deport them to Siberia. It was the beginning of mass deportations: for the next decade, one out of every ten Lithuanians was exiled in Siberia.

Their crime?

Devotion to Christ and the Catholic Church, not the state.

Sister Nijole published A Radiance in the Gulag in 1987. Her 148 page diary chronicles her persectution, torture, Siberian exile with…radiance.

“This is the happiest day of my life. I am being tried on account of the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, which is struggling against physical and spiritual tyranny. That means I am being tried for the truth and the love of my fellow man. What can be more important in life than to love one’s fellow man, his freedom and honor?”

She continues, “Love of one’s fellow man is the greatest form of love, while the struggle for human rights is the most beautiful form of love. May this hymn forever resound in our hearts and never fall silent…I will joyfully go into slavery for others and I agree to die so that others may live…”

Hers is the story of a pure soul. One so inflamed with the love and trust of Jesus Christ that nothing can dim her love for Him and the souls he died to save. Nothing but pity, sympathy and love for the “poor atheists,” leap off the pages. Lightly, humorously, Sister Nijole expected nothing and accepted everything. Reading her anecdotes about the KGB agents and criminals she was imprisoned with is achingly relevent–and instructive– in our increasingly Communistic government and atheistic culture.

“People from whose hearts God has been torn sink relentlessly into a morass of rottenness, considering evil to be good, and being ashamed of the good. Only when I ran into those unfortunates did I appreciate what a great treasure is faith in God and how great is our resulting responsibility.
Are we doing everything possible to help others?”

A Radiance in the Gulag

From A Letter to Diogenetus.

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in…

  And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labour under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law.

  Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonour, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life…

  To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body…The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.

  Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body���s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian���s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself. [Italics mine]

My faith, my faith gets me through, Father…

A simple five letter word noun meaning confidence or “belief in a religious system.”

Or the theological virtue that eclipses the satanic lie of self-sufficiency?

How do they do it?

Father Eric’s unnamed friend, Edith Stein and Sister Nojole’s capacity to accept wrenching sorrows and suffering comes not from their inner strength, intelligence, money or anything the world can offer but through the Person [not a system] of Jesus Christ. Along with his spirit breathed into us at our Baptism.

Faith, hope and charity are called theological to distinguish them from the cardinal virtues. Prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice known by ancients long before Christianity as the doorway to happiness.

This is the great paradox of the Christian life: by surrendering our lives to God, we find true freedom and peace. As Don Dolindo assures us in the Surrender Novena:

���I perform miracles in proportion to your full surrender to me and to your not thinking of yourselves. I sow treasure troves of graces when you are in the deepest poverty. No person of reason, no thinker, has ever performed miracles, not even among the saints. He does divine works whosoever surrenders to God.��� (Day 7)

The path of surrender is not always easy, as it requires a constant dying to self and a willingness to embrace the cross. But as Don Dolindo reminds us, it is precisely in our weakness and poverty that God’s strength is made perfect (cf. 2 Corinthians 12:9). By abandoning ourselves to His will, we allow Him to work miracles in our lives and transform us into instruments of His love and grace.

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Therapy: Bad, Good Or None?

Therapy: Bad, good or none?Therapy: bad, good or none?

Abigail Schrier’s new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, peels back the multlayered onion of America’s obsession with health. In this case, that of our kids. The author notes at the beginning of the book that there are kids, a small percentage, with real psychiatric problems. But this book isn’t about them. Rather, it’s about cowed, confused and over-educated parents. One of the many stark realities she reveals is poorly understood: Our doctors know nothing about health, that of kids or adults. How could they since they are trained in the diagnosis of disease? To them, and truthfully, to us, health is boring.

Surprised, even dubious about my “stark reality?” Research it for yourself: starting here.

Over six million American kids, between the ages of 0-17 are on psychoactive drugs, of the six million, over 400,000, are five or younger. Take a few minutes to scan the  IQVia Total Patient Tracker Database for Year 2020. It’s appalling. For example, over 20,000 children three and under are on anti-depressants. And 16,000 kids aged three and under are on ADHD drugs. But then again, maybe it isn’t so shocking if we dig a little.

In 2016, Scientific American reported that one out of every six American adults is on at least one psychiatric drug with twice as many women as men taking the drugs. We can safely guess the number hasn’t dropped but risen in the last eight years. So if mommy needs meds to make it through the day then so does her kid.

It gets worse. Author Schrier shares Atlantic Magazine’s editor, Franklin Foer‘s public musing about his decision to let his fourteen-year-old daughter skip school to attend a climate change protest inspired by activist Greta Thunberg. “I long to build a seawall to protect her from her fears. But her example and Thunberg’s doomsaying have made me realize that my parental desire to calm is the stuff of childish fantasy; anxiety is the mature response. To protect our children, we need to embrace their despair.” Online searching reveals that “eco-anxiety, ecological grief…” are indeed things.

Sin makes us stupid

I’ve been there—that self-absorbed sponge of useless melancholy. All too easily, I can recall my early-twenties-atheist-self listening to La Boeheme with my dad. Crying, because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

“Can you understand, Dad? All that work and energy getting my degree and now I have even less of an idea of who I am or supposed to be!”

My father, a man who never completed the seventh grade because he had to go work in the cotton fields of Connecticut to support his family, looked sadly at his whining, self-pitying daughter and said, “Honey, no, I don’t. I was always too busy working to put food on the table.”

And there we have it, don’t we?

The combination of affluence in the sense of having enough of everything, and godlessness can lead us to one destination only: stupidity.

The arrogant delight in their arrogance,

and fools hate knowledge.

Because you disdained all my counsel,

and my reproof you ignored—

in my turn, will laugh at your doom;

will mock when terror overtakes you;

When terror comes upon you like a storm,

and your doom approaches like a whirlwind;

when distress and anguish befall you.’

Then they will call me, but I will not answer;

they will seek me, but will not find me,

Because they hated knowledge,

and the fear of the LORD they did not choose.

They ignored my counsel,

they spurned all my reproof;

Well, then, they shall eat the fruit of their own way,

Proverbs

Against or for the young?

We know what kids need—it’s not all that different from what everyone needs regardless of age need: work, discipline and virtue.

Chapter forty-eight of the Rule of Benedict begins with this jarring statement: Idleness is an enemy of the soul. King David lived the truth of this when he chose to stay home while his troops went to battle.

The tragically inane anecdote about Franklin Foer and his daughter reverberates in Foer’s Jewish ancestry and must call out to long ago patriarchs with real grief. They would understand and applaud the daughter’s attraction to causes far greater than herself, but know there’s only One who is worthy. She and her father suffer from a crisis of meaning. An emptiness of souls which cry out to God and can be filled only with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Another Jew from another century transformed his existential despair into the magnificent Fifth–Resurrection– Symphony. Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony fills our souls with—awe.

All of which calls to mind a favorite Israeli writer of mine. Favorite because he is Jewish not just ethnically, but in his heart, mind and soul. Recently Leil Leibowitz wrote an article about his attendance at an ecumenical seminar for priests, ministers, rabbis and inmans. In response to the handwringing about what to do about the vast numbers of young who are absent from their houses of worship, Leibowitz writes this:

Rising to my feet, I delivered my pronouncement clearly, loudly, and succinctly: The young suck.

Against the Young

Asked to elaborate he did so.

Let’s offer a serious, demanding admissions process into the faith,

one that is as eminently forgiving of failure as it is uncompromising about effort. To those who want to grow and change and flourish, let’s offer everything we can. To those in the market for yet another facile lifestyle affectation, let’s show the door.

What will happen if we do? At first, nothing. All of us need hard work, devotion, and repentance, but not all of us are willing to put in the work required. We can turn our churches and our synagogues and our mosques into austere academies and push our youth to the limit, and the pews will continue to be empty for a little while longer. But then, as the serious young people we’ve instructed grow up, as they settle down and start families and deepen their commitment to the faith and its teachings, we’ll begin to see something miraculous, something that everyone, from teachers to farmers to CEOs, values above all else—real, organic growth.

We haven’t a moment to spare. It’s time to stop coddling our young and pretending that their frivolous nonsense merits acknowledgment. It’s time, as the kids say, for us “to adult.” We need to accept responsibility for those who depend on us and guide them to virtue. It’s time to proclaim that we’re neither cool nor hip nor conversant in the thin gruel that passes for culture these days. We’ve something else to offer, something far more precious, something eternal, without which none of us, old or young, can thrive.

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Trust The Science: Bread Becomes Flesh

Eucharist, sacrament of communion backgroundTrust The Science: Bread Becomes Flesh

“Give me bread, a Catholic priest and his prayer and I’ll show you the flesh of a human heart.”

The audience of forensic scientists erupted into laughter, guffaws and mockery at the speaker’s bold claim.

The commotion quieted when Dr. Ricardo Castanon Gomez mentioned the names of two attendees. He read the forensic analysis from each of their lab stating the specimen was heart tissue.

Dr. Ricardo Constanon Gomez then turned to Dr. Frederick Zugibe and said, “You personally anaylyzed the specimen.”

Silence reigned in the room as he read Dr. Zugibe’s–a cardiologist as well as forensic pathologist– analysis.

“…this flesh is…from the left ventricle not far from a valvular area…This heart is inflamed and infliltrated with white blood cells not normally found in heart tissue…. The presence of the white blood cells tell me the heart’s been traumatically injured….not unlike someone who has been beaten severely over the region of the heart.

This heart is alive…I am looking at a snapshot of a living heart.”

What was the specimen?

A dirty, discarded communion host was found in Santa Maria’s Catholic Church in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1996. Following standard protocol, it was placed in water and then in the tabernacle. But it did not dissolve. It transformed. Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio–Pope Francis– initiated an investigation. Dr. Castanon Gomez, a local Argentinian scientist was an atheist when asked to study the strange blood-like substance. Dumbfounded by his finding, he sought confirmation from American experts. An Australian lawyer, Ron Tesorioro, writes and has produced a documentary about his experience with the Santa Maria investigation at Reason to Believe.

Now Catholic, Dr. Castanon Gomez speaks all over the world about trust the science: bread becomes flesh. For more detail on this and other eucharistic miracles, click eucharistic miracles-scientific proof, fr chris alar.

Photo courtesy Reason to Believe

Transubstantiation

The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
“How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?”
Jesus said to them,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood,
you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
For my Flesh is true food,
and my Blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood
remains in me and I in him.

Jesus graphicaly describes eating and drinking his body and blood. Never, in the entire “Bread of Life discourse” (Chapter six in the Gospel of John) does he mitigate what sounds like cannabilism. To a first century Jew, his words would be especially offensive because the Mosaic Law forbade the drinking of animal blood.

In fact, the Greek word he uses, Bishop Barron explains, isn’t the word for eating a meal but the Greek word that descibes the way an animal would eat: gnawing.

Bishop Barron in Capernaum

The result?

Shaking their heads they leave him saying, “This saying is hard. Who can accept it?”

We can infer from the Gospel reading for Saturday of this week, that almost all Jesus’ disciples left. Prompting Jesus to look at the twelve and ask, “Are you going to leave too?”

Sometimes kids can understand what adults cannot.

Confirmation class introduced me to the concept of transubstantiation–we were Episcopalians and my eleven-year-old brain had no difficulty accepting that bread and wine could change its substance. In fact, transforming the communion bread and wine to his body and blood made perfect sense. How else could we made perfect as he is perfect?

And now that I reflect on the seemingly sudden conversion to Roman Catholicism, I realize there was nothing sudden about it.

That long ago Friday evening at Vespers at Saint Benedict’s Abbey in Still Water, Massachusetts, when I fell on my knees sobbing with joy and relief, and wondering why and how I could feel at home in such a foreign place, was because I knew the place. Back when my older sisters mockingly called me “Sister Lin.” Back when I knew the horror of sin. When I knew Jesus is the way and the truth and the life: home.

Small children can see and understand things far beyond the field of adults. Especially when they’re very ill. Looking back on my childhood years of both critical and chronic illness, I realize it was all gift. All of it. Although adults whisper around kids and use words they don’t know, I’m guessing that my parents belief that I’d die at four years old was transmitted to me. So each time I was rushed to the hospital, I knew I might die.

Knowing our lives are precarious is a very good thing, even at the tender age of four–it is necessary. Last Sunday, I wrote of the need for “momento more.”. And that all major traditions recommend a daily practice of remembering that we will die.

Our lives, Saint Paul tells us are on loan. Just so are our bodies and our souls.

.There are many great questions that all of us face in life: Who is God?  What is Heaven like? How do I pray?  It is necessary that we seek answers to these questions from wise and holy people, from good books, and even from our own soul-searching. However, all these resources, as good and necessary as they are, have their limits. What all of them can do is point us towards the truth…Ultimately, we must leave the comfort and even the consolation of books, retreats, and spiritual conversations, and follow Christ wherever and however he is leading us.

Following Jesus to Eternity

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Momento Mori: Sure There’s Time?

Image from Classical Wisdom WeeklyMomento mori: sure there’s time?

Time…it’s like light, air and water. We have plenty, until…we don’t. The April 8 solar eclipse that brought thousands to Texas, for just a nanosecond, revealed a darkness unlike any other. That total absence of light, reminded me of evil, also a negative: absence of goodness, of God. All of which brings up another absence.

Death. In our twenty-first-century, is there anything more terrifying to the modern mind? In fact, scientists like Ray Kurztweil have devoted their entire careers in an effort to achieve immortality. Recently, at a Silicon Valley Conference, Kurtzweil declared that immortality will be achieved by 2030 with this phrase– “the singularity is nearer.” Cleverly, it’s the title of the scientist’s new book with the horrific sub-title, “When We Merge With AI.”

Huh?

Singularity: the merging of the machine with the human mind is how Kurtzweil and other tech giants define it. It’s a most curious use of this noun since phycists define singularities as “places in the universe where the laws of physics simply break down.” What could possibly go wrong with the notion of transhumanism?

Sarcasm aside, do you remember the 1968 film, 2001, A Space Odyssey, and the black monolith that appeared episodically–and ominously– throughout the film?

The movie, specifically the monolith, was, to my twenty-something-atheistic-self, an explicit warning to humanity. I saw it at least five times, each time thinking about the need for boundaries to knowledge, that once known a thing cannot be unknown. Never dreaming that I was thinking of the tree of good and evil.

Many decades later, here we are scrolling through articles that discuss merging human brains with artificial intelligence to defeat disease and death as reasonable. The notions of creating superintelligence, superlongevity, and superhappiness — the goals of transhumanism–are….what?

Wait-what does it mean?

Right–momenti mori: remember, you must die. The Latin phrase is believed to have originated with ancient conquering Roman leaders whose slave whispered the phrase into their ears as they rode through the jubilant crowds of citizens. In his website, Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday writes this.

Epictetus would ask his students, ���Do you then ponder how the supreme of human evils, the surest mark of the base and cowardly, is not death, but the fear of death?��� And begged them to ���discipline yourself against such fear, direct all your thinking, exercises, and reading this way ��� and you will know the only path to human freedom.���

It isn’t only stoic philosophers and Roman soldiers who recommend a daily reminder of our death. Saint Benedict writes in his chapter, “The Tools for Good Works, to “day by day, remind yourselves that you are going to die.” Similarly do the Hindus and Buddhists.

Why?

To make sure we make use of time, to discipline our minds and bodies. To live virtuously, training our souls for the next life.

To our death-defying transhumanists mentioned earlier, such a practice is morbid or even foolish. Momento mori: sure you have time? Each of us is this mysterious combination of body and soul. Human beings are immortal. After death, we’ll go somewhere- heaven or hell, even those who don’t believe there are such thibgs. Not our bodies, of course we sense them dying, more so as we age. The souls created by God when we were thought into being will live forever. The phrase sounds quaint when we place it next to the sophisticated, scientific wizardry of integrating a human mind with a computer, doesn’t it?

Thought into being

King David sings to Our Lord in Psalm 139:

LORD, you have probed me, you know me:

you know when I sit and stand;*

you understand my thoughts from afar

You formed my inmost being;

you knit me in my mother���s womb.

I praise you, because I am wonderfully made; wonderful are your works!

Intelligence, no matter how brilliant the mind and its acquired knowledge cannot lead us to the Person, Jesus. Jesus cannot be known by reading about his life. Or by the study of theology. Or comparative relgion. Jesus lives on the other side of reason.

How do we get there, to the other side of reason? Ask for faith–faith: the first of the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

We have what we need

Saint Basil’s definition of sin–I’ve italicized it below–cuts through the opacity of scientific jargon. Humanity is created in the image and likeness of God. We bear his law written in our hearts. Any manipulation of human gender and/or mind and/or preborn life is nothing other than sin.

���First, let me say that we have already received from God the ability to fulfill all his commands. We have then no reason to resent them, as if something beyond our capacity were being asked of us. We have no reason either to be angry, as if we had to pay back more than we had received. When we use this ability in a right and fitting way, we lead a life of virtue and holiness. But if we misuse it, we fall into sin.

This is the definition of sin: the misuse of powers given us by God for doing good, a use contrary to God���s commands. On the other hand, the virtue that God asks of us is the use of the same powers based on a good conscience in accordance with God���s command.

Since this is so, we can say the same about love. Since we received a command to love God, we possess from the first moment of our existence an innate power and ability to love. The proof of this is not to be sought outside ourselves, but each one can learn this from himself and in himself.”

Saint Basil

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Who Is This God?

“Truly, this man was the son of God.” Painting by Clark Kelly Price: Used with permission.

Who is this god?

The centurion had watched the spectacle of Pilate and Jesus in the praetorium since early morning. He despised these Jews and their wretched relgious gymnastics. And had hated every interminable moment of his three-year assignment in this eerily beautiful city, Jerusalem. The centurion had trained for war, not babysitting.

But he’d heard and seen things happen around Jesus– things defying explanation. Like the story of Lazarus rising from the dead in Bethany. He’d not been there but men he trusted had. The three soldiers came back to the quarters that night and could speak of nothing else.

Also, last year, the centurion had been returning from an uprising in the north to Jerusalem with his soldiers. They stopped at Jericho to allow Jesus, who had left Jerusalem and was followed by the throng that always accompanied him, pass by. They heard the blind man begging. Everyone knew him, Bartimaeus, for he was always there, by the ruined gates, begging. When the blind man shouted, “Son of David, have pity on me!” Several of the people surrounding Jesus tried to quiet him. But Bartimaeus just shouted again, louder, “Son of David, have pity on me!”

And then Jesus stopped. And said, “Call him.”

Obviously incredulous, two of Jesus’ associates went over to where Bartimaeus sat and said, “He is calling you.” Instantly, Bartimaeus threw aside his cloak and went to stand in front of Jesus who asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said, “Rabbi, I want to see.” Then Jesus merely said, “Go, your faith has healed you.” Instantly his sight was restored and he joined the crowd of followers.

Now, as he stood watching, these and other suppressed memories surfaced. He pitied Pontius Pilate, so clearly stupefied that after Jesus’ horrific scourging, the Jews demanded crucifxion. Pilate’s questions weren’t answered with reason but with hatred.

“What has he done?”

Finally, it was over.

Trained since a boy in the writings of Epictecus, the centurion knew pain. Like all soldiers, he was a trained killer, had taken many and almost lost his own life countless times. But he was aghast at what he saw. The man Jesus was clothed in blood, from the crown of his head down to the soles of his feet.

Finally, Pontius Pilate submitted to Caiphas and his incited mob. Reluctantly, he handed Jesus over to the crucifixion team. These men weren’t Roman soldiers, the centurion thought, for the one hundredth time since he’d witnessed the gruesome torture. They’re mercenaries, no legionary would behave like these brutes. In wonder, he thought, Those thorns…they had to be over three centimeters long. ..piercing his eyes, ears, his entire skull.

Although he wanted to leave, the centurion couldn’t. Instead, he followed the bleeding, dying man, crushed under the weight of the crossbeam. He watched him fall, then fall again and then again. Knowing better than to do it, he rushed forward to stop the kicking and beating of Jesus as he lay crushed in the dirt. When, abruptly he was stopped. It felt like he’d run into a wall. He staggered and looked around for the soldiers who’d managed to immobilize him. But they took no notice of him, they were busy torturing Jesus. When the centurion’s gaze met that of Jesus’ blood-filled eyes, he realized, He wills this!!

The thought stood tall in the centurion’s mind: Jesus wants to be crucified!

When Jesus was raised up by the soldiers and his crossbeam affixed to the waiting pole, the sky darkened ominously. Then, when lightning bolts hit the ground followed by the earth shaking and renting the Temple with a loud crack, the centurion was unsurprised. The heavens keened in horror.

At Pilate’s insistence, a plaque inscribed with Jesus, King of the Jews in Hebrew, Latin and Greek was affixed to the crossbeam over Jesus’ head. The letters seemed to pulse in the darkness.

The centurion heard Jesus shout as the soldiers raised him up, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!” The words echoed through the winds, seemed to drill themselves into his brain. Forgive us, forgive me.

And then he noticed a woman and a man standing at the foot of the cross as Jesus died. Without even thinking, the centurion strode over and slid his lance into Jesus’s side. As the flood of blood and water gushed out, he fell to his knees.

Who is this god? he thought. Then, “Surely, this is the Son of God!”

Tradition calls him

Longinus. The church honors him so greatly that Bernini’s marble statue of Saint Longinus is displayed in the Vatican crossing of Saint Peter’s. And carefully guards a piece of the lance that pierced the heart of Jesus.

Vatican canon holding relic of the lance that pierced the side of Christ-EWTN

Each year, we read about this nameless centurion who plunged his lance into the side of the dead Jesus. Who, upon releasing the torrent of blood and water, fell to his knees and cried out, “Truly, this man was the son of God.”

Artist Clark Kelly Price‘s magnificent painting details how it happened. Looking at the portentous sky, apocalyptic earthquake, gale-force winds and lighning strikes surrounding the crucified Jesus, impels us to immerse ourselves into the Roman soldier’s mind precisely like I did. We sense the soldier’s abrupt Stop! One that seems directed, even commanded. The rigid tension in the soldier radiates to his horse, who paws the ground nervously. The thunderous claps emanating from the angry heavens are audible.

He’d have seen Jesus and the healings. And like us, would have worked hard to deny what he saw with his own eyes. Explain away all the miracles— of course there’s no such thing!

But when he looked up at Jesus on that cross, might he have begged? Like Bartamaeus?

Lord, I want to SEE!

Could he have perceived just one atom of the Love that hung there?

A love for humanity never before seen?

Such an overwhelming love that it set his heart on fire.

Our Easter command: Go and make disciples of them all?

Circumcise our hearts

But later, as the Eleven were at table, he appeared to them
and rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart
because they had not believed those
who saw him after he had been raised.
He said to them, ���Go into the whole world
and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.���

Gospel Mk 16:9-15

The post Who Is This God? appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

Who is this god?

“Truly, this man was the son of God.” Painting by Clark Kelly Price: Used with permission.

Who is this god?

The centurion had watched the spectacle of Pilate and Jesus in the praetorium since early morning. He despised these Jews and their wretched relgious gymnastics. And had hated every interminable moment of his three-year assignment in this eerily beautiful city, Jerusalem. The centurion had trained for war, not babysitting.

But he’d heard and seen things happen around Jesus– things defying explanation. Like the story of Lazarus rising from the dead in Bethany. He’d not been there but men he trusted had. The three soldiers came back to the quarters that night and could speak of nothing else.

Also, last year, the centurion had been returning from an uprising in the north to Jerusalem with his soldiers. They stopped at Jericho to allow Jesus, who had left Jerusalem and was followed by the throng that always accompanied him, pass by. They heard the blind man begging. Everyone knew him, Bartimaeus, for he was always there, by the ruined gates, begging. When the blind man shouted, “Son of David, have pity on me!” Several of the people surrounding Jesus tried to quiet him. But Bartimaeus just shouted again, louder, “Son of David, have pity on me!”

And then Jesus stopped. And said, “Call him.”

Obviously incredulous, two of Jesus’ associates went over to where Bartimaeus sat and said, “He is calling you.” Instantly, Bartimaeus threw aside his cloak and went to stand in front of Jesus who asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said, “Rabbi, I want to see.” Then Jesus merely said, “Go, your faith has healed you.” Instantly his sight was restored and he joined the crowd of followers.

Now, as he stood watching, these and other suppressed memories surfaced. He pitied Pontius Pilate, so clearly stupefied that after Jesus’ horrific scourging, the Jews demanded crucifxion. Pilate’s questions weren’t answered with reason but with hatred.

“What has he done?”

Finally, it was over.

Trained since a boy in the writings of Epictecus, the centurion knew pain. Like all soldiers, he was a trained killer, had taken many and almost lost his own life countless times. But he was aghast at what he saw. The man Jesus was clothed in blood, from the crown of his head down to the soles of his feet.

Finally, Pontius Pilate submitted to Caiphas and his incited mob. Reluctantly, he handed Jesus over to the crucifixion team. These men weren’t Roman soldiers, the centurion thought, for the one hundredth time since he’d witnessed the gruesome torture. They’re mercenaries, no legionary would behave like these brutes. In wonder, he thought, Those thorns…they had to be over three centimeters long. ..piercing his eyes, ears, his entire skull.

Although he wanted to leave, the centurion couldn’t. Instead, he followed the bleeding, dying man, crushed under the weight of the crossbeam. He watched him fall, then fall again and then again. Knowing better than to do it, he rushed forward to stop the kicking and beating of Jesus as he lay crushed in the dirt. When, abruptly he was stopped. It felt like he’d run into a wall. He staggered and looked around for the soldiers who’d managed to immobilize him. But they took no notice of him, they were busy torturing Jesus. When the centurion’s gaze met that of Jesus’ blood-filled eyes, he realized, He wills this!!

The thought stood tall in the centurion’s mind: Jesus wants to be crucified!

When Jesus was raised up by the soldiers and his crossbeam affixed to the waiting pole, the sky darkened ominously. Then, when lightning bolts hit the ground followed by the earth shaking and renting the Temple with a loud crack, the centurion was unsurprised. The heavens keened in horror.

At Pilate’s insistence, a plaque inscribed with Jesus, King of the Jews in Hebrew, Latin and Greek was affixed to the crossbeam over Jesus’ head. The letters seemed to pulse in the darkness.

The centurion heard Jesus shout as the soldiers raised him up, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!” The words echoed through the winds, seemed to drill themselves into his brain. Forgive us, forgive me.

And then he noticed a woman and a man standing at the foot of the cross as Jesus died. Without even thinking, the centurion strode over and slid his lance into Jesus’s side. As the flood of blood and water gushed out, he fell to his knees.

Who is this god? he thought. Then, “Surely, this is the Son of God!”

Tradition calls him

Longinus. The church honors him so greatly that Bernini’s marble statue of Saint Longinus is displayed in the Vatican crossing of Saint Peter’s. And carefully guards a piece of the lance that pierced the heart of Jesus.

Vatican canon holding relic of the lance that pierced the side of Christ-EWTN

Each year, we read about this nameless centurion who plunged his lance into the side of the dead Jesus. Who, upon releasing the torrent of blood and water, fell to his knees and cried out, “Truly, this man was the son of God.”

Artist Clark Kelly Price‘s magnificent painting details how it happened. Looking at the portentous sky, apocalyptic earthquake, gale-force winds and lighning strikes surrounding the crucified Jesus, impels us to immerse ourselves into the Roman soldier’s mind precisely like I did. We sense the soldier’s abrupt Stop! One that seems directed, even commanded. The rigid tension in the soldier radiates to his horse, who paws the ground nervously. The thunderous claps emanating from the angry heavens are audible.

He’d have seen Jesus and the healings. And like us, would have worked hard to deny what he saw with his own eyes. Explain away all the miracles— of course there’s no such thing!

But when he looked up at Jesus on that cross, might he have begged? Like Bartamaeus?

Lord, I want to SEE!

Could he have perceived just one atom of the Love that hung there?

A love for humanity never before seen?

Such an overwhelming love that it set his heart on fire.

Our Easter command: Go and make disciples of them all?

Circumcise our hearts

But later, as the Eleven were at table, he appeared to them
and rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart
because they had not believed those
who saw him after he had been raised.
He said to them, ���Go into the whole world
and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.���

Gospel Mk 16:9-15

The post Who is this god? appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

Holy Saturday: The Anguish of an Absence

Dark underground hallway leads to a stone staircase illuminated by sunlight.Holy Saturday: the anguish of an absence

…Holy Saturday: the day God was buried; is not this the day we are living now, and formidably so? Did not our century mark the start of one long Holy Saturday, the day God was absent, when even the hearts of the disciples were plunged into an icy chasm that grows wider and wider, and thus, filled with shame and anguish, they set out to go home, dark-spirited and annihilated in their desperation they head for Emmaus, without realizing that he whom they believed to be dead is in their midst?

God is dead and we killed him: are we really aware that this phrase is taken almost literally from Christian tradition and that often in our Viae Crucis we have made something similar resound without realizing the tremendous gravity of what we said?

We killed him, by enclosing him in the stale shell of routine thinking, by exiling him in a form of pity with no content of reality, lost in the gyre of devotional phrases, or of archaeological treasuries; We killed him through the ambiguity of our lives which also laid a veil of darkness over him: in fact, what else would have been able to make God more problematical in this world than the problematical nature of the faith and of the love of his faithful? The divine darkness of this day, of this century which is increasingly becoming one long Holy Saturday, is speaking to our conscience. It is one of our concerns. But in spite of it all, it holds something of comfort for us. The death of God in Jesus Christ is at the same time the expression of his radical solidarity with us. The most obscure mystery of the faith is at the same time the clearest sign of a hope without end.

And what is more: only through the failure of Holy Friday, only through the silence of death of Holy Saturday, were the disciples able to be led to an understanding of all that Jesus truly was and all that his message truly meant. God had to die for them so that he could truly live in them. The image they had formed of God, within which they had tried to hold him down, had to be destroyed so that through the rubble of the ruined house they might see the sky, him himself who remains, always, the infinitely greater. We need the silence of God to experience again the abyss of his greatness and the chasm of our nothingness which would grow wider and wider without him.

Four Meditations on Holy Saturday-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

The great silence

Monastics proclaim a great silence after their last meal and prayers. No word will be spoken until the first prayer the following morning. Sleeping, the monks place their trust in the Lord. Father Steve Grunow writes: …the great silence is not just a time of rest, of passivity, but the time where, while human labor ceases, God remains active and working, though unseen and most often unheard, speaking in the stillness with the eloquence of his Eternal Word. The monks rest, knowing that God in the great silence abides.”

Just so, we know that Jesus is far from passive today. Rather, before ascending to the Father, he descends to the silence of the tomb. In another of his magnificent meditations on this day Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:

“It was vital to defend the holy stupidity of the love of God who chose not to proclaim something powerful but to travel the road of powerlessness to send our dream of power to the gallows and defeat it from within.“

Four Meditations- Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

Imagine how our first parents feel when they hear his voice?

It’s a voice they could not have forgotten, is it not?

He who breathed life into them.

He who walked with them during the breezy time of the day.

What terror must have struck the heart of Adam!

Eve’s shame would have eclipsed all of humanity’s. She knew what we can barely glimpse: the irresistible essence of divinity. But these are the words they hear from Jesus when he breaks open their darkness and reopens the doors of paradise…

“Look at the spittle on my face, which I received because of you, in order to restore you to that first divine inbreathing at creation. See the blows on my cheeks, which I accepted in order to refashion your distorted form to my own image.

‘See the scourging of my back, which I accepted in order to disperse the load of your sins which was laid upon your back. See my hands nailed to the tree for a good purpose, for you, who stretched out your hand to the tree for an evil one.

`I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side, for you, who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side healed the pain of your side; my sleep will release you from your sleep in Hades; my sword has checked the sword which was turned against you.

‘But arise, let us go hence. The enemy brought you out of the land of paradise; I will reinstate you, no longer in paradise, but on the throne of heaven. I denied you the tree of life, which was a figure, but now I myself am united to you, I who am life. I posted the cherubim to guard you as they would slaves; now I make the cherubim worship you as they would God.”

The Resurrection: Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart

The dream of the Rood

This Jesus- this magnificent image of the resurrected Jesus conjures up the warrior I met in a poem known as The Dream of the Rood. The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet describes the Christ created by an Italian artist in the stained glass window high in the bell tower of the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart facing downtown Houston.

Written somewhere before the 9th century in a warring culture; in that respect very similar to our own.

Speaking as the tree upon which Christ is nailed, the tree describes Christ not as piteous or powerless. But as a warrior, as a hero striding forth to mount the tree-the cross.

On shoulders men bore me there, then fixed me on hill; 
fiends enough fastened me. Then saw I mankind’s Lord 
come with great courage when he would mount on me. 
Then dared I not against the Lord’s word 
bend or break, when I saw earth’s 
fields shake. All fiends 
I could have felled, but I stood fast. 
The young hero stripped himself–he, God Almighty– 
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows, 
bold before many, when he would loose mankind. 
I shook when that Man clasped me yet I dared not bend to
the earth, fall to the ground for fear; to stand fast was my duty.
A rood was I reared up, bore the rich King,
the Guardian of heaven; I dared not give in.
They drove me through with dark spikes, deep wounds could be seen upon
me, open envy-thrusts, yet not a one of them dared I harm.
They mocked us both together. I was bedrenched with blood
spilled from the side of the Man as he sent up his spirit.
On that mount I endured many agonies,
words of wrath, saw racked in pain
the God of hosts. Then a gloom fell
and clouds shrouded the corpse of the all-Wielder,
its shimmering sheen; a shadow went forth,
wan, under the clouds. Then all God’s creatures wept,
lamented the King’s fall: Christ was on the cross. …

The Dream of the Rood

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