Integrity

St. John Cantius

St John Cantius is a paradox to me. Everyone tells me that I should love the place. You love the liturgy, you will love St John Cantius. You love sung liturgies, you will love St John Cantius. You love Latin, you will love St John Cantius. And so on.

I have been there twice now.  It has been a lousy experience both times. Last week, I left the celebration of Tenebrae early it was that bad. And I have pinpointed the problem. The choir. Not the Latin. Not the chant. The choir. There is nothing that turns me off more than a choir that sings a polyphonic setting that I can neither understand what they are saying nor dare participate. It was no doubt beautiful. But it was not prayerful. Maybe the fault rests with me, but I would seriously like to know how people overcome the distraction. I have participated in sung liturgies before, of several rites and in a number of languages. I have never had this problem before and, upon reflection, all of them had in common the fact that their music was participatory or at least capable of it.

I would really love to hear from some who go to St John Cantius.  Tell me how you or others deal with this. Spare me abstract defenses of polyphony or the traditional liturgy. You are talking to someone who is favorably disposed to all of that. I went to St John Cantius because of its treasures. But how does it become prayerful?  Because twice now I have gone and it has not been. It became a concert. And I struggled tonight to avoid that. 

I hope someone from St John Cantius or who loves the traditional Latin mass can read this and understand what I am identifying and speak to my real need expressed above. I don't think I am alone in my experience and that this is my stumbling block with the way the extraordinary form is celebrated in many places.   All screeds about the pitiful state of folk music in the ordinary form of the liturgy will be deleted. I'm not pining for a guitar mass. I am genuinely asking where that line is between beautiful, mystical musical prayer and a concert?  And if it primarily rests in the way one approaches the mass and one's participation in it, what am I not getting?

Learning Through Fraternity

As anyone vaguely familiar with this blog knows, for about a year and a quarter now I have been involved in the Communion and Liberation movement.  It has been quite a ride.  Over the years, I have been involved in many organizations that form part of the life of the Church.  But this is the first time where I have felt that I was most definitely caught up in a charism, that of another, of a people, and possibly my own.

As a result, one of the things that I have tried to do recently is take more seriously the methods that CL proposes to us for growing in the faith, to embrace more deeply the charism.  One such method, is the Fraternity, where adults who have formally acknowledged their adherence to the charism gather to share their lives and to help each other judge our daily events.  I'm not a member of the Fraternity, and truthfully don't plan on being one for some time longer (to verify that this is truly the way I am called to live out the Catholic faith before I make a deeper commitment).  Nevertheless, at the invitation of a friend, I have been meeting with three others as a Fraternity group.  We've been spending time together, talking about our lives and helping each other face the questions that we are asking about our experiences.  We've been using the text of the Spiritual Exercises from last year as our backdrop.

It was within this context that I think I made a very important discovery for myself.  Now, some of you may read what follows and think, "I could have told him that!"  The discovery, though, isn't the fact but the application of it to my life.  So often we don't truly appropriate what the Church teaches, making it our own and allowing it to move and change us.  Sure, we might give the gloss of having done so, but quite often that's all it is.

I had been going through some difficult times with changes at work and an incredibly busy schedule.  (I'll spare you the details, but also in my effort to maintain what semblance of pseudonymity remains for this blog.)  I was experiencing a real loss of hope.  As it happens, we were studying at the time a part of the Exercises that was speaking to this very experience.  In that section, Fr. Carron emphasized how hope needs a great grace to be sustained and that grace is the encounter with Christ.  But rather than a single moment, a past thing, the encounter with Christ that we have experienced is also a path that we are to follow.  In other words, we must return again and again and look upon this grace for hope to be sustained.  Later in the week, several of us went to the Divine Liturgy at a Byzantine Catholic parish.  I love their liturgy so much.  But this time I was struck powerfully by how much their prayer resounds with begging for God's mercy.  The Kyrie appears throughout, not just at the beginning.  Their prayer in preparation for receiving the Eucharist is drawn from St. Dismas' prayer -- if ever there was a prayer that reflecting the notion of begging -- "Remember me, O Lord, when you enter your Kingdom".  It drove home for me something that I had forgotten:  the Mass is my prayer.  The Sacraments are a place where I encounter the Lord again and again.

Together, all of that has motivated me to start attending daily Mass, as best as I can.  Not out of a sense of obligation, but the exact opposite.  Out of a need to encounter Christ again and again and a recognition that what I desire out of life is not possible without resting within His grace.

As I said, many might read this and wonder why it took all that for me to recognize the merits of being a daily communicant.  But I hope it might give a flavor for how a charism like CL's might lead one on the journey that is our life in Christ.

(Next time, I'll return to complete the series on "Parishes vs. Movements?".)

Joseph As Model For The Laity

Yesterday, I shared a quote from the Council fathers presenting Mary as a model for the laity.  Of course, her husband, Saint Joseph, also is a wonderful model for the laity.

It is one of my laments that St. Joseph seems to be overlooked in Catholic piety.  (Although I would piously speculate that a man so devoted to the Blessed Mother and the Christ-child would have it no other way.)   So, upon my recent visit to Annunciation Byzantine Catholic Parish, I was excited to see that the Icon of the Nativity of the Lord included this scene depicting St. Joseph.  I'm told that the scene is of a story passed down from Tradition.  St. Joseph, sitting on a rock, has a troubled look on his face.  The hunched over old man before him is Satan, tempting St. Joseph to doubt the virgin birth of Jesus, telling him that it is impossible and that he would be a fool to believe it.

I find the Icon helpful because it begs the question of St. Joseph's importance:  why would Satan target him?  It makes it impossible for me to think of St. Joseph as merely a bystander to the Mystery of the Incarnation, rather than one who participated in it in a way more unique than anyone other than the Mother of God.  It also seems quite fitting, given the title of St. Joseph that Pope John Paul II chose for the name of his exhortation on this saint.  For the depicted scene would have occurred shortly after the Annunciation.  I think it is reasonable to surmise that Satan works mightily to oppose God every step of the way through the history of salvation.  Preventing the Incarnation itself no longer being an option, it seems only fitting that he would target the Guardian of the Redeemer.

If you never have, I highly recommend reading Pope John Paul II's exhortation,  Guardian of the Redeemer.  Many -- St. Escriva, St. Therese and the Carmelites and Pope JP II to name a few -- have offered St. Joseph as the master of the interior life and as a wise teacher for the rest of us. 

 

Mary As Model For the Laity

From The Decree On The Apostolate Of The Laity:

"Perfect model of this apostolic spiritual life is the Blessed Virgin mary, Queen of Apostles.  While on earth her life was like that of any other, filled with labors and the cares of the home; always, however, she remained inimately united to her Son and cooperated in an entirely unique way in the Saviour's work."

The Apostleship of Praise

From The Everyday Apostle by Fr. Edward F. Gareshé

Another apostleship that Fr. Gareshé discusses is the Apostleship of Praise.   Fr. Gareshé begins by distinguishing this apostleship with the Apostleship of Encouragement (which we discussed in a previous post).  Encouragement does not necessarily require praise; but it is difficult to praise in the manner Fr. Gareshé desires without providing encouragement.

Praise is something that we deal with in our practical daily lives.  This is important to recognize.  One of the great things about Fr. Gareshé's reflections is that they do not live in the abstract.  We daily are involved in the giving and receiving of praise (and its opposite, blame).  In fact, if you are like me, I think honesty requires that we say we find it hard to resist making such judgments.  And these judgments have influence. 

God Is

Today's reflection from Pope Benedict's work, Co-Workers Of The Truth  (do click through to read the whole thing):

"God is. Christian Faith adds here that God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- three Persons in one God.  Among Christians, an embarrassed silence frequently greets any reference to this central tenet of their Faith.  Has the Church perhaps gone too far in this instance?  Would it not be better simply to leave something so great, so incomprehensible, to its incomprehensibility?  Can such a statement really be meaningful for us? 

Tributes to Pope John Paul II

This John Sherffius cartoon tribute to Pope John Paul II is tremendous.  (Hat tip to Jeffrey Lloyd.)

Holy Spirit As Air

Today's reflection from Pope Benedict's work, Co-Workers Of The Truth:

"The Holy Spirit is most frequently depicted under one of two main images:  that of a strong wind and that of fire.  But in the image of the strong wind there is concealed a second concept.  The Spirit is likewise the expression of one of the four life-sustaining elements:  the element of air.  What this mysterious element of air means for biological life, that the Holy One, the Holy Spirit, is for every spirit.  Where he breathes, human life can begin, humanity can exist, God can really dwell.

Possibility

From Luigi Giussani's, The Religious Sense:

"Hamlet, in Shakespeare, says: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'  There will always be more things in heaven and on earth -- that is in reality -- than in our perception and conception of reality -- that is to say in philosophy.  For this reason, philosophy must possess the profound humility to be a wide open attempt, earnestly seeking adjustment, completion, and correction; it must be dominated by the category of possibility.  And if this is missing, philosophy cannot advance because the next step is already predetermined by a project of those in power or a project serving one's own interests.  In fact, an ideological society tends to put a freeze on every true search.  Such a society uses power as an instrument to contain such research within certain limits of realization and expression. A dictatorship is never concerned that research regarding man be free research because it is the most dangerous limit to power; it is a potentially uncontrollable source of opposition.  Whenever the humble sense of human thought's essential reformability is not understood, a metamorphosis is ushered in:  philosophy becomes ideology."

How Jesus Christ Entered My Life

Yesterday, I mentioned one of our Holy Father's probably overlooked works, Co-Workers of the Truth, a compilation of his writings prepared as meditations for each day of the year.  So I decided to pull the book down from the shelf and see what our Holy Father had to say for this first full day of his papacy, April 20th:

"How Jesus Christ entered my life:  I met him first, not in literature or philosophy, but in the faith of the Church.  That means that from the beginning he was not, for me, an important figure of the past (like Plato or Thomas Aquinas, for example), but someone who  lives and works today, someone who we can meet today.  It means above all, that I have learned to know him within the history of the Faith that originates in him, to see him as faith sees him in its most enduring formulation by the Council of Chalcedon.  In my opinion, Chalcedon is a great and most courageous reduction of an extremely complex and multilayered fund of Tradition to a single, central and fundamental statement:  Son of God, possessed of one nature with God and one nature with us.  In contrast to the many other possibilities that have been broached in the course of history, Chalcedon interpreted Jesus theologically; I regard that as the only interpretation that can do justice to the whole spectrum of Tradition and can bear the full implications of the phenomenon.  Every other interpretation is, in some way, too restricted; every other concept includes one part of the truth and excludes another.  Here and here alone, is the whole truth revealed.  Ultimately, everything else derives from this interpretation.  First of all that Jesus and the Church are, for me, as impossible to separate as they are impossible to identify one with the other.  Jesus is always infinitely transcendent to the Church.  It was not through Vatican Council II that we first learned that, as Lord of the Church, he is also her standard.  I have always regarded this truth as both consolation and challenge.  As consolation because we have always known that the scrupulosity of the rubricists and the legalists does not have its source in Jesus, in that infinite magnanimity that comes to us from the words of the Gospels like a fresh breeze and collapses all excessive literalness like a house of cards.  We have always known that nearness to him is a totally independent of the ecclesiastical rank one may hold as of one's knowledge of juridical and historical details.  That has enabled me to look upon external details with a corresponding ease of mind.  To that extent, the person of Jesus has always been for me a source of optimism and liberation.  On the other hand, I have never been able to ignore the fact that, in many respects, he asks more of me than the Church would ever dare to ask, that the radicalism of his words can be equated only with the kind of radicalism displayed by Anthony, the Desert Father, and Francis of Assisi in their wholly literal acceptance of the Gospel.  If we do not do that, we have already taken refuge in casuistry, and cannot escape the corroding restlessness, the knowledge, that, like the rich young man, we have turned away when we should have taken seriously the words of the Gospel."