Per Christum

Well, we have made it through the heart of the Church Year, and are liturgically now in Ordinary Time. I have to admit it: once Ordinary Time progresses into the late summer, I get a little tired of the season. I am ready for a change of color and a change of season. I yearn for the penitence of Lent, the magic of Christmas, or the joy of Easter.

But then again, I am ready for Ordinary Time now. I know it sounds weird, but I am glad we are in Ordinary Time. I have enjoyed using the beginning material in the Liturgy of the Hours for Lent, Easter, etc, but I am also excited about just getting back to the basic antiphons, prayers, and responsories of Ordinary Time for awhile (this may not make sense to those unfamiliar with the Liturgy of the Hours).

Of course, Ordinary Time is not meant to be a break from the Church Year. I remember growing up people would often take a summer vacation from church. Church attendance would thin out as people did other things on Sunday morning. We must resist this, because summer Ordinary Time is not meant to be a vacation from the mysteries of Christ’s life. Rather, the Church views Ordinary Time as “devoted to the mystery of Christ in all its aspects.” Many feasts and holy days fall within Ordinary Time, so there are still many chances to experience the things that make other seasons of the liturgical year so memorable.

So I wish everyone a blessed Ordinary Time!

I was thinking the other day about the reasons I became Catholic. I have been Catholic for almost four years now, and have been interested in liturgical Christianity since about 1999. One thing that attracted me to liturgical Christianity and Catholicism is how Trinitarian our life, worship, and theology really is.

Growing up, I was fascinated with the Trinity and took it upon myself to defend the deity of Christ against its critics (like Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc). When I returned to my faith in college, I once again became interested in the Trinity. However, in both evangelical settings I found that the Trinity was usually only mentioned when we started talking about apologetics or Christian distinctives. Our everyday worship and education was not overly Trinitarian, although the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all mentioned, although not really in an orthodox Trinitarian framework. It wasn’t that the references to the Father, Son, and Spirit were purposefully heretical, it is just that often the three persons were not connected in any meaningful fashion. The Trinity was especially absent at the “contemporary” church I attended in college. There was no Trinitarian Creed, no Trinitarian hymns, no Church Year, no real catechesis about the Trinity beyond what may have come up in Bible Study, and no prayers that ended with …”who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God…” Perhaps a sermon or two throughout the year might mention the Trinity, but you couldn’t even count on that. Had you asked the leaders of that church if the Trinity was important, they would have said, “Oh, of course!” However, you wouldn’t have known it from the worship.

When I began studying Catholicism and Orthodoxy I found two Churches that were immersed in Trinitarian theology, that not only helped formulate the doctrine at Nicaea, but that also looked to the Trinity to shape their ethics and practices. Even the most basic Catholic/Orthodox prayer, the sign of the cross, was deeply Trinitarian. Upon attending liturgical services for the first time, I remember thinking, “wow, this is very Trinitarian!”

Today is Pentecost in the Western Church, and also happens to be Mother’s Day in the U.S. I would suspect that in many evangelical churches, the latter is more celebrated (despite being a secular holiday). Even though I think in liturgical settings the Church calendar should take precedence over secular holidays, I have nothing against Mother’s Day, and will be celebrating it by taking my mother out.

That Pentecost and Mother’s Day fall on the same day this year got me thinking about how celebrating Pentecost is really celebrating a type of motherhood. After all, the birthday of the Church at Pentecost is the celebration of the founding of the Church, the body of Christ, and our symbolic mother. There is a long-held Christian tradition that the Church is our mother. St. Cyprian (3rd century) suggested that we cannot have God as our Father unless we have the Church as our mother. In other words, it is impossible to separate God from the community of believers that he established. The Catechism speaks to Church as mother too:

Salvation comes from God alone; but because we receive the life of faith through the Church, she is our mother: “We believe the Church as the mother of our new birth, and not in the Church as if she were the author of our salvation.” Because she is our mother, she is also our teacher in the faith (169).

The Church, “the pillar and bulwark of the truth”, faithfully guards “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints”. She guards the memory of Christ’s words; it is she who from generation to generation hands on the apostles’ confession of faith. As a mother who teaches her children to speak and so to understand and communicate, the Church our Mother teaches us the language of faith in order to introduce us to the understanding and the life of faith (171).

Catholics also understand that Mary, the mother of our Lord, is a symbol of the Church as mother. The Catechism states it like this:

At once virgin and mother, Mary is the symbol and the most perfect realization of the Church: “the Church indeed. . . by receiving the word of God in faith becomes herself a mother. By preaching and Baptism she brings forth sons, who are conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of God, to a new and immortal life. She herself is a virgin, who keeps in its entirety and purity the faith she pledged to her spouse” (507).

As the mother of God, Mary is also our mother as well, which the Catechism addresses:

“Mary is “blessed among women” because she believed in the fulfillment of the Lord’s word. Abraham. because of his faith, became a blessing for all the nations of the earth. Mary, because of her faith, became the mother of believers, through whom all nations of the earth receive him who is God’s own blessing: Jesus, the “fruit of thy womb.”

Thus, Catholics have a rather full understanding of motherhood that includes, but goes beyond mere earthly motherhood. The Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Church (itself functioning in faith and humility as did the Virgin Mary), function as mothers to us. So this year, while certainly not forgetting your biological (or adopted) mothers, remember your spiritual mothers as well, the Church, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Give thanks to the Church, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and your earthly mother, for their prayers, guidance, patience, and love!

Today is the Solemnity of the Ascension, at least in many parts of the Catholic world. Some dioceses (including most in the U.S.) translate the feast to the following Sunday, and our Orthodox brothers and sisters on the Julian calendar celebrate it later in the year, since they just recently celebrated Easter.

The Ascension feast was highly symbolic to me when I began reading the Church Fathers and discovering the Church Year in college. Along with the Epiphany, the Feast of the Ascension was a thoroughly biblical holiday that I hadn’t celebrated as an evangelical Christian. It became a symbol to me of the incompleteness of the evangelical church year, which in my experience at the time (in college), generally consisted only of Christmas and Easter (as days, and not seasons). Growing up, I remember observing an expanded church year, celebrating Advent and (sometimes) Lent.

When I began researching the Ascension feast, I discovered that the Ascension was very important in early Christian theology, and it was regularly portrayed in art. In fact, the lion (Jesus) conquering the dragon (Satan) is a symbol of the ascension in early Christian artwork. As a part of the paschal mystery, along with the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Ascension constitutes an important part of the mystery of our salvation. This holiday gives us a chance to reflect on this important part of Christian theology.

I want to note that it was around the time I was discovering the Ascension feast that I encountered criticisms of the biblical ascension, e.g. claims that the Ascension was based on outdated science, which pictured the universe as three-tiered, Hades below, heaven above, and earth in between, literally. C.S. Lewis and others have addressed this concern, reminding us that whatever cosmology the biblical writers may have had, the Ascension event was supernatural, but had to be rendered in natural language. Thus, even if the biblical writers did conceive of Jesus going “up” to heaven (either based on what they observed, their cosmology, or both) this is not to say Jesus is still floating in space somewhere!

Image: “Ascension” by Giotto

…to our Eastern brothers and sisters who observe Easter on the Julian calendar. Holy Week for many Eastern Christians began yesterday, on Palm Sunday, or as it is often called in the East, “Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem.” For those of us who use the Gregorian calendar, we are currently in the fifth week of Easter. I pray that one day East and West might agree on the date of Easter and that we would be one, as our Lord prayed.

Even though most of us Westerners tend to naturally make a huge deal about Christmas (for good reason!), sometimes we can forget that Easter is a very important feast and Church season too. In fact, technically, it is Easter that is the high point of the liturgical year, not Christmas. Of course, Christmas and Easter are not in competition, and are on the same team, since both celebrate important components of the mystery of our redemption by Christ.

Have a look at what the General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar says about Easter and the Easter season:

- The fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost are celebrated in joyful exultation as one feast day, or better as one “great Sunday.” These above all others are the days for the singing of the Alleluia.

- The Sundays of this season rank as the paschal Sundays and, after Easter Sunday itself, are called the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Sundays of Easter. The period of fifty sacred days ends on Pentecost Sunday.

- The first eight days of the Easter season make up the octave of Easter and are celebrated as solemnities of the Lord.

- On the fortieth day after Easter the Ascension is celebrated, except in places where, not being a holy day of obligation, it has been transferred to the Seventh Sunday of Easter

- The weekdays after the Ascension until the Saturday before Pentecost inclusive are a preparation for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

As you can see, Easter is a very important time in the liturgical year. In fact, every day of the Octave of Easter (today included) is celebrated as a solemnity. So, enjoy the Easter season. Feast. Celebrate. Yell out those “Alleluias” at Mass and during Morning and Evening Prayer with gusto, and celebrate the resurrection of Christ like…well…like it’s Christmas!

“Easter Lights” image from christmas-decorations-gifts-store.com

Blessed Francesco Faà di Bruno
1825-1888

Blessed Maddalena Caterina Morano
1847-1908

Ok, I grant that a number of non-Catholics go out of the way to call the holiday “Resurrection Sunday“  a few seem to have gravitated towards calling it “Pascha” like Eastern Christians do…  Some of them dislike the term “Easter” wrongly thinking it connotes paganism. (Taylor Marshall has the 411 on that with today’s entry Why is the festival of Christ’s Resurrection called Easter? - it is about as “pagan” to use the term “Easter” as it is “Thursday” or “January” or “Sunday“[!] for that matter!)

Read the rest of this entry »

A great site that is new to me is called Catholic Calendar. Among other things, it has a succinct daily summary of the liturgical calendar with the readings and mysteries of the Rosary. 

Very cool.

H/T: Heckling Soul

from www.vatican.va: “The Servant of God Fr Emilian Kovch was born on 20 August 1884, near Kosiv. In 1911, after graduating from the College of Sts Sergius and Bacchus in Rome, he was ordained to the priesthood. In the spring of 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo for aiding Jews. On 25 March 1944 he was burned to death in the ovens of the Majdanek Nazi death camp. On 9 September 1999 he was honoured with the title “Righteous Ukrainian” by the Jewish Council of Ukraine.”

Blessed Maria Karlowska, 1865-1935

Foundress of the Good Shepherd Sisters, she worked for the moral and social rehabilitation of prostitutes, and cared for those suffering from venereal diseases.

She is an intercessor for our times.

(Resurrection by Piero della Francesca)

Christ is risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

And this will be the last of my Holy Week/Easter reflections, so for those of you who may have been annoyed by them, that’s one more reason to rejoice!

At the Easter Vigil last night I thought back over the accounts of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, his passion and his resurrection. I thought about the different people I identified with: the crowds whose shouts of “hosanna” soon turn to cries of “crucify him”, the spineless Pilate who has an innocent man beaten and crucified out of fear of those above and below him, the despairing traitor Judas, the repentant denier Peter, the awed solider who proclaims “surely, this was the Son of God, the hopeless disciples hiding behind locked doors while the Lord is in the tomb and the joyful women who hear the angel say “he is not here for his is risen.”

Placing myself in those scenes, I identify with all of the above. I realized, however, that it’s not any of those people that the Scriptures invite us to walk the road of Holy Week with. We, by grace, are invited to walk this path with Christ himself.

Those of us who are Christians know, as Christ did, that when he enters Jerusalem he is headed for a cross not an earthly throne. With Christ we know which diners at the table in the upper room will deny and betray him. We know the contents of the cup he is about to drink as he enters the garden to pray. We know that he will not receive justice from his own people or from Pilate. We know as he cries “it is finished” that this is not the end. We know what those who come to the tomb on Easter morning will find.

This is what it means to be a Christan: to be made an heir with Christ and to be adopted as sons and daughters of God receiving by grace what Christ has by nature. The first Adam fell into a grave and took us with him, but the second Adam descended into that grave and rose again, bringing us out.

Christ is risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Happy Easter to all contributors and readers. May God richly bless all of you during this Eastertide.

Christ is Risen!!

Blessed Metod Dominik Trčka, 1886-1959

Succumbed to pneumonia on this date back in 1959 in a Czechoslovakian prison. Illness was contracted when confined to solitary confinement as punishment for singing a Christmas carol. See also my favorite photo of him - Blessed Metod Dominik Trčka in a horse-drawn cart.

Blessed Metod, pray for us!