Good Infection

Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book IV, Chapter IV, “Good Infection”

The Venerable Bede on All Saints

Dearly beloved: Today we keep holy-day, with one great cry of joy, in memory of all the Saints; whose presence is a gladness to heaven; whose prayers are a blessing to earth; whose victories are the crown of holy Church; whose testimony is now to be honored in proportion to the glory imparted to it by the agony which was endured in the giving of it. For the greater the torment, the richer the reward; and the fiercer the battle, the brighter the glory of the fighters whose triumph in martyrdom was in this wise adorned with more sufferings.

Our mother the Catholic Church, which is spread far and wide throughout all this planet, hath learnt, from Christ Jesus her Head, to fear neither shame nor cross nor death, but to increase in strength by enduring suffering rather than by resisting it. Therefore she was able to breathe into each one of that noble band, which persevered under condemnation to suffering, a spirit of courage like unto her own, even the hope of conquest and glory, whereby they were invigorated to persevere manfully in conflict unto the very end. O truly blessed Mother Church, whom God’s mercy doth so illumine! Whom the glorious blood of victorious Martyrs doth adorn! Whom the inviolate virginity of so many pure souls doth clothe with raiment white and glistening! Neither roses nor lilies are wanting in thy garlands.

Therefore dearly beloved, let us each one of us strive to attain the goodly crown of one or the other of these dignities, either the glistening whiteness of chastity, or the red dye of suffering. In the heavenly army both peace and war have chaplets of their own, to crown Christ’s soldiers withal. Moreover, the unutterable and infinite goodness of God hath provided this, namely, that the time of working and wrestling is not over-long, much less everlasting, but as it were for a moment.

That is, only in this short and scanty life is there wrestling and working, but the crown and the prize endureth for a life which is eternal. The work is soon over, but the wage is paid for ever. And when the night of this world is ended, the Saints see the clearness of the essential light, and receive a blessedness outweighing the pangs of any torment, as testifieth the Apostle Paul: The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

– The Venerable Bede, Sermon 18 De sanctis

The plum you’re going to eat next summer

The plum you’re going to eat next summer
doesn’t exist yet; its potential
lives inside a tree you’ll never see
in an orchard you’ll never see, will be touched
by a certain number of water droplets
before it reaches you, by certain angles
of light, by a finite amount of bugs
and dust motes and hands
you’ll never know. The plum you are
going to eat next summer will gather
sugar, gather mass, will harden
at its center so it can soften toward
your mouth. The plum
you’re going to eat next
summer doesn’t know
you exist. The plum you are
going to eat next summer
is growing just for you.

~ Gayle Brandeis

On Liturgy

Liturgy is a most intimate facet of the Christian assemblies lived faith in Jesus Christ and a function of the presence of within it. The liturgy, like the Sabbath is not playing for the faithful assembly, but it sustained summons home to God in Christ. It is the fundamental way church stands before the father in Christ, filled with his spirit.

Aiden Cavanaugh, Elements of Rite, 7.

Robert Farrer Capon on Mothers

To be a mother is to be the sacrament-the effective symbol-of place. They do not make homes, they are our home: in the simple sense that we begin our days by a long sojourn within the body of a woman; in the extended sense that she remains our center of gravity through the years. She is the very diagram of belonging, the where in whose vicinity we are fed and watered, and have our wounds bound up and our nose is wiped. She is geography incarnate, with her breasts and her womb, her relative immobility, and her hands reaching up to us the fruitfulness of the earth.

Bed and Board p. 57

Lord, It Is Good for Us to Be Here

Upon Mount Tabor, Jesus revealed to His disciples a heavenly mystery. While living among them He had spoken of the kingdom and of His second coming in glory, but to banish from their hearts any possible doubt concerning the kingdom and to confirm their faith in what lay in the future by its prefiguration in the present, He gave them on Mount Tabor a wonderful vision of His glory, a foreshadowing of the kingdom of heaven. It was as if He said to them: “As time goes by you may be in danger of losing your faith. To save you from this I tell you now that some standing here listening to me will not taste death until they have seen the Son of Man coming in the glory of His Father.” Moreover, in order to assure us that Christ could command such power when He wished, the evangelist continues: “Six days later, Jesus took with Him Peter, James and John, and led them up a high mountain where they were alone. There, before their eyes, He was transfigured. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as light. Then the disciples saw Moses and Elijah appear, and they were talking to Jesus.”

These are the divine wonders we celebrate today; this is the saving revelation given us upon the mountain; this is the festival of Christ that has drawn us here. Let us listen, then, to the sacred voice of God so compellingly calling us from on high, from the summit of the mountain, so that with the Lord’s chosen disciples we may penetrate the deep meaning of these holy mysteries, so far beyond our capacity to express. Jesus goes before us to show us the way, both up the mountain and into heaven, and— I speak boldly— it is for us now to follow Him with all speed, yearning for the heavenly vision that will give us a share in His radiance, renew our spiritual nature and transform us into His own likeness, making us for ever sharers in His Godhead and raising us to heights as yet undreamed of.

Let us run with confidence and joy to enter into the cloud like Moses and Elijah, or like James and John. Let us be caught up like Peter to behold the divine vision and to be transfigured by that glorious transfiguration. Let us retire from the world, stand aloof from the earth, rise above the body, detach ourselves from creatures and turn to the creator, to whom Peter in ecstasy exclaimed: “Lord, it is good for us to be here.”

It is indeed good to be here, as you have said, Peter. It is good to be with Jesus and to remain here for ever. What greater happiness or higher honor could we have than to be with God, to be made like Him and to live in His light?

Therefore, since each of us possesses God in his heart and is being transformed into His divine image, we also should cry out with joy: It is good for us to be here – here where all things shine with divine radiance, where there is joy and gladness and exultation; where there is nothing in our hearts but peace, serenity and stillness; where God is seen. For here, in our hearts, Christ takes up His abode together with the Father, saying as He enters: “Today salvation has come to this house.” With Christ, our hearts receive all the wealth of His eternal blessings, and there where they are stored up for us in Him, we see reflected as in a mirror both the first fruits and the whole of the world to come.

 St. Anastasius of Sinai

Rowan Williams on the Transfiguration

The effect of hearing the story of Jesus’ transfiguration this morning — just before Lent — has the effect of framing the whole of Lent between two parallel stories. A story of Jesus going into a lonely mountainous place to pray, attended by his three closest friends: Peter; James; and John. A story in which Jesus, as He prays in solitude, enters into a mystery so great that His friends shrink from it and have no words for it. Because, you see, at the beginning of Lent we have that story of the transfiguration and at the end of Lent the story of Jesus going to pray alone in the garden of Gethsemane. The same story? Yes, but how very different. In both Jesus prays alone; in both there is a revelation of the Father; in both those three friends shrink in terror.

To frame the season of Lent in that way is to tell us that out Christian life is always, so to speak, lived between those two stories, between those two poles, those two moments of prayer and revelation. On the mountain of transfiguration, as the Gospel tells us, Peter, James and John see the veil lifted. They see, as it were, that behind and within the human flesh and blood of Jesus there is an unbearable light and glory: a radiance better than any light on earth. They see that His flesh and blood – though it is flesh and blood just like ours – is soaked through with that glory and brightness which is the work of God. They see that His human nature is shot through with God’s own freedom. And then at the other end of Lent they see that that radiance, that glory and brightness and liberty, is exercised and made real in accepting the pain of the cross for the love of humankind. They see that the blinding power of God is exercised not in crushing and controlling, but in the sacrifice of love. Perhaps it begins to make sense that we live between those two visions. We can’t understand the glorious brightness of God unless we see that God’s power and splendour is entirely focused on that sacrifice of love which sets us free and gives us life. And we can’t understand the darkness and the terror at the end of the story, at the end of Lent, unless we see that in the depths of that is the glory of God. And that, of course, is why St John, in his Gospel, again and again, refers to the crucifixion itself as Jesus being made glorious. The dazzling freedom of God, the total weakness of God, bound together, woven together, in one vision, in one person, in Jesus Christ.

 – Rowan Williams, Morning Sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, March 2, 2003

We Know All Things But the Truth

Step softly, under snow or rain,
    To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
    That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
    On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
    And we know all things but the truth.

We have gone round and round the hill
    And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And served the mad gods, naming still
    The furies the Eumenides.

The gods of violence took the veil
    Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
    And calls himself Eternity.

Go humbly…it has hailed and snowed…
    With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
    That we may stray from it.

The world grows terrible and white,
    And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
    And something much too plain to say.

The Child that was ere worlds begun
    (…We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone…)
The Child that played with moon and sun
    Is playing with a little hay.

The house from which the heavens are fed,
    The old strange house that is our own,
Where trick of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
    And Honour is as hard as stone.

Go humbly, humble are the skies,
    And low and large and fierce the Star;
So very near the Manger lies
    That we may travel far.

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
    To roar to the resounding plain.
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
    For God Himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
    Through the snow and rain.

G. K. Chesterton, The Wise Men

Education as Life

Education in the Church’s doctrines is not merely a matter of abstraction or learning, a kind of theological grammar. Salvation in Christ is not simply a matter of the mind or of checking off a list of the correct ideas. Education in the faith requires witness, testimony to one’s relationship with Christ and how one came to know, love, and serve him. This can be presented in words, but it most powerfully displays itself in a way of life that demonstrates how the revelatory truths of the faith expressed in doctrines are concretized in actions and activities. Education in the Church’s faith falters and fails if it is not rooted in an invitation to accept a unique way of life. If the teacher does not embody this way of life in Christ-like behaviors, then the risk is that the doctrines might be presented correctly, but the meaning and mysticism of those doctrines will be thwarted.

~ Fr. Stephen Grunnow, “A Word from the Institute,” Evangelization and Culture, Autumn 2023