I just had to re-post this fabulous song.
It's a remake of Mother Teresa's poetic meditation
on St Ignatius's principle of 'holy indifference'.
Also, I edited my Tree of Life post - I have been rushed
writing of late and make lots of sloppy mistakes. Ugh.
A blessed Feast! Pray for Catholic-Orthodox unity as
Orthodox reps are in Rome to honor the Petrine blood
that consecrated the papacy so long ago.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Tree of Life
My wife and I went to see Tree of Life last night. Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, et alia did a bang up job.
Let me tell you, it was quite an experience!
I don't want to go on too long about what I saw its meaning to be, or try to summarize the narrative. I will share a few thoughts that have not yet been touched by the no-doubt myriad commentaries already littering the Net.
Graceful Theology
It was thoroughly imbued with theological meaning. The opening quote from Job 38:4,7 framed the whole movie as a struggle with the problem of good and evil, of meaning and purpose, against the backdrop of God's providential care of all life. God created the terrifyingly vast universe, and is to be perceived in the beautiful, the tragic and the seemingly meaningless events of life.
One gets a sense that the film is an extended meditation on the tensions inherent in monotheism, that allows the main characters to wrestle with this God who presides over a universe with inscrutable wisdom.
Will and Grace
It was also a story about the dialectical tensions of 'nature and grace.'
There was a remarkable quote whispered by the wife/mother (Mrs. O'Brien) at the beginning of the movie:
The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it...The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.
She closes this ponderous discourse, evidently addressing 'grace', I will be true to you. Whatever comes.
An almost Marian phrase.
Harmony
The movie unfolds as a narrative of grace and nature struggling mightily to harmonize, to find their balance and symmetry. Ultimately it is a story of grace's unlikely, tragic triumph.
This tumultuous struggle was shown in the violent and strangely beautiful beginnings of creation, at the inception and evolution of life on earth, and above all in a marriage/family that stood at the epicenter of the film's nature-grace drama.
Disorienting
The sense of time in the movie was definitely non-linear, with past, present and future constantly interchanging. While this often made the storyline difficult to follow, it gave the movie a liturgical character where past, present and future intermingle, where time and eternity intersect. And as with salvation history, the apparent randomness of the ordering of events traced out a single story of great and rich depth.
The sense of space also followed time's disruptions, as the camera's eye traversed oceans and deserts, cities and galaxies, microbes and dinosaurs, trees and dining rooms, while always rhythmically returning to a fiery point of 'living light' that was (presumably) God. All of these spacial treks were ambled in erratic sequences. Here I found powerfully evoked the liturgy's power - via art, architecture, sacramentalized matter - to transform space and call into unity the whole cosmos at-once into a material symphony of God's creative-redemptive providence.
Near the end of the movie, at a key moment of 'redemption' for the main character, the chanting of the Agnus Dei, followed by a litanic Amen sealed that liturgic sense for me.
The movie felt more like a work of iconography. It was disorienting, but, for me, in a strangely prayerful way it opened my imagination to something new and transcendent. In fact, today as I was reading a text on liturgical theology, I found myself flooded with insights that linked the movie to the text.
Ite, Missa est
I highly recommend seeing it. It's the kind of movie that continues to yield new insights after you have seen it. At least for people with overly active theological imaginations like myself.
Not all will agree, but...
With so much kitsch smeared on the screens of movie theaters these days, it's nice to know that those same screens can still bear the weight and beauty of masterful art.
Let me tell you, it was quite an experience!
I don't want to go on too long about what I saw its meaning to be, or try to summarize the narrative. I will share a few thoughts that have not yet been touched by the no-doubt myriad commentaries already littering the Net.
Graceful Theology
It was thoroughly imbued with theological meaning. The opening quote from Job 38:4,7 framed the whole movie as a struggle with the problem of good and evil, of meaning and purpose, against the backdrop of God's providential care of all life. God created the terrifyingly vast universe, and is to be perceived in the beautiful, the tragic and the seemingly meaningless events of life.
One gets a sense that the film is an extended meditation on the tensions inherent in monotheism, that allows the main characters to wrestle with this God who presides over a universe with inscrutable wisdom.
Will and Grace
It was also a story about the dialectical tensions of 'nature and grace.'
There was a remarkable quote whispered by the wife/mother (Mrs. O'Brien) at the beginning of the movie:
The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it...The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.
She closes this ponderous discourse, evidently addressing 'grace', I will be true to you. Whatever comes.
An almost Marian phrase.
Harmony
The movie unfolds as a narrative of grace and nature struggling mightily to harmonize, to find their balance and symmetry. Ultimately it is a story of grace's unlikely, tragic triumph.
This tumultuous struggle was shown in the violent and strangely beautiful beginnings of creation, at the inception and evolution of life on earth, and above all in a marriage/family that stood at the epicenter of the film's nature-grace drama.
Disorienting
The sense of time in the movie was definitely non-linear, with past, present and future constantly interchanging. While this often made the storyline difficult to follow, it gave the movie a liturgical character where past, present and future intermingle, where time and eternity intersect. And as with salvation history, the apparent randomness of the ordering of events traced out a single story of great and rich depth.
The sense of space also followed time's disruptions, as the camera's eye traversed oceans and deserts, cities and galaxies, microbes and dinosaurs, trees and dining rooms, while always rhythmically returning to a fiery point of 'living light' that was (presumably) God. All of these spacial treks were ambled in erratic sequences. Here I found powerfully evoked the liturgy's power - via art, architecture, sacramentalized matter - to transform space and call into unity the whole cosmos at-once into a material symphony of God's creative-redemptive providence.
Near the end of the movie, at a key moment of 'redemption' for the main character, the chanting of the Agnus Dei, followed by a litanic Amen sealed that liturgic sense for me.
The movie felt more like a work of iconography. It was disorienting, but, for me, in a strangely prayerful way it opened my imagination to something new and transcendent. In fact, today as I was reading a text on liturgical theology, I found myself flooded with insights that linked the movie to the text.
Ite, Missa est
I highly recommend seeing it. It's the kind of movie that continues to yield new insights after you have seen it. At least for people with overly active theological imaginations like myself.
Not all will agree, but...
With so much kitsch smeared on the screens of movie theaters these days, it's nice to know that those same screens can still bear the weight and beauty of masterful art.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Public Worship
My quest for creative examples of how Catholics work to invade the public square with 'the holy' stumbled on this flash mob moment.
Such a perfect preface to Corpus Christi.
Franciscans rock.
Such a perfect preface to Corpus Christi.
Franciscans rock.
Re-vised post
I had to edit this after re-reading it and seeing how awfully messy it was! My obsessive tendencies show. Don't feel obliged to read again.
Gospel Truth
I was struck by today's Gospel regarding authority. What set Jesus apart?
To Sir
I watched the movie, To Sir, With Love with my children the other day. I hadn't seen it in years, and found it just as inspiring as when I first saw it. Actually, I found it more inspiring as I have lived 30 more years of life that allow me see its truth in a fresh way.
I found To Sir to be a striking example of the virtuous man's capacity to influence others simply by virtue of his virtue. Mark Thackeray is hired as a teacher in the slums of London's east end at a school for 'misfits', where there is little discipline among teachers and students. Largely by the force of his stolid and stoic character - itself forged by hardship in his own life - Thackeray draws out of these young men and women their own natural desire for greatness.
Character makes an impression
The authoritative character of Christian witness lies not primarily in word or argument, but in the quality, depth, and solidity of one's character. One who has internalized the word of God becomes a living force of change just by virtue of who s/he is.
Suffering
I also reflected on the role that suffering plays in forging character, and how the praise of suffering as character-building fills the New Testament.
That reflection brought to mind an elderly Russian woman I knew in Rhode Island who once said of a young and energetic Orthodox priest that had just 'wowed' a congregation with his eloquence: "It was nice, but he does not know of what he speaks; he has not suffered enough."
Authority capable of transforming others must be forged in the fire of suffering, molded by the force of long and hard labors, and carved by the chisel of pain - though for a Christian this only succeeds if we are vivified by faith, hope and love.
Jesus' character
Jesus spoke with authority - his character was deep, teeming with virtues, solid and unmovable as a rock. But his power was only 'made perfect' in the crucible of his Passion. Such a stunning thought.
Chisel me, O Lord
Strive to become in yourself that unshakable rock that has power to give harbor to those buffeted by life's storms.
Gospel Truth
I was struck by today's Gospel regarding authority. What set Jesus apart?
To Sir
I watched the movie, To Sir, With Love with my children the other day. I hadn't seen it in years, and found it just as inspiring as when I first saw it. Actually, I found it more inspiring as I have lived 30 more years of life that allow me see its truth in a fresh way.
I found To Sir to be a striking example of the virtuous man's capacity to influence others simply by virtue of his virtue. Mark Thackeray is hired as a teacher in the slums of London's east end at a school for 'misfits', where there is little discipline among teachers and students. Largely by the force of his stolid and stoic character - itself forged by hardship in his own life - Thackeray draws out of these young men and women their own natural desire for greatness.
Character makes an impression
The authoritative character of Christian witness lies not primarily in word or argument, but in the quality, depth, and solidity of one's character. One who has internalized the word of God becomes a living force of change just by virtue of who s/he is.
Suffering
I also reflected on the role that suffering plays in forging character, and how the praise of suffering as character-building fills the New Testament.
That reflection brought to mind an elderly Russian woman I knew in Rhode Island who once said of a young and energetic Orthodox priest that had just 'wowed' a congregation with his eloquence: "It was nice, but he does not know of what he speaks; he has not suffered enough."
Authority capable of transforming others must be forged in the fire of suffering, molded by the force of long and hard labors, and carved by the chisel of pain - though for a Christian this only succeeds if we are vivified by faith, hope and love.
Jesus' character
Jesus spoke with authority - his character was deep, teeming with virtues, solid and unmovable as a rock. But his power was only 'made perfect' in the crucible of his Passion. Such a stunning thought.
Chisel me, O Lord
Strive to become in yourself that unshakable rock that has power to give harbor to those buffeted by life's storms.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Secular Relics?
One could argue from this that the cult of relics is built into the spiritual DNA of humanity.
Or not.
Or not.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
A spontaneous laud to the thrice holy God. . .
O mes Trois
Three are gathered
In your Name, O God;
Thrice holy, majestic
Substantially the same;
Of one essence, undivided
Threefold Flame, raging
Enkindling, consuming
Sin’s isolating shame;
Incarnate, One of Three
Drank dregs of our blame
On a Tree, fallen-risen,
Regathered the Free by
Untamed Love, breathed;
Thou, O Most High Beauty,
Thou alone I long to see
Unbegotten, Life-Begetting
Magnificently wondrous
and ineffably dancing
life-creating Trinity.
Three are gathered
In your Name, O God;
Thrice holy, majestic
Substantially the same;
Of one essence, undivided
Threefold Flame, raging
Enkindling, consuming
Sin’s isolating shame;
Incarnate, One of Three
Drank dregs of our blame
On a Tree, fallen-risen,
Regathered the Free by
Untamed Love, breathed;
Thou, O Most High Beauty,
Thou alone I long to see
Unbegotten, Life-Begetting
Magnificently wondrous
and ineffably dancing
life-creating Trinity.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Distracted into Silence
I have blanked out for a while here as a blogger, largely because my work load has been so demanding. Because I need a certain amount of ‘space’ to think prayerfully before I blog, when I am frenetic in my work and home commitments that space shrinks.
Not that this is of interest, but there it is.
Over the Top
We have left the paschal season of Eastertide. This year I experienced its excessive character more than usual. Excessive in its call to bask in glory, to rejoice in the resurrection and to recall the white hot fire that burned in the first hours, days and years of the Church’s existence.
A Study in Contrast
It’s really an interesting tension that fills one who wishes to live from within the unique grace of liturgical time. On one hand, the liturgy cultivates its own attitudes toward life – Lenten penance or Easter glory; Advent longing or Christmas joy. On the other hand, one’s life in the world cultivates its own attitudes toward life – work and family; life’s seasons and stresses. They often do not find between them facile reconciliation.
What to do?
Let me venture a few gestures toward an answer.
Are we there yet?
First, as liturgy is truly the intersection between time and eternity, between the ‘already’ and ‘not yet,’ it is inherently tense, restless, conflicted. Pilgrims on a journey always wrestle with the fact that they are ‘not yet’ where they wish to be, and have to constantly read their present pilgrim plight through the lens of the goal that awaits them. They are buoyed by desire and hope, knowing that the goal of their pilgrimage surely awaits them.
Erosion, Eruption
Second, I find that the graces and attitudes proper to every liturgical season are often only experienced in the midst of the actual liturgical celebrations of that season. In the Mass, in praying the breviary, in my lectio time with the Mass readings I find a time and place where I can allow the joy or sorrow, the desire or praise to take hold of me. While I will not be consciously attentive throughout the day to the unique liturgical grace, it has left its mark on me and has shaped me. While this grace sometimes surprisingly intrudes into the earthen clay of my day with existential verve, mostly I see it only in retrospect. I am being changed, mostly at imperceptible rates, in ways that in retrospect amaze me. I am being broken down – metabolized – by the Spirit who inhabits the liturgy in a most remarkable and unremarkable way. Broken, only to be refashioned. Knit afresh in the womb of the liturgy.
Here it is who I am becoming that allows the liturgical celebrations' grace to overflow into the discontinuities of my life in the world.
As a mentor of mine once said of himself, after 46 years of being the priestly celebrant of the liturgy, "Joy fills everything now, even sorrow and pain."
He was a metabolized man, who now, having died several years ago, no doubt smiles knowingly as he gazes on the Cause of that joy.
Hollow Be Thy Name
Third, there is a certain disconnect between liturgy and life which is the unfortunate consequence of living in a de-sacralized, secularized world – a world that ever-more thoroughly evacuates the sacred from culture, and so makes any attempt to discover a harmony between life and liturgy, grace and nature, ever-more difficult. It creates not a tension but a disconnect. The chasm between a God-less world and a God-drenched liturgy is not one that is natural to Christian life in the world. Overcoming this chasm, and reversing the relentless process of sanitizing the divine from the cosmos is an imperative built into those final words of the Mass: Ite, Missa est. Go, be sent.
Three’s a crowd already, so I will stop here at point three. But how apropos to our impending Feast!
Wow, Wow, Wow
I hope your celebration of the dogmatic feast this Sunday – Trinity Sunday – gives you ‘space’ to gaze on, reflect on, and step into the most astounding truth that a human mind can seize upon: that dizzying, astounding mystery of God’s own supreme secret about Himself. A secret into which we dare to peer.
I dare you.
Let us worship.
I have blanked out for a while here as a blogger, largely because my work load has been so demanding. Because I need a certain amount of ‘space’ to think prayerfully before I blog, when I am frenetic in my work and home commitments that space shrinks.
Not that this is of interest, but there it is.
Over the Top
We have left the paschal season of Eastertide. This year I experienced its excessive character more than usual. Excessive in its call to bask in glory, to rejoice in the resurrection and to recall the white hot fire that burned in the first hours, days and years of the Church’s existence.
A Study in Contrast
It’s really an interesting tension that fills one who wishes to live from within the unique grace of liturgical time. On one hand, the liturgy cultivates its own attitudes toward life – Lenten penance or Easter glory; Advent longing or Christmas joy. On the other hand, one’s life in the world cultivates its own attitudes toward life – work and family; life’s seasons and stresses. They often do not find between them facile reconciliation.
What to do?
Let me venture a few gestures toward an answer.
Are we there yet?
First, as liturgy is truly the intersection between time and eternity, between the ‘already’ and ‘not yet,’ it is inherently tense, restless, conflicted. Pilgrims on a journey always wrestle with the fact that they are ‘not yet’ where they wish to be, and have to constantly read their present pilgrim plight through the lens of the goal that awaits them. They are buoyed by desire and hope, knowing that the goal of their pilgrimage surely awaits them.
Erosion, Eruption
Second, I find that the graces and attitudes proper to every liturgical season are often only experienced in the midst of the actual liturgical celebrations of that season. In the Mass, in praying the breviary, in my lectio time with the Mass readings I find a time and place where I can allow the joy or sorrow, the desire or praise to take hold of me. While I will not be consciously attentive throughout the day to the unique liturgical grace, it has left its mark on me and has shaped me. While this grace sometimes surprisingly intrudes into the earthen clay of my day with existential verve, mostly I see it only in retrospect. I am being changed, mostly at imperceptible rates, in ways that in retrospect amaze me. I am being broken down – metabolized – by the Spirit who inhabits the liturgy in a most remarkable and unremarkable way. Broken, only to be refashioned. Knit afresh in the womb of the liturgy.
Here it is who I am becoming that allows the liturgical celebrations' grace to overflow into the discontinuities of my life in the world.
As a mentor of mine once said of himself, after 46 years of being the priestly celebrant of the liturgy, "Joy fills everything now, even sorrow and pain."
He was a metabolized man, who now, having died several years ago, no doubt smiles knowingly as he gazes on the Cause of that joy.
Hollow Be Thy Name
Third, there is a certain disconnect between liturgy and life which is the unfortunate consequence of living in a de-sacralized, secularized world – a world that ever-more thoroughly evacuates the sacred from culture, and so makes any attempt to discover a harmony between life and liturgy, grace and nature, ever-more difficult. It creates not a tension but a disconnect. The chasm between a God-less world and a God-drenched liturgy is not one that is natural to Christian life in the world. Overcoming this chasm, and reversing the relentless process of sanitizing the divine from the cosmos is an imperative built into those final words of the Mass: Ite, Missa est. Go, be sent.
Three’s a crowd already, so I will stop here at point three. But how apropos to our impending Feast!
Wow, Wow, Wow
I hope your celebration of the dogmatic feast this Sunday – Trinity Sunday – gives you ‘space’ to gaze on, reflect on, and step into the most astounding truth that a human mind can seize upon: that dizzying, astounding mystery of God’s own supreme secret about Himself. A secret into which we dare to peer.
I dare you.
Let us worship.
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