Seventh Sunday of Easter - Dom Peter

It sometimes surprises people to find out that in high school, my extracurricular specialty was not so much music as it was theater. In college I came to understand why in the ancient world theater had a bad reputation: pretending to be someone else is a risky task. I’ve had the idea of a short story about a man who plays Shakespeare’s Iago and ends up himself becoming duplicitous in real life. But my writing skills are even shakier that my skills at music and theater, so the story probably will never be written.

An influential, if somewhat brutal moment in my realization about the theater scene came in my second year in college. There was a certain woman who never acted in any shows, but always seemed to be on the stage crew or lighting crew, helping out with whatever needed doing. In my awkward way of trying to show appreciation one day, I asked her what moved her to volunteer for these jobs. She replied, “Oh, I guess it’s my way of having power.” The answer really shocked me. This was a time in my life when I was studying texts by the philosophers Marx and Nietzsche, men associated with the idea that any suggestions of charity or help are really about power, but this was the first time the idea really hit home.

God is love we hear this morning; this phrase is one often quoted, indeed is felicitously the name of the Holy Father’s first encyclical. Yet, as Pope Benedict points out, the phrase needs explaining, especially if we struggle to believe in agape, that self-giving love, rather than self-aggrandizement masquerading as love. How does the Church ask us to hear this phrase, as we contemplate Jesus ascended into heaven, and as we await the Holy Spirit?

As the Father sent Jesus, so now, after His Ascension into heaven, He sends us. At the same, time, He promises to be with us always. Indeed, we believe that we are baptized into His Body and this means that in some fashion we have been raised in the Ascension to God’s right hand. But how can we be at God’s right hand and still sent? The sending into the world part is easy enough for us to see, though we might wonder sometimes what our task is. What about our exaltation at God’s right hand? Can this really be true? If it is true, why don’t we experience this?

I would like to suggest that we will come to the realization of our deep union with Christ to the extent that we love truly, that God is truly the wellspring of all our actions.

Pope Benedict notes in his encyclical that in the earliest days of the Church, Christians were admired for their charity. In a world where the poor and slaves were regularly treated with contempt, the Christians offered a radically new message. Today, because Christianity has so deeply influenced our world, concern for the poor and the sick has come to be seen as normal. Therefore, this care has largely been secularized. Where friars and nuns once relieved the poor and cared for the sick, science and government programs have stepped in and not infrequently are more effective, particularly in medicine. Because many of the tasks of charity that were once done by religious have been taken over by non-religious, Christianity itself is caught in a quandary: what is it that we are about then? What, then are we sent to do?

We should recall that the mission of Jesus is connected to baptism and therefore to the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not begin His public ministry until He was anointed with the Holy Spirit. As He is leaving the world, He promises that we, too, will receive this anointing, and that the Holy Spirit will tell us all things.

And what will the Spirit empower us to do? To serve one another in love and to bring salvation to others. In another time, this often meant clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. We are not dispensed from that task today, but we should look seriously at the charge, noted by the Holy Father, that charity to the poor reinforces their helplessness and that charity is really a front to assuage our consciences.

Saint Augustine made the same observation:
“If you render service to a wretched person, perhaps you desire to extol yourself before him and wish him who is the source of your beneficence to be subject to you. He was in need; you shared. Because you rendered service, you seem greater, as it were, than he to whom the service was rendered. Wish him an equal so that you may both be under the One to whom no service can be rendered. [Tractate 8 on the First Epistle of John, 5]”

Pope Benedict’s observation, one that accords with monastic tradition, is that charity should develop in tandem with humility because it should be real service, rather than mere favors. We will achieve that true humility that pours itself out for others if we grow in union with Christ, who provided His greatest service from the Cross, the lowest place.

This is why Pope Benedict implies that prayer is the greatest form of charity by placing the monastic life first in a list of the Church’s works of charity. I don’t take him to be meaning that this is limited to the monastic state, but that real prayer is real charity because it is union with God who is charity. It is in prayer that we conform ourselves to Christ and so can imitate Him in valuing persons for their full dignity as humans in God’s image. In prayer, if we really bring ourselves to it as creature to Creator, we will discover ourselves needy and we will discover ourselves loved. Too often, we go to prayer as if it is a favor that we do for God, and then we ask Him for favors in return. Is this love or is it business? We shy away from deeper prayer because it exposes us as empty, needy and naked. But it is the crushed spirit that God will save, not the healthy and self-satisfied. Sometimes we act before God: we pretend to be righteous, we avoid looking at our neediness and we never get to prayer. Yet, if we really pray, really encounter the greatness of God, the sweetness of God, our reliance upon God, we will easily dispense with the illusion that our good deeds are our own doing, that we somehow are righteous because of them.

Here, then, is the gift we should seek from God: the gift of knowing ourselves truly: both the neediness of our present state and the blessedness of the glorified state promised but not yet realized. We seek this union with God every time we gather at the Eucharist. In the liturgy, we practice this: we act as if we are there. Unlike the unfortunate actor playing Iago, or the Pharisee acting righteous before God, this type of acting transforms us into the image of God.
This week, let us renew our devotion to prayer: real prayer! Not reading texts that affirm our opinions, not fearing to go past devotions that produce expected results, but real prayer that brings us face to face with the God who is our supreme good, who loves us and pours out His Spirit into our hearts. Then let us pray for the gift of this Spirit that as we are sent to bring Christ to others, we may truly have Christ to give them.

Solemnity of the Ascension - Dom Brendan

Ascension Thursday
May 24, 2006

At the end of the children’s mass on Christmas Eve in my home parish in Michigan they bring in a big birthday cake with sparkelers on it and everyone sings happy birthday to Jesus. A similar custom has sprouted up on the Solemnity of the Ascension, at least in the parishes I worked in from Vermont to Texas, Michigan and Minnesota. The children write letters to Jesus and put them into balloons and inflate them. After mass everyone goes out in the parking lot and releases them into the air. The idea is that people who find these balloons and read the messages are supposed to write or call the school to say how far the balloons have floated. In one place where I was the Principal even provided music for the occasion: a recording of “UP, UP and Away” by the 5th Demension.

For some odd reason, Christimas and Ascension seem to appeal to this sort of liturgical kitch. But birthday cakes for Jesus and balloons floating through the sky are more than just a chapter from the “liturgy lite” theology manual. They are as theologically inadequate as they are liturgically inappropriate because they do not convey the true extent of the Mystery that we celebrate.

Rather, they flatten the Mystery out like a steam roller by implying that all reality is divided into two, with Jesus upstairs in heaven and a world of men and women downstairs. Two separate spheres of influence: Moreover, God is not in charge of the daily running of the material world and does not intervne in it. If he did then Tsunamis, wars, bird flu, and cancer would not happen. The nice thing about this arrangement is that it salvages God’s reputation when something bad, like a major earthquake, happens. The bad thing is that it makes it feel as though Jesus is an absentee Landlord waiting around for his Last Coming to collect the rent.

The danger here is that Christianity becomes a religion preoccupied with a future afterlife rather than a religion that asks our investment in the here and now as a precondition to blessedness in an otherworldly existence. It’s a short step from here to speculating about the nature of the “rapture” and who gets left behind.

Rather, the truth that we celebrate is at once simpler and more theologically satisfying: in his ascension, Christ does not disappear from the world; on the contrary, he begins to appear and to come. He who is the splendor of the Father and who once descended into the depths of our darkness is now exalted and fills all things with his light.

But because Christ’s presence is now hidden it can only be discerned by those who are sensitized to it by the workings of the Holy Spirit, that is those who have been initiated into the Mysteries through the sacraments and who form a body of believers in communion with one another and with Him. A community so intimately bound up with one another and with Christ in love that they become the visible extension of his body in time and space: this is Church.

The full movement of the ascension will only be complete when all the members of his body have been drawn to the Father and brought to life by his spirit. Isn’t that the meaning of the angels who say to the disciples: why do you stand here looking up into the sky? This Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way has you have seen him go into heaven.

Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter - Dom Brendan

6th Sunday of Easter
3 May 2005
Cycle B

The most solemn moment in the Liturgy of Good Friday occurs during the proclamation of the Passion according to John when Jesus cries out in a loud voice and delivers over his spirit. At that point, the rubrics instruct the priest and assembly to kneel in silent worship before the God who dies. If you were here last year on Good Friday you may remember that was the moment when someone’s cell phone went off.

I have been pestering the Prior for some time now to put up a sign in the entryway that reads:
OUR NEW CELLPHONE EJECTOR PEWS HAVE BEEN INSTALLED. PLEASE! FOR YOUR SAFETY AND THE SAFETY OF THOSE IN THE PEW WITH YOU, TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE BEFORE ENTERING THE CHURCH.

I was visiting my brother in California once before one of his tours of duty in the Middle East. I dragged him to the 10:00 Sunday mass with me at the local Catholic Church. Someone’s cell phone went off during the Eucharistic Prayer: the opening bars of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik floated through the Church which, on the positive side, was a step up from what we had been singing, a mixture of Kenny G and Up With People. The priest looked up from the altar and quipped “God Calling”. Everyone broke into a nervous laugh.

I fear that I am getting old. Under the burden of years my sense of humor is receding at twice the pace of my hairline. I fail to find this sort of thing funny. Not the least because its bad theology, the kind of bad theology that has become the default mode for talking about God.

You may be thinking to yourself at this moment, as you reach into your pocket or purse to turn your own cell phone off, that wringing a theological truism out one phone call is the homiletic equivalent of squeezing blood out of a turnip. And you may be right. You can do lot’s of things with turnips, I highly recommend them. But I am less concerned about cell phones than I am with the comment “God calling”. It betrays a theological mindset that has infected us all. A mindset that you can check by answering a simple question: where is Jesus Christ?

The standard answer that most people tend to give is that Christ is in heaven, a place which by everyone’s definition puts him beyond pain, fear or death. And this is not entirely wrong. The Creed affirms that:
He ascended into heaven from
And he will come to judge the living and the dead.
The problem is when believers, like their non believing neighbors, fail to finding him here on earth in meaningful and significant ways. So that we have to imagine that the only encounter we will ever have with him is at the moment of our death. This ensures that praying to Christ is a little like placing a long distance phone call. One of the few that the NSA can’t listen to, but what exactly is the area code for eternity?

The question that should we should be struggling to answer in the post-modern age is how do we move from abstract knowledge of God based solely on creedal statements about Him to a personal encounter with a living Christ: and more specifically to a living communion with the Risen Lord through the institution called the Church?

This is not a modern preoccupation. Judging by John’s Gospel it was also a problem for the young Christian communities for whom the Gospel was written in the late first century. And it revolves around two questions: How do we carry on in Jesus’ absence? How do we come to know him now that he is gone? John’s answer is given in the passage we hear today.
The key lies in the common human experience of knowing how to love.

This is my commandment; love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

In the weeks after Easter Sunday we hear longs portions of John’s Gospel in which the world “love” is a prominent verb. It’s important to remember where these chapters come from: they are not records of conversations Jesus has with his disciples after Easter Sunday, that is after he has come through the crucible of the Good Friday whole and triumphant.

No, they come from Holy Thursday, the evening before Christ’s personal journey into the heart of darkness that we call evil.

This is makes it a remarkable passage for two reasons: First, in his confrontation with evil Christ will be crushed by it, swallowed by it whole in death. And he will do this armed with nothing more than love.

Few of us will argue with the fact that the world is not a loving place. These are lessons that most of us learn very early: bad things happen to good people but evil things also happen to good people. And yet on the night before he dies Christ has the chutzpa to talk about love.
The second reason the passage is remarkable is for what it says about love, loving, and being loved for anyone who calls himself a friend of Christ: Christian love—Catholic love if you will—for the world and all who live in it looks exactly like the broken body of Jesus on the Cross. It is the giving away of self in order to discover self. This is love made visible in a way that many people in our nihilistic, suspicious and self-seeking culture are ill prepared to understand or accept. Even among some in the Church who want the agenda to be about ideology and power. Yet for some unfathomenable reason God has chosen the cross as the means by which His love and presence are made visible in the world. And we need to get used to the fact that we are not only its beneficiaries, but also its ambassadors and its witnesses.

This is why the stories and books that say that Christ did not die on the cross, that he lived to marry and have children and that he’s really buried in southern France or in Northern Israel or in an unmarked grave near Jerusalem, why this new “take” on an old story needs to be firmly opposed with the truth about the meaning of Christ’s death as God’s irrevocable offer of love and reconciliation which sets aright a world gone wrong.

This is the church’s job: not merely to preach the cross to but to live its meaning as those who have truly died and risen with Christ. A people whose agenda is not determined by power, influence, money, or distraction from the burden of consciousness but by another set of priorities centered on the fact that in the death and resurrection of Christ everything in the world has changed.

Fourth Sunday of Easter - Dom Peter

Good Shepherd Sunday, Year B (2006)
From time to time you will hear the phrase, “Christian humanism.” Personally I don’t care for the term. As a Christian I find it tautological. As it is normally used, it verges on insult, since it is usually contrasted with an apparent Christian opposition to human development. This is inspite of the fact that ours is the only religion I know of that worships a human being and claims that humans can be divinized. What is there about Christianity that is not humanistic?

Unfortunately, the humanists who have been critical of the Church over the past five centuries or so have not been entirely without justification. There are some ways in which the Church might appear to keep the masses down and discourage human creativity and
flourishing. One such aspect of the Church that coincides historically with the humanist critique is the problem of clericalism. Officially, clericalism is the belief that the hierarchy should have power in the Church, this hierarchy being restricted, of course, to ordained men. Let us agree that this approach is sinful from the outset because it seems to suggest that the Church is primarily about power. This is an aberrant view that derives from an overemphasis on the model of the Church as the perfect society, the Kingdom of God on earth. This view flourishes when the Church is politically powerful and wealthy. It encourages the wrong sort of men to seek ordination to the priesthood and consecration as bishops. And it causes us to be suspicious, in some ways a healthy reaction, to today’s gospel. We don’t like thinking of ourselves as sheep because we don’t trust our shepherds. We don’t trust our shepherds because we suspect that they are in it for themselves and not for us: they are, in Jesus’ terms, actually hired men who will leave us in the lurch when the wolf comes.

This is an overly suspicious view, but one, as I said, that has its foundations in a certain reality of life in the Church in the modern world.

Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd. In English, this sounds like He is simply contrasted with the bad shepherds, those who abandon the sheep when the wolf comes. This is true enough. In the Greek, Jesus says ego eimi ho poimen ho kalos. I am the kalos Shepherd. This adjective kalos has many meanings, including ‘beautiful’ ‘fitting’ ‘excellent’ ‘suitable’. Thayer’s New Testament lexicon has a nice phrase, “excellent in its nature and characteristics and therefore well-adapted to its ends.” In other words, Jesus is not merely one shepherd among many who happens to be good where others are not so good, He is preeminently the Shepherd by His nature. What is that nature? He is not only human but divine. It is because of His divinity that He is the Good and True Shepherd.

More than that, Jesus can’t be accused of running a power play on us sheep, being in it for Himself. He proves this by laying down His life, by emptying Himself, by becoming lower than all, a worm and no man.

But it is because He is the divine logos, the Word of God and Second Person of the Holy Trinity that He can make the astonishing claim, “I have power to lay [my life] down, and power to take it up again.” More literally, He lays down His psyche, His soul. More on that in a moment. But here we come to the crux: there has been a great effort in recent decades to emphasize Jesus’ humanity. There are scholars, even of a traditional bent, who will assert that Jesus was unaware of His divinity. Such studies are very interesting indeed, and I do not wish to downplay the wonder of Jesus’ humanity, nor the importance it plays in our own spirituality. But we need to say here that there is more to Jesus than this humanity. He is truly of a different origin than we are, and this is why the Church is not a democracy. We hear the voice of the one who has the authority to speak.

I say that Jesus is of a different origin; this is too simple a formulation, of course, for two reasons. First of all, Jesus possesses the whole of human nature. While as God He comes down from heaven to rescue His sheep, as a man, he is born of Mary. He has a mother as do we all. He even has a human soul, as this passage suggests. Saint Augustine pointed out that Jesus lays down His soul; English unfortunately lacks some of the nuances of the Greek or Latin versions of this reading. We can say confidently that Jesus is the Way the Truth and the Life. Life itself lays down not life in the abstract but the particular life of His human soul. This is because He participates in the divine life even as he participates in human death.

Let me return here for a moment to the question of Jesus’ origin and ours. I said that He is the True and Fitting Shepherd because He is God and we are not. This is too simple not only because Jesus is also a man, but because in our baptisms, we now have a divine origin analogous to the divine origin of the Word of God. It is for this reason that we do not or should not fear death. When the wolf comes to snatch us away at our deaths, we will find that the same Divine Logos, the life of the world, is indwelling not only in Jesus’ human soul but also in ours. As Jesus laid down His life to take it up again, we will find our lives given to us at death. This is what Saint John means when he urges us to reflect on the love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God. Indeed, that it what we are! We shall be like Christ: freed from death, freed from sorrow, intimately united with our sole Good, Who is our God and Creator, the giver of every good gift to humanity. If this is Christian humanism, why settle for anything less?

Third Sunday of Easter - Dom Brendan

3rd Sunday of Easter
April 30, 2006
Cycle B
I received a strange phone call two weeks ago. The person on the phone said that she had just seen an NBC program called Dateline about Michael Baignet the author of the book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”. Baignet claimed on the program to have seen a papyrus document that proves that Jesus did not die on the cross but was still alive in 45 ad. The document is purported to be a letter written by Jesus himself to the Sanhedrin stating that he was not divine and was unfairly treated by the Sanhedrin. Baignet says this papyrus was found under the foundation of a home in Jerusalem 20 or 30 years ago. It has since disappeared into the Vatican’s Secret Archives, or so he claims.

The woman on the other end of the phone wanted to know if I had ever seen this document or had any knowledge of it. I explained that I was merely a humble Benedictine monk and did not have access to the Vatican’s Secret Archives; moreover if every monk and clergyman had access to the Secret Archives they would no longer be a secret thus depriving people like Michael Baignet and Dan Brown from making millions of dollars on books fabricating conspiracy theories involving the Vatican and it’s Secret Archives. There was a moment of silence on the line. Then she asked if I had the Cardinal’s phone number handy.

As it happens I looked up the interview on the internet where NBC is kind enough to provide a complete transcript. At one poinet Baignet is asked by the NBC correspondent:
Correspondent: You believe that much of what we think we know about Jesus is a lie?
Michael Baigent: It’s a lie. It’s an obvious lie.

I find this story very interesting but not for the same reasons that my caller did. What’s interesting about this story is it’s timing. Next to Christmas, March and April are the most religious times of the year as Christians observe Lent and Holy Week and Jews observe the Passover. And every year around this time there are always news stories in the media concerning some new take on faith. Either John Dominic Crossan, the poster boy for the Jesus Seminar, telling us that Jesus body was left on the cross to be eaten by dogs, the Da Vinci Code, last year’s fascination with Mary Magdalene or this year’s favorite the “Judas Gospel”.
Some are inclined to dismiss the furor about these so-called revelations claiming that they are merely works of fiction. But its much more than fiction: it is a toxic blend of pseudo scholarship, half-truths, ideology and blasphemy packaged for maximum sales. And they sell because it feeds the public imagination for conspiracy rather than mystery: the X-files masquerading as theology produced by conspiracy theorists on ideological steroids who argue that Gnosticism is the real story behind the origin of Western civilization.

And here we get to the core of it all: these gnostic “discoveries” validate all of the inferences to be derived from the sexual revolution: we are free to make up our sexual identity, roles and relationships, as we go along; moral codes tracing back to biblical times are now obsolete; conventional notions of the Deity are simply a form of social control and ought to have no effect on human behavior.

Apologists for this form of theological pornography argue that the media barrage ultimately has no effect on believers who are already convinced of the truths of faith. I’m not so sure. Two years ago my 16 year old nephew did something completely uncharacteristic: he bought a book and read it. The book was the Da Vinci Code. And then he did another uncharacteristic thing. He announced to his parents that he would no longer be going to church with them because, to use his own words “I believe in God but I don’t believe in the Church”. All this took place within a month of his was Confirmation. In his case, as with so many others, the Sacrament of Confirmation was ritual graduation out of the Church.

At the heart of many of these programs, books and movies is a relentless hostility to the Church. In the end, the success of these “catechisms of suspicion” show the depth of the present cultural darkness and the willingness of the popular mindset to believe the worst of organized religion in general and Catholicism in particular.

The Passion, Death and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is the one truly piece of Good News that the world needs to hear. This is why it lies at the core of the Church’s liturgical year, her preaching of the Gospel, and the celebration of the Sacramental life. Why would anyone want to let this good news be taken from us?

What should committed Catholics do?

One response is to cancel your subscription to the papers and news magazines, boycott the movies and cut the plug off the television set. What will you have missed: news about Madonna’s latest husband or the perils of being Jessica Simpson? Now days the fine line between news and entertainment is hardly distinguishable. You can barely tell the difference between the news and the commercials. Remember what Fred Allen said: “Television is called a medium because it’s seldom well done”.

Unfortunately most people cannot not be persuaded by this kind of approach. Cutting off the plug to pop culture can seem, for some, like cutting off their nose to spite their face.

The best place to start is by taking a cue from the Gospel itself. It seems to me that one of the greatest arguments for the truth of the Resurrection are the apostles themselves. Gathered in the upper room they are 11 frightened men who fear that the news of Jesus’ resurrection might prove true and that when he returns he will have his revenge for their betrayal.
Instead Christ reconciles them to himself; befriends them once again. The power of their encounter with the Risen One changes them in ways far more convincing than any writer of fiction could describe. They become men willing to endure hardship and death for the sake of the gospel.

The greatest testimony of the truths of our faith is the witness of a holy life. Orthodoxy leads to orthopraxis, true believing leads to right living. If the church is ridiculed and mocked because Catholics are little better than pagans and unbelievers than whose fault is that? If we are accused of being a false Church and our faith an obvious lie because Catholics are too busy manning the barricades of the intramural culture wars then whose fault is that? In that case, arguing about where the sanctuary furniture goes is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. In some cases we’ve brought discredit on ourselves.

But if we live lives of courage, faith, honesty, truth and love then all the blasphemies and lies spoken and written about the Church’s faith will have no power to convince or confuse even the most naïve.

This is a homily not a program of reform or a political platform for another faction within the Church. Clearly, there is a need for pastoral action in our hyper critical culture. But whatever you do, don’t call me on the phone and ask if I’ve visited the Vatican’s Secret Archives lately. I lost my membership card.