Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

At the end of the eleventh chapter of the book of Leviticus, God says to the people of Israel through Moses: “You…shall be holy, for I am holy.” The Hebrew word qadosh, “holy” connotes being ‘cut off’, different from the profane. God in effect, in making His covenant with Israel says, “if you desire life with Me, and this is true life, you must become worthy of Me: you must become different than the world, because I am other than the world.”

Significantly, this exhortation takes place in the midst of the kashrut or Kosher laws. There are many ways in which Israel is to be different from the surrounding Canaanites and other peoples, but the most obvious way is by refraining from eating certain foods. The foods that God permits the Israelites to eat also must be prepared in a certain way. In chapter seventeen, God says to Moses, “You shall not eat the blood of any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood.”

One can imagine, then, the scandal occasioned by Jesus when He says “to the crowds,” “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” This teaching gives some currency to C.S. Lewis’ argument that Jesus is either God or insane. We have the advantage of knowing Jesus Christ risen from the dead; we know that all authority has been given Him and so this testimony is perhaps easier for us to absorb. Or is it?

From time to time one reads about polls that claim alarming numbers of Catholics denying the Real Presence or at least not understanding it. One must always exercise caution in interpreting polls; I’m half Polish, so I should know. However, some struggle to grasp the presence of Christ in the Eucharist should not surprise us. The teaching has been a source of difficulty for believers from the very beginning. How can we deepen our faith in this mystery and enliven others’?

“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” Here we have life with God in a deeper and more intimate way than ever envisioned even in the marriage covenant given at Mount Sinai. “The life of every creature is its blood.” In this teaching of the Lord on Sinai, we see that all life belongs to God, but we also see the problem of sin in the world of creatures. The food that sustains our bodies is good. Eating is good, especially eating together. It is a visible and visceral reminder of our connectedness to the earth, to other creatures, and to each other. The downside of this is that creatures are perishable. The life of creatures has a limit. If we limit our horizons to the enjoyment of bread, we are apt to lose sight of the fact that we do not live on bread alone.

On the other hand, as the Council of Nicea taught, the Son of God is not a creature. The drink that He gives is not perishable but imparts eternal life. This is why, overruling the prohibitions of the old Law, Jesus can offer us His blood to drink. His life is also in the blood, but it is not the life of a creature, but the life of Blessed Trinity Himself.

With this as background, we return to the question: how to enliven our faith in the Eucharist, to desire communion with God and to receive it in this humble sacrament of bread and wine? We might ask an ancillary question: Why did God choose food as the privileged means of Christ’s continuing presence and of the gift of life? Surely this suggest that our attitude toward food and toward creation to which we are linked by our bodies must somehow be connected to the choice of bread and wine for the material of the source and summit of our faith.

This in turn suggests that if our faith in the Blessed Sacrament is somehow waning, we should examine our attitude toward creation. There are two temptations: to overvalue creation or to undervalue it. To overvalue it, to serve the creature rather than the Creator (Blessed be He), is tempting because the world is full of good things delightful to the eye. But this is to choose mortality rather than immortality. Not much of a bargain if you ask me, unless by some confused reasoning we think that the God who created the earth ki tov, very good, will somehow make heaven less good. There is also the temptation to equate God with creation, the mistake of pantheists or nature-worshippers. This makes God less than All-powerful and probably less than good as well.

However, we must also not become Manicheans and undervalue or denigrate this creation. Do we really do this today? I think that we do, when we eat meals on the run, treat bodies like machines or sculptures, abuse the earth for short-term conveniences and the like. We can also do this for alleged religious reasons, such is the temptation of Puritanism. This seems to me less of a temptation today, but it is worth noting, if only to make the Church’s stance clearer. Perhaps the clearest problem we have in this area is accepting the Incarnation, the idea that God would create the universe and the human person not merely as an amusement to be discarded when no longer interesting, but as a place within which He could dwell intimately with His creatures.

How do we balance a true appreciation for creation with a longing for everlasting life in union with the Blessed Trinity? Saint Paul gives us the answer in the Epistle to the Ephesians. “[Give] thanks always and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.” Do you have no choice but to eat quickly at McDonald’s? Give thanks. Do you have to cancel a trip this year because gas is scarce? Give thanks. Give thanks for those whom you love, and give thanks for those who show you your inability to love. Give thanks for good food and for lousy food. Give thanks for the sun and for the rain. Give thanks for this world and for the promise of a better world. This, after all, is the true meaning of the Eucharist: thanksgiving to God in Jesus Christ, to whom be power and glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Assumption - Dom Brendan

When I was a child and we had a Holy Day of Obligation like today our parish priest would inevitably begin his sermon by saying: Today is the Feast of the Assumption and how happy we are to be here. My father would groan quietly and slide down in the pew for what he knew would be a 40 minute sermon on the joys of coming to Church in the middle of the week. Obviously he was not happy to be there, half baked Catholic that he was. But his sentiments did not seem to be shared by the other in my parish: the Church on a day like today would have standing room only at all three masses.

In 1958 a parish priest could assume that most people would be happy to treat a weekday as a Sunday and interrupt their day to come to church to celebrate the Liturgy in honor of the Mother of God. I doubt if any priest today would make that assumption, if you’ll forgive the pun.

So why are we doing it? Certainly, we are honoring the memory of the Mother of the Lord. But we cannot forget that we’re doing so out of a set of specific historical circumstances that most of us have first hand knowledge of.

Historically speaking there has been a Feast of the Assumption since the 7th or 8th Century, but it was Pius XII who proclaimed the Assumption a dogma of the faith in 1950. However this was viewed at the time, his decision has been criticized in the last 25 years by voices inside and outside the Church.

But the fact that the Pope proclaimed the Assumption a dogma and the timing of it, November 1, 1950 cannot have been insignificant given the extraordinary assault on the human body witnessed in what another Pope has called "The Century of Tears".

Ten million killed in World War I, 600,000 alone in one battle, the Battle of the Somme (there were 58,000 causalities in the first hour of that battle). And that figure is dwarfed by the 60 million dead in the battles and death factories of WWII.

We have no time to talk about the 40 million dead in the Stalinist purges of the 30’s and 40’s, the 100 million dead in the Maoist purges of the 50’s and 60’s, the millions killed by Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the slaughter of over 1.3 million Tutsi’s in Ruanda. And I have only skimmed the surface: we should not forget the 28 million abortions in this country alone since Roe v. Wade. A century of unimaginable atrocities, and a century that gave us new verb to describe what human beings are capable of: genocide.

In the face of this assault on the human body, Pius XII understood that in defining the dogma of the Assumption the Church was at the same time making an assertion about the nobility, dignity and worth of the bodies and souls of every human being.

It is not the teaching of the Church that the Mother of God escaped the common fate reserved to all human beings. It is the Church's teaching that at the end of her life she was taken into heaven body and soul in anticipation of the general resurrection on the last day. She is, as it were, the first fruits of Christ's Resurrection from the Dead just as she was his first disciple.

That is a bold and extraordinary claim for the Church to make about a fellow human being who was and is a woman and a mother. An extradordinary claim to make about the human body in an age that both exalts and denegrates bodilness in every advertisement, tv show, movie and magazine.

But it is also an extraordinarily hopeful and optimistic assertion about the lives and deaths of every human being in an age rank with pessimisim nihilism, and dispair. To say that Mary lives, body and soul in heaven means that Christianity does not promise a salvation of the soul alone in which all that has been precious and valuable to us in this world will vanish like a pageant that has been staged for a single occasion and then has no further meaning.

It means that God knows and loves the entire person that we are now, body and soul, flesh and spirit. Immortality or eternal life is not a "state" we will enjoy in heaven or fail to enjoy in hell after our death, it is something that is present, in this body of ours thoughout the journey we call life. Present in and through what we experience, feel, suffer, think, know, love and fail to love.

Our eternity is based on God's love for us. And anyone whom God loves never ceases to be. It is not just a shadow of ourselves that continues in being, rather in God and because of God we ourselves, with all that we are and all that is most ourselves, are preserved forever in an act of creative love.

So it is for the Mother of God. So it is for the great throng of the dead throughout human history and so it will be for us. And so it will be for you and me.

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Brendan

My grandmother had an all purpose aphorism which she used liberally when I was growing up: “sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child”. I did not discover until years later that she was quoting a passage from that most complex of all Shakespeare’s play’s King Lear: a play about parents, children and gratitude among other things,.

It’s unlikely my grandmother knew she was quoting Shakespeare. She was not a highly educated woman: she had to leave grade school to help raise her 11 brothers and sisters when her father died. Nor was she a great lover of books: her reading material was generally limited to the “Readers Digest”, “St. Anthony Messenger” and the occasional Ellery Queen mystery story.

She grew up in great poverty and knew the hardship of the depression and the war years. And perhaps, because of this, knew a thing or two about being grateful.

And while she was not educated, one of the things she did know was that children are not naturally grateful. They have to be taught. Of course children are quick learners because they are such good observers though they are not necessarily good interpreters of what they see. They imitate the behaviors they observe around them often without knowing what they mean.

For example: One of the stories trotted out on those occasions when my family gets together has to do with the fact that as a little child I swore like a sailor. Apparently at a certain point it became so bad that my mother finally went to the parish priest, Msgr. Scheringer, to get some help on how to break me of the habit. As the story goes Msgr. Scheringer patiently listened to my mother describe the problem and then asked her one simple question: “Where did he learn it?”

A child learns to be grateful by observing the adults around them performing the important little rites of daily life that often begin with “thank you” or “I’m sorry”. These are simple phrases that are the basis of any real communal life because they are acts of recognition that we are not self-sufficient, self-reliant and self-contained. Someone whose focus is exclusively on him or her self are all to willing to abandon others.

Already at the beginning Genesis we hear the divine judgment on this kind of self-idolatry: “It is not good for man to be alone”. In this context, sin is a form of impersonalism: the failure to be attentive, responsible, compassionate, faithful and grateful.

The opposite of gratitude is resentfulness. Resentfulness, as St. Benedict recognized, is a powerful agent in destroying community because it too needs to be shared. And if the vehicle for sharing gratitude is saying “thank you” the vehicle for sharing resentment is murmuring.

Resentment and murmuring provide the background for this Sunday’s reading from the Gospel of John. Actually, we should be hearing Mark today because Year B in the Lectionary cycle is the Year of Mark. But because his Gospel is so short the Church inserts portions of chapter 6 of John, the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes, over a span of 5 weeks in late summer.

Today’s passage gives a good example of John’s theology at work.
The Jewish people, having come into the desert, are hungry and thirsty. They cry out for food and are given “bread from heaven” but no sooner do they eat their fill than, in a complete lack of gratitude for what they have received, begin to murmur against God.

I’m speaking about the Gospel of course but I could also be describing the events of Exodus 16 the famous story of the manna from heaven. John’s Gospel follows Exodus closely here because the evangelist is deliberately and insistently inviting the Christian community to think of their journey in faith in a way similar way to the one described in Exodus: the life of a Christian is a Passover from slavery into freedom, from Egypt to the Promised Land and from death into life. If Moses was the means through which Israel of old is saved, then Jesus is the means through which the new Israel finds salvation: and more, he himself is the true heavenly bread, the true paschal lamb, the true and long awaited messiah.

This is fully revealed in the multiplication of the loaves. But like the Israelites of old this sign, however wondrous, is not enough. And the people begin to murmur against Jesus just as they did against Moses. The words of Psalm 78 which we sing at Vigils on Wednesday simultaneously describes both events:
They tested God in their hearts
By demanding the food they craved
They spoke against God saying,
Can he provide a table in the wilderness?
Can he give us bread or provide meat for his people?
Behind these texts lies that most toxic of human inclinations, ingratitude. The lack of which is but a symptom of those quintessential American qualities of self-fulfillment and self-reliance that tempt us to do everything out of our own resources. Why? because neither God nor others can be trusted to provide for us.

But in the end Self-reliance and Self-fulfillment, like all forms of idolatry, are merely an illusion: no human can do what God does just as no human and fulfill what God alone fulfills. And this is precisely what Jesus is pointing out to his listeners in John 6. We cannot engineer our own salvation: only He can give life because he himself is the author of life. Human life is, from start to finish, a gift and we are responsible to the Giver of the gift for what we make of it. But we will make nothing of this Gift if we do not recognize the fundamental truth that “sharper than a serpents tooth is an ungrateful child”.

When all is said and done the Gospel is posing a simple question: who is God? I, myself or someone to whom I must surrender myself without conditions, qualifications or reservations at every level of my being?