A Share in the Power and Wisdom of Christ

Greetings,

            April 29 was the Memorial for Catherine of Siena, Virgin and Doctor.  She was an Italian mystic and teacher.  The youngest of twenty-five children of the Sienese Benincasa family, Catherine was born at Siena in 1347.  At six she dedicated her life to serve God through her chastity.  Her parents tried to get her to marry, but showing her resolution to devote herself to a life of prayer and service she cut off her hair. [What would we make of this misfit - this rebellious young person today?]  She was eventually accepted into the Dominican Tertiaries although it was normally comprised of widows.  After three years spent in prayer and asceticism she went out to serve the poor and sick in her own city and beyond.

            In one of her many visions, Jesus told her, “…love of me and love of neighbor are one and the same thing: Since love of neighbor has its source in me, the more the soul loves me, the more she loves her neighbors.”  She reached out to prisoners and became skilled at mediating disputes and helping individuals reconcile differences.  Her work of compassion was one piece of her connection with the spiritual and political life of her day.  In her later years she became highly involved in ecclesiastical politics, trying to mediate the conflict between Florence and the Papal Government, and later, between Urban IV and the rival pope at Avignon.

            She received the sign of the stigmata, though tradition says she felt its pain, without the visible marks on her hands.  Catherine’s themes are God’s providence, the role of Christ as redeemer and mediator, and the reform of the Church.

            Although she could not write, she dictated some four hundred letters and her Dialogue, a collection of insights gained in prayer and meditative visions.  The following is from the dialogue “On Divine Providence.”

  

            Eternal God, eternal Trinity, you have made the blood of Christ so precious through his sharing in your divine nature.  You are a mystery as deep as the sea; the more I search, the more I find, and the more I find the more I search for you.  But I can never be satisfied, what I receive will ever leave me desiring more. When you fill my soul I have an even greater hunger, and I grow more famished for your light.  I desire above all to see you, the true light, as you really are.

            I have tasted and seen the depth of your mystery and the beauty of your creation with the light of my understanding.  I have clothed myself with your likeness and have seen what I shall be.  Eternal Father, you have given me a share in your power and the wisdom that Christ claims as his own, and your Holy Spirit has given me a new creation in the blood of your Son, and I know that you are moved with love at the beauty of your creation, for you have enlightened me. 

            Eternal Trinity, Godhead, mystery deep as the sea, you could give me no greater gift than the gift of yourself.  For you are a fire ever burning and never consumed, which itself consumes all the selfish love that fills my being.  Yes, you are a fire that takes away the coldness, illuminates the mind with its light and causes me to know your truth.  By this light, reflected as it were in a mirror, I recognize that you are the highest good, one we can neither comprehend nor fathom.   And I know that you are beauty and wisdom itself.  The food of angels, you gave yourself to man in the fire of your love.

            You are the garment which covers our nakedness, and in our hunger you are a satisfying food, for you are sweetness and in you there is no taste of bitterness, O triune God!

Yours & His,

DED

Shakespeare’s Birth

Greetings,

            While on retreat I missed commenting on the anniversary of the birth and death of William Shakespeare on April 24.  Because of our still trying to deal with the aftermath of Roberta’s father’s death, we will have to postpone our celebration for several weeks.  For today I would just share these words from Hamlet, Act. 1, scene 3:

                                    There, my blessings with thee!

And these few precepts in thy memory

Look thou character.  Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;

The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade.  Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,

Bear ’t that the opposèd may beware of thee.

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy;

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are most select and generous, chief in that.

Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

+      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +  

            And while not a direct response to these wonderful words of advice, it seems to me that an appropriate response is one of my favorite lines, also from Hamlet:

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us.”  (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4)

            I have come to appreciate the line not simply as a plea for defense, which is often needed against both the great evils which attack us and against the great goods which would sometimes engulf us, but also as a recognition that there are indeed times when we are the “ministers of grace” who must defend those under attack from both those great evils and overwhelming goods.

Yours & His,

DED

Spiritual Rebirth

Greetings,

            Thomas Carlyle, the English writer, thinker and man of great influence, experienced a striking spiritual rebirth which is related in Sartor Resartus (1834). Put briefly and prosaically, it consisted in a sudden clearing away of doubts as to the beneficent organization of the universe; a semi-mystical conviction that he was free to think and work, and that honest effort and striving would not be thwarted by what he called the “Everlasting No.”

            This is from Book II of Sartor Resartus:

            But indeed Conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into Conduct.  Nay properly Conviction is not possible till then; inasmuch as all Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices: only by a felt indubitable certainty of Experience does it find any centre to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a system.  Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action.”  On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,” which thou knowest to be a Duty!  Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.

            May we not say, however, that the hour of Spiritual Enfranchisement is even this: When your Ideal World, wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work, becomes revealed, and thrown open; and you discover, with amazement enough, like the Lathario in Wilhelm Meister, that your “America is here or nowhere”?  The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man.  Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live be free.  Fool, the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matter whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou givest it be heroic, be poetic.  O thou that tirest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a Kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, “here or nowhere,” couldst thou only see!

Yours & His,

DED

The Constant of God’s Blessings

Greetings,

From my mother’s womb you are my strength.

                                                                                            Psalm 71:6

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.  You have been born anew.

                                                                                            I Peter 1:22-23

Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.  It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.  It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them.  It may be that God has the eternal appetite of infancy.

                                                                                G. K. Chesterton

Certainly I am grateful that thus far God has not gotten tired of forgiving me, just as God so often and lovingly forgave Israel.  Indeed, God’s gifts are continual.  New every morning are the blessings of God.  Yet God’s love and blessing are unchanging, ever constant.  God creates, and each creation is a gift of love which does not end with its presentation, but which continues to love and bless, and when necessary recreate, even unto eternity. 

Yours & His,

DED

First the Bread, Now the Wine

Greetings,

            For the last several days I have been on the Spring retreat of the clergy group of The American Inklings, and missed sending, or reading, any e-mails.  Now I am back and trying to get caught up, and not doing too well at that today because of all of the new things happening, but here is the next e-mail.

Before the retreat break we talked about bread.  Now some thoughts on the wine.

            “I am the true vine.”

            We were created to delight, as God does, in the resident goodness of creation.  We were not made to sit around mumbling incantations and watching our insides to see what creation will do for us.  Wine does indeed have subjective effects, but they are to be received gratefully and lightly.  They are not solemnly important psychological adjustments, but graces, super-added gifts.  It was St. Thomas Aquinas who gave the most reasonable and relaxed of all the definitions of temperance.  Wine, he said, could lawfully be drunk usque ad hilaritatem, to the point of cheerfulness.  It is a happy example of the connection between sanctity and sanity.

                                    Robert Farrar Capon

            It was with good reason, then , that some people, when they heard the apostles speaking in every tongue, said: “They are filled with new wine.”  For they had become fresh wine-skins, they had been renewed by the grace of holiness, so that when they were filled with the new wine, that is, with the Holy Spirit, they spoke with fervor in every tongue...Celebrate, then, this day as members of the one body of Christ.  Your celebration will not be in vain if you are what you celebrate, if you hold fast to the church which the Lord filled with his Holy Spirit.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        African homily,  Sixth century

            Similarly, the wine of Christ’s blood, drawn form the many grapes of the vineyard that he has planted, is extracted in the winepress of the cross. When men receive it with believing hearts, like capacious wineskins, it ferments within them by its own power.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Cyril of Jerusalem,  Fourth century

            The wine of the psalter [Psalm 116] and the wine of heaven are the same, and they are ours, because whether in heaven or on earth there is only one chalice, and that chalice itself is heaven.  It is the cup Jesus gave to his disciples on the night when he said to them: “With desire have I desired to eat this Pasch with you.”  There is one mystery in the kingdom of heaven, which is the light of that kingdom, replacing the sun, moon and stars.  It is the light also of the psalter and of the church on earth, though it shines in darkness.  Its light is wine.  It was of this wine that Jesus said: “I shall not drink the fruit of this vine again until I drink it with you now in the kingdom of my Father.”  He had just chanted the psalms of the Hallel with his apostles.  He knew his blood would flow like silence through our psalter.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Thomas Merton

            But it is not only the martyrs who share in his passion by their glorious courage; the same is true, by faith, of all who are born again in baptism.  That is why we are to celebrate the Lord’s paschal sacrifice with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.  The leaven of our former malice is thrown out, and a new creature is filled and inebriated with the Lord himself.  For the effect of our sharing in the body and blood of Christ is to change us into what we receive.  As we have died with him, and have been buried and raised to life with him, so we bear him within us, both on body and in spirit, in everything we do.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Leo the Great,  Fifth century

Your & His,

DED

The Hospitality of God

Greetings,

In Lent we were aware of the hospitality of God though our willing sacrifices.  In the Easter season we are aware of the hospitality of God through the abundance of the Easter feast.   Always, the hospitality of God comes through the Body of Christ.

I will extol you, O LORD, for you have drawn me up,

and did not let my foes rejoice over me.

O LORD my God, I cried to you for help,

and you have healed me.

O LORD, you brought up my soul from Sheol,

restored me to life from among those gone down to the pit.

                                                                                                                                       Psalm 30:1-3

a man who had fallen among thieves

lay by the roadside on his back

dressed in fifteenth rate ideas

wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less

emancipated evening

had in return for consciousness

endowed him with a changeless grin

were on a dozen staunch and leal

citizens did graze at pause

then fired by hypercivic zeal

sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brook

of pinkest vomit out of eyes

which noticed nobody he looked

as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest

its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt

while the mute trouserfly confessed

a button solemnly inert

brushing from whom the stiffened puke

I put him all into my arms

and staggered banged with terror through

a million billion trillion stars

                                                                                                            e. e. cummings

I saw a stranger today.

I put food for him in the eating-place,

And drink in the drinking-place,

And music in the listening-place.

In the Holy Name of the Trinity

He blessed myself and my house,

My goods and my family.

And the lark said in her warble,

Often, often, often

Goes Christ in the stranger’s guise

O, oft and oft and oft,

Goes Christ in the stranger’s guise.

                                                                                                            Irish rune

Nowhere does the Torah say, Invite your guest to pray;

but it does tell us to offer a guest food, drink and a bed.

                                                                                                            Jewish proverb

And finally, these words from our old friend the other Berrigan brother.

Christ, fowler of street and hedgerow

of cripples and the distempered old

—eyes blind as woodknots,

tongues tight as immigrants—

takes in his gospel net

all the hue and cry of existence.

Heave, of such imperfection,

wary, ravaged, wild?

Yes.  Compel them in.

                                                                                                Daniel Berrigan

Yours & His,

DED

Resurrection Faith

Greetings,

            When I took my first religion course, from Prof. Crain at Western Maryland College, the text book was Understanding the Old Testament by Bernhard W. Anderson.  More than 15 years later when I took an Old Testament course at Wesley Seminary, the text was Anderson’s (Third Edition).  I have been reading Anderson ever since.  In his Rediscovering the Bible, Anderson writes a wonderful comment on the Resurrection (the emphases are mine):

            Early Christians did not go out into the world preaching an ethical code, or a system of philosophy, or a utopian gospel of social improvement.  Those who think that the essence of Christianity in the New Testament period was the Sermon on the Mount, or the doctrine of the “Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” have the evidence of critical, historical scholarship against them.  The Church was established on the Resurrection faith, summed up in the creedal affirmation: Jesus is Lord.  This is not to deny the importance of the Fatherhood of God or the Sermon on the Mount.  We are merely demanding that these matters be placed within their proper context of faith if one is to do justice to the New Testament.  Christianity is not just the belief in one God; Christians worship the God who raised Christ from the dead (see Romans 4:24; I Peter 1:21; and so on).  Christianity is not just a noble ethic; ethical motivation arises from the fact that men are “raised together with Christ” in order that they may “walk in newness of life” (Col. 3:1; Rom. 6:4).  Christianity is the religion of the Resurrection.  Herein lies its distinctiveness and power.

+      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +  

            This is the power of Christianity.  Jesus is Lord.  Christ is Risen.  Christ is Risen, Indeed!  Everything we do, everything we are flows from this.

Yours & His,

DED

After Easter

Greetings,

The great Georgia Harkness wrote this poem:

After Easter

On Easter day my heart is lifted high

With gladsome praises to the Lord of life.

The hallelujahs ring: the heavens are rife

With song and story.  He who could defy

The powers of death has risen again—it nigh

To say, “Fear not...Men, put away your strife,

I am the resurrection and the life.”

All earth seems joyous, and we need not die!

The vision fades; the Easter joy is past;

Again in dull drab paths our lot is cast.

The heavens no longer sing.  The war clouds lower.

O Lord, where art Thou in Thy risen power?

The calm voice speaks—it answers all I ask,

“I am beside you in the daily task.”

            We are working to keep the resurrection alive and well this week, and all of the year.

Yours & His,

DED

Resurrection: the Body and Blood of Jesus

Greetings,

            Sunday, April 15^th, was the Second Sunday of Easter, and I preached using the Gospel lesson from John 20:19-31 as the text.  The focus was on The Risen Lord, and the reality of the Resurrection for us, who in Jesus are now the Resurrection People.  These comments, ranging from the Fourteenth century and the Twentieth century, raise thought provoking images for our understanding of the Body and Blood of Jesus, our Communion, as the essence of being Resurrection Christians.

            The table fellowship of Christians implies obligation.  It is our daily bread that we eat, not my own.  We share our bread.  Thus we are firmly bound to one another not only in the Spirit but in our whole physical being.  The one bread that is given to our fellowship links us together in a firm covenant.  Now none dares go hungry as long as another have bread, and anyone who breaks this fellowship of the physical life also breaks the fellowship of the Spirit.

                                                                                Dietrich Bonhoeffer

                                    By this light I shall come to know

                                    that you, eternal Trinity,

                                    are table

                                    and food

                                    and waiter for us.

                                    You, eternal Father,

                                    are the table

                                    that offers us as food

                                    the Lamb, your only-begotten Son.

                                    He is the most exquisite of foods for us,

                                    both in his teaching,

                                    which nourishes us in your will,

                                    and in the sacrament

                                    that we receive in holy communion,

                                    which feeds and strengthens us

                                    while we are pilgrim travelers in this life.

                                    And the Holy Spirit

                                    is indeed a waiter for us,

                                    for he serves us this teaching

                                    by enlightening our mind’s eye with it

                                    and inspiring us to follow it.

                                    And he serves us charity for our neighbors

                                    and hunger to have as our food

                                    souls

                                    and the salvation of the whole world

                                    for the Father’s honor.

                                                                                                                                                            Catherine of Siena

Yours & His,

DED

A Day When History Was Changed

Greetings,

            The world and life are full of remarkable coincidences, some serendipitous, some frightening, some lovely, some bazaar, some joyful, and some incredibly sad.  The evening of April 14 and early morning of April 15, 1865 and 1912.  Lincoln and the Titanic. 

            Both the assignation and the sinking depended upon a wide variety of unusual circumstances occurring in the days and hours before the actual events.  Both occurred in part because of the foolish/improper actions of key persons who had responsibility for seeing that such disasters did not occur.  Both brought about immediate shock followed by a tremendous out-pouring of grief.  Both not only had a major immediate effect on the many people directly involved, but both also had a profound effect on the course of history and on the social order. 

            It would not be inaccurate to say that each tragic event marked the end of an era.  Indeed, in each case life in this society would never be the same after these events.  Each also called into question the action, or non-action, of God.  How could a loving, merciful God allow these terrible things happen?  Where was God?  Each also, at the time, evoked comparison with the Good Friday event—the sacrifice of the innocent. 

            The passage of time has not eliminated the questions.  We still ponder these events and seek to understand the why and wherefore of them.  We realize that even after all of these years, these events have had an effect on our society and our lives.  We still struggle with the questions.  We still seek to understand God, and where God was and what God was doing on those nights of April 14.  And our answers to those questions still have a profound effect on our lives.

Yours & His,

DED

Resurrection Now – Suffering and Service

Greetings,

We are in the midst of the Easter season, and celebrating the grace of God toward us in the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  Consider these thoughts on the suffering Messiah and the Body of Christ.

I wish to know Christ and the power flowing form his resurrection; likewise to know how to share in his sufferings by being formed into the pattern of his death.

                                                                                                                        Philippians 3:30

Jesus’ words and his life reflect the same spirit which we believe we see in Job, in Jeremiah, in the Servant of the Lord: that there is no answer to the problem of evil, and no way to meet evil in the concrete, except suffering and death.  We have seen people in all the ages try to shake off the burden by the most varied and ingenious devices, and they have all failed.  Jesus alone came and said: Take up your cross.  If you wish to live, die.  If you wish to find joy, suffer.  He did not explain it; he simply lived that way.  If there were a better answer to the problem, if there were a better way to meet it, it is hard to think that the incarnate God would not have chose it.  He did not make evil easy to understand or easy to bear; he showed only that it is possible to live with it, and to live well, to live heroically, without doing anything about evil except to suffer it.  This is the mystery of the Servant, the mystery of the life and death of Jesus, that it is in yielding to evil, in becoming its victim, in being consumed by it, that you have your only hope of overcoming it; and, by the solidarity which links Jesus with all and all with each other, this victory over evil can be communicated to others who are ignorant of what happens on their behalf.

                                                                                                                  John L. McKenzie

McKenzie wrote about the suffering of Jesus, and those who would follow him, in 1956 in The Two-Edged Sword: An Interpretation of the Old Testament.  Some two hundred years earlier Charles Wesley wrote:

Didst thou not make us one,

That we might one remain,

Together travel on,

And bear each other’s pain;

Till all thy utmost goodness prove,

And rise renewed in perfect love?

Then let us ever bear

The blessed end in view,

And join, with mutual care,

To fight our passage through;

And kindly help each other on,

Till all receive the starry crown.

And my old favorite, Dorothy Sayers, comes through with:

It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills

a sparrow can hear that story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not                 experience any shock at all.

Yours & His,

DED

The Lord Is My Shepherd – 1 & 2

Greetings,

            In the 1920's the English poet Herbert E. Palmer wrote this interesting paraphrase.

I

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,

            I lie down in his meadows so green,

I follow his led where the low winds chant

            By the softly stealing stream;

And I seek to obey whate’er he saith

            Because he is my Lord;

Though I grope through the Vale of the Shadow of Death

            He draws near me, my friend and adored.

For his rod and his staff are so comforting,

            Director, and comrade, and priest;

When my foemen are boasting and trumpeting

            He leads me awhile to his Feast.

O, surely his mercy and kindness

            Shall abide after seeing is dim!

He is everlasting divineness,

            I will house me in Him

II

Come, little David, come now down,

            Quit for awhile the skies;

Run through the streets of London Town,

            Lend unto all your eyes.

Come with the waters the angels quaff

            From the rivers beyond the moon,

Come with your bright harp and shepherding staff

            Soon . . . Soon!

                                                                (The Unknown Warrior and Other Poems, p. 69)

Yours & His,

DED

Alleluia!

Greetings,

            At Easter services around the world the most used word is one which is virtually the same in all services regardless of language: Alleluia.  The only real difference is that the British, and some others, tend to spell it Halleluia.  In many of those churches the word was specifically withheld throughout the season of Lent.  Now, on Easter, it resounds loud and clear.  The following is an excerpt from Signs, Words, and Gestures by Balthasar Fischer, which is both a simple explanation and thought provoking.

            It is an unusual word that is not native to the English or ever the Latin liturgical vocabulary: the word “Alleluia.”  As a matter of fact, it sounds less like a meaningful word than the babbling of a child, and when it is sung with many notes for the final vowel, this impression becomes even stronger.

            “Alleluia” does, of course, have a meaning.  It is a Hebrew word, and down the centuries the church has brought it along with her, untranslated (like “Amen”), as a product of the Jewish soil from which she herself sprang and as a reminder of her earliest days.  The word is a cry of jubilation meaning “Praise the Lord,” and occurs frequently in the psalms...

            But the translation does not explain why the church chose and retained this word from the Hebrew language of prayer in order to express her Easter jubilation, even though in later centuries her own children did not understand the meaning.  I think the church meant to say: “In the presence of the mystery that we celebrate on Easter, the mystery of our redemption, our usual intelligible vocabulary is inadequate; when faced with the superabundant mercy of God we can only stammer in amazement like children.”

            That is how it is with us Christians: As we gaze at the Son that has risen high over the darkness and cold of our Good Friday, all well-chosen words are useless.  We can only stammer out our Alleluia of wonder and jubilation.

+      +      +      +      +      +      +      +      +       +      +      +      +

      I would recommend listening to Mozart’s wonderful “Alleluia” from Exsultante Jubilate, K165.  I remember with great appreciation the Faith United Methodist Church Choir performing it at my retirement celebration.)  It will truly lift your soul.

Yours & His,

DED