Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Traditional Latin Mass)

Dominica XIV Post Pentecosten (Mass of the 1962 Missal)
29 August 2021

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, AND OF THE SON, AND OF THE HOLY GHOST.  AMEN.

It is a reality of life and a truth proclaimed in God’s Word that man experiences a civil war within himself.  As St. Paul says it (epistle), “the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, for these are contrary to one another.”  The material world, including our flesh was made good by God.  Yet it is marked by sin.  And so, the flesh – after the Fall – battles even against the spirit to find its place and to establish its dominion.  In the civil war that is within us, the flesh can seem stronger or better armed than the spirit.  After all, isn’t it a common experience that the flesh seems to “win,” to get its way?  Don’t we experience frustrations and worries in life when we face the reality of our own sinfulness?

But upon deeper reflection, is it really true that the flesh is stronger than the spirit?  Might it be, rather, that the flesh is more savage than the spirit?  Might it be true that the flesh has more to prove than does the spirit?  A more thoughtful evaluation of our civil war reveals, I think, that the flesh in its fallen nature is like a loosely organized troop, armed with some weapons, yes, but trying to exert its presence and influence on a larger scale, battling in a more frantic way.  Perhaps we might even call the fallen flesh a terror cell, organized and able to inflict damage, to be sure, but frenzied and struggling to exert a stability and endurance it will never have.

If the flesh seems to be victorious in this civil war, is it really true that it is more powerful?  Or rather, is it that the spirit, being more eternally established, adopts a longer and wider vision, one that can afford something akin to patience or a more measured response to the fight?  After all, when you know that you are the victor, as the spirit knows, you can tend to live with or suffer the blows of a weaker enemy, knowing that you can sustain some inconvenience and harm because you know the weaker enemy will not have the upper hand.

 By faith and baptism we have been washed clean of the eternal consequences of sin and given the possibility of the inheritance of eternal life, that is, given the possibility of living in the ultimate victory of the Lord, where flesh and spirit are harmonious.  But in the meantime, in the campaign or the theater of battle that is this life, how are we Christians to understand the reality of our experience of the flesh and the spirit lusting against one another?  And, more importantly, what are we to do about this civil war?

 By maintaining the life of grace, especially in a proper sacramental life, we can faithfully take part in the battle that is our lot in this life.  Our battle strategy has two basic foundations as regards the flesh and the spirit.  One, while fallen flesh will not ultimately win, we need to take its savagery seriously and train it under discipline to live in greater freedom and conformity to holiness.  Two, while the spirit is ultimately victorious we need to rouse it from slumber and its tendency to dismiss the attacks of the flesh so that we strive with greater zeal and eagerness to live according to the spirit.  Penance and mortification are our practical responses to this twofold battle strategy.  We complete penance out of justice for our sins.  And we undertake mortification as a response to the call of prudence.  Penance and mortification become the duty of “every Christian who is not foolish enough to pretend to be out of the reach of concupiscence” (The Liturgical Year, Guéranger, vol. 11, p. 332).

 In the Gospel, the Greek wording is stronger than our English translation can communicate.  Rather than a message that no one can serve two masters, it is more like no one can be a slave to two lords.  When we focus on grasping, possessing, and controlling our own stability in this life, we are permitting the flesh to have the upper hand.  We are thereby serving “mammon,” that Aramaic word with a negative connotation, meaning “money” or “wealth.”  The gospel highlights some of the most basic elements of life.  We are not talking about fanciful things here.  No, it is more basic.  Do not worry over what you will eat or drink or wear.  Do not worry about the future.  This is such a basic lesson but such a foundational aspect of faith.  Faith can refer to an intellectual assent but it can equally mean trust.  Trust is a faith that has practical implications for how we live.  The Lord’s words in the Gospel are meant to recall for us who we are in this battle of life: we are God’s children and we are called to live in the freedom of the children of God.  We are worth more than the smallest of creatures, yet even they are cared for by God.  We are being called to a radical trust in God’s Fatherhood.  And when in our weakness and frustration with our own flesh we tend to listen to the lies that make us hopeless, we are called to have hope and trust in God’s working.  We have this hope and trust because we have been united and incorporated into Christ.  As members of the Church we are united to the Lord as Bride to Bridegroom.  As members of Christ’s Body we are united to our Head.  Thus, in the introit, when we cry out to God our protector and ask Him to look on the face of thy Christ… this is our face too and in a mystical way we are crying out to God to look upon us with that same favor and protection.  We cry out to a Heavenly Father who cares for us and who invites us to trust in Him.  We have confidence that when our Heavenly Father looks upon us He sees the face of His Christ, battered and wounded yet glorious and victorious.  And He responds such that we are withheld from eternal harm and guided to what is good for our salvation.

 IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, AND OF THE SON, AND OF THE HOLY GHOST.  AMEN.

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Assumption of the BVM
15 August 2021

A formal part of Catholic faith is our belief that God has blessed Mary with certain privileges.  These privileges bring salvation to Mary and they come purely from the generosity of the Holy Trinity.  These privileges are an answer to the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, and so they are part of God’s plan to make it possible for mankind to have eternal salvation.  All the privileges of Mary stem from her first or main privilege, namely that God chose her in a singular way to be the Mother of God the Son in the flesh.  In the privilege of the Assumption that we celebrate today we express our Catholic faith that at the end of her earthly life Mary, having been preserved from sin from the first moment of her life and having chosen to use her freedom to live sinless her entire life, was rescued from the decay of the tomb and brought up body and soul into heavenly life.  You can find this doctrine already believed and celebrated liturgically in the fifth century.  Finally, being formally defined in 1950 by Pope Pius XII, this doctrine is thereby a dogma of the faith.

You may have noticed that the Scripture readings do not make explicit reference to the assumption.  I actually love pointing that out because it raises an important lesson for us, especially important for a Catholic to grasp here in the Bible belt.  The lesson is highlighted in this question: Which came first, the Church or the Bible?  Or another way to ask it, did the Church’s faith precede the Bible or did the Bible precede the Church’s faith?  The answer is that the Church and the Church’s faith came first, well before anyone had a Bible to use.  Now, I want to pause right here, and say clearly that by making this observation I am not in any way downplaying the Bible or its importance to our faith, or suggesting it be allowed to collect dust on your shelves.  No, the Church reads and digests the Bible, and reflects upon it, and sees it as the inspired and inerrant recording of God’s Word in Tradition.  “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” St. Jerome says.  By observing that the Church precedes the Bible, what is important to highlight is that the Church was alive and faithful to the Lord well before the Church even decided at the end of the fourth century which books made it in to the Bible.  Still more, the Church was alive and faithful to the Lord well before the invention of the printing press, well before any printed copies of a Bible were available to the general public and for a user to hold before his eyes for personal reading.  So, for all those hundreds of years, how did the Church and individual believers hear God’s Word?  The answer is that God’s Word has its first and proper context within the Sacred Liturgy, hearing God’s Word proclaimed in the living faith expressed in our worship.  The liturgy is the first and proper context of the Church’s listening to God’s Word.  The Assumption of Mary can put an exclamation point on this foundational lesson of biblical history and how we read the Scriptures in a Catholic way.  One important understanding of the Scriptures is that they are read in a typological way.  That means that the Old Testament prepared the way for the New Testament and that persons, images, and events in the Old Testament are “types” that prefigure persons, images, and events in the New Testament.  So for instance, figures like Moses and Elijah are revealed through typology to prefigure Christ.  Again, the People Israel prefigures the Church.  As Christ and the Church are prefigured in the Old Testament, likewise so do the images of the woman, mother, and queen prefigure Mary in the New Testament.

While we don’t have passages of Scripture that make explicit reference to the assumption, we do have passages that refer to the ark of the covenant.  And this is key for our observance of the assumption of Mary.  The ark of the covenant in the Old Testament was the dwelling place of God with His people Israel; the ark was His sanctuary on earth (Ex. 25:8).  The ark was the sacred chest, the container that carried within it those precious signs that were incarnations of God’s presence and promise: namely, the ark contained the tablets of the Ten Commandments (Ex. 25:16), a golden urn containing the manna from the desert, and the staff of Aaron that had budded miraculously as a sign of the priesthood.  The ark was made of acacia wood (Ex. 25:5), which was known as a hardy, incorruptible wood.  The ark was covered in pure gold, and veiled in a cloth of blue (Num. 4:5-6).  It was placed in the holy of holies in the sanctuary.  This should sound familiar to a catholic and should get us thinking typologically about Mary. 

Since the Gospels do not record an account of the assumption, the Church chooses the Gospel of the Visitation.  That choice deserves some attention.  There are similarities in the passage of the Visitation that hearken back to the Old Testament, to King David’s triumphal transfer of the ark of the old covenant into Jerusalem, recorded in the 2 Book of Samuel 6.  There we read that David rose and went to the hill country of Judah to bring up the ark of God.  David exclaims, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?”  He leaped before the ark as it was brought into the city with joyful shouting.  Considering this joy before the ark of God’s dwelling we can appreciate the devastation when, upon exile, the ark disappears and is not seen again.  The Gospel of the Visitation echoes this Old Testament event of the ark.  Mary who is carrying God-incarnate in her womb goes out, like David, to the hill country of Judah, and she visits Elizabeth.  Before the presence of God contained in the ark of Mary, John leapt in his mother’s womb, like David had leapt and danced before the ark.  Elizabeth cries out in joy, like David had done, and asks “how can the mother of my Lord come to me?”  The Gospel of the Visitation shows that Mary is not only the Mother of Jesus, but also the New Ark of the Covenant.  With this in mind, the Gospel of the Visitation has been read by the Church for centuries typologically as an account of the ark’s return, a return not just to the earthly Temple, the sanctuary made by hands, but rather to its proper place in the heavenly sanctuary, since the earthly Temple is a copy of the heavenly one. 

The first reading of this solemnity opens with the apocalyptic vision of St. John from the Book of Revelation.  That reading began, “God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant could be seen in the temple.”  St. John is given a vision of the true and lasting Temple, the one not made by hands, but in Heaven.  It’s as if the veils or curtains, the parts and divisions of the heavenly Temple, are opened and St. John sees all the way into the holy of holies, the inner sanctuary where the ark is kept.  And immediately, coinciding with this vision of the ark, as if the same image in different form, St. John reports next: “A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.”  By choosing the Gospel of the Visitation and St. John’s vision, the Church wants to instruct us on how the faith has viewed Mary from ancient times.  She is the fulfillment of the Ark of the Covenant.  She is the New Ark.

Mary’s first privilege from God, that she was chosen by Him to be the mother of His Son, tells us that for all the reverence and care for the ark of the Old Covenant, Mary is greater still for she is the New Ark.  As fitting as it was that the ark of the old covenant be placed in the holy of holies, how much more does it make sense that God’s chosen daughter, and the vessel of the Incarnation of the Son, should be preserved from the corruption of the grave and dwell in God’s presence in the heavenly temple where He is worshiped?  Thus, the choice by the Church to have us listen to the Gospel of the Visitation and St. John’s vision in the first reading tells us something important about Mary and helps us situate our faith in her assumption within the context of where the ark should rightfully dwell.

In celebrating Mary, we are reminded that God is with us.  As the New Ark, Mary fulfills to a greater extent than the signs of old that God is with us because she contained not just the old types of the commandments (God’s Word in stone), the manna, and the staff of priesthood, but rather she contained God’s Word-made-flesh, the Bread of Life come down from heaven, the one Who is the great and eternal High Priest.  Finally, we not only celebrate her rightful dwelling in the heavenly temple, but we find in our faith in her assumption a reminder of God’s loving invitation to us that we follow the life of grace, as did Mary, so that we may take up our place in the vision seen by St. John, the heavens opened for us by the Savior who came to us through Mary the New Ark, assumed body and soul into heaven.   

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XVIII per Annum B
1 August 2021

We are currently in a tour through the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, known as the Bread of Life discourse.  This chapter is a prime location of Jesus’ teaching and our faith in the Holy Eucharist, that ordinary bread and wine become his Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.  This is a distinctively catholic belief, a matter of our identity as catholics, and a litmus test of sorts for the authentic faith, such that lesser notions that would render the Holy Eucharist as only a reminder or a symbol of Jesus, or as somehow still ordinary bread, must be clearly rejected as uncatholic opinions.  And yet we struggle to maintain this full and catholic faith when our eyes see only the outward appearance of bread but cannot see the substance of what the thing is.  Therefore, our affirmation of the clear scriptural teaching about bread and wine being the true and real Body and Blood of Jesus is something that requires from us an act of faith.

There is a tendency in our fallen human nature to see, but to fail to recognize.  There is a tendency to see and to focus almost exclusively on the things of this world while failing to elevate our mind and our thoughts to see higher realities.  Here at our parish we go to great lengths to avoid the pitfall of thinking of the Holy Eucharist in an impoverished or lower way.  Our primary experience of the Holy Eucharist is at Holy Mass.  And so, here we give great attention to reverence in how we observe the Mass, reverence in how we handle and in how we receive the Holy Eucharist.  We emphasize greater solemnity in how we conduct the Mass.  We know the value of sacred music that serves to lift the mind and the heart, to help it soar above the tendency to think in mundane ways about the Holy Eucharist.  We adopt that ancient posture by which we all gather around the altar yet face together a common focal point of the Lord in our midst on the altar, even as that posture reminds us we are in a procession to look for, and to await, and to move toward the Lord when he returns in glory.  And outside of the Holy Mass, we have the opportunity to elevate our minds about the truth of the Holy Eucharist by committing to spend time in our adoration chapel, coming to know more intimately the Lord who is truly present in the Blessed Sacrament there displayed.

 Why do we take such effort to keep our minds elevated and strengthened in what is the proper catholic faith about the Holy Eucharist?  Are we really susceptible to a lower theology, to thinking in a more mundane way and being weak in our faith?  The answer is yes.  We operate in a sense perceptible body, which means it is very easy and natural to us to focus on what we can touch, and see, and hear, and measure… to focus on material realities.  And in our fallen nature our human powers of the mind and of the strength to direct and control ourselves face defects and weakness.  When you couple our fallen nature with the tendency to trust that which we can perceive with our senses, the risk is that higher realities of the spiritual realm that are more difficult to measure are viewed as less reliable or suspect or even fantasy.  Do we live surrounded by mundane thoughts and tendencies?  Yes, we do.  We live in a highly individualistic age hijacked by the relativism that makes the self the arbiter of self-made truth that stands in contrast to plain matters of objective reality.  Consider some examples of lower, muddled thinking in our time: Cultural elites invoke “the science” to stop all debate about highly complicated variables that go into their regularly-wrong predictions about climate change and human extinction, yet the plainly obvious science about reproduction and the child in the womb escapes them.  Or does it really escape them?  Yes, they know a thing or two about human extinction.  We are constantly barraged by mundane slogans like “love is love,” that undermine the truth of the clear design of the complementarity of the sexes.  Marriage, designed by God and set in the natural law, is now anything man wants to make of it.  It is lower, muddled, and increasingly delusional thinking that trumpets that men can be women and women can be men and there isn’t any discernible, fixed, and physical distinction between them.  It seems clear to me that we religious-minded types have a much more serious and consistent respect for, and grasp of, the science whose origin is the same God we worship.  And the lower and muddled thinking of our age regularly tells us that “devout” and “catholic” go together even when that devout catholic supports positions, like the ones I just mentioned, that are contrary to the faith.

When we come upon John 6 I would normally focus my homily on expressing and explaining Catholic teaching on the Holy Eucharist.  I summarized that teaching at the very beginning of this homily.  But my attention this time in John 6 is drawn to a subtle lesson that underpins the Lord’s teaching and his awareness of our tendencies.  The Lord knows we tend to suffer from weak minds in our fallen nature and so we need to elevate our thinking.  In the Gospel passage the crowd comes looking for Jesus after they had been miraculously fed with bread (we heard this account last week).  Jesus notes their mundane motives when he says, “you are looking for me NOT because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.”  In other words, you ate the bread I miraculously provided for you but you didn’t see the signs, you didn’t recognize what that means.  The Lord makes it still more clear in what St. John next records him saying, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”  In other words, he’s saying, you are hungry again and are coming for physical or ordinary bread that perishes; you need to elevate your thinking and seek the bread that endures, that is above, that nourishes not just the body but nourishes you to eternal life.  But their minds are focused on lower things, mundane things, things that do not last.  The crowd may have been privileged to see Jesus miraculously multiply bread but they didn’t recognize it as a sign of God acting in their present moment.  Instead they are still looking for a sign from him and their main point of reference is not the present but the past.  For they say to the Lord, “Our ancestors ate manna in the desert.”  Jesus focuses them (and us) on the present moment and on what God is doing for them: “my Father gives you the true bread from heaven…. I am the bread of life.”

 Listening to John 6 today I suggest we renew our full and proper Catholic faith in what the Holy Eucharist is, because by it the Lord is inviting us to see, to recognize, and to trust that he is operating in our midst, in our present moment now, to nourish us for eternal life, if we will recognize the call to first live an authentic communion with him by prayer, good moral life, seeking absolution for our sins, and presenting ourselves in a worthy way for his total gift of self.  We need to recognize the dangers of that tendency to succumb to mundane and lower ways of thinking by which we focus mostly on the things that perish.  And for that reason we should seek all the more to know and to nourish our catholic faith, to elevate our minds, to “seek what is above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God” (Col. 3:1).  St. Paul seems to make a similar observation in today’s second reading: “you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds;… you should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.”