What’s Mary without St. Joseph?

By and large, the Advent season and Christmastide are heavily Marian. I have no complaints about this. I’m a Marian devotee and rosary collector through and through. So I would like to think that her intercession, along with the grace of her Son, who happens to be God, that should be credited with my growing devotion to her most saintly spouse, St. Joseph. Ever since preaching on St. Joseph for my ordination sermon a few years ago, I can’t shake a burgeoning devotion to him.

Enter: the Feast of St. Andre Bissette, a brother of The Holy Cross (cheers to my favorite order), and a devotee of St. Joseph. St. Andre’s greatest virtues mirror that of his patron, Joseph– obedience and obscurity-especially in the face of burdens, pain, and frustration. When people asked St. Andre for help, the ‘miracle man of St. Royale’ never pointed to himself, but to Christ and to the intercession of St. Joseph. I suspect it would have been easy for Saint Andre to let the miracles and healings “raise him in the ranks” of the world. Not only credited with miracles and healings, St. Andre raised the funds and supervised the building of the Oratory of St. Joseph, the largest shrine to Joseph in the world. Not too shabby. Clearly he lacked no charisma or force of character. Which makes his self-imposed holy obscurity all the more impressive, but what else would we expect from a man devoted to St. Joseph?

St. Joseph’s story, or the very little of it contained in scripture, points not at all to him, but to his blessed wife and especially towards his foster Son. Joseph is a good man, not immaculately conceived and not the rose of Sharon. Joseph isn’t translated into heaven or assumed or even wheeled away in a golden chariot. There’s no proto-evangelium of James to tout Joseph’s awesome family. Nope. Joseph is a good man, in the Genesis 1 sense of the world good. If all generations call Mary blessed, they might equally call Joseph good. Joseph hears God’s call. Joseph does what God says. Rinse and repeat as long as is necessary to raise the Son of God. Pretty normal, excepting the part that he’s God’s foster-father, not just any foster-father.

Not many of us are called to be Marys, I suspect. Most people aren’t immaculately conceived. Most of us are ordinary, plain, and obscure. If it weren’t for twitter and blogs we couldn’t even delude ourselves into thinking the world really cared about our thoughts and opinions. Our greatest deeds rank on the lists of simple and ordinary goodnesses. We’re not the “ring bearers,” to use a nerdy Lord of the Rings reference. We are the gardeners in Hobbiton. But the ordinaries have a part to play too we bear of our holy friends. We can’t carry their special holy deeds for them, but we can carry them. Through our prayers with the prayers of the saints, we lift others up to claim their vocations in God. Through our care and compassion, we help our friends who labor to bring Christ into their lives. Through our love, we build a home for Christ and his servants in the spaces of our own lives. Not too shabby for a bunch of obscure simple folks.

Were it not for St. Joseph, a good man and for St. Andre, his devotee, it might be easy to look at superstars of the faith and say, “pin a rose on your nose,” before going our merry way. We may not all be the shining stars of faith like Mary or the great patriarchs and matriarchs in Hebrews 11, reflecting the brilliance of the Son with in your face virtue and grace. That’s the beauty of St. Joseph and the ordinary grace to which we are all called. Some of us embrace our God-given identity along with the St. Josephs and brother Andres of the world who live in the painfully obscure light of God with all the obedience and goodness God helps us muster.

After all, Mary wouldn’t have got very far without St. Joseph.
St. André and St. Joseph, pray for us.

A Hermit’s Soup

First: a host of happy holiday greetings, friends! Happy solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, a very happy eighth day of  Christmastide, and happy secular new year! Sorry if that last one sounds a bit odd, but this is a liturgy blog, and I most unfortunately am a “scary liturgical terrorist” so I feel like I should stick to the liturgical year and we’re a month in at this point. So wishing you happy “new year” didn’t seem right. Anyway- take you pick of which day you’re celebrating, and I hope it’s a very happy one and that you’re all very blessed in 2012!

My parents gave me this awesome cook book for Christmas:

I tried one of the winter soups tonight, “A Hermit’s Soup.” It’s pretty basic, but delicious! so I thought it’d share. I made mine a little differently, so I’ll give you the real recipe and then tell you how I made mine so you can enjoy your own on some cold night, if you’d like! I’ll also tell you that it pairs very well with fresh sour dough bread. I didn’t try it, but I imagine it would go well with a nice red wine, if you’re not home alone or not actually trying to be austere and if you like a good Chianti.

A Hermit’s Soup: 

1 potato
1 turnip
half a small cabbage
2 carrots
1 onion
3 Tbsp. oil of choice
1/3 cup rice
2 qts. water
salt and a pinch of thyme to taste.

Wash and trim vegetables. Cut and slice them into tiny pieces.
Pour oil in a soup pot, add vegetables, and sauté for a few minutes Add rice and water, stirring well. Cook over low heat for one hour. Add salt and thyme just before serving. Stir well and serve hot.

I made several adjustments, but it still worked. Which is good, because it means the real thing must be amazing. All the grocery store had were huge cabbages, so I used only 1/4 of the cabbage. So I can try my next soup which also calls for cabbage and not even need to buy another head of cabbage! Yay frugality! I don’t like turnips so I left those out, and I didn’t have rice on hand so I left that out as well. Also, since I exercised a lot today and am trying to take better care of myself I added beef broth, instead of water, for extra protein. IT WAS DELICIOUS. I’m going to try to stop by the grocery store tomorrow and pick up some rice, which I’m sure will only improve the taste. I may also try adding just a few pieces of stew beef (again, protein. We don’t want any hermits with eating disorders!). If you like veggies and a good hot soup, this one’s for you!

Much Love for the New Year,
A

Getting Liturgy “Right” … the right way

Let me say from the beginning that I fully understand and am aware of all the liturgical, historical, and translation reasons that memorial acclamation 1, “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again” was removed from the soon to be current translation of the Roman Missal. I’m a liturgical purist, and a little piece of me is completely fine with this omission. After all, it’s not in the “original” latin. Following the standards set by Liturgiam Authenticam, it’s not an o.k. acclamation. It’s not addressed directly to God. And if it isn’t introduced well it really can seem like a side note that gets stuck in, mid Eucharistic Prayer, to make sure everybody’s paying attention. And yes, sometimes I do giggle when we sing the mass of creation version because it evokes a feeling akin to mixing the imperial march from star wars with John Phillips Sousa, and then repeats itself just in case you haven’t had enough imperial marching around. All that to say: I get why it got dropped. 

Dropping the text itself doesn’t bother me that much, for all the afore stated reasons. But singing it at mass for the last time last night really, really bothered me. What bothers me is that I think Mother Church could have done this differently, and used this as a way to reach across the boundary of schism to begin healing a very deep wound. It’s not time for finger pointing- and I heartily admit that protestants have their share to do for healing reformation scars. I find shifting reformation blame completely uninteresting and unhelpful. But it dawned upon me last night that no longer will Protestants and Catholics use the same words to profess their hope in the realization of Christ’s kingdom. This new translation, particularly the point of the mystery of faith, could have been a point where liturgical Protestants (at least mainlines) and Catholics worked together and informed each other. If we had worked together, we still could have dropped memorial acclamation one, no big deal. And when I say we I mean here my whole extended Christian family, weird cousins and all. Protestant liturgy could have grown toward an arguably better expression of the mysterium fide. And Roman Liturgy might have benefited from looking at it’s own genetic development as it was passed down toward its grand children and great grandchildren. We (and here I mean Protestant we) did, after all, steal most of the Roman Rite originally. Just take a close look at the 1662 BCP or Luther’s first few german translations, and you’ll see what I mean.

Again, I find figuring out who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’ for its own sake completely uninteresting and largely unhelpful. Everybody’s to blame for continued schism. What I do find interesting are opportunities for healing and union in the body of Christ. The liturgy can only be for the life of the world when it is the wellspring of the church’s life, it’s source and summit. I’m not angry at anyone, and I’m not even annoyed. I think I feel more like a parent, who knows what my beautiful and brilliant child is capable of, watching that same child settle for less. It makes me unspeakably sad to see yet another opportunity for healing and life pass my Christian family by, untried. In this particular move, I think all of us would have benefited from an aim toward eternal life along with formal latin. The two need not be diametrically opposed.

Let’s do better by each other next time, y’all. We’re family.

From John Henry Cardinal Newman

I’m working on a longer post, but I came across this while reading John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Apologia today and thought it was really well said and a beautiful exposition of precisely why ‘private’ reason must be ‘governed’ as it were by tradition and scripture. Enjoy!

“It is the custom with Protestant writers to consider that, whereas there are two great principles in action in the history of religion, Authority and Private Judgement, they have all the Private Judgement to themselves, and we have the full inheritance and the superincumbent oppression of Authority. But this is not so; it is the vast Catholic body itself, and it only, which affords an arena for both combatants in that awful, never dying duel. It is necessary for the very life of religion, viewed in its large operations and its history, that the warfare should be incessantly carried on. Every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason, both as its ally and as its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, a reaction of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private judgement alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide;– it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into ne by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power, — into what may be called a large reformatory or training school, not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) to be brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.”

(Newman, Apologia, 226).

Lex Legere; Lex Vivendi part I

The law of reading establishes the law of life. So go do lectio! No, just kidding…

A plethora of red-flags about technology, specifically the ordo vitae constructed by the internet for people participating in online society  have me wondering, and worrying a bit, about the future of humanity as it continues forward in this current reciprocal relationship with technology. I preface this by admitting my bias against the technology I daily use and abuse. Technology scares me, partially because I don’t understand it, and partially because I dislike the continual interruption caused by cell phones, blackberries, emails, pagers, ipods- you name it. There is something terribly rude about their interruption, and I remember with great fondness a time long long ago in a far away land, when a “no cell or smart phone” rule at my dinner table didn’t need to exist. But enough nostalgia for the beep, ring, and buzz-less yesteryear of five-years-ago.

I have three major concerns about the outcomes of technology’s shaping forces on humanity- and eventually (as in one day six months from now when I make time again) I’ll hopefully get to a liturgical component to this: why we need to think carefully about how liturgy, specifically the, regula fidae (the Creeds and dogmatic teaching), the Liturgy of the Hours, and practices of popular piety- especially practices like the praying the rosary or attending Eucahristic Adoration regularly engage or mediate or remedy the issues raised for humanity by our current  relationship with technology. Here, however, let me briefly touch on each of the three problems technology poses to living a human life.

First, I fear technology turns noble simplicity to lazy mumbling by setting the boundaries for common human interaction at 140 characters or less. During a sermon I heard recently, the closing charge was to express your faith as a tweet, which apparently allows you 140 characters. While noble simplicity should be the norm for liturgical and ecclesial expression and prolixity need not clutter the expression of faith, I worry that supplanting the Church’s guidelines for an adequate expression of the faith- say– a three paragraph statement- with twitter’s guidelines of 140 characters problematically places the technology instead of the tradition in the foreground of evangelization, and places it over and above the ‘good news’ that, at least according to St. John could fill all the books in the world and not run dry. (see St. John’s last chapter). I worry that allowing technology to set the guidelines for faith and its expression, far from encouraging a creative and engaging witness, could the witness of the Church and the Gospel down to the level of man-made technology in problematic ways. It demotes the Word of Life to a trite aphorism and diminishes the complex mystery of God by relegating it to the realm of the sound byte.

Second, technology may actually be subverting our God-given ability to creative thought and reason. Sure, we have unlimited information at our fingertips through the inter-webs, but true thought can’t be reduced to the input and output of fact sets, and must include also the creative rational component that makes sense of data sheets and conceives of a telos, a future, in light of the sum-total of the information received. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,”  Nicholas Carr points out that the technology giants, particularly corporations like Google and Twitter actually transform the way we think with the constant bombardment of information and encouragement to skim, skip, and slide over the surface of information before moving to the next thing. In two particularly poignant moments, Carr writes, “When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed…The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.” Yet, Carr writes, very little actual research into the ethics of the net’s intellectual shaping actually exists. For all its pervasive influence upon our minds, he finds that few minds actively think about its effects.

Finally, the internet has taken an active role in shaping our passions and affections, or so claims Facebook’s most recent campaign to switch most users over to their new facebook-timeline format. Here, users are promised that they will receive a compendium of themselves (narcissistic much?) that will remember them to themselves. One user went so far as to applaud the feature, which allayed his skepticism  claim that facebook knew him better than he knew himself! (“You’ll Freak When You See The New Facebook”). Sir Francis Bacon’s words of warning come to mind here, “Death comes as a heavy blow when, known too well by others, you die unknown to yourself.” The work of self-knowledge is a lifetime in the making, and requires an honesty facebook never claims. There is no editing things out in self knowledge, no “hide story” button, and the depth and complexity of memory far exceeds the capacity to ‘tag’ others. In other words, it would be a sad day indeed were I to engage only the parts of myself I liked and reduced all my friends to little blue words indicating nothing about the depth, length, or breadth of our relationship. A sad day indeed.

Ok. Such are my worries. Hopefully I’ll have the time and concentration to finish up discussing the liturgical, sacramental, and theological means by which the Church can help us receive the benefits of technology, without establishing it as an idol with eerily God-like powers to transform us without the renewing of our minds.

With Hope,
A