Letter to Helena Hahn Basquette - part 4

letter to Helena Hahn Basquette continued...)

So, let me sum up my position. The pill is a disaster because recreational sex is a disaster. Recreational sex destabilizes marriage, it demeans women, it makes men irresponsible, it makes children homeless through the break up of their families. They may have houses, but they don’t have homes. They don’t have brothers and sisters that a large family provides. They are shuttled from day care to school to Dad’s house to Mom’s house, then to Grandma’s and back to Dad’s house then to day care again. They live in their parents’ cars just as surely as the families that I met parked in their broken down old cars in front of the rectory of the church I pastored in Uptown. They are orphans when their parents are alive and twice orphaned when their parents die.

Sex is not recreation. It is a gift that brings a man and a woman together to create the stable, life long relationships that are necessary for the well being of the culture and the security of children. Though it can be a source of joy and of pleasure, it is more importantly the cause of love. Real love. Sacrificial love. That Love which is God. 

In marriage there is meant to be an unbreakable linking of the three loves, eros, philia and agape. The love which is desire, the love which is friendship and ultimately the love which is sacrifice come together in a faithful marriage and family.  Our modern age demands the right to stop at eros, (desire) so it never arrives at friendship (philia) and that love which is God Himself, sacrificial love (agape). 

What a wonder it is to see two old people in love. The fires of youth have cooled to the warmth of friendship and then billows out once again into the passion of sacrifice, a life lived for others, a life lived for one another, for children, a life lived for God. We moderns end the process when eros cools, because we know no other kind of love. We say, “I am no longer in love with you. I have gotten a lawyer. I am taking the house and the kids. Get out.”  We never experience what love can be when we end it unreasonably. 

You may counter with “We practiced birth control and we did just fine, no divorce, close to the kids and the grandkids. It’s all good.” Maybe you did. Most of us didn’t.  You were fine in your lifeboat while the ship sank. Congratulations. You avoided a lot of hard times. Still, hard times are meant to stretch us. Children are the teachers of love, because they demand sacrifice.

My mother was the daughter of privilege. She told me that when she was married she had never cooked a meal nor touched an iron. As a girl, she spent summer on the Canadian shore in a twenty-room “cottage” or sometimes went on summer cruises on the Great Lakes. She went to the best Catholic schools and graduated from college in about 1929. She grew up surrounded by servants when her father was flush, and when he wasn’t they pretended.  She met a boy, a young university graduate at a party. He was her brother’s best friend. They called him “Si”. He wasn’t from prosperous people, but he was ambitious. He sold newspapers to put himself through university. In addition he taught rhetoric and debate to put himself through grad-school. He planned to become a lawyer.

They met at a party on the eve of Easter. He invited her to come along on his paper route with him. Her brother and “Si’s” girl friend, also at the party, were going along. It would be fun. After a while, Dad’s girl friend and mom’s brother got tired and gave up, but mom continued with the paper route and as the sun rose, they went to early Mass together. They were Catholics. Soon they were engaged.

The depression hit, Dad got a real job, left school and they married. My father did well despite the depression. He didn’t make much money, but managed to stay employed. He was an up and coming young stock expert, I think with Dun and Bradstreet. Things were tight in the depression, but Mom was a social worker and they managed to hire a girl to act as nanny and housekeeper and the future looked bright. He and his friends came up with the company through the great depression into the hard times of the war.

In about 1946, the company transferred Dad to Chicago. They found a house they could afford in a parish they liked with a good Catholic school and settled in. The company called again and said that they were going to transfer him one more time. The sixth child had been born. The seventh was on the way. He couldn’t uproot them again. He found a job with Morris B. Sachs. They gave him lots of titles and not much money. They had old furniture and threadbare rugs. The days of privilege and ambition were long gone. 

I can remember Mom on wash day, wearing her old dress and tying her hair back with a shoe string. She had almost no jewelry and no furs. Even the diamond chips had fallen out of her wedding band. My Dad always kicked himself that he had never made a million. All his friends in the “freshman class” at Dun and Bradstreet were millionaires many times over.  I remember our “vacations” back to Detroit where we stayed with Uncle Ed in his very nice home or went to his “cottage” on the Canadian shore. We would visit family and friends from my folks’ youth. I remember they all had such nice things. 

Mom and Dad put all seven of us through Catholic schools including university, and eventually Dad’s very canny investments paid off and they were comfortable. He kicked himself that unlike his old friends form Dun and Bradstreet, he never made a million. He plodded through a job he hated and why? Because he loved his children and his wife more than he loved the security and the things that money could buy.  Every time Mom found out that she was pregnant, Dad would say, “Where will we find the money?” Mom would say “God will provide.” and He did. They were Catholics.

There is an old Yiddish lullaby. “Du, mein Sohn, mein lieber Kaddish..” Kaddish is the prayer said for the dead among the Jews. It is an old custom to call one’s child his Kaddish, because that child is the one who will recite the mourner’s Kaddish at his parents grave. If another Catholic teaching is true, that love goes beyond the grave and that prayer reaches heaven, who will pray for us when we stand at the judgment seat of God? 

 I am the seventh child of two people who sacrificed all their ambitions for me and my brothers and sisters. Friends worried about my mother and her pregnancies. They encouraged her to “do something about it.” I was born a month late. I’m sure my father worried that he was going to lose the woman he loved in a difficult labor. I’m sure my mother worried too, but she never told me. That was all a long time ago. They are dead now. Thirty years after his death, twenty after hers, I still go to their graves to pray. I am so grateful for their sacrifices that gave me life and faith. When I say Mass, at the memorial of the dead, I think of them with love and pray for the repose of

their souls. 

I am their seventh child. I am their Kaddish. 

Rev. Know it all

PS:I know that this letter in 4 parts is pretty rough. And I know that I get pretty personal and paint things in my family life as pretty rosy. Believe me, they weren't. As

anyone who knows me  will tell you, there was at least one screwball in the family, the one who writes this column. 

My parents were convinced by their faith to obey papal authority in the most intimate details of their life, and, as I have pointed out, I didn't really accept or teach these ideas in my early ministry. I was convinced of the easy Catholicism that swept the Euro/American members of the Church and their clergy. If you were convinced by idiots like me to salve your conscience and do what you pleased, don't beat yourself up. 

"Well, isn't it a little late?" It's never too late as long as God gives us life in this world. The goal is sacrificial love. If you are long past the time when Humanae Vitae and artificial birth control are an issue, do a little sacrificial loving. Visit a hospital. Call a sick friend. Volunteer at an orphanage.  Better still volunteer at a pro-life crisis pregnancy center. Tutor at an inner city school.  Bake a cake for a shut in neighbor. Donate to a worthy cause. If you can't do any of those, pray! My wonderfully wise mother once said, as I effusively apologized for something I had done, "Don't just say you're sorry! Do Something!!!   

Again I regret being so blunt and so harsh, but I suspect that there is a grizzly bear just behind us, and I thought I should mention it. Perhaps I am mistaken, but it sure looks like a very hungry grizzly bear who is  going about seeking someone to devour!

Letter to Helena Hahn Basquette - part 3

Are you still reading this? I just called you a monster! Perhaps I was harsh.  I realize there were and are people who agonized over these things. There were then and are now marriages that are in difficulty. There were and are those with serious medical issues. I had one sister who couldn’t conceive and another sister who couldn’t keep from conceiving. We discussed these things at length over dinner in my home back in the early sixties. If you struggled to obey, if you agonized over your  decisions, God keep me from condemning you.  It’s not you that I blame. The real monsters are those who made or make the decision glibly thinking only of the inconvenience or expense of large families. The monsters are those who sacrifice children to Moloch and Baal, the Canaanite gods of prosperity.

In the current age it is simply assumed that one will be sexually active before marriage and will practice artificial birth control. It is routine when a doctor interviews a young woman, married or unmarried, he asks “What kind of birth control are you using?” (It is interesting to note that a doctor never seems to ask a young man the same question. Another victory for feminism, no?) Extra marital sex is the assumption and small families are the expectation. Chastity, marital fidelity and large families seem  odd, or even irresponsible now.   

The monsters are those of us who, for love of ease and money have grown callous to the beauty and sacredness of human sexuality and its relationship to the family. Further, we, the clergy are the ones to blame for the monstrosity. We failed to teach the Catholic Faith. We encouraged you to pick and choose those teachings that were most useful and least challenging.    

“Dear brothers and sisters, not many of you should become teachers in the church, for we who teach will be judged more strictly.” (James 3:1) 

We, the scoffers of the 60' and 70's will soon have to face God and I tremble because of all the people I misled. Thinking it was kindness, I failed to say the hard things. Now as my life hurries to its final chapters, I realize that I deprived people of the truth, I deprived them of real love by trying to be polite. If there is a lion about to devour you, is it kindness on my part not to point it out? If I fail to warn you of danger simply because I don’t want to upset you, or to anger you, is this love?

We clergy in the years after the Council taught a diluted faith that made few demands. Fasting was no longer important. Marital fidelity was a high ideal, but not really practical. Mass was optional. Frequent Confession was tedious and an invasion of privacy. Father would make up the Mass as he went along, and use bread baked by the liturgy committee that was tastier than a dry communion wafer. He used wine that had a bit more zing, like a good port. We had general absolutions at Christmas and Easter. Everybody should go to communion, because we were now all sinless. God understands our weakness. 

What  we did mattered not so much as what we felt. It was our good intentions that mattered. If we had made a “fundamental option” for God, then the rest was unimportant, after all St. Augustine said “Love God and do what you will.” We taught you to pick and choose among the treasures of the faith. 

Now I see people my own age who, when they talk about their children, get a far away look in their eyes. “Yes, my daughter lives in California. That’s where her career took her. She was married, but got divorced and the grand kids spend their time going between Nevada where their father lives and then back to California. We see them on some holidays when it’s mom’s turn to have them, but it’s all right... they seem OK. They were baptized, but I don’t think they go to church much. I’m not sure..... My son lives in California too. He never married and I hear from him fairly regularly.... He’s always going on trips with his friends. He’s taken some wonderful vacations, and sends us photos, but he doesn’t come back to the Midwest much...” 

I have this conversation all the time, or ones like it. It breaks my heart. I want to run away and weep, not because you have sinned, but because I have. I taught a kind of Christianity that inspired no one because it demanded nothing. All truths were the same. All religions were as good, one as one another. The old man in the Vatican couldn’t tell me or you how to run our lives.

I remember now with great shame going to dinner with some fellow seminarians on Ash Wednesday. We of course ordered meat, just a sign of “Christian Liberty.” It was purely an act of defiance. If it is true that love is sacrifice, then I taught narcissism as if it were love, just as I had been taught by a seminary of priests who left the priesthood. I remember a dramatic reading of the Song of Songs that was the grand finale of one my theology school classes. It was read antiphonally by a priest professor and a friend of his, a nun. They did it with great feeling looking longingly at one another and reciting in hushed breathy tones. A month or two later they ran off together. Haven’t heard of either of them since. So now our churches are empty, our nests are empty and our hearts are empty. God forgive me. And, as God is my witness, I cannot do it any longer. Perhaps there is still time.

I recently got a letter pointing out that “ ...your rhetoric appears to be heading towards absolute dogmatic adherence without the necessary nuances... Empathy, Forgiveness, Charity, Reconciliation are the words I would like to hear at Mass more often and less archaic rituals."

Maybe the writer was correct.  Please understand that there is no one unloved by God, and that all one must do to receive forgiveness is to admit sin. If we can really admit that we “have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” (Romans3:23), then we are on the path to heaven. But to say that my sin is not sin is the surest road to hell. 

We, the clergy helped you along that road to hell by assuring you that your sin was not sin! How often have you gone into a confessional and heard the priest say, “Oh, that’s not really a sin.” You knew it was a sin. It was eating you up inside, but father told you it was okay. Do you think you will be punished nearly as harshly as I will be? I tremble to think of the wrath that awaits me! 

I remember hearing of a man who repented all his life of a childhood prank. Everyone said it was nothing. He knew it was something. As a boy, he and his friends had turned a sign on a country road so that it pointed in the wrong direction. It was all great fun. He wondered all his life how many people he had misled who never found their destination because of something he thought good fun. It haunted him on his very deathbed.  So many of us clergy turned the signs that led to heaven and replaced them with the sign that led to hell. God be merciful to us. 

The few heroes who held out for the faith were mocked and hounded into silence or obscurity. I remember going to a lecture by an old priest who questioned some of the liturgical changes. I was invited by some of the older seminarians to come along and heckle. It was all great fun. We who wanted to get along and go along, and preached the new and more pleasant Gospel. 

I believe with all my heart that God is giving us, the clergy, another opportunity to accept the teaching of the Church and to obey the pope regarding Humanae Vitae and the sacred liturgy of the Mass. What will happen if we once again refuse to obey? Haven’t the moral scandals of the past forty years been enough? What will happen if we priests once again refuse Him? I, for one, will obey this time and hope that God will have mercy on me in my old age.

Again, I know this sounds very harsh. That it sounds harsh is not the matter. More importantly, is it true?  There are people who cannot have children but long to or are able only to have a small family. I am not speaking about them. I am speaking about those who refuse the gift that God would give, and even more I am speaking about myself and the others who taught a shallow materialism. 

Once, the woman who could not bear children received sympathy. Now, the woman who has a large family is pitied and often looked down on. Have we forgotten what the Lord said on His way to Calvary?   

For the time will come when you will say, '"blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!'"hen they will say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’ For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry? (Luke 23: 29-31) 

We are the generation of the green wood. The dry wood is surely on its way.

(You guessed it! To be continued.....)

Letter to Helena Hahn Basquette - part 2

Letter to Helena Hahn Basquette, continued:

I can hear you saying, “Isn’t it true that the world is overpopulated?”  The truth is that there is not an overpopulation crisis. Quite the opposite. The population of Russia has dropped from 148 million in 1990 to 143 million today. It will drop to 111 million by 2050. The Russian government is now paying people to have children. The population of China is about to face the same crisis. The Chinese are simply not having enough children to keep up with their death rate. 

People in China and India have a cultural prejudice in favor of male children. It is common in both India and China to have an abortion if the child in its mother’s womb is a girl. That means China and India are on their way to becoming countries populated by old men. The situation is much the same in Western Europe. Some estimates predict that at the current rate, there will be no Italians in 400 years. The situation is much the same in all of Western Europe. Amazingly, Africa is facing an under population crisis in parts of central Africa, Zimbabwe and South Africa. It is the young and those of productive working age, especially women, who are missing.  China will soon face the end of its abundant work force and its economic growth. So would the United States, were it not for the immigration of young workers, especially from Latin America.

How do you define overpopulated? People have never lived longer nor eaten better than the age in which we now live. Admittedly there is starvation and a struggle for resources, but starvation seems usually  the result of political inequity and war, not of inadequate resources. 

“But overpopulation causes pollution!”  People don’t cause pollution, any more than cows or termites or any other form of organic life. Machines cause pollution. It is fascinating to note that the greatest environmental pollution is produced by countries that have controlled their population. Russia, Western Europe, and the United States are all committed to population control, or have been in the past. They also have large “carbon footprints.” Now that China has succeeded in limiting its population growth, it is taking its place among the great polluters. 

Depopulated societies are mechanized societies. They need machines to do the work that people once did.  In the USA we seem to think that it is reasonable to have one child and three cars, a summer home, a mini mansion with five televisions, six phones, a garbage can full of leftovers, styrofoam carry out containers filling the refrigerator etc. etc.  We spend our money on things because we don’t have to provide for children.

Children are not a form of pollution. They are, please forgive my reference here, biodegradable. They, like you and I, are dust and to dust they will return. This is not true of the styrofoam container that mom got at the carry out as she drove her Hummer from her job downtown to the prestigious day care academy on the North Shore to pick up her 2.3 children. The styrofoam container will still be in a landfill centuries from now. 

My mother would never have gotten carry out to feed her seven children. She couldn’t have afforded it. Leftovers became soup the next day and hash the day after that. We ate what we bought. Now our garbage cans are filled with the food we disdain to reheat and the poor rummage through our dumpsters, grateful for the feast we have discarded.  We pretend that we are concerned about the environment and pride ourselves on having limited the size of our family as an effective means of reducing pollution. We are idiots.

"How about the rights of women? Hasn’t the ability to control the size of her family empowered woman to compete in the work place and the wider world? Do you really think that birth control and abortion have improved the situation of women in the world?"

Again, forgive my unfortunate turn of phrase. The pill has created recreational sex, and who has been made the toy of this new game? Women are objectified more cynically and brutally than ever before. Internet pornography, the soft porn that passes for prime time comedy, and the constant search for the more desirable sexual trophy have made women only as valuable as their makeup. It is not the depth of their souls nor the quality of their mind that TV producers and advertising agents value. It is their ability to arouse that really matters. 

Women used to define themselves by their relationships. Now they are working drones just like men who define themselves by their dreary jobs, not by their relationships. When asked the question, “What are you?” We answer that we are lawyers or shop clerks or firemen or firewomen, bricklayers, soda jerks, whatever. We are not mom and dad, or spouses and lovers. We are our jobs, not our loves. This is the victory of feminism? 

My mother was an exceptionally beautiful woman. After giving birth to seven children she struggled to control her weight. My father was never in favor of my mother’s diets. He worried that they would ruin her beauty. She was beautiful in his eyes not despite the fact that she had born seven children, but because of it. 

Her motherhood  enhanced her beauty. She never changed her hair color and wore almost no makeup or jewelry, but my father knew that she was beautiful and so did her children. She was valued for her relationships and not for her ornamental value. She was thought of as beautiful by her husband, her children and all those who knew her well. She had a dignity that no amount of paint can confer.  She was a woman, not an aging adolescent trying to hide her years with layers of make up, dyed hair and expensive baubles. 

Her virtues were the jewels she wore. She needed no other ornaments. So many of the jewels that decorate the beauties of our age of plastic and tinsel are mined by children forced to work in the mines, digging stones like tanzanite and diamonds out of the African soil.  The gem trade and its child slavery helps fuel the wars in Africa, Asia and South America. 

We don’t waste our money on having children so we have the wealth to sit in front of the television and order jewelry that has been dug out of the rocky ground by children.  We pretend that smaller families are somehow morally superior to large families, when the truth is that we prefer things to children. We are worse than idiots. We are monsters.

(most certainly to be continued.....)

How dare the Bishops demand religious liberty...

Dear Rev. Know it all,

How dare these old men in the Vatican and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops interfere with a woman’s right to choose! I am incensed at the refusal of the Catholic Church to comply with the government’s defense of all workers to receive reproductive services even if they work for a repressive institution like the Catholic Church. Democratic Congress person Connolly could not have been more correct when on February 17, he blasted Bishop Lori who testified to a House committee that the Health and Human Services birth control mandate threatens religious liberty. I was delighted when the congressperson pointed out that they were “complicit in the trampling of freedom” and that Lori and the others were participating in an attempt to embarrass the President in an election year by overstating an issue. When will you catch up to the times?

Yours,

Helena Hahn Basquette

Dear Helena,

Thank you for pointing out that we are not in sync with the times. The times stink. Hooray for the Church. I have nothing but respect for the office of the presidency and the majesty of the law. I only wish that the same Barak Obama who said at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, that “It is important for western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit” would extend the same concern to Catholic Christians.

All this excitement has brought the Catholic Church’s teaching on family life and children into the sharpest focus since Humanae Vitae was first published in 1968. I remember the outrage that greeted it then and still does. There was a poster plastered all over my seminary of a stern looking Pope Paul VI in an “Uncle Sam wants you” pose, finger pointing with the caption “the Pill Is a No-No.” It was all great fun. Some of our professors believed it was their duty to help us think our way around the Catholic prohibition of artificial birth control in a sophistry that would impress the most adroit Pharisee or the most subtle Jesuit. The Dutch Catechism of 1966, all the rage in my seminary days, pointed out that the Vatican Council had not mentioned artificial contraception. “Every one can ascertain nowadays, there are several methods of regulating births. The Second Vatican Council did not speak of any of these concrete methods… we can sense here a clear development in the Church, a development, which is also going on outside the Church.” (p. 402, New Catechism, Authorized Edition of the Dutch Catechism with Supplement.)

Councils, in the belief of many of my teachers, were superior to popes, thus what the council did not say trumped what a pope said, and we should be pastoral and help people to not have such big families because it’s just too hard and the world can’t take any more children and it’s hard on the poor to keep having all those babies and if you are a good priest you’ll let people slide on this one..... Thus my education on Humanae Vitae!

And then, for those more conservative professors, there was natural family planning as Catholic birth control. Well...alright! You can limit the size of families, but you have to do it with natural family planning because the old guys in the Vatican don’t want anybody having too much fun because well, we all know that you shouldn’t be doing that anyway and you should have been a nun just like Aunt Mary Margaret said!

I got no real education on Humane Vitae. It was all about the medical aspect and what to do in the confessional about what was done in the bedroom. It was nothing about an amazing and beautiful document that has turned out to be prophetic.  In paragraph 17 of Humane Vitae, Paul VI warned us that 

“a wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.... man may finally lose respect for woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, (and) may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.”  

If you think that the past 40 years have brought greater dignity and freedom to women, think about all the pornography, the glorification of one night stands, the increase in divorce which has impoverished women and children, the objectification of women and sexuality in general by the computerized proliferation of pornography and the new and raging sexually transmitted diseases. 

The pill gave us recreational sex that hasn’t really been as much fun as we had hoped, especially for women who now go to the same dreary jobs that men go to because the tax man demands a double income just to keep a roof over her head and that of 2.3 children. If daddy bails for the trophy wife, then mommy will just have to get a second job. Women can now be lawyers and senators and brick layers and waitresses and anything they want except mothers. Just tell someone you’ve got  eight children, and see the look they give you. It says, “Don’t you know that children are a form of pollution, burdening the planet with their disposable diapers and green house gas emissions? Have you no self respect?” or my favorite usually addressed to full time mothers: “You mean you’re just a mom?  Don’t you have a real job?”  

Paul the VI was a prophet and my teachers who laughed at him were fools. The scandals we have had to endure were, I believe, a consequence of the whole sale rebellion against papal authority. My morals classes and confession practica were in large measure an attempt to teach us how to help the poor beleaguered parents in our parishes find a way around obedience to the ridiculous demands of Humane Vitae and its outmoded sexual morality. And simply put, it you can think your way around one sin, you can find your way around any sin, and we priests did a fine job of it. The pope was a senile idiot in the view of some of those who taught me and they made it possible for every man to be his own pope. That would account for the moral chaos from which we are now awaking like some drunk on the morning after who wonders what became of his trousers and his wallet.

Nothing gets anyone so riled up as the Church’s teaching about artificial birth control. When I go to a pulpit and say perhaps we need to look at this again,  I can feel the narrowing of eye slits from women my own age who are past the time of child-bearing. I feel  their thoughts. “Are you saying that I did the wrong thing? Are you saying that I sinned by having my tubes tied, or insisting that the old goat have his untied?” Now, let’s calm down everybody. I think there’s a way to look at this that will not result in riots and angry torch-wielding, pitchfork-toting mobs congregating on the rectory lawn once again.

To be continued.......

Letter to PennyQuostal, part 6

Letter to Penny Quostal, continued:

Where was I when I was so rudely interrupted by the government’s attempt to destroy religious freedom? 

Oh yes.... sacraments. As I have said, a sacrament is an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace. It is very hard not to think magically about sacraments. Sacraments aren’t magic. A lot of superstitious people treat them that way. What pray tell, does the Catechism say about superstition? Paragraph 2111 tells us that:

 “Superstition.... attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.”   

Say what?  Can you translate that into English? Certainly!  The catechism is simply saying that it isn’t just the appearance that counts. A sacrament doesn’t work like magic. It is an outward sign that gives grace to the degree that a person is disposed to that grace. So, what is grace?  Paragraph 1997 of the Catechism says “Grace is a participation in the life of God”  and Paragraph 1999 “The grace of Christ is the gratuitous (free, unmerited) gift that God makes to us of his own life.”

In other words God is freely  offering us His own life in the sacraments. It is free but it isn’t automatic. It is the offer of the new life and the only thing we do is allow the Holy Spirit to take way our old life. God will not give the new life to His children if we cling to our life. Grace doesn’t overwhelm us like a magic spell. We have to say yes to that offer. He offers, but we can refuse.

Perhaps we need to back up and look at the Greek word for grace. That’s always fun. The word is “Kharis.” and it means “favor, even attractiveness,” as in “to find favor with someone.”. It can also mean “help, goodwill, that which someone experiences from another.” A common definition of the word grace is “an unmerited favor.” This means that a sacrament is the offer of a gift from God. What kind of gift?  As I’ve already said, it is the gift of adoption as God’s sons and daughters. 

Sacraments are NOT magic ceremonies that make our lives nicer. They are visible signs that invite us into the process of being turned into God’s children. They are entrances to conversion, to transformation. This is not always a pleasant process, “Those whom He foreknew  He predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son that He (Jesus ) might be the first of many brothers.”  Remember Jesus had holes in His hands even when he rose from the dead.

A sacrament is not a voodoo ritual. It is an adoption ceremony that really works. It really changes us into something new and different but it is not a quick or easy process. Falling over at a camp meeting is very quick and easy (Remember that’s what this harangue is about.) Mystery, in the sense of a secret may be the Greek word for a sacrament, but when the first Christians wanted to talk about these things in Latin, they chose the word sacramentum, which means “an oath to the death,” or “a solemn oath between lovers.”  The Roman soldier swore a “Sacramentum” on a regular basis, that he would die, if need be, for the emperor.  This is precisely the word that Pliny, a Roman governor in Turkey uses in about 110 AD when writing to the Emperor Trajan about the Christian  They were accustomed, on a stated day, to meet together before it was light, and to sing a hymn in alternating antiphons, to Christ, as to a god, and to oblige themselves by a sacrament, not to do anything that was evil, but that they would commit no theft, or pilfering, or adultery...”  This sacramentum, this solemn oath was Mass. 

It may seem almost blasphemous to say, but to receive the Lord in Holy Communion is more than to receive the whole Christ, in His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. It is, as St. Paul says, to make up in our flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ. (Col.1:24)  What could possibly be lacking in the sufferings of Christ? Simple: my participation. 

To take Holy Communion is to say that, just as Christ gave His life for me on the altar of the cross, I give my life for Him and His Bride, the Church on this altar. Like the Roman soldier swearing the sacramentum for his emperor, or the lover offering his life for the beloved, I will live for Him and, if necessary, die for Him. That’s what a sacrament is. It isn’t a nice experience of God’s love that causes me to fall over. It is not the laying on of hands for the sake of blessing. It is the laying on of hands for sacrifice.

If this is true of the Holy Eucharist, it is most certainly true of Holy Orders, by which the Eucharist is made available and it is a commitment most certainly made by deacons priests and bishops. Part of this “being conformed to the image of Christ” is the visible nature of the sacrifice. A Greek mystery made the secret things of the gods visible to the elect. So it is with us. The world sees a piece of bread, we see the Lord. A sacrament make the invisible realities of the Kingdom of God visible to us sinners. “If I am lifted up I will draw all men to Me.” (Jn. 12:32)and again “He is the visible image of the invisible God.” Col. 1:15) 

The sacrament of Holy Orders makes bishops, priests and deacons into marked men. They are targets. That’s why they wear the odd clothes at Mass. It is as if they are wearing bulls’ eyes on their clothing that say, “Arrest me first. Shoot me first.” There is no such thing as an invisible sacrament. Religious experience is  interior and invisible. The sacramental, sacrificial reality of the Christian Mysteries is there for all the world to see, even if they don’t understand. “Seeing, they do not see.” (Matt. 13: 13) That’s why you wear a ring if you are married and the clergy wear clerical garb, though those things are not sacraments in themselves. They are extensions of the visible nature of the sacrament.  Believe me, they don’t get the respect they used to. They get you some really funny looks in the super market and the occasional insult.

The liturgy is not a drama. It is not a show, but it does have some elements of drama. It is a presentation of the mystery. The Eucharist is the un-bloody representation of the sacrifice of Calvary. It is the foreshadowing of the Heavenly Wedding of the Lamb, that is of Christ and His bride, the Church. The tradition is that while we all have our roles, we are all standing in for someone else, as in a wedding by proxy. The congregation stands in for the Church, the bride. The congregation in itself is not the Church. She may be part of the Church, but despite the Neo-Congregationalists who write the vapid liturgical music so popular these days, we are not the Church. She has existed from all times and we have the privilege of being joined to her. We are her members and her children, but we are not the whole ecclesial enchilada. We represent the saints, though poorly, who stand at the Father’s throne.

The priest, an unworthy sinner, stands in for Christ. The Latin phrase  “in persona Christi” is usually translated , “in the person of Christ.” In Latin, the word “persona” primarily referred to a mask worn by an actor in one of the solemn religious dramas of the Greco Roman theater. It had a double use. It was actually a loudspeaker, but it also hid the actors individual face so that the audience was in no doubt which god or hero was being portrayed. So the phrase “in persona Christi” really means “representing,” or in “the guise” of Christ.” The individual actor didn’t matter in the drama, just as the individual priest shouldn’t matter at Mass. We priests are there wearing the mask of Christ. So we have the Bride, and the saints her children, and we have the Lord in His priestly role, but what use are deacons?

Deacons represent that most understudied element of the Kingdom of God. Deacons stand in for the Angels! In the Eastern Liturgy of St, John Chrysostom, at a certain point, the deacon’s stole is rearranged during the Mass to make it represent the wings of angels. The word deacon means minister, steward. The angels are called ministering spirits. “Are not all angels ministering spirits sent in service to those who will inherit salvation?”  (Heb:1:14) the word “ministering” in the text is “liturguca” and “service” here in Greek is “diakonia.” The very word angel means “messenger” The angels go back and forth between the altar in heaven and the altar on earth, bringing the messages of God to earth “In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God, command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high.” (Words for the Roman Canon of the Mass.)  The role of the deacon is not just to clean up the altar and read the announcements. He stands in for the angelic choir without which the Heavenly Wedding would not be quite complete. The deacon is more than a functionary. He is the messenger of God in the Church and that role is symbolized in the Eucharist.

So there you have it. There is the laying on of hands for blessing and the laying on of hands for sacrifice. You have ecstatic experience and you have the absolute commitment of the sacraments. “Gather my saints together before me. Those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice.” (Psalm 50:5) I have nothing against a good revival meeting. I thoroughly enjoy them, and I’ve fallen over with the best of them, but if falling over is the high point of your religious life, you’ve set the bar pretty low. “The Spirit and the Bride say, Come!” (Rev. 22:17)   Come where? “You have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly.”(Heb.11:1)   

That’s what Mass is.  It is Calvary seen from heaven. Sacrifice and Joy at the same eternal moment. It is the best God has to offer. Falling over is swell, but God has a lot more to offer.

Yours truly,

The Rev. Know it all