Slander, Justice, and Freedom

This morning as I was talking with the Lord I was reading Mark 7, where He is interacting with Pharisees. Verse 2 sets up where the difficulties start: "they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands defiled..." You can feel how this observation quickly turned into a judgment of Jesus, as in verse 5 they ask him, "why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?"

Jesus had inconsistency in his camp. Some washed, some didn't. Maybe the some who did were mindful of the tradition; maybe it was culturally engrained. Maybe those who didn't were unschooled in the ceremonial practices, or maybe they omitted it intentionally. We don't get any of that commentary. What, to the Pharisees, reflects back on Jesus is that He did not spend enough time enforcing the traditions, or He was not a careful enough rabbi to eliminate from his midst those who weren't doing it right, or simply this slipshod performance did not trouble Him. Clearly, He was either a lousy rabbi or a rebel. This is clear because they were their own standard of righteousness.

Jesus then proceeds to rip into them. From the text, I observe a few things.

First, He quotes Scripture against them (v. 6-7) to point out their hearts are far away, their worship is empty, and they teach human ideas. 

Second, the text is suggesting this was an ongoing exchange, not simply one conversation. Verse 9 says, "And he said to them," and again in verse 14 "And he called the people to him again and said to them." It sounds to me like Jesus often circled back to this theme when he talked with Pharisees and Mark is condensing Jesus' response in this account. I'm no scholar. But what I see in the paragraph begun by verse 9 ("you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God..." -- reminds me of Daniel 13 when Daniel is interviewing the two lying letchers who were accusing Susanna, "your fine lie has cost you your head") is that Jesus here is recounting for the Pharisees a detailed example of how they teach human ideas as doctrines of God. To me, this reveals He has spent time meditating on this, interceding with the Father for these wayward men. He is intimately familiar with their hearts, their words, and their deeds. This intimate familiarity is diametrically opposed to tribalism, where separatism rules.

As Jesus teaches his disciples about this exchange, he tries to help them arrive at the understanding which he says the Pharisees lack. And what caught my heart was in verse 22, where Jesus is listing the things which defile, and among these he includes slander. 

My Gen X heart stopped and did a little sideways glance around. Slander? As in, saying something publicly about someone else's behavior that makes them look bad? Ok, Lord. I just got done reading you ripping into the Pharisees and giving that group pretty much a bad name for the last 2,000 years, but I know that that wasn't slander, and that you are actually differentiating slander as a different thing.

This hits a real sore spot in my soul, one that I know needs healing and strengthening. My head knows that slander involves saying something that isn't true. Let's do some dictionary and catechsim definitions here.

slan·der

/ˈslandər/

noun

Law

1. the action or crime of making a false spoken statement damaging to a person's reputation.

CCC2477: Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likelyl to cause them unjust injury. He becomes guilty:

--    of rash judgment who, even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor;

--    of detraction who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another's faults and failings to person who did not know them;

--    of calumny who, by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them.

1. Another good Catechism quote is paragraph 2479: "Detraction and calumny destroy the reputation and honor of one's neighbor. Honor is the social witness given to human dignity, and everyone enjoys a natural right to the honor of his name and reputation and to respect."

I'll be honest. I have always struggled with saying anything about another person to a third party, even when there is no real question of slander involved. I am certain this came from some confusing childhood circumstances which followed me into adulthood, both when I simply couldn't understand what was going on, and when my attempts to speak or ask questions were met with explicit or implicit demands of secrecy and "we don't talk about this." Or, I simply knew that exposing the truth of my pain would really rattle others in my life, which led me to keep silent about what was happening in me, to make it easier for someone else.

This was deeply formative for me, and not in a good way. I took in that revealing truth was in fact slander and it dishonored people I should honor. My deformation never stopped me from mentally creating a class of people* I felt didn't deserve my honor, and whom I could scapegoat to make me feel better. And of course nothing reminds me of that as much as our political atmosphere in an election year.

Nothing could be further from what Jesus was doing with the Pharisees and his disciples. Jesus was in fact confronting the intimate places in his personal culture that people had skirted away from out of fear: the hypocritical power of religious leaders. I'm sure there were folks who thought it was much wiser to just go along and get along. But Jesus spoke right into the heart of dysfunction with the hopes of change and of pulling people out from under the wreckage that already existed. We do too talk about this might have been his exact attitude. And this is not slander. It is justice. No longer will those who do harm find protection, and those who are wise will gain instruction. 

To me, this shows the difference between learning to pattern my life on Jesus Christ, and learning to be nice. Learning how to show honor starts in a heart where identity and truth are clearly understood.

Oh Lord, conform and transform my heart unto Thine. With St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, make me into a supplemental humanity for You through whom You may live again in this world.

*Generally, this class of people consisted of anyone who did not remind me enough of myself.

Ponderings from Dear Master, Part Two

Fortunately I marked for myself the second piece that struck me as I was reading Ponderings from Dear Master, which I had intended to write about. I'm forgetful that way. In fact, one of my primary purposes for writing is to be sure that I return to things that I know I have more to glean from, like marking an unmined vein of gold. 

Here is the line, from page 15 of Susa Muto's book:

My faults were at war with God's faith in me, but God was the victor on this battlefield. His perfect virtues gained the upper hand over my imperfections.

This quote captures something simple but central to my experience. 

In January, I tried to write about the moment I had a revelation about this phrase: "[m]y faults were at war with God's faith in me." With God's faith in me.  Here's what I wrote then: 

You know that plastic thing that holds a turkey's legs together? (I had to Google it; apparently it is called a hock lock.) I feel like I had one of those taken off me. But instead of locking poultry legs, this thing held something in me to a way I -- or it -- wanted God to be, that He just isn't. A way I unconsciously was tempted to believe God is, and which subsequently kicked up a fight within me. What I could not see was it was the Holy Spirit fighting to get me out of the lock, and so I put up immense resistence. I was partnering with the wrong side of the struggle. 

My faults were at war with God's faith in me. 

Galatians chapter 3 says this:

Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. (Gal. 3:23-26, RSV-SCE)

 What Paul was saying about the point in salvation history when the Jesus entered it seems also to have application to the path of spiritual development. Maybe a better way of putting that is that we go through stages of purification of our interiority after baptism; it doesn't all happen at once. That's actually the whole basis of purgatory and of "growth" in the spiritual life. God has a schedule, and our job in partnering with Him is to continue to say yes, intelligently, to His designs for our transformation. And the "intelligently" part requires that we have accurate information about who God is and what He wants. His goal is that we become partakers in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). He is our loving Father (Mt. 6:9). We can need decades of meditation on these truths before they break through into our experience of them with God Himself. Or, He can communicate them to us in an instant, or by any combination of means. 

"Faith" in an incorrect understanding of God clearly is never going to be born of and fueled by the Holy Spirit. I will always be "trying to believe." Say for example that underneath my formal training in catechism, I hold a rather primal belief that God is secretly disappointed that I'm a human woman with physical senses, intellect, and desires. Say further that my religious training left me linking that which is intrinsically human with that which is intrinsically evil. What I'm left with, as an adult, then is that at best, God tolerates me, even though I'm bombarded with homilies about God's love for me. I will be "trying to behave" according to standards of a God who finds my humanity rather disgusting, all the while I'm "trying to believe" that He actually loves me. Or, maybe I will completely buy that God does hate transgressors and they deserve fierce condemnation. They'll just always be someone who's not me, because if I can prop myself up to look better than some vile sinner, that will help me "try to believe" in my faith.

The Holy Spirit will always and only lead us to embrace the truth. The more deeply we are able to tell Him, "I don't care what the truth is or what it costs; I want You" then the easier time He will have in leading us. 

False beliefs, lies about the image of God or His will for us, can in fact twine themselves so closely around good things that we cannot see them. We simply cannot save ourselves. We will have blind spots. Such a blind spot I encountered in January.

And I found that I was fighting against God's faith in me. Wow. That almost sounds audacious. I was trying to believe that needed me to be restrained, like by law, like a criminal in handcuffs, like a woman in a burqa, like the toughest Bill Gothard devotee. This was all humming at a level far below my conscious thought. But when I had the experience of going to confession, and then coming across that one line in the Catechism as directed by my penace, I encountered the living power of God. BAM! "God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings."

In other words, faith has come. You are a son [daughter] of God by faith in Christ Jesus. To the core. Or at least to the deeper core than yesterday. 

The battle was what I was trying to do because I believed it was my Christian duty, my Christian battle even, vs what the Holy Spirit wanted for me. 

And as I intuited then, that exchange has brought tremendous peace, happiness, stability, certainty, and freedom to my heart. And has stripped away so much overgrowth of "should," or self-imposed obligation, that I didn't even realize I had. 

I remember writing to a friend in the 80s that my life on the outside always looks about the same, but inside, my life is like a three ring circus. I've realized that is because God calls me to be a contemplative, and He's been wrecking and building and renovating and designing in me for years. It is actually an exciting, adventurous life. 

Submission Revisited

This morning, let's say it was by the time Mass ended, I realized I now have a refined understanding of submission. 

Sometimes spiritual insights just click, becn ause a grace God gives grabs hold of words that are spoken, and both goes to a place of past experiences, and then it all elevates, it changes key, and something new is perceptible. 

And this happened today regarding the reality of what it means to be in submission.

Fr. Mike Schmitz was addressing this in recent episodes of Catechism in a Year, because the topic has been the Sacrament of Matrimony. He was discussing the verses in Ephesians that tell wives to be submissive to their husbands, and husbands and wives to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Now, I've heard any number of takes on Christian submission, but how it landed in my mind was that submission means saying yes to what someone with valid authority tells you to do. I wrote a blogpost about this way back in 2007. Fr. Mike's definition of submission (CIAY, Day 224) is "to place yourself under the mission of the other person."

And I think those words just sunk in and hit a very deep part of my awareness today.

It's the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. Now, Mary was totally submitted to the mission, the plan, of the Blessed Trinity. She was totally on-board with the salvation of the world, the sanctification of the world, and bringing total glory to God in and through her every breath. She was also totally submitted to the mission of Joseph, who was specifically made Guardian of the Redeemer. He, in turn was totally submitted to Mary's mission as Mother of the Redeemer. Their marriage was a partnership in the mission God had entrusted to each of them. They were submitted to one another out of reverence for Christ, literally. 

And so it has to be with us. Our lives are about the mission: the Great Commission, to call to bring all souls to life in God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. 

Ok, so even as I'm writing this, I'm coming up a sense of well, duh. 

The changed key, the newly perceptible truth stems from an interior shift. How can I struggle this out into words...

In the aforementioned blogpost, I gave the example of how I might respond to the Bishop saying he was closing my parish. I said it would hurt, but I'd go with it. And that was pretty much my take on submission. Responding to something that happened. But if I place myself under the mission of Jesus Christ, or more concretely if I place myself under the mission of a particular human being, then I am going to employ all of my energies, all of my creativity, all of my resources into furthering that mission, that aim, that goal. This is how the dynamic of my life has been leaning for some years now, but today it clicked. This employing of my energies -- that is submission. It is not passive. I don't sit and wait for orders. I'm not a harem member that waits to be summoned. To waste my energies -- to spend them all on myself or my entertainment, or to fret myself away in anxiety or nitpicking, instead of love -- that's not submission. To chase after financial security or a name or success -- that's not submission. 

I would posit that spouses submitting to each other is not about each other; ultimately, it is also about Christ. It is about serving God, the common good, and learning where each other fits within that (because God always makes space for us). And it definitely is not about simply saying, "Yes, dear" and doing what the other person selfishly says or wants. It might keep peace, but it is not a way to grow holiness. If there's no mutual discernment of a virtuous path and an active desire to seek the Lord's will and way, then trouble ensues.

Several years ago, I had the strange experience of being contacted by an acquaintance who was leaving society to join a monastery. He had a few months as he transitioned into his new life, and just during this time he challenged me to write a song every week. He asked if I'd be willing to take it as a formal challenge and submit the new songs to him every week, and then he'd give me a new tweak in the challenge for the next week. I was intrigued, so I said yes. I had not written new music in a long time, but during that time I cranked out several new songs. I was very aware that I needed that piece of being called forth. Then he abruptly had to cut off communication, and that was that. I stopped writing, because I no longer had a mission to place myself under. That experience stayed with me a long time, and I didn't know what to call that powerful impetus. I think it is the power of submission. And I think one of my central life frustrations has been to rarely find a healthy person with a Christ-focused ability to say, I have this mission; join it. Well, I know now I am a Carmelite and I do have a mission there, but even there, we are still figuring out how to respond. Why are we so slow to live this reality in the Church? Why is it so unclear to engage the mission of Christ with our whole selves? Is it because we are not in possession of our whole selves? 

Teaching the Our Father, Part One

 I teach New Testament Bible stories to 1st through 4th grade students at our local Sonshine Bible Club. This is my 7th year teaching, minus a chunk of 2020. I know I have learned more than anyone as I've taught.

Each year I try to take some theme or plan, and almost always I bite off more than I can chew. This year, at least to begin with, I have decided to teach the Lord's Prayer. Now, it pays to note that we rotate groups of kids through various teaching stations, so I have either three or four groups of kids (depending on the day; I teach twice a week for groups from different schools) for only 12-15 minutes at a time. Part of that time is for settling in. Occasionally that takes much more time than it should. So, I'm usually left with more like ten solid minutes to teach from the Bible. 

The kids that I teach typically either do not go to church at all, or are rather unlikely to have any Christian formation coming from their families. Many come from family circumstances that hold a lot of pain and brokenness. When I started talking about the Lord's Prayer, only one or two children in each class knew what this was. A few were able to recite what amounted to a gibberish version of it.

So here's how I've proceeded thus far. I started with talking about God the Father and God the Son. This is one of the things that gets the kids confused a lot; they don't quite get the God and Jesus thing. "Jesus is God" is just a statement of confusion to them, because "God, Jesus, Holy Spirit" is vocabulary they are still figuring out. I use the sign of the cross to "draw" God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. 

It dawned on me how smart the old basic catechism teachers were. There were people who went before me who taught clueless children and realized where people need to start. 

I have a musical setting for the Our Father which is not the traditional Catholic tune. I like it because a friend wrote it and no one knows it and it makes me feel special and like I'm spreading a level playing field for all the kids to use a tune no one knows. So I sang the song for them. Now I've started teaching it by phrases.

Then we talked about Our Father, who art in heaven. Right off, I have to explain KJV English, and some kids are absolutely incredulous that words have been preserved from 400 years ago, like "art" meaning "is." Had to explain that one, of course. 

I did not explicitly mention it, but I couldn't help but think of my own experience of coloring my understanding of God with my own experience of my natural father. I decided it is a better thing for these kids, instead of telling them, "Now, your Dad may be absent, or hit you or your Mom, or be in prison or on drugs, but God is not like that," that I would say "Our Father in heaven is all good, all wise, we are precious to Him, He loves you and wants to be with you." 

One week, after having covered this opening phrase, I heard this little boy, above the hubbub of the class settling, shouting out, "God is my father!" God is my father!" It didn't dawn on me at the time, but I think this could fill the holes in some little hearts who have lost their fathers in one way or the other.

I talked about the "who art in heaven" part by saying that heaven is a place where God rules, and asking the kids -- where does God want to rule? I may have helped by making a heart shape, but someone eventually responded, "In our hearts!" I explained that, yes, God wants to be the one who rules our hearts. I'm realizing now they probably understand a more slang version of rule than I intended. I accidentally said "reign" once, and they immediately got confused by that. I tell you, teaching kids makes you watch your every word.

Then I told the story of the Woman at the Well. I had a hunch it would serve as an illustration, and I have to say I learned as I was telling it how it does. The kids resonate with the hatred between Samaritans and Jews. They get it that there are groups who hate each other. Jesus talked to her, treating her with dignity, not like an enemy. He started talking to her like He was God, offering her eternal life. Then, he called out her secrets, how she had five husband and now was with a different man. (The kids get this, too.) They see that he doesn't shame her, but says that the Father in heaven in looking for those who will worship him in spirit and truth, from their hearts. Doesn't matter if she was from the hated group, God is her Father, too, and He came to tell her He was the Messiah, come for her, to bring her back to God, just like He came to do that for everyone.

This is how I learn while teaching. It blows my mind sometimes. Every time I teach that story, it really sticks with the kids. One year, they were retelling it to me months later.

So next, I taught "Hallowed be Thy name." Just the English here was a bugger. What in the world does it even mean? Holy be your name? Ok, no help -- now what does THAT mean? Fortunately, I have the Catechism of the Catholic Church. But honestly, after reading and understanding what the CCC says on this, I still was challenged to boil it down for kids. I tried explaining "holy" and God's name as who he is, etc., and saw I was making no progress. In my first group I went impromptu, and said "let me tell you a story," and saw delight sweep across the face of one boy in the front row. I told the story of Adam and Eve and their sin. I explained how God had made everything good and beautiful and peaceful, and then asked them if that's what they see when they look around them. No. I ask if people do things they shouldn't sometimes, and if everyone doesn't at some time do things they should not do. They know that's a yes. I explain that that state of things being not like God made them, the Bible calls the problem of sin. And that God had a plan to fix the sin problem by sending Jesus to come right down into the middle of our mess to be with us, and to pay the price to take away our sin and open heaven again, so that we could follow him there, and start living new lives here on earth.

So I take another stab at saying "hallowed be thy name" meaning that I want to agree with God about what is true and good and beautiful. I don't want to be like Adam and Eve who listened to lies and doubt and mistrust God. 

I really need to come back this week and firm that up. There's a lot about praising God, extolling who He is, acknowledging who he is in this petition. And I realize that even though I have known that in my head, this really hasn't been my experience of praying this. I am finding I need to stop and include this kind of praise in my prayer time where I just focus on declaring who God is. I mean, I'm an old time charismatic! It pre-dates me being Catholic! But I have kind of dropped this piece about agreeing, lining up with, getting my thoughts subordinated to, setting my mind on, God's name, God's reality, God's person. 

What I planned to teach as a Bible story this week to illustrate this actually just the accounts of Jesus going off at night to pray. As a human being, He communed with His Father. He subordinated all of his activities to His Father's will. He chose according to what the Father showed Him. He emptied Himself and lived as one who is taught. All of that is totally astounding. To do the will of the Father was Jesus' food. He calls us to the same kind of holy life. Totally astounding.

As I tell the kids, the great thing about the Bible is that you can hear simple things when you are 8, and for the next 70 years you can think about them and you will constantly learn something new, because God's word is alive. I realize I do not teach the Bible as something I know; I proclaim it as something God says.

And that's as far as I've gotten. My goal is to write each weekend as prep for my next week's classes. And maybe to report on how they went. We'll see.

Integration

 I became a Catholic when I was 25. (I shared my conversion story here, if you haven't read it.) In my first fifteen or so years as a Catholic, I would occasionally catch a glimpse of a flickering and deeply attractive beauty in the heart of another Catholic. I didn't have a word for it. Whenever I encountered it, I felt like a dry sponge encountering something that I wanted to immediately sop up and take into myself. It felt like quality humanity. I always got the sense that the person who manifested it had no idea they were manifesting it. I sensed, especially early on, that this was something that had been fairly foreign in my experience of Christians in my pre-Catholic days. When I encountered this flickering beauty, I felt instinctively I could trust the person who possessed it.

And now I think I finally have a word for it: integration. The beauty I perceived in such a person was the beauty of being a well-integrated person.

Lately I've been listening to a podcast called Interior Integration for Catholics, which is all about the psychology of the interior life. I highly recommend it. I also listened to the audiobook Boundaries for Your Soul over Holy Week, which is a practical look at how to get all the warring parts of yourself to both work together and to come before the Lord. How to make the bossy bits of you calm down and listen, and how to draw out the parts of you that hide in shame, and how to give your overworked bits a break. It's good.

It is interesting to me that the Catechism says this in paragraph 2114: 

The commandment to worship the Lord alone integrates man and saves him from an endless disintegration.

 And then there is this, in paragraph 2338:

The chaste person maintains the integrity of the powers of life and love placed in him. This integrity ensures the unity of the person; it is opposed to any behavior that would impair it. It tolerates neither a double life nor duplicity in speech.

When I think about these two things:  worship, and loving with all one's power, I basically see my vocation in life, especially as a Carmelite. It makes me understand why, when I would encounter this grace present in another person, that my antennae would stand up and twitch. 

It seems to me that God calls us not so much according to our great ability, but according to our great wounds. At least, that's how it seems to me with my Carmelite eyes. We are to be the Great Empty before the God who is present to In-Fill. 

I mean, I just think of my college-age self, and I just have to shake my head in amazement at God. Even though I considered myself a devout Christian -- and I was, to the extent I was -- I was also an avowed misanthrope. Chastity, a commitment to Christian love, to create community? Like, what are you smoking? No, I was completely incapable. Nada. 

So for all of those years, slowly, I encountered grace, and God fed me by placing a longing in me. He broke me apart to put me together -- all of the pieces. He put my pieces together, to make me whole. At least now I am on the other side, where I can know what it is I long for. And I know that He will complete what He has begun. 

Salvation Is From The Jews

When the pandemic was just getting into full swing in the United States, I joined a now-closed theological discussion forum on Facebook. Can anything good come from a Facebook discussion group? you ask. And I answer, yes, it can. 

The exchanges were fascinating. For one thing, my sense that true unity and acceptance among Christians is growing and deepening received two charlie horses and fell over, frantically moaning in pain and rubbing its legs for relief. There are plenty of people who at all costs avoid conflict or disagreement over anything. There are plenty of people who will lock and load their theology and let you have it. But, there are also plenty of people who, given enough time on their hands due to a pandemic, will pull up a chair, present a position, and pick it apart with others who may have varying degrees of agreement. I find that kind of discussion fruitful, enjoyable, and edifying.

One challenging discussion I had was with a Messianic believer who took strong issue with St. John Chrysostom and his rantings against Jews. I happened to share a glowing quote from SJC, supporting some completely disconnected point, and this man in the forum upbraided me and found it easy grounds to dismiss my Catholic theology. 

In the ensuing discussion, I shared extensive quotes from the documents of Vatican II on the Catholic teaching regarding the role of Judiam. My interlocutor was somewhat shocked, because he could find nothing at all objectionable in it. He couldn't believe it came from a Catholic document.

There was much we still disagreed on, but he challenged me to read and dig deeper. I messaged a Jewish Catholic friend of mine, asked for her input about St. John Chrysostom and some of the discussions we were having, and asked her for a suggestion for how I could educate myself. She recommended Roy H. Schoeman's book Salvation is From the Jews. 

I had other books to finish, I'm slow, and it's 350+ pages, so I just finally finished it recently. I highly recommend it to my fellow Catholics.

Judism and Jewish people were never on my radar screen in my younger days; I grew up in Wisconsin where the debate was Lutheran vs. Catholic. For five years I belonged to a non-denominational charismatic fellowship whose strongest institutional connection was with the Christ For the Nations Bible school in Texas, which flies the flag of Israel on its campus. While it was in the order of a minor footnote, escatology that touched on the political state of Israel got an occasional mention. But my biggest take away (like so much of helpful religious formation) was a subliminal, intuitive, and delicate sense of awe about the Jewish people, because obviously Jesus was Jewish. I vividly recall the first time (well into my 20s) I ever saw men dressed in the style of Orthodox Jews. We were in the post office. I gave a little interior gasp like one would at suddenly finding a huge diamond. 

But I had never really grappled with questions theological or social about Jews, Judaism, or the intersection of Christianity or modernity with them. Oh, I knew the Shoah was a deeply repulsive moment in history and that antisemitism was wrong. Right after I became a Catholic, I did ask John Michael Talbot, during the pilgrimage to the Holy Land for which he was a guide, to elaborate on what the Church taught about Israel. He asked, "theologically, or politically?" to which I replied, "Yes." I don't recall what he said about the theology, but what did stick with me was his statement that Evangelical Christianity's political embrace of modern Israel was theologically in error, and stemmed from a lack of understanding of the Church. Since most of what I had ever heard regarding theology and Israel had to do with unconditional support for Israel militarily, I thought I had a grasp on all there was to know there.

Enter Roy Schoeman's book. To begin with, he does an overview of Scripture, and the Messianic claims of the Old Testament which was all thoroughly familiar territory to me. A big chunk of his book covers the historical and spiritual roots of antisemitism, the roots of Nazism, anti-semitism after World War II, and the impact all of this has had on Judaism. 

Let me stop right there a second.

We are not made in such a way as to be able to gain a view of pain and suffering and walk away unchanged. Right here was the place of change for me.

During the time I was reading this section, I was engaged in a days-long process of recording all seven sections of the Liturgy of the Hours for Advent. I spent a few whole days listening to the Psalms being prayed. With this view into pain and suffering that I had gained, I listened to the Word of God cry out the pain, anguish, confusion, terror, the hope and praise, of God's people. The pleading for the Messiah to come. 

Later I recounted this tectonic movement within my soul to my spiritual director with tears. There is something very deep going on here. 

St. John of the Cross teaches us about the dark nights, how we move forward only by faith, having lost all supports. The Catechism teaches us that there is a movement like this through which the entire Church must pass.

He also writes about the mystical life. The dark nights aren't designed to grind us to nothing. They capacitate us for living in union with God.

Schoeman's final sections include discussion of the mystical revelation to many Jews of Jesus the Messiah. Of how Catholicism was viewed by them not as a new religion, but as the completion of Judaism. (As an aside here, I am shocked to learn that in the Evangelical world, Jews are told they need to "break the chains of Judaism" and renounce it in order to become Christians.) 

He also discusses his views, based on Scripture and Church teaching, how the second coming of Christ will be preceded by an influx of Jews believing in the Messiah. And there I am, back with my Messianic believer Facebook aquaintance. One of his chief complaints was the lack of evangelistic outreach to ethnic or believing Jews. Why does no one care?

This Carmelite right here has a strong sense of connection to both the prophet Elijah and St. Edith Stein, also to St. John of the Cross, and the call to meditate on the law of the Lord day and night. The landscape of my heart shifted here. 

More than that I cannot now say.

But, this is why I write.   

Thoughts on Waldstein's Talk: "Redeeming the Erotic: John Paul II's Reading of the Song of Songs."

The other night I has the opportunity to listen in on a live broadcast of a talk by Dr. Michael Waldstein entitled "Redeeming the Erotic: John Paul II's Reading of the Song of Songs." Because it was a live feed and not a recording, I am at the disadvantage of not being able to go back and listen to it again, nor can I quote from it as I was not taking notes of any sort at the time. But with that said, I was struck by one phrase that he developed regarding the character of the Bride in the Song of Songs. This was not from a line of Scripture per se but from John Paul II's discussion of her. It was this: She is the master of her own mystery.

The master of her own mystery.

The concept, of course, is that one can only give the gift of oneself if one possesses oneself.

The sort of related concept that Waldstein mentioned that pertains to the Lover in the Song of Songs is this notion that he calls the woman "My sister, my bride." He states that this shows that she is a person in her own right. She is not a commodity that he can grasp and take for himself as one might pick up a candy bar at the grocery store. In other words, the Lover knows that the woman is a person, not a thing.

And as a person, the woman is master of her own mystery. She chooses to make of herself a gift, which she bestows on her Lover, and he then receives her.

This struck a deep chord in me.

Then shortly afterwards, I came across a quote that I have been reflecting on for quite some time in a different context, weighing how this applies to various aspects of life: "He who makes himself his own master subjects himself to a fool for a master." -- St. Bernard of Clairvaux. (This, by the way, is one of the reasons I love Facebook. Where else can I be a part of little conversations here and there about the sayings of saints?!)

On the one hand we have John Paul II saying the Beloved is "the master of her own mystery," and on the other hand we have St. Bernard warning against being one's own master. What gives?

The discussion of the St. Bernard quote made it clear to me that the options here are a) Jesus is the master of my life or b) Jesus is not, and I am. So, what kind of Master is Jesus? If we lose our lives for His sake, we find them. If we give all to Him at His cross, He gives all back to us, redeemed, purified, sanctified and ready for life with Him in His kingdom, following Him. If I follow myself, I wander aimlessly, led by my animal desires.

So, how does the Bride get to be the master of her own mystery? From whence comes her mystery?! From the Lord. The enticement, the seduction, the beauty that is hers is only hers because it is truly His in origin. The Lord bestows to each, graces. Talents, as Matthew 25 has it. We are set as master over what God gives, and harsh words are reserved for the servant who did not act as master. But the image of the Bride in the Song of Songs is clearly a woman acts as master. "Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits" (SS 4:16). This is a woman who possesses herself so that she may make a free gift of herself to her Lover.

I am reminded what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about self-mastery:

2339 Chastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training in human freedom. The alternative is clear: either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy. "Man's dignity therefore requires him to act out of conscious and free choice, as moved and drawn in a personal way from within, and not by blind impulses in himself or by mere external constraint. Man gains such dignity when, ridding himself of all slavery to the passions, he presses forward to his goal by freely choosing what is good and, by his diligence and skill, effectively secures for himself the means suited to this end."

2346 Charity is the form of all the virtues. Under its influence, chastity appears as a school of the gift of the person. Self-mastery is ordered to the gift of self. Chastity leads him who practices it to become a witness to his neighbor of God's fidelity and loving kindness.
2347 The virtue of chastity blossoms in friendship. It shows the disciple how to follow and imitate him who has chosen us as his friends, who has given himself totally to us and allows us to participate in his divine estate. Chastity is a promise of immortality.
Chastity is expressed notably in friendship with one's neighbor. Whether it develops between persons of the same or opposite sex, friendship represents a great good for all. It leads to spiritual communion. 

Not surprisingly, self-mastery is linked with the notion of chastity. At first blush, it seems that Eros and chastity have blessed little to do with each other except as some kind of opposites. It seems to me that this is because the word "chastity" gets used in an awkward, embarrassed way to mean "not all that dirty stuff." And what do we mean by "all that dirty stuff," anyway, if we are pressed for a definition? We usually mean "what we actually desire." This was Waldstein's first point: the Lover and the Beloved are both quite in tune with their desire. And this is where religious folk tend to get tripped up. We think that to be presentable to God we have to take all of our desires and stuff them under the couch cushions and into the closet, quick, before He sees them. Do you see how completely silly that is?!

The Lover and the Beloved are both very much in tune with their desires. If you read Song of Songs, you have to concur that it is erotic stuff. So, how is the erotic redeemed? Just like everything else that is a created good is redeemed: by the cross. 


If we take the Beloved as symbol of the Church for a moment, or at least if I take her as a symbol of myself as a woman, I need self-mastery to be able to give myself the way the Beloved does. This I know by my personal experience. The Beloved's got it; I'm working toward it! Again, the Catechism states: "Self-mastery is a long and exacting work. One can never consider it acquired once and for all. It presupposes renewed effort at all stages of life." (CCC 2342). It is a work of grace. Grace operates in our lives by bringing our human hearts, filled with their desires, to the cross. I can't surrender something to the Lord that I can first own as mine. And I can't receive back from the Lord something I haven't given over in the first place. The only place we have the "laudable exchange" with the Lord is the cross. I bring my sin, my unfulfilled longings, my powerlessness for good, my need, and I meet His inexhaustible love, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, healing and meaning. I bring me; I meet Him.

So. Eros redeemed, then, is demonstrated by a "me" who has met "Him" and experienced the transformation into Him that this meeting brings. Looking back at the Catechism, Eros redeemed is demonstrated by a free and conscious gift of the self, given personally. I keep in mind my personhood: I am not a thing; and the personhood of the one to whom the gift is given: there is no acquisition going on. I am not purchasing the other with my gift. Only when I am giving myself this way, freely, personally, consciously, am I chaste. If I am just restrained by external pressures, I am not chaste.

As the catechism puts it, the virtue of chastity "blossoms" in friendship, of the sort that leads to spiritual communion and actually tutors us in how to follow the Lord. Now there's a beautiful image that I can relate to after a summer of gardening. The gift of self, the gift of Eros, the gift of the cross, the gift of friendship: it all brings us ultimately to know, love and serve God more and more deeply. There is a constant flow of grace as God gives to us and we give back to Him.

Suffering, Penance, and Evangelization

In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside, but is born from the sin within the church, the Church therefore has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice. Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues. That is how we respond, and we need to be realistic in expecting that evil will always attack, from within and from outside, but the forces of good are also always present, and finally the Lord is stronger than evil and the Virgin Mary is for us the visible maternal guarantee that the will of God is always the last word in history. -- Pope Benedict XVI, May 12, 2010, on the plane on the way to Fatima.

I have been thinking quite a bit about this statement made by Pope Benedict the other day, made in reference to the famous third secret of Fatima. I have been thinking especially about what it means to re-learn penance. Sometimes when I hear the word, I think of one of the first Life Chain events I participated in as a Protestant. It was a freezing and blustery day, and one woman standing near me said "This is a good penance, isn't it?" I looked at her as if she had just said "I worship the Anti-Christ!" I know that it is not only non-Catholics who misunderstand penance as I did then, I suppose as some method of earning salvation or of making God less angry by making myself miserable.

I had an experience a few months ago that helped me learn the meaning of penance. There is a line in the Catechism of the Catholic Church which illuminated this experience very precisely: "The human heart is converted by looking upon him whom our sins have pierced." This experience was simply that of looking into the eyes of someone I realized I had sinned against, and feeling the impact of the fact of what I had done. My love for this person immediately caused me to feel deep pain, and the desire for the suffering I had caused to be alleviated. In a word, it was a desire for penance.

Penance is not about punishing myself or depriving myself or trying to pay with my pound of flesh for some abstract fault, either of my own or for the sin of the world. I've thought this in the past. But now I understand penance as simply what happens when we see what we have done, when we truly look and see. I had a dream many years ago when I taught in Japan about the Blessed Mother standing in my 6th grade class room, by far my most difficult students, where Jesus was hanging on the cross. The room was filled with people who were chatting with each other, reading, and doing everything but looking. She was going from person to person, asking them to just look at her Son. Just look at His suffering. That act alone, done by a human person, has the power to convert us, because we cannot truly look at suffering without our hearts being moved. Conversion is a long process, life-long for sure, understood this way. Conversion lasts our whole life long because it is possible for us to love for our whole life long. And because conversion and love are gifts from an infinite God, we can never exhaust them.

So, what of standing in the freezing rain. Why is that a "good penance?" Well, love dares to do generous, daring things for the beloved, like give up one's umbrella in a downpour, or stay up all night to make a special gift, or sacrifice one's time to do a favor. If suddenly a car splashes the umbrella-less one, or the gift requires a restart or the sacrifice of time becomes quite inconvenient, these can actually make the love of the giver more intense, the choice to do the task from love all the more conscious, calling forth a greater nobility from the act of love. That's why awful weather for Life Chain makes for a great penance, because it enables our act of love to be more noble. No brownie points. No returns owed for "all I'm doing for you." Just purer love. And if it's not about purer love, then it's likely to be nothing more than what the Catechism calls "sterile and false" penance.

Just this morning I hunted down a paper I'd written 12 years ago on Aquinas' Treatise on Law and the New Evangelization. I remembered that I was surprised while writing it to make the connection between evangelization and the need to practice and preach penance. I was really surprised to read many things today that I'd written over a decade ago! I guess that's a matter for a separate post. But it did tie in both with the Pope's statement, this meditation on penance and with a quotation I came across today from St. Teresa of Avila: "All the troubles of the Church, all the evils in the world, flow from this source: That men do not by clear and sound knowledge and serious consideration penetrate into the truths of Sacred Scripture!"

Penance

Penance has been a theme for me of late, and today I read this section from The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1430-1433.


Jesus' call to conversion and penance, like that of the prophets before him, does not aim first at outward works, "sackcloth and ashes," fasting and mortification, but at the conversion of the heart, interior conversion. Without this, such penances remain sterile and false; however, interior conversion urges expression in visible signs, gestures and works of penance. (Cf. Joel 2:12-13; Is. 1:16-17; Mt. 6:1-6, 16-18)

Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our heart, an end of sin, a turning away from evil, with repugnance toward the evil actions we have committed. At the same time it entails the desire and resolution to change one's life, with hope in God's mercy and trust in the help of his grace. This conversion of heart is accompanied by a salutary pain and sadness which the Fathers called animi cruciatus (affliction of spirit) and compunctio cordis (repentance of heart).

The human heart is heavy and hardened. God must give a man a new heart (Cf. Ez. 36:26-27). Conversion is first of all a work of the grace of God who makes our hearts return to him: "Restore us to thyself, O Lord, that we may be restored!" (Lam. 5:21) God gives us the strength to begin anew. It is in discovering the greatness of God's love that our heart is shaken by the horror and weight of sin and begins to fear offending God by sin and being separated from him. The human heart is converted by looking upon him whom our sins have pierced (Cf. Jn. 19:37, Zech 12:10).

"Let us fix our eyes on Christ's blood and understand how precious it is to his Father, for, poured out for our salvation, it has brought to the whole world the grace of repentance." (St. Clement of Rom, Ad Cor. 7.4: PG 1, 224)

Since Easter, the Holy Spirit has proved "the world wrong about sin," (Cf. Jn. 16:8-9) i.e. proved that the world has not believed in him whom the Father has sent But this same Spirit who brings sin to light is also the Consoler who gives the human heart grace for repentance and conversion (Cf. Jn. 15:26; Acts 2:36-38; John Paul II, DeV 27-48).

Grace, and Homilies in General

I guess homilies are really sticking with me these days. Today's memorable homily was by Fr. David Morrier, TOR. He spoke from the reading in 1 John about how grace is like gravity or like wind: you can't see these things directly, but you can see their effects. The effects of grace that are evident in our lives from being with Jesus? Cleansing, healing, empowering.

Once again I look at my experience, and what Fr. David said rings true. We are cleansed: sin is removed, uprooted from my life. We are healed: grace puts back in working order that which wasn't working right before. We are empowered: grace doesn't stop with me "just surviving" but moves me to do things for the good of others.

You know, there is a completely different feel between a Catholic homily and a Protestant sermon. I think this is why many Catholics who encounter Christ in a Protestant setting leave the Church bewildered with the sense that no one is "feeding" them. Homilies sort of require us bringing our experience to Scripture within the context of the Church, so they collaborative in a way, and not meant to just fill empty cups and passive minds. It seems though, that what is direly needed is the basic teaching or catechesis that already informs us as members of the Church. Here is a nifty guide that can be used for reading the Bible and the Catechism through in a year, which might be very handy for adult Catholics who find themselves drawn to Protestantism to help them understand the Christ they have met.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church on Happiness

I've selected some of the passages from the Catechism that mention happiness as I meditate a bit on my last post. I started to put passages in bold that were particularly striking, but found myself bolding almost everything...


1718 The Beatitudes respond to the natural desire for happiness. This desire is of divine origin: God has placed it in the human heart in order to draw man to the One who alone can fulfill it:

We all want to live happily; in the whole human race there is no one who does not assent to this proposition, even before it is fully articulated.

How is it, then, that I seek you, Lord? Since in seeking you, my God, I seek a happy life, let me seek you so that my soul may live, for my body draws life from my soul and my soul draws life from you.

God alone satisfies.

1818 The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men's activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity.

2548 Desire for true happiness frees man from his immoderate attachment to the goods of this world so that he can find his fulfillment in the vision and beatitude of God. "The promise [of seeing God] surpasses all beatitude. . . . In Scripture, to see is to possess. . . . Whoever sees God has obtained all the goods of which he can conceive."

45 Man is made to live in communion with God in whom he finds happiness: When I am completely united to you, there will be no more sorrow or trials; entirely full of you, my life will be complete (St. Augustine, Conf. 10, 28, 39: PL 32, 795}.

1723 The beatitude we are promised confronts us with decisive moral choices. It invites us to purify our hearts of bad instincts and to seek the love of God above all else. It teaches us that true happiness is not found in riches or well-being, in human fame or power, or in any human achievement - however beneficial it may be - such as science, technology, and art, or indeed in any creature, but in God alone, the source of every good and of all love:

All bow down before wealth. Wealth is that to which the multitude of men pay an instinctive homage. They measure happiness by wealth; and by wealth they measure respectability. . . . It is a homage resulting from a profound faith . . . that with wealth he may do all things. Wealth is one idol of the day and notoriety is a second. . . . Notoriety, or the making of a noise in the world - it may be called "newspaper fame" - has come to be considered a great good in itself, and a ground of veneration.

30 "Let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice." Although man can forget God or reject him, He never ceases to call every man to seek him, so as to find life and happiness. But this search for God demands of man every effort of intellect, a sound will, "an upright heart", as well as the witness of others who teach him to seek God.

You are great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised: great is your power and your wisdom is without measure. And man, so small a part of your creation, wants to praise you: this man, though clothed with mortality and bearing the evidence of sin and the proof that you withstand the proud. Despite everything, man, though but a small a part of your creation, wants to praise you. You yourself encourage him to delight in your praise, for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

27 The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for:

The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.

1024 This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity - this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed - is called "heaven." Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness.


Profound stuff here. I see that seeking after happiness through the desires in our hearts is indeed God's idea. I remember Fr. Roberto at the CL Lenten retreat last year talking about how all of our desires are to be heeded as the beginning of the way to seek God. That seemed really radical to me. Of course, our desires can go quickly askew to the degree our hearts are impure, but this is the other startling thing I glean from this reading: the desire for happiness is key to how our hearts are made pure by God's grace. This is exactly how St. Augustine could say "Love God and do what you will," because the love of God will purify our heady, indulgent, disordered desires as we walk with our hearts open to Him and His Church. The openness has to be concrete, though, meaning that our lives need to be, to a fitting degree, open books to our friends in Christ. Else we too easily deceive ourselves. Hence all this talk of living in communion.

Golly, I love being Catholic!

Catechism of the Catholic Church on Christian Unity

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 813-822 : (see original text for all footnotes and sources.)

"The sacred mystery of the Church's unity"

The Church is one because of her source: "the highest exemplar and source of this mystery is the unity, in the Trinity of Persons, of one God, the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit." The Church is one because of her founder: for "the Word made flesh, the prince of peace, reconciled all men to God by the cross,... restoring the unity of all in one people and one body." The Church is one because of her "soul": "It is the Holy Spirit, dwelling in those who believe and pervading and ruling over the entire Church, who brings about that wonderful communion of the faithful and joins them together so intimately in Christ that he is the principle of the Church's unity."

What an astonishing mystery! There is one Father of the universe, one Logos of the universe, and also one Holy Spirit, everywhere one and the same; there is also one virgin become mother, and I should like to call her "Church." (St. Clement of Alexandria)

From the beginning, this one Church has been marked by a great diversity which comes from both the variety of God's gifts and the diversity of those who receive them. Within the unity of the People of God, a multiplicity of peoples and cultures is gathered together. Among the Church's members, there are different gifts, offices, conditions and ways of life. "Holding a rightful place in the communion of the Church there are also particular Churches that retain their own traditions." The great richness of such diversity is not opposed to the Church's unity. Yet sin and the burden of its consequences constantly threaten the gift of unity. And so the Apostle has to exhort Christians to "maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."

What are these bonds of unity? Above all charity "binds everything together in perfect harmony." But the unity of the pilgrim Church is also assured by visible bonds of communion:

• profession of one faith received from the Apostles;
• common celebration of divine worship, especially of the sacraments;
• apostolic succession through the sacrament of Holy Orders, maintaining the fraternal concord of God's family.

"The sole Church of Christ [is that] which our Savior, after his Resurrection, entrusted to Peter's pastoral care, commissioning him and the other apostles to extend and rule it... This Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in (subsistit in) the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him."

The Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism explains: "For it is through Christ's Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained. It was to the apostolic college alone, of which Peter is the head, that we believe that our Lord entrusted all the blessings of the New Covenant, in order to establish on earth the one Body of Christ into which all those should be fully incorporated who belong in any way to the people of God."

Wounds to unity

In fact, 'in this one and only Church of God from its very beginnings there arose certain rifts, which the Apostle strongly censures as damnable. But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions appeared and large communities became separated from full communion with the Catholic Church -- for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame." The ruptures that would the unity of Christ's Body -- here we must distinguish heresy, apostasy and schism -- do not occur without human sin:

Where there are sins, there are also divisions, schisms, heresies, and disputes. Where there is virtue, however, there also are harmony and unity, from which arise the one heart and one soul of all believers.

"However, one cannot charge with the sin of the separation those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from such separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ, and the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers.... All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church."

"Furthermore, many elements of sanctification and of truth" are found outside the visible confines of the Catholic Church: "the written Word of God; the life of grace; faith, hope and charity, with the other interior gifts of the Holy Spirit, as well as visible elements." Christ's Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church. All these blessings come from Christ and lead to him, and are in themselves calls to "Catholic unity."

Toward unity

"Christ bestowed unity on his Church from the beginning. This unity, we believe, subsists in the Catholic Church as something she can never lose, and we hope that it will continue to increase until the end of time." Christ always gives his Church the gift of unity, but the Church must always pray and work to maintain, reinforce and perfect the unity that Christ wills for her. This is why Jesus himself prayed at the hour of his Passion, and does not cease praying to his Father, for the unity of his disciples: "That they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be one in us,...so that the world may know that you have sent me." The desire to recover the unity of all Christians is a gift of Christ and a call of the Holy Spirit.

Certain things are required in order to respond adequately to this call:

• a permanent renewal of the Church in greater fidelity to her vocation; such renewal is the driving-force of the movement toward unity;
• conversion of heart as the faithful "try to live holier lives according to the Gospel"; for it is the unfaithfulness of the members to Christ's gift which causes divisions;
• prayer in common, because "change of heart and holiness of life, along with public and private prayer for the unity of Christians, should be regarded as the soul of the whole ecumenical movement, and merits the name 'spiritual ecumenism';"
• fraternal knowledge of each other;
• ecumenical formation of the faithful and especially of priests;
• dialogue among theologians, and meetings among Christians of the different churches and communities;
• collaboration among Christians in various areas of service to mankind.

Concern for achieving unity "involves the whole Church, faithful and clergy alike." But we must realize "that this holy objective -- the reconciliation of all Christians in the unity of the one and holy Church of Christ -- transcends human powers and gifts." That is why we place all our hope "in the prayer of Christ for the Church, in the love of the Father for us, and in the power of the Holy Spirit."