Wisdom, Hebrews, Needle’s eye

Notes on the readings for the 28^th Sunday of Ordinary Times (Cycle B)

Wis: 7:7-11

I was surprised to learn that the book of Wisdom dates only back to about 50 years before Christ.  I usually assume that the OT reading is centuries older.

 

I’ve long known that Wisdom is personified as feminine.  Sounds right to me!  About 25 years(?) ago, She Who Is, by Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, drove that point home.  Masculine or feminine, I don’t care.  Calling God Wisdom doesn’t do anything for me.

 

Hebrews: 4:12-13

I was surprised to learn that the book of Hebrews dates only to about 30 or 40 years after Christ’s death, but, of course, I shouldn’t have been.  It’s attributed to Paul, and I do have a decent idea of when Paul was writing.  Turns out that Paul probably didn’t write it — though I had assumed that he had.  I was also surprised to learn that it might not have originally been a letter; it may have been a sermon or some other kind of public address.

 

Mark 10:17-30

Well, now.  That’s a scary one, isn’t it?  I think it shocks us because we are rich.  (It would have also shocked Jesus’s listeners if they assumed that riches were a sign of God’s favor.)

Us, rich?  Yep.  Even the poorest of us have comforts that Alexander and Augustus and Kubla Khan and the tsars of Russia would have envied.  Running water.  Indoor plumbing.  Heating and air conditioning.  Medical care.  Television, for goodness sake!  So, what do we do with this reading?  We try to reason our way around it, naturally!

• ·       Surely this is simply Middle Eastern hyperbole, like saying take the 4x4x8 out of you own eye before worrying about the dust mote in mine
• ·       Maybe the “eye of the needle” is a reference to a narrow gate in the walled city of Jerusalem.  impossible for a loaded-down camel to get through, but doable if you take the cargo off its back.
• ·       Or maybe the eye of the needle is, you know, the eye of the needle, but that the “camel” is a thick rope of camel hair.
•      Our maybe it's just a counsel of perfection.

·        Well, OK, I do buy the hyperbole idea, but not the others.  

Recall last week’s gospel: Children, who depend on others for everything, get into heaven.  The rich young man — who, we can assume, depends on his wealth and power and his own good works (“all these things I have done since my youth”) — is out of luck.  I think the message is pretty clear.  Regardless of our material prosperity or poverty, we are to rely on the tender mercies of God for our salvation. 

animals, divorce, children

Notes on the readings for the 27^th Sunday of Ordinary Times (Cycle B)

 

Old Testament: Gn :2:18-24

 

“… he brought [the animals] to the man to see what he would call them”

 

I love the way Anthony Hecht imagines the scene:

 

Naming the Animals

By Anthony Hecht

 

Having commanded Adam to bestow

Names upon all the creatures, God withdrew

To empyrean palaces of blue

That warm and windless morning long ago,

And seemed to take no notice of the vexed

Look on the young man's face as he took thought

Of all the miracles the Lord had wrought,

Now to be labelled, dubbed, yclept, indexed.

 

Before an addled mind and puddled brow,

The feathered nation and the finny prey

Passed by; there went biped and quadruped.

Adam looked forth with bottomless dismay

Into the tragic eyes of his first cow,

And shyly ventured, "Thou shalt be called 'Fred.' "

 

Epistle: Hebrews (Heb 2:9-11)

 

“it was fitting that he … should make [Jesus] perfect through suffering”

Why in the world was that fitting?

The whole idea of what’s “fitting” has, I suspect, led to all sorts of mischief throughout history.  It’s “fitting” that Mary be a perpetual virgin, for example, because Augustine didn’t want to imagine her under the covers with Joseph or, later, screaming in pain during childbirth.  The fact that our savior was born “a marginal jew” shows that what’s “fitting” is a bad guide to what’s true. 

                                                                      

Gospe: (Mk 10:2-16)

 

Two unrelated pericopes. The first concerns marriage:

 

“Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife”

The pharisees were “testing” Jesus, which I would typically interpret as meaning they’re trying to trick him into something.  If so, he walks right into the trap.  He says Moses’s law is wrong in allowing divorce.  I’m surprised the pharisees didn’t arrest him right then. 

 

Some modern (liberal) interpretations suggest that Jesus wasn’t really talking about divorce, but rather about abandoning someone poor and weak.  Maybe.  But I’m curious what criteria should be applied to decide which of Jesus’s injunctions are universal and which are conditioned by the time and place he lived.

 

I’m actually fine with the liberal interpretation.  Catholics should be able to divorce, but I’d like to see us admit that, rather than futz around with this annulment sham.

 

“the two shall become one flesh”

When unmarried priests use this gospel to preach on marital love, it grates on my ears.  At the very least, a priest needs to start with a humble disclaimer: “OK, so I haven’t been married, but I’ve observed a lot of marriages, so allow me to share this outsider’s view of the institution; take it for what it’s worth.”

 

The second pericope talks about kids:

 “the kingdom of God belongs to such as these”

 

We frequently think of children as innocent, pure.  Here, I prefer to see them as weak, aware of their total dependence, uninhibited, and asking for what they need — recognizing, as Bernanos’s country priest does, that “all is gift.”

Real presence

I was privileged to be able to assist at Communion yesterday (Pentecost).  One thought led to another, so later in the day I dug up a 10-year-old lecture by Avery Dulles on the real presence.  (If memory serves, Dulles authored, or maybe co-authored, the metaphysics text we used at St. Joe's half a century ago.)

Much of the lecture seems to me to be gobbledygook.  The part I was trying to remember, however, has less gibberish than the rest:

According to Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council, [the authors at the Council of Trent] remind us, Christ is present in the liturgy in no less than five ways:  in the congregation, when it gathers for prayer; in the word of God when it is proclaimed; in the priests, when they preside at the liturgy; in the sacraments, when they are administered, and finally; in the Host and Chalice offered at Mass.

The presence in the consecrated elements, these authors maintain, is only one of the five, and should not be taken as though it alone were real. In fact, they say, it should be seen as subordinate to the presence in the Church, of which it is a sacramental sign. Did not Augustine and Thomas Aquinas teach that the purpose of the sacrament is to bring about the unity of the Church as Christ's mystical body? Some theologians therefore began to say that Christ's primary presence is in the gathered assembly.

According to the teaching of the Church, the multiple presences of Christ are real and important, but the presence in the Eucharist surpasses all the others. Some fifteen years before Vatican II, Pope Pius XII called attention to four of the ways in which Christ is present in the liturgy. But he was careful to point out that these presences are not all on the same level. The divine Founder of the Church, he wrote, "is present ... above all under the eucharistic species".

Paul VI in his encyclical of 1965 gave a similar listing, adding to Pius XII's list a fifth: Christ's presence in the proclamation of the word. But he left no doubt about which presence is primary. After noting the manifold presences of Christ, he declared: "There is another way, and indeed most remarkable, in which Christ is present in His Church in the sacrament of the Eucharist, which is therefore among the rest of the sacraments 'the more pleasing in respect to devotion, the more noble in respect to understanding, and the holier in regard to what it contains', for it contains Christ Himself and is 'as it were the perfection of the spiritual life and the goal of all the sacraments'". This presence, he said, is called real not because the others are unreal but because it is real par excellence. [emphasis added]

A puzzle.  I'm absolutely positive I first learned of Cardinal Dulles's lecture in one of Paul Cioffi's  classic homilies at Copley Crypt.  But Paul died in 2004, and the lecture wasn't published until 2005. 

My Pope

God never condemns, he only loves and saves.

Source

Dan Larkins: Money changer in the temple

Well, not exactly.  More like "money counter in the basement."  Last Sunday was my first stint on one of OLQP's 3-person "counting teams." 

Fortnight for Freedom, 1

A few days ago, the wonderful wife and I sent a letter to our bishop:

Hello, Bishop Loverde--

We don't view the implementation of the Affordable Care Act as the serious threat to religious freedom that you and your brother bishops apparently do; with all due respect, we think that your fears and those of your brothers are greatly overblown and that the “fortnight for freedom” is an astonishing overreaction. Therefore, we will not support it.

Indeed, if we learn of an organized protest against the “fortnight,” we will join in enthusiastically. In any event, we will not be attending mass at Our Lady Queen of Peace during the three Sundays of the fortnight (counting the 17^th when parishes are supposed to distribute a bulletin insert promoting the “fortnight”), and the $135 we would have contributed to the church during that period will instead be sent elsewhere – perhaps to the LCWR. We realize that this tiny drop in collections will have no significant impact on the diocese's finances, but it is the only way we can emphasize how strongly we feel.

We hope that someday that you and your brothers will call for fortnight-like protests against deportations, war, and capital punishment (to name just a few of the government policies that, by our lights, are contrary to the gospel and to church teaching). And that you will do so regardless of which political party's ox is to be gored. If so, you can count on our strong support. Who knows? Such protests might even convince us to give you the benefit of the doubt the next time you ask us to join in a cause we are less incensed about.

May God bless us all.

/signed/

Quote of the day

“If the church were my religion, I would have given it up a long time ago,” [Cuomo] said. “All the mad and crazy popes we’ve had through history, decapitating the husbands of women they’d taken. All the terrible things the church has done. Christ is my religion, the church is not."

Mario Cuomo, quoted by Maureen Dowd

Doubting Thomas

Yesterday's gospel was "doubting Thomas" (Jn 20:19-31).

Our homilist thought that Thomas gets criticized unfairly for his failure to believe his friends' story. "Sure, it's easy for us to criticize Thomas, because we've been hearing about the resurrection all our lives. Of course, we believe. But put yourself in his place. He was hearing about something that had never happened before -- ever! It's not so surprising that he was, shall we say, skeptical."

True enough.

But Thomas gets a bad rap in another respect, too. Yes, he insisted on seeing the wounds before he'd believe, and the other disciples didn't. But the other disciples didn't need to insist; Jesus showed them voluntarily, without being asked. What reason do we have to think that they would have believed that the person in front of them was the Lord if they hadn't seen the wounds too, just like Thomas?

Not to mention the fact that some of us who have heard about the resurrection all our lives are still struggling to make sense of it.

Greg Boyle

Here's a nice post about a guy who "'seeks a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment of how they carry it."

What happened to my joyful season?

OK.

I can live with "And with your spirit" if I have to.

I'll even listen to the priest declare (scandalously) that Jesus's blood was poured out for "many," rather than for "all"!

I, myself, refuse to use the first person singular in the creed, but that's no problem because no one will mind when I use the plural.

But when they start screwing around with the Lenten prefaces, they've gone to far!

From the new English translation of the missal:

For by your gracious gift each year your faithful await the sacred paschal feasts with the joy of minds made pure, so that, more eagerly intent on prayer and on the works of charity, and participating in the mysteries by which they have been reborn, they may be led to the fullness of grace that you bestow on your sons and daughters.

Source

In what universe, I ask you, is that an improvement (either poetically or theologically) on:

Each year you give us this joyful season,
when we prepare to celebrate the paschal mystery
with mind and heart renewed.
You give us a spirit of loving reverence for you, our Father,
and of willing service to our neighbor.
As we recall the great events that gave us new life in Christ,
you bring the image of your Son to perfection within us.

Source

Where do I sign up for a better religion?

RFK / MLK

Wow! Just wow!

RE syllabus

I've pretty much been winging it when I've gone out to Abby's house to do RE with her. I usually talked off the top of my head about the readings for the coming Sunday.

I hope to change. The readings will still be a big part of the sessions, but I'm also hoping to:

• talk to her about the structure of the mass,
• teach her a prayer or two or three -- Lord's prayer, Francis's peace prayer, maybe Niebuhr's serenity prayer,
• maybe go through the Apostle's Creed phrase by phrase,
• talk more about saints, and
• come up with some activity --drawing, puzzle, story telling -- that might make the whole thing a little less like school (or church).

(Not all of these things every week, of course.)

Sometimes I'm sooo proud of my church

Other times, however, . . .

. . . Father Manny Gallo, a thirty-one-year-old theology teacher with a shaved head and a goatee, addressed the [high school football] players—there were more than a hundred—before a recitation of the Hail Mary. He began by apologizing for the fact that, "because I'm a priest," he wouldn't be able to say certain inspirational words. "Jesus Christ will teach you two things today," he said. "The first thing is, when Jesus was carrying that Cross, defeat was not on his mind. Victory was on his mind!" The boys listened solemnly. "The second thing, gentlemen, that Jesus Christ can teach us is that weakness was not in his heart. So when you feel pain, when you feel like vomiting, when you feel nervous, when you feel that you can't no more, think about that."

Ben McGrath, "The Jersey Game"

The New Yorker (January 2, 2012)

A kindred spirit?

I went through a C.S. Lewis phase many years ago. Looking back on it now,

• His apologetics (Mere christianity, God in the dock) strike me as falling somewhere between disingenuous and dishonest.
• Surprised by Joy left me cold.
• Ditto his poetry.
• Narnia was plodding and uninteresting and long, long, long.
• His other works are only a faint memory; clearly they didn't make much of an impression, except for the Perelandra series, which was one of the few sci-fi works that I can say I enjoyed, though I suspect that if I revisited it now I would find it terribly heavy-handed and tedious.

All this notwithstanding, I just ordered A grief observed. (I probably read it before, but I have no clear recollection of it.)

Why bother going back to so disappointing an author? I suspect there might be more to him than I ever appreciated. That suspicion is raised by something Keillor said about the book this morning:

In the book, [Lewis] writes that he doesn't believe people are reunited with their loved ones in the next life. "Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

The Writer's Almanac

RE

29th Sunday of ordinary time

"A farmer has 15 sheep.  All but 6 of them die.  How many are still living?"  Etc.

I tried to trick you with those riddles, but that was just for fun.  One time people tried to trick Jesus, but not for fun; they wanted to get him in trouble.  So they asked him if people should pay their taxes?  If he said yes, .... If he said no, ....  "Render to Caesar . . . Render to God the things that are God's."  What is God's image on?  ("Let us make man in our image . . . ").


30th Sunday of ordinary time

What are commandments?  Why did God give us commandments?

There used to be hundreds of them, then Moses said they could all be summarized in 10, and then Jesus summarized them into a single commandment.  [Yes. Abby, it does sound like two, but they're like different sides of the same coin.]  Seems like things are getting easier and easier, doesn't it -- first 600+, then 10, and now only 1?  But the 10 aren't quite so clear and simple as they seem:  "You have heard it said: . . . ; but I say to you: . . . "  And Jesus's 1 -- how easy is that?  It's impossible, that's how easy it is.  And now, with only 1, I can't tell myself, "Well, sure, I don't keep all the commandments, but I'm able to obey some of them, so maybe I'll get a passing grade."  If there's only 1, and I can't obey it, I can't pretend that I'm doing OK.  So what do we do?

31st Sunday of ordinary time
(We didn't do this lesson; Abby had a birthday party to attend)

"The greatest among you must be your servant.  Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted."

Let's talk about saints.  What's a saint?  Sunday, which is almost the last day in October, is the feast of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez; the month began with the feast of St. Theresa.  Both saints "humbled themselves."  Do you know anybody who might be a saint?  (There are lots of saints.  In fact in a couple days, we'll have a feast for all the saints that don't have a special day set aside for them.)

RE

Today's syllabus (composed after the fact):

• God loves us and forgives us for anything we've done if we just want to be forgiven. (If I remember to do it, all of our sessions will begin this way.)
• What's the bible, a book? No! It's a collection of books.
• Is the bible about Jesus? No! Most of it was written hundreds of years before he was born.
• "But Pop Pop,the whole book is about God, and Jesus is God, so the whole book is really about Jesus."
• "Well, um, er, uh, . . . "
• A long discussion of the divinity of Christ. (She's only 9 years old!) I wound up saying that yes, Jesus was always God, but it's as if God said "People just aren't getting it. They don't know what to believe or how to behave." "And Jesus said, "I'll go down and tell them and show them." So Jesus kind of gave up being God for a while. But he gave it up completely! (He kind of became God again because of the way he lived.)
• A discussion of Philippians 2:6-9, which fit perfectly and which, conveniently, is from this Sunday's readings.
• Segue to the story of the first Adam, (Genesis 3:6)
• So the moral of our story is although Adam and Eve messed everything up for everybody Jesus kind of makes everything OK again. It's like we got a whole new do-over.
• "But Pop Pop, there's still sin in the world."
• "Um, er, uh, . . . "

Footnote:  Year A, 26th Sunday of ordinary time

RE

For the past few years, I've been trying to do RE with Abby. Last school year I failed miserably -- I don't think we talked religion more than a few times. The year before, we did a lot better, but I wasn't very comfortable teaching the stuff in her text book.

This year, we're going to try something different. Instead of using one of those awful textbooks, we'll talk about the readings for the coming Sunday. On those occasions when the Sunday readings don't look interesting, we'll talk about saints who have feast days that week or about church history or the sacraments or something.

We'll start this week. When I first looked at this week's readings, I thought we'd be doing "saints or history or sacraments or something." But that's because I barely glanced at the epistle -- I didn't realize it was Paul's great hymn to the second Adam!

I don't think we'll have any trouble finding something to talk about.

A bum rap?

Too bad that so many of us, when we think of Paul, think of stuff that sounds to us either like bigoted garbage or like just plain gibberish. It's easy for us to forget that sometimes he got the message exactly right, as in last Sunday's reading: "Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law."(Romans, 13:8)

It was a different Paul who never used to tire of telling us that it's all just as simple as that. As simple -- and as impossible, on our own -- as that.

Not to put too fine a point on it, . . .

Let’s say it clearly: the Republican activist base consists largely of worshipers of evil. The god they believe in accepts human sacrifice. They call him “Jesus,” but the true name of the god they adore, and who accepts their sacrifices, is Moloch.

Mark Kleiman

You say puh-TAY-toe; I say . . .

You've probably been wondering about the proper pronunciation of "Gerard," as in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like me, you may cringe when at what is far and away the most common pronunciation, "jur-ARD," because (diseuphony aside) you seem to remember your freshman English teacher at St. Joe's said that the stress falls on the first syllable: "JUR-urd."

Problem solved. In an excellent video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL4lsEcE-js), John Wain pronounces it with equal stress on both syllables (at about the 4:55 mark). That settles it for me.

Even if -- unlikely event -- you don't care about how to pronounce the name, the video is well worth watching. Wain, a 20th century atheist, is wonderfully sympathetic to the 19th century Jesuit. And he, Wain, that is, pulls of a remarkable feat in narrating some of Hopkins's lines in a way that almost make them understandable. (Most of Hopkins's poems, of course, are so intricate, convoluted, and just plain strange that you really need to see the words and think about them to make any sense out of them.)

An extra bonus. If, like me, you haven't turned to "God's grandeur" in a while, check out Wain's recital beginning at the 6:48 minute mark of part 5 of the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKDxgfvUCNo).