“On November 1, 2014, the Solemnity of All Saints, the Abbey celebrated the Monastic Investiture of postulant Gwyneth Owen who was clothed in the monastic habit and received the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross…”

Sr. Teresa Benedicta is our community member Quinby Finch’s sister. Here’s an account of the investiture ceremony with a gallery of beautiful photographs.

May God bless Sr. Teresa Benedicta in her life of prayer and work!

Friends, pray for vocations to the religious life!

Our Lady, Queen of Praise, pray for us!

St John Lateran
9 November 2014
1 Corinthians 3.9-11,16-17
Fr. Patrick Allen

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In February of the year 313, the Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Constantine the Great, and Licinius, who had control of the Balkans, met and, among other things, issued a decree known as the Edict of Milan, which extended official toleration to the Christian religion. Property and money confiscated from Christians either by government officials or private citizens were to be restored or repaid, and, for the first time, Christians would be free to worship openly and without fear of reprisal.

That same year Constantine gave the estate of the ancient Roman Laterani family, which had come to him by marriage, to the Bishop of Rome, Pope Miltiades. He had a basilica, baptistry, and patriarchate built for him. The Basilica was completed in the year 324 and dedicated to the Most Holy Savior. Later dedications to both St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist would be added, so that today it is commonly referred to as “St. John Lateran.”

The Lateran patriarchate was the residence of the Popes from Miltiades until they abandoned Rome for Avignon for the better part of the 14th century. When Pope Gregory XI returned, the Lateran was in such poor condition that the Pope made his residence next door the Vatican basilica, St. Peter’s – which Constantine had also built, and where the Popes would continue to reside until Pope Francis decided to move in to the hostel down the hill.

The Popes have moved their residence, but the Lateran Basilica remains the Cathedral Church of the Bishop of Rome – not St. Peter’s, as is often thought. Though it has been repeatedly destroyed by and rebuilt after the invasions of Goths and Visigoths, devastating earthquakes and fires, and our old friend deferred maintenance, it is the oldest Church of the Latin rite, the mother church of Christendom. As is engraved in the wall over the main doors, “Most Holy Lateran Church, of all the churches in the city and the world, the mother and head.” And today throughout the Universal Church is the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, which takes precedence over the Sunday.

It perhaps seems odd, particulary to us who have only recently come into full communion with the Church, to venerate a building, particularly on the Lord’s Day. But we honor the Lateran Basilica as an expression of love and veneration of the Church of Rome, and her bishops the Popes – because, as St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote more than 200 years before the edict of Milan and Constantine’s gift to Pope Miltiades, the Church of Rome “presides in love” over all the churches.

And by venerating this building, the Church calls us to remember that the building itself, beautiful as it is (and it is!), is made of dead stone, and is but a token of the living Church – which is a community, the “people of God,” as the Second Vatican Council taught so insistently.

Insistently – and Biblically, we might add. Pope St. Clement, writing about the year 100, called Saints Peter and Paul the “greatest and most righteous pillars” of the Roman Church, and already in their writings we see the Universal Church understood as a “spiritual building.”

So, in our epistle lesson we have heard St. Paul say to the Corinthians, You are God’s building… with no other foundation [than] Jesus Christ. And, you are God’s temple… and God’s Spirit dwells in you… God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.

And in his first epistle, St. Peter invites us to “Come to [Jesus], to that living stone, rejected by men but in God’s sight chosen and precious; and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house” (1 Pet 2.4,5).

God’s building… “Living stones built into a spiritual house.” It has been 24 years since I saw the Lateran Basilica in person, and to be honest, I was too young and stupid to appreciate all that I was seeing.  But just last week I was in St. Louis, Missouri, which used to be called “the Rome of the West,” believe it or not, because of its strong Catholic identity, and because it is mother to ao many of the midwestern dioceses.  And the Archdiocese is home to the beautiful neo-Byzantine Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. The interior of that basilica is covered, floor to dome, with stunning mosaics – 41.5 million pieces of glass tesserae, in 7,000 colors, covering 83,000 square feet.

Any one of those small pieces of glass would, I suppose, have its own beauty and worth; if you saw one lying on the sidewalk, you might tempted to pick it up – but maybe not. But when they are fitted together by a skilled craftsman, they become, if you’ll forgive the worn out cliche, so much more, infinitely more, than the sum of their parts. Each tessera is elevated; it’s individuality is maintained, yet wonderfully transcended and transfigured. And so it is with the Church, as baptized individuals – each a precious stone in his or her own right – yield themselves in faith and obedience to the loving Craftsman, an ordered community of persons is revealed as God’s building, God’s holy temple, where God’s Spirit dwells.

Pope Benedict XVI put it this way: “The beauty and harmony of churches, destined to render praise to God, invites us human beings too, though limited and sinful, to convert ourselves to form a ‘cosmos,’ a well-ordered construction, in close communion with Jesus, who is the true Holy of Holies” (Angelus, 9 November 2008).

That “conversion” into a “well-ordered construction” of which the Pope Emeritus speaks is not, though, some kind of sterile rule-following or “do-goodery,” to use a phrase of Pope Francis’, that yields self-righteousness and – paradoxically but inevitably – hate. Nor is it a “hostile inflexibility [so that one] closes oneself within the written word,” as the Holy Father said at the Synod on the Family.

Rather, that conversion is instead an act of love, many acts of love in concert, but always responding to, conforming to, and called forth by, God’s original and perfect act of love for us – which is why St. Paul warns us to let each man take care how he builds upon it; for no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

And so the community of the baptized, God’s building, this “spiritual house” whose “living stones” we are, becomes most fully and truly itself in the Eucharist – in which that primal act of love, our “sure foundation,” Jesus Christ himself, gives himself to us in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood – so that we are transformed into what we receive, we become what we eat. As we will pray after our Communion, “that, by partaking of this Sacrament, we may be made the temple of your grace.”

And that is what God is making us into, as we yield ourselves to him in faith and love: carefully, patiently, skillfully fitting us together into the temple of his grace, built on the foundation of Jesus Christ.

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All Souls’ Day
2 November 2014
Fr. Patrick Allen

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Yesterday, the first of November, was of course All Saints’ Day – a day set apart in the Church for us to celebrate the witness and example of all those Christians who have gone before us as true martyrs or having lived lives of heroic virtue. But of course, this is not just a backward-looking exercise as we seek strength in their witness and example. No, we believe “in the communion of the saints,” which is happening right now. We celebrate their present company, their real encouragement, and especially their prayers.

So in just a few minutes, we will seek their intercession for us, and we will lift up our hearts to the heavenly realm where they are, and in the Holy Eucharist enter into the ceaseless worship of heaven, together with “angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven.”

Or we may think of St. Therese of Lisieux, dying so young of tuberculosis, who said, “My mission – to make God loved – will begin after my death… I will spend my heaven doing good on earth.”

“I will spend my heaven doing good on earth!” The saints are those known and unknown, formally canonized or not, who have been, as St. Paul has it, “conformed to the image of Christ,” who have been perfected in love, and enjoy the Beatific Vision. And there, in the Presence of God, they exercise a ministry of prayer for us.

But of course this is not the Mass of All Saints, but rather the Mass of All Souls – or “All the Faithful Departed.” And at this Mass we pay particular attention to the other side of this prayer ministry. To be sure, we give thanks for the lives of our departed loved one, and we may well mourn our own losses, but most especially we have a ministry to perform: to help the faithful departed, to encourage them, to love them. In a sense, we may spend our earth (some portion of it, anyway) doing good in Heaven.

All that Father gives me will come to me, is the promise that our Lord makes in today’s Gospel. And the Lord, in his goodness and mercy, is fitting us for that great day. That process, in which we cooperate with his grace, is called “conversion” – and the goal, the promise, is that we will each in our own particular way, be like the saints, conformed to the image of Christ – that we will love as he loves.

We might think of it in terms of last Sunday’s Gospel, in which Jesus was asked which is the greatest commandment in the law. And you remember his reply: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy, soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like unto it: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self.” And that is not, at its deepest level, so much a commandment as it is a promise. “Thou shalt love,” God promises his people.

But immediately, we see the rub. For the vast majority of us, upon reaching the “grave and gate of death,” we do not yet love perfectly, whole heartedly, and have in our own individual ways and to varying degrees resisted God’s grace, so that we do not love as Christ loves, do not do as he would do. Not conformed to the image of the Son, we are not yet ready for the Father’s presence.

But it is not just that there is, so to speak, an objective moral shortfall in our lives. Our problem is not just that holiness is not only required objectively, but that it is also desired subjectively – it’s what we want. And perhaps the best way to measure the progress of our sanctification or the depth of our conversion is to consider to what degree we actually desire holiness and wholeness. Regardless of how we struggle and often fall and experience deep conflicts within our hearts, we know what we want – or, in my case, I know what I want to want: to love freely and without reservation, to leave behind mixed motives, for our appetites and desires to be brought in to good order and subject to reason and love. We long, in our saner moments, for purity, to be rid of anything that would keep us from perfect communion with a loving Father.

C.S. Lewis pondered this dilemma of arriving at Heaven’s gate with our love still imperfect, with our desire for holiness still unrealized, and had this to say:

Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid  you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first’ (“The Business of Heaven”).

But God will not break our hearts, and he, incredibly, desires our fellowship and presence, wants our own longings for holiness and wholeness to be fulfilled. And the name that the Church gives to the Father’s love at this point is “Purgatory.”

The teaching of the Church in this matter is actually pretty slim as to content, though it is filled with great comfort and common sense. In fact, the Catechism sums up only three things the Catholic Christianity insists upon with regard to Purgatory.

The first, I hope should be clear from all that has gone before – simply that Purgatory is about purification for heaven (which all Christians – Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant agree is necessary), not about punishment and Hell. Actually, I should be even clearer than that – the Church teaches that Purgatory is Heaven, at least its narthex or doorway or, perhaps, its mudroom. It is part of the process of salvation, the application of redemption – and again, something for which God’s friends desire as “the hart longs for the waterbrook” (Ps 42). So Purgatory is forward looking, not backward. It is for those who are being saved, not for those who have chosen their own way.

Secondly, Purgatory may involve some degree of pain and discomfort. This should not be surprising and is, I think, common sense. Sanctification on this side of the grave involves pain and discomfort – at least in the sense of striving and straining towards the goal and of disciplining the appetites. And also in this sense: it involves necessarily the revelation to ourselves of our own horrifying sinfulness and does so against the backdrop of a much clearer vision of God’s holiness and love than we can have in this life. We can perhaps think of this in terms of confession – which is nothing other than being truthful with God about our sin, and, as we know, sometimes the truth, especially the truth about ourselves, hurts, but truth, honesty, is always the necessary precondition for healing and reconciliation. A Puritan theologian called confession “the vomit of the soul” – it’s not pleasant, but it gets the badness out, and we’re glad and relieved to have it out.

But if Purgatory must necessarily involve pain, it must also necessarily involve pleasure and joy because it brings us to the Source of pleasure and joy. Indeed, St. Catherine of Genoa, the Church’s great teacher about Purgatory, insisted that these pleasures must outweigh any pains:

Thus, according as the rust diminishes and the soul is laid bare to the divine rays, happiness is augmented. The one grows and the other wanes until the time of trial is elapsed . . . With regard to the will of these souls, they can never say that these pains are pains, so great is their contentment with the ordinance of God, with which their wills are united in perfect charity (Treatise on Purgatory).

And finally, the Church has always believed that just as by God’s design and command prayer aids our growth in grace and holiness on this side of the grave, so prayer can aid growth in grace and holiness in Purgatory. How does that work – how do our prayers help? In the same way that any prayer works. God has ordered his world in such a way that our prayers have some effective part in its – and mine and your – unfolding history. As Pascal said, in prayer God “gives us the dignity of causation.”

In the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom encouraged his flock in Constantinople, “Let us help and commemorate them. If Job’s sons were purified by their father’s sacrifice, why would we doubt that our offerings for the dead bring them some consolation? Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them” (Hom. in 1 Cor. 41,5:PG 61,361; cf. Job 1:5).

So let us exercise our full dignity! Let us pray!

Love demands that we pray, and the highest prayer of the Church is the Eucharist, when we unite ourselves to Christ’s sacrifice. And it is here, in the Mass, that the veil between this world and next is lifted, and we are there before Christ’s throne with “Angels and Archangels and the whole company of heaven.” The Communion of Saints is actualized. United with Christ, we are united with one another. Our love and desire and prayer for those we love is lifted up to the Father in the Son’s perfect offering of himself on Calvary’s cross – and theirs for us.

And so it will be until that great Day when God will bring all of us finally, fully, and forever to Himself. All that the Father gives me will come to me, he has promised. And so we shall: we will see Christ, and be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

In the meantime, with all who hope in him, we purify ourselves, even as he his pure – trusting that God in his mercy and grace will provide for us and for those whom we love whatever is lacking in our sanctification, and that the One who began a good work in us will bring it completion in the Day of Christ.

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Yesterday, Wesley Hill, an Anglican New Testament scholar teaching at Trinity School for Ministry, published a reflection on God’s grace given to us in and through the everyday-ness of our lives – those things, those duties, those neighbors (whom perhaps we share our beds and homes with) – which constitute the normal furniture of our lives. His jumping off point is St. Paul’s enigmatic comment that women will be “saved though childbearing”:

Then another housemate sat down next to me. He asked me questions. He told me about his day. He helped me do dishes. Insistently, and simply by his physical presence, without any verbal articulation of what he was doing or why, he asked me to notice him, to talk with him and listen to him. At that moment, I didn’t especially want to. I wanted to get back to work—to get back to preparing tomorrow’s theology lesson, to get back to the theological novel I would read after closing the computer with my file of lecture notes. It only dawned on me later that perhaps this was, in my childless state, my analogue to being saved “through childbearing.”

Calvin’s gloss on 1 Timothy 2:15 speaks of the reference to childbearing, with its concomitant gestures to “faith and love and holiness, with modesty,” as indicating “in what way God conducts us to salvation, to which he has appointed us through his grace.” These children, in other words, inthese daily circumstances, are the path on which we are led to receive our spiritual rescue. Soskice again: “It is by being at the disposal of another that we are characteristically drawn out of ourselves.” We are saved, that is, by traversing the way of what Iris Murdoch has called the “extremely difficult realisation that someone other than oneself is real.” We are saved in and through such patient attention, not outside of it or beyond it. Perhaps we are saved in the early mornings, as the coffee cools, as well as in the lecture halls and carpools.

I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing! The essay also reminded me that I tried to make a similar point in a homily I preached last Advent, though, I see now, much less elegantly and effectively than did Professor Hill. In any case, since I never got around to posting it at the time, here ’tis.

– Fr. Patrick Allen

I Advent (A)
1 December 2013
St. Mary’s/Corpus Christi
PSA

This first Sunday of Advent reminds us that the Christian story is not over yet; there is more to come.  In Advent, we very intentionally place ourselves in solidarity with our elder brothers and sisters in the faith – those faithful Israelites – like Simeon and Anna and Elizabeth, Joseph and our Lady – were waiting, longing, and looking for “the consolation of Israel”, and saw and welcomed that Consolation, that Christ, when he arrived, poor and in a manger.  Because doing so teaches us to wait and long and look for him when he shall return “in power and great glory to judge both the quick and the dead.”  The Christian story, which is the world’s true story, moves forward; there is another act yet to come – and Advent reminds us of that.

Our Advent preparation for the feast of our Lord’s Nativity is a picture in miniature of what our preparation for his Return – which is to say, the entirety of our lives – ought to be: expectant; hopeful; watchful.  Awake and prepared, so that “without shame or fear we may rejoice to behold his appearing.”  In this morning’s Gospel lesson, our Lord is very bluntly warning us to be ready, to be prepared: Therefore you also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

It is, I know, difficult to keep any kind of an Advent in America, when the religious Holy Day has been swamped by a no-holds-barred retail free for all and Christmas trees are dumped on the curb on St. John’s Day.  But if we will give ourselves to it, teach ourselves, in the midst of all the bustle and busy-ness, to keep a holy Advent, it will form us, sharpen our senses, lift up our heads and our hearts so that, like those elder brothers and sisters in the faith, we will see and welcome him when he comes.

Now that can happen, Advent can do its work, in a number of ways – but I can’t help but notice that in this Gospel lesson, the emphasis falls on the mundane, the everyday; the emphasis falls, if you’ll indulge the paradox, on the unemphasized.  Notice what our Lord says.  Making the comparison of his own return to the days of Noah, he says, in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage – in other words, they were living their lives, as of course, were Noah and his family.

And when he looks forward to the day of his return, he says two men will be [at work] in the field… two women will be grinding at the mill – in other words, just living their lives.  Their days are filled by the very same things, yet one is prepared and taken, and the other left, and Jesus doesn’t mention any other difference between them.  Both their days were filled with work and the necessities of life: the joys and obligations of family, maintaining a home, the morning and evening commute, getting the children to school and practice and lessons, watching whatever the ancient Middle-Eastern equivalent of college football on Saturday was – all the same things that our own days are filled with.  But one will be taken and the other left.

The point is that the watchfulness our Lord urges upon us, the preparedness we must develop, does not mean jettisoning our everyday lives.  And what I want to suggest is that the joys and responsibilities, the adventures and tedium of our everyday, normal lives, can be either the means of our faithful and joyful preparation for our Lord’s return, or the obstacles to it.  C.S. Lewis made just this point in the Screwtape Letters when his fictional demon Screwtape, advising his demon nephew Screwtape on how to tempt a human being to Hell, says regarding this particular human’s having fallen in love: “Like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, it is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material.”

To which I would add, as so also are the things we don’t get so excited about: working in the field, grinding at the mill, changing diapers and washing dishes, filling out forms, driving the carpool – all of it the raw material of our spiritual formation.  All those things are the little deeds we may do either with great love and praise or with disdain and distraction.  It depends, of course, on the attitude, the orientation of our hearts, we bring to the task.

Because our work, the ordinary tasks of domestic life, even the way in which we drive, all of these things are, in reality, opportunities to love and serve our neighbor – which is to say, they are opportunities to love and serve our Lord.  But that takes, of course, the constant and conscious application of the Advent discipline to our lives:  looking for our Lord, watching for him, ready to love him when he appears – as he does.

The Lord will come at the end of the age, at a day and hour neither we nor even the angels in Heaven know, to judge both the quick and the dead.  That is Advent’s ultimate horizon, the coming of our Lord for which he urged us to watch and prepare.  But the way to prepare, the way to watch, is to see and welcome the Lord in his nearer and quieter Advents.  “God walks among the pots and the pans,” St. Teresa of Avila told her fellow nuns.  And he comes among us in those in need – and who is not in need at least of a smile and cheerful word, if not a helping hand up or a merciful hand out?  And of course, in just a few more minutes, he will come among us in the Sacrament of the Altar, in the most ordinary of appearances, a bit of bread, a cup of wine, but really and substantially present among us.  Will we be prepared?

Again, it all depends on the orientation of our hearts – but that is determined by the degree to which we have understood the orientation of his heart, which is always to love, and to love to the end, giving himself on the cross for the life of the world, for my life and your life.  When that cup of suffering was placed before him, he was ready and prepared to drink it.

And how did that happen?  We of course are curious about our Lord’s childhood and young adulthood before that fateful day when he presented himself to John for baptism in the river Jordan.  But the Gospels are all but silent.  St. Luke simply places him within the context of the Holy Family and tells us that “he increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.”  Which is simply to say that Jesus learned love precisely in the midst of the everyday tasks and joys and sorrows of a normal life, as a faithful and obedient Son, and if not at work in the field or grinding at the mill, then in St. Joseph’s carpenter’s shop.  He cheerfully and diligently gave himself to his work in love and service to others, and thereby to his Father in Heaven.  At his work, day by day, for love, he hammered in nails, and when the day came, for love, he offered himself up and the nails were driven into him.

Well, tomorrow is Monday, and we are back to it: the field, the mill, the carpenter’s shop; the classroom, the office, the kitchen.  And Jesus will be there.  Let us watch for him and love him, so that on that great day when he returns in power and great glory, we may without shame or fear rejoice to behold his appearing.  Even so, come quickly Lord Jesus.

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Even more!

19th Trinity (OT 30a)
Mt 22.34-40
26 October 2014
Fr. Patrick Allen

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As I understand it – which is hardly at all – contemporary physics is on a quest for what is sometimes called a “Theory of Everything” – that’s an arresting phrase, isn’t it? Modern physics operates under two theories, or frameworks. The theory of General Relativity focuses on gravity and explains large-scale, high mass phenomena – stars, galaxies, and so on. And it works; it has enormous predictive value. On the other hand, when it comes to understanding and explaining very small-scale, low-mass phenomena – atoms, subatomic particles, and so on – physics relies on what is known as Quantum Field Theory. And it works; it also has enormous predictive value. The problem is that when it comes to some phenomena, at least on the theoretical level, the two theories actually conflict with one another; they can’t both be true. And thus a search for the Theory of Everything, “the deeper underlying truth that can harmoniously integrate both General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory – a single theory that is, in principle, capable of explaining all phenomena” – I copied that straight out of Wikipedia, so it must be true!

In this morning’s Gospel, we see the Pharisees, in particular one lawyer on an analogous quest: Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the law? St. Matthew tells us that this was a test – and in fact this was a much discussed and debated question among the rabbis; it manifested a particular concern, a kind of angst within the ancient Jewish tradition, to find “a unifying principle in all the various formulations of God’s will” (Benedict XVI, 2008) – a single commandment, if you will, capable of explaining all the prohibitions, principles, and precepts to be found within the Torah. And this was a difficult question, a real test: the rabbis discerned 613 distinct commands within the Scripture, and what made sense of, gave a meaningful interpretive context to, all of them? Were they 613 essentially arbitrary commandments, or could there be discerned, could Jesus discern, a central, unifying principle, a “theory of everything.” What is the greatest commandment in the law?

And this is not merely an academic question; it’s important, and not just for what it tells about the law, but because of what it tells us about the Law Giver.

Jesus has his answer, he doesn’t hesitate. He quotes immediately from Deuteronomy: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind; this is the first and greatest commandment. And then he goes for the extra credit, quoting now from the Holiness Code in Leviticus: And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

Love is the answer. Well, of course it is. “All you need is love, yeah, yeah, yeah,” etc., etc., etc. Love is the answer – but is it, really? Or, maybe I should say, does knowing that, hearing it from Jesus really help? We might even ask if Jesus is actually making sense.

Thou shalt love, he says. Well, I don’t know. Love can be encouraged, enjoined, recommended; it can, I suppose, be advised. But can love be commanded, demanded, required – a matter of law? And not only a just demand of the law, but the very lynchpin and ground of all God’s legislation – this double law from which all the law and the prophets are derived and find their meaning.

Can love be commanded? It’s a real problem. And by “commanded,” and by “problem,” I don’t mean “coerced.” Love is free by definition. And to whatever degree some word or some deed is coerced or bargained for or extorted, whatever else it may be, it cannot be love.

But what I mean is, can love – complete and unstinting love – be justly commanded if it is not in our capacity to give it? What if we can’t do it – does God have the right to demand it?

You know another silly season of electoral politics is soon upon us, and we will hear and perhaps take part in debates about the appropriate rate of taxes on the profits of corporations and the income of individuals. Some think the top rate should be 10%, others will argue that it should be closer to 90%, but no one thinks it should be 101%, right? No one thinks it is just to demand more than a person has.

Can love be justly commanded if it is not in our capacity to give it?

There are, of course, some people whom it is very easy for me to love, the very sight of whom calls forth my love. And I may, after all, either because of a sense of guilt or genuine distress at another’s ill fortune be moved to some act of material charity. A few dollars for the homeless veteran, an hour of my time to visit someone old, sick, and alone. But to open my heart to another, to a stranger – or worse, someone I know and know to be difficult – and genuinely to desire his presence, his company, and his well-being, so that we come to share our lives together, which is is what this double commandment requires: that is a different matter altogether. Even if I see the justice in it, how can I will it to be so? How can I reach inside and remake my own heart?

In his Confessions, there is a section in which St. Augustine meditates on the virtue of continence, sexual self-mastery, and upon the goodness and difficulty thereof. And then, as ever, he turns his meditation to prayer: “O God,” Augustine prays, “on your great mercy rests all my hope. Lord, you command continence: give what you command, and command whatever you will.”

“Give what you command, and command whatever you will.” Augustine understood that if he were to live into the just and good requirements of the law, he would require, indeed he would depend every step of the way, on God’s grace and mercy; God would have to give what he commands.

Thou shalt love, Jesus, the new Moses commands, and we know it is right, that it is just and good. And our only response can be to pray with Augustine, “Yes, Lord, but give what you command, and then command whatever you will.”

And of course, that is just what Jesus does, just what he is doing, as he hands himself over to these “chief priests and elders of the people,” to be baited and tested by Sadducees and Pharisees and their lawyers, obedient to the law of love unto death, even death on a cross, a whole-hearted, whole-souled, whole-minded gift of love to the Father, by giving himself for his neighbor. “Having loved his own,” St. John says, “he loved them – even you and me – to the end.”

Thou shalt love, Jesus says. And it is precisely in him that the command is fulfilled. He has given, finally and fully, what he has commanded. And as we see that love, and yield ourselves to that love, and by our own stumbling steps of self-offering on behalf of our neighbors unite ourselves to and participate in that love, then we will be changed: hearts of stone will become hearts of flesh; we will look around and recognize strangers and enemies as, in truth, friends and neighbors, whose well-being, whose presence and companionship we long for. Indeed, all the commandment will make sense, and the heart of the Law-giver will shine through them.

And in the end, we will rejoice to find that Thou shalt love was never really a commandment at all, not at its deepest level, but a promise. Thou shalt love – and finally, purged of guilt and every stain of sin, we shall. We shall love, because he has loved us, and given what he commanded.

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Monday evenings, 6.30, beginning 10 November at the John Paul II Center,
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18 Trinity (OT 29c)
Mt 22.15-21
19 October 2014
Fr. Patrick Allen

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“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is an old saying of practical – even Machiavellian – politics.  And we see it on full display in this morning’s Gospel lesson: The Pharisees went and took counsel how to entangle Jesus in his talk; and they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians…”

Of course, normally, the Pharisees and the Herodians would have had nothing to do with each other – except perhaps to throw stones at one another.  The Pharisees were Jewish nationalists, who longed to throw off the yoke of Roman occupation. The Herodians were, as you might guess, supporters of Herod, who himself was backed by the Romans – “go along and get along” was their attitude. And yet, here they are together with a question for Jesus – although it’s not really a question at all, at least not an honest one.

Tell us, then, what you think, they ask. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

Again, it’s not a question; it’s a trap. If Jesus answers that paying the tax is unlawful – that is, opposed to Torah – then Jesus will immediately be guilty of insurrection, of fomenting rebellion. Calvin Coolidge famously said that “the business of America is business,” and I sincerely believe he was wrong about that – the business of America is the liberty of persons and communities. But in a very real sense, the business of Rome really was business. The whole point of extending the empire into backwaters like Palestine was to collect taxes and send them back to Rome, and there was no toleration for anyone who called the system into question.

This was no new issue. In fact, when Jesus would have been a young boy, there was a revolt on precisely this issue, and the Romans had ruthlessly crushed it, leaving the countryside littered with crucified revolutionaries.

On the other hand, if Jesus answers that it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he will alienate the people, who hated the Romans and found the tax offensive and a token of injustice and oppression. Indeed, all those crowds of people who supported Jesus, those who welcomed him with palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” when he entered Jerusalem just a few days before, supported him as a hoped-for political and military Messiah – and what’s the point of that if not to get rid of these hated Romans and their taxes.

So, how will Jesus answer? Notice, first of all, how he begins: he asks his questioners to produce the money for the tax. It’s worth noting that he himself doesn’t have one. And the fact that his questioners do reveals that they themselves are already blithely complicit in the Roman system.  The coin would have been the Roman denarius, with Caesar’s image stamped upon it, and the words “Caesar, Son of God, High Priest” engraved around the edge – all of which, from the commandment-violating “graven image” of a human being to the blasphemous inscription would have been deeply offensive to any devout Jew.

And so we may, I think, fairly imagine Jesus holding the coin slightly away from himself, much as someone might handle a dead rat, a maybe some foul bit of trash pick up while walking along the beach, now ready to ask his own question: Whose likeness and inscription is this?

Caesar’s, they reply. Then, says, Jesus, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Rather than falling into the trap that has been set, Jesus offers a new way to think about their money – namely, hard as it was, hard as it is, to believe, that money is not ultimate. There has been a movement in recent years towards an enforced secularization in American society – that is, from governmental neutrality among religions, or between religion and no religion, and towards a kind of official atheism in which all references to the divine and transcendent are scrubbed from public life. And so we have seen attempt to remove the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, but also the motto “In God we trust” from our money.  Now, in general, I think we ought to be concerned about that – although my concern there is more as an American than as a Christian.

But there is, let us admit, a certain and unavoidable irony in placing the motto “In God we trust” on our money, of all things, because we so deeply trust in money to fix what ails us. “Money don’t get everything, it true / But what it don’t get, I can’t use,” the Beatles sang.

Jesus, without saying anything about the justice or injustice of the tax or the Roman occupation, asks his opponents, and asks us as well, to consider just where their true allegiance, their faith, lay. Why he asks, are you so concerned, to the point of violent revolution or the compromise of your consciences, with this stuff? Have you made a means into an end? Have you made a secondary concern an ultimate?

Or, to put it another way, Jesus was essentially saying that political oppression and unfair taxation were not their biggest problems.

And so then he adds, and render unto God the things that are God’s. We see the connection. The coin belongs to Caesar and should be returned to him, because it bears his likeness. The word in St. Matthew’s Greek is eikon, and it is the same word used in the Greek language version on the Hebrew Bible when, in the Genesis creation account, God says, “Let us make man in our own image…”

You, your whole self, belong to God, Jesus is saying, and that is the issue you need to deal with. As an ancient commentator on this passage said, “The image of God is not impressed on gold, but on the human race. Caesar’s coin is gold, God’s coin is humanity…. Therefore give your riches to Caesar but keep for God the unique innocence of your conscience, where God is contemplated….”

God’s claim, Jesus is reminding us, is much more sweeping than Caesar’s. Caesar wants your money, but God wants your reason, your body, your sexuality, your time, your creativity, your thinking and your speaking, your waking and sleeping, your living and dying – every human capacity. Jesus is simply asking us to ask, “What am I, and what am I for?”

This analogy between Caesar and our Father in heaven, of course, quickly breaks down: Caesar is a taker, and God is a lover. God’s claim does not stunt or limit our human capacity, but places them in the context in which they can be properly used toward their true ends, and so flourish and grow: it is not arbitrary choice but conformity to the truth that actually sets us free.

God is a lover; “God is love.” It is here that we learn what it means at the most basic level to render… unto God the things that are God’s. God is not a solitude, but is perfectly and eternally a loving communion of persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  And for this reason, as Pope Benedict put it, “the human person, the image of God, realizes himself or herself in love, which is a sincere gift of the self.”

And there we have that truth that sets us free: we bear God’s image, and so we are made for love, become most truly ourselves when and as we love.  I’m tempted to say that God becomes most truly himself as he loves: but that would be heresy, or at least a very sloppy way of talking about God: God does not “become”; God is always and only truly himself.

But the place we may see him most clearly for who he always and only is in Jesus Christ and his perfect and full gift of himself, which these Pharisees and Herodians, conspiring with Caesar’s representatives, are about to engineer. As St. Paul says in the epistle to the Colossians, “He is the image – the likeness, the eikon – of the invisible God… For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

It is there, in Christ’s whole gift of himself on the cross, that we see love, that we see “the invisible God” in whose image we are made, and that we may learn what it means to render unto God the things that are God’s. And there, at the same time – or first, even – that we may see Jesus making up our own shortfall in love, rendering to God the perfect offering of love on behalf, that perfect oblation to which we unite ourselves and our intentions in this Holy Mass.

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Sources:

Benedict XVI, Angelus, Trinity Sunday 2005:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/angelus/2005/documents/hf_ben-xvi_ang_20050522_holy-trinity_en.html

N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone

Carl E. Olson, “Taxes, Tricks, and the Roman Coin.”:
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/3446/taxes_tricks_and_the_roman_coin.aspx

Sunday, 22 June, is the Feast of Corpus Christi, our Titular Solemnity and the first anniversary of the establishment of our community. Mass will include the Rite of Reception into Full Communion and Confirmation of three new members, and conclude with Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

But, wait – there’s more! On Sunday evening, there will be Solemn Mass of Corpus Christi at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist at 6PM, followed by a Solemn Eucharistic Procession through the streets of Charleston to St. Mary’s for Benediction. The Procession will depart the Cathedral at approximately 7.15PM, and you may join in then. Afterward, there will be a block party (not-at-all solemn!) on Hasell Street and the St. Mary’s campus. Join us!

And here is Benedict XVI on the Cosmic Eucharist (or Eucharistic Cosmos!) and the Corpus Christi procession:

“When the apse mosaic of San Clemente was created, there was as yet no feast of Corpus Christi.  The sense of the day is, however, wonderfully represented here.  For it shows, indeed, how the Eucharist spans the world and transforms it. The Eucharist belongs not only to the Church and to a closed community.  The world should become Eucharistic, should live in the vine of God.  But that is Corpus Christi: to celebrate the Eucharist cosmically; to carry it even to our streets and squares so that the world, from the fruit of the new vine, may receive healing and reconciliation through the tree of life of the Cross of Jesus Christ.  We celebrate the feast in this sense.  Its procession is like a loud call to the living God: Yes, fulfill your promises. Let your vine grow over the earth,and let it become the place of reconciled life for us all. Detoxify this world through the watersof life, through the wine of your love. Do not let your earth shatter from hate and from man’spresumption of omniscience. You, Lord, are yourself the new heaven, the heaven in whichGod is a man. Give us the new earth in which we men become branches of you, the tree oflife, steeped in the waters of your love and taken up into the ascent to the Father, who alone is the true progress we all await.”

Benedict XVI, “Images of Hope”