The Virtual Oratory

August 8th...Luke 12:32...about dying!

Where I am now...Middletown Connecticut...I rarely see a family before the funeral. I am looking into why. But the custom is to go the funeral home and then voila! appear in the church for a "standard" Catholic funeral. When the funeral is "booked" the parish is also...automatically???...supposed to call "the" parish organist who rolls something out though rarely has the congregation been willing to sing anything.

Well, this is just a little challenge.

 Challenge ONE...do some funeral planning. The rite has been in place for some decades and has been revised from time to time. But the part nobody reads...the introductions...makes it clear...over and over again...that planning and personalizing the funeral increases the comfort the liturgy provides. So in the parish this week I am providing some aids for funeral planning and asking people to pass them around.

For instance the readings are varied and of great comfort. So we start there. THere are a variety of prayers and blessings including the Eucharistic prayer introduction...the long part that starts out with LIFT UP YOUR HEARTS...At the end of the Mass...here the commendations get dropped quite a lot and the Sunday straight dismissal is used...there is no such provision in the funeral Mass because the body is to blessed and a procession forms around that without a blessing. And so on...

IF you have not (caps by the way is NOT SHOUTING...but just for emphasis...If I feel the need to shout...which I won't  unless there is REAL GOOD NEWS  it will look like that. So IF you not planned your funeral this Sundays Gospel will encourage you and so do I.

Previous Sunday POSTS

For the Good Samaritan see the blog sight, svp. But for Mary and Mary, here goes.

The question was posed by the imagination of a nun that I knew, a nurse practitioner in Appalachia. Overwhelmed, of course, by the needs and the 7/24 schedule tied into driving on wretched roads winding here and there to poor homes where very sick people needed here, she decided to go on a special retreat...a Poustinia...a plain little cabin, nothing but the bible and a box of food for a week. Nothing else...nothing even for "spiritual" purposes. No tapes, no extra books, nothing. She went into a panic as the day to start approached and thought several times of cancelling. But she made it to the front door of the tiny cabin and "heard" a voice say, "Am I not good enough company for you?" 

Luke 9 is the great measuring rod of discipleship...its cost. Bonhoeffer's classic The Cost of Discipleship was based on his lectures about the Gospel of Matthew. It could have started with Luke 9. In any case, this whole summer, Luke 9 might be mulled over. We should not rush through this but return and return and return.

St Damien of Molokai...an example of Luke 9...

What time is Liturgy?

The word “Mass” is a Latin slang word used in only part of the Catholic Church. As such, it is not traditional. The traditional word that both east and west understand is the Greek word LITURGY and it covers all of the prayer of the Church, all the sacraments. Also in the east, there is no low Mass tradition, prayer is always sung. ..and takes longer!

The word Mass though does express one profound aspect of our worship because it comes  from the word Missa, or sent, the dismissal at the end of the Liturgy. At the end of the liturgy we are SENT, we are MISSIONED. Wonderful.

Hints about the Eucharist:

To understand it would help being Jewish.

The Jewish community knows all about Passover. They know what it means to offer a sacrifice of praise, the sacrifice of the heart, the worship of the whole self offered to God. The Passover is not something to be watched.

To understand it would help being Protestant.

Protestants usually celebrate the Eucharist infrequently, maybe quarterly. That is because at the time of their origin nobody, not even Catholics went to Communion more than once or twice a year. But Protestants are very reverent and would never think of leaving church at or just after Holy Communion.

PENTECOST!

This is the feast of the Holy Trinity. The Byzantine churches never thought anything like a Trinity Sunday was necessary since this day said it all, did it all. How do we know about Father Son and Holy Spirit? Pentecost...an event...not a statement. It took the Church centuries to figure it out. But the same with us. We hear and then we respond and then we figure it out. Thanks, of course, to the Holy Spirit!

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Redemptorist novices and friends in a country where seminarians have a very tough time. The doggies are a sure sign of the blessings of heaven in any case.

 April 24/25, 2010

y World Day of Prayer for Vocations

Otherwise known as the 5th Sunday in Easter. It is Jesus speaking to us as the shepherd that gives the western Church a chance to specifically pray for priestly vocations after what appears to be decades of trying to destroy the priesthood by covering up sexual predation among the clergy.

I have been a priest for 36 years and with the Oratory for 46. A Protestant inviting me into the Rotary (and providing the fees for me) said that even if the job did not provide money it must be a rewarding life. I did not think "rewarding" was accurate. I asked another priest friend and he agreed. We settled on the life of a priest as "meaningful."

But as a job, it must be one of the worst in the world. Perhaps serving in the North Korean infantry might beat it out for the bottom of the list, but if you like kim chee than the priesthood is worse than the North Korean army.

The priesthood is obviously emotionally isolating. My old pastor used to say that if you were a priest and wanted a decent funeral, you had to die with your boots on. Retired priests are usually forgotten.  The abuse scandal has also indicated how isolating the life of a priest is within the structure. The Irish bishop who resigned this week said he did so because he participated in a  structure and a process that many would find "un-Christian." That would be an insult to people who were not Christians. The hellish structures that allowed the abuse were satanic.

I have during my time been the significant human instrument for the ordination of 8 men to the priesthood. One was entirely a disaster though subsequently a bishop gave him years to redeem himself and his original community welcomed him back on its website. But of the seven others, six were no worse than usual, one was way above average.

 The effort these vocations cost me was huge. Time, money, and creativity was eaten up in huge gobs. There will be no vocations who make a difference unless there is more blood given, more sweat lost, and near despair invited. That is all I know after all these decades.

The Lord is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!

The Church rests on an unshakeable foundation of peace created by an encounter with the risen Lord. 

Every Sacrament, every sacramental moment, is an encounter with the risen Lord, healing and reconciling, present in the Holy Spirit leading us through this Lord to the ever lasting Father. Far from being a wish fulfillment, these encounters turn the world upside and then transforms  all things beyond the power of imagination.

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Just a reminder about Blessed John XXIII

There could not be a better example of the Pope as a real servant of the servants than John XXIII. So Mark 10: 46-52 shines in that face. Then the 25th we read about the blind beggar calling out Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. Mercy on me is better than pity me...because the expression in Greek, Kyrie Eleison, has made it into the liturgy and great musicians including the devout Lutheran J.S. Bach, have turned it into wonderful music. 

And the Kyrie is a humble reminder of a once united Church that spoke Greek from east to west, read the Bible in Greek, and celebrated the liturgy in Greek. The west only went to Latin because the shifting populations caused by the barbarian invasions had lost Greek (and access to the Bible written in Greek and the liturgy). Latin became the language of the Mass in the west because that was the language understood by everyone. The liturgical disaster of private Masses celebrated in near silence (very low voice) excluding the people and rarely sung is something we have had a long time recovering from. We could profit by a review of these bishops pictured opposite as they in council started to experience a dialogue Mass in Latin (not then a silent Mass and one in which everyone participated...not just the altar boy and priest. It was a revelation for them. We thank God for the great things we have SEEN and HEARD as the liturgy was restored in our own time. 

October 11, 2009

28th Sunday

This fantastic cover photo...original in color caught the great spirit of this holy pastor. 

It was taken right after his election as he greeted the cardinals who had just elected him. 

A few years later he would call the Council. His baptismal name was Giuseppe...Joseph. When he received a group of rabbis he stepped down from his chair and rushed to greet them saying, "I am Joseph, your brother!" The words are from the bible, Genesis 45,  when Joseph greeted his long lost brothers with love and reconciliation. 

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 Feast of the Assumption/Dormition August 15 2010

Some Christians have trouble with the feast that western and eastern Christians have shared from way back because it seems "non-biblical" but as a matter of fact "assumptions" into heaven are very much a part of the Jewish tradition that we have in the Bible and in the Gospel of Luke Jesus is assumed into heaven. (Not in Matthew though and not in early Mark).Since there are no relics of Mary and there is no tradition of relics even in from the time of relic crazy devotion, the alternative theology that applied to prophets and to Jesus took over as logical, theological, and devotional.

Carl Jung thought the doctrine was brilliant because the Christianity he was brought up in was male and dualistic. The doctrine of the Assumption puts a premium on a woman believer and the human body. What a celebration and what a good time...the middle of the summer...or is it...sadly near the end of summer...school looming??? If you are a farmer August is the middle. Only people lashed at the masts of school ships see August as the end.

The basis of the feast is biblical because in Luke Mary is the first one to believe and her cousin Elizabeth have from the beginning a faith we find in the men called by Jesus only after Easter. So slow the men, so faith filled the women. There is a parable here.

Corpus Christi 2010

The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, a very late development that the eastern Church considers redundant, helps western Catholics to focus a little bit. Our mentality, very much like the Roman one of engineers, politicians, and military, is rather sensate, cut and dry, bean counterish, so something like the Eucharist is hard for us to take in. We tend to chop it up, measure it out, and then, pronto, head off to breakfast, hopefully ahead of any Protestants (a neat trick in the American South).

For a mystical, really traditional liturgy, the eastern celebration of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom cannot be beaten though it is intolerable to many Romans as well as Protestants. There are exceptions especially now that it is politically incorrect to attack other people's religion. During the 1000th anniversary of Christianity in Russia, a liberal Presbyterian woman, part of the board of the World Council of Churches visited Moscow. Did she struggle to say something nice about the archaic liturgy? In the bad old days for sure, she would have criticised it for its length and ritual, perhaps also for all the references to the Mother of God. But in this ecumenical age, she said how much the eastern liturgy appealed to all the senses. Indeed, incense, icons, candles, singing, prostrating, bowing, signs of the cross, holy water, vestments, prayer ropes (knotted wool for the Jesus Prayer) could all pass as a wholistic spirituality long before anyone thought about how wise being wholistic was.

THE REAL PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE WORD

 The New Testament was written with one basic foundation, one fundamental experience that John Henry Newman captures so well: " ...Christ is still on earth. He said expressly that He would come again. The Holy Ghost's coming is so really His coming, that we might as well say that He was not here in the days of His flesh, when He was visibly in this world, as deny that He is here now, when He is here by His Divine Spirit..."

If you read especially the Gospels with this as the mindset of the writers, you will encounter the reality from which the New Testament originates.  

Below is too good to ever erase.