“The Lord Whom the seraphs fear to look at”
August 1, 2009
My favorite hymn from the liturgy is this metrical homily attributed to St. Jacob of Sarug. At St. Mary’s we sing it (in Malayalam) during the distribution of the Gifts. What do you think?
The Lord Whom the seraphs fear to look at,
the same you behold in bread and wine on the altar.
The lightning-clothed hosts are burned if they see Him in His brilliance,
yet the contemptible dust partakes of Him with confidence.
The Son’s Mysteries are fire among the heavenly beings.
Isaiah bears witness with us to have seen them.
These Mysteries which were in the Divinity’s bosom
are distributed to Adam’s children on the altar.
The altar is fashioned like the cherubim’s chariot
and is surrounded by the heavenly hosts.
On the altar is laid the Body of God’s Son
and Adam’s children carry it solemnly on their hands.
Instead of a man clad in linen, stands the [priest],
and distributes alms [the Eucharist] among the needy.
If envy existed among the angels,
the cherubim would have envied men.
Where Zion set up the Cross to crucify the Son,
there grew up the tree that gave birth to the Lamb.
Where nails were driven in the Son’s hands,
there Isaac’s hands were bound for an offering.
Welcome, priest, who carries the Mysteries of his Lord,
and with his right hand distributes life to men.
Welcome, priest, who carries a pure censer,
and with its fragrance makes the world sweet and pleasant.
Welcome, priest, whom the Holy Spirit did raise up,
and on his tongue bears the keys to the house of God.
Welcome, priest, who binds man in the depth below,
and the Lord binds him in heaven on high. Hallelujah.
Welcome, priest, who unbinds men on earth,
and the Lord unbinds him in the highest. Kyrie eleison.
Praise be to the Lord! His mercy upon you and absolution for me,
and good commemoration to Mor Jacob the Malphono [James the Great Teacher].
Beautiful letdowns
July 19, 2009
It was a beautiful letdown
When I crashed and burned,
When I found myself alone, unknown and hurt.
It was a beautiful letdown
The day I knew
That all the riches this world had to offer me
Would never do.
Switchfoot, “Beautiful Letdown”
Today while driving to church for confession I wondered if all repentance begins with the experience of disappointment—the kind that comes from the realization that one has been duped by an illusion, a phantom, a mirage.
Take the so-called Prodigal Son for example. While craving for the slop meant for the pigs he was hired to feed, it suddenly occurred to him that he had chased his own dream into that very rut. What he once perceived as freedom, independence, wealth, turned out to be alienation, loneliness, hunger. Then the humiliating but sober deduction: “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish with hunger!” A beautiful letdown.
This morning I found these words in the Saphro prayers for Saturday:
O you martyrs, why did you despise this passing world which all men love? “Because we saw that it is deceitful in its pleasures, and that it has hated from the beginning to the end those who love it.”
It has hated from the beginning to the end those who love it. How many of my dreams—of “living comfortably”, of “a bright future”, of “happiness”—are shaped not so much by God’s Word but rather by hope (and I mean an intense, eschatological kind of hope) in the gaudy possibilities laid out by the world?
Too many.
The martyrs called the bluff on the world. What set them apart was their ability to grasp a truth the multitudes so often miss: the world “has hated from the beginning to the end those who love it”. The rest of us, it seems to me, appear to be quite all right with loving this thing that secretly hates us. Sounds like a spiritual version of the Stockholm Syndrome to me.
Once again, Sunday comes, and to the Physician I go, deluded, limping, hands half-clenched, half-opened to receive the medicine of immortality. It’s a good thing He understands.
“All of theology is here.”
April 5, 2009
Pascha. Holy Week. Essentially bright days such as are needed. And truly that is all that is needed. I am convinced that if people would really hear Holy Week, Pascha, the Resurrection, Pentecost, the Dormition, there would be no need for theology. All of theology is here. All that is needed for one’s spirit, heart, mind and soul. How could people spend centuries discussing justification and redemption? It is all in these services. Not only is it revealed, it simply flows in one’s heart and mind.
The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983, Entry dated May 1, 1973
I’m resolved to do my best to “receive” for the first time the services of Holy Week of our Church, and I hope that you all are able to do the same from your respective traditions. I’m absolutely convinced of Fr. Schmemann’s words: All theology is here.
In his autobiography, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977, then-Cardinal Ratzinger identified Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism (the original French title of which is Catholicisme: les aspects sociaux du dogme) as one of books that has influenced him the most. In Principles of Catholic Theology, he sums up de Lubac’s thesis in Catholicism like this:
The concept of a Christianity concerned only with my soul, in which I seek only my justification before God, my saving grace, my entrance into heaven, is for de Lubac that caricature of Christianity that, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made possible the rise of atheism. The concept of sacraments as the means of a grace that I receive like a supernatural medicine in order, as it were, to ensure only my own private eternal health is the supreme misunderstanding of what a sacrament truly is. De Lubac, for his part, is convinced that Christianity is, by its very nature, a mystery of union. The essence of original sin is the split into individuality, which knows only itself. The essence of redemption is the mending of the shattered image of God, the union of the human race through and in the One who stands for all and in whom, as Paul says (Gal 3:28), all are one: Jesus Christ. One this premise, the word Catholic became for de Lubac the main theme of all his theological speculation: to be a Christian means to be Catholic, means to be on one’s way to an all-embracing unity. Union is redemption, for it is the realization of our likeness to God, the Three-in-One. But union with him is, accordingly, inseparable from and a consequence of our own unity. (pp. 49-50; italics in original)
If Ratzinger is here reading de Lubac (with whom he no doubt agrees) correctly, then the privatization of the sacraments must be one of the most diabolical afflictions on church life because it spiritualizes and sanctions the very “split into individuality” which is a curse of original sin.
As I thought about these words I was reminded of an incident that made a deep impression on me several years ago, when I was serving as a Catholic campus missionary at the University of Illinois. In one of our team meetings, my colleague Mary Claire asked me in a gentle but direct tone: “Why do you and the other people here sit by yourselves when you go to a weekday Mass?” It had never occurred to me to be critical of my own preference to sit alone during the liturgy and I didn’t have an answer for Mary Claire that day (and brushed her question aside without much consideration) but the frank answer to the question would’ve been something like this: “Because for me, the Eucharist is where I, as an individual believer, encounter and receive Jesus Christ in the privacy of my own heart.”
At that point, the Eucharist held little communal significance in my mind, the “community” nonsense having become one of the signatures by which “the libs” were identified, along with their tell-tale omission of the definite article whenever they spoke of “Eucharist” (as in, “He gave me Eucharist”) and “Church” (as in, “We are Church”). Holy Communion was little more than the vehicle of grace by which I attained to my own sanctification and only indirectly allowed me to “bring Christ to others” by its fruits in my life. The liturgy was no “sacrament of the assembly” (again, that would’ve been classic “lib-talk” if you asked me then), and my own devotional practices made that clear. I went to Mass as an individual, received Communion as an individual, made my own thanksgiving prayer as an individual, and walked out of church as an individual. (I also recited the breviary as an individual, though it was good every and then to have company.)
This, it seems to me, is precisely “a Christianity concerned only with my soul, in which I seek only my justification before God, my saving grace, my entrance into heaven”. I might not have contributed to the rise of atheism but I was sure as heck propping it up.
The inherently communal—let’s say “ecclesial”—nature of the Eucharist is something I still struggle to appreciate and practice. Really, it was only when I started worshipping with the folks at Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Denver that I began to see that the Eucharist has something to do with “making” the Church.
What I think allowed that to happen was, first of all, the size of the congregation itself—basically made up of 25 people and often a few visitors. There was precious little anonymity or hiddenness at Ss. Cyril and Methodius (since one couldn’t really get away with sitting in the backmost pew without being publicly “invited” by Fr. Chrysostom to stand in front of the iconostasis). Everyone knew everyone.
Then there were the potluck lunches after each Sunday liturgy which, in many ways, was the highlight of my dining experience week after week. Not only was the food terrific—and it was pretty good even during the various fasts—, but the fellowship that took place during these meals was something that I’d never consistently experienced before in a parish context. (Going out to dinner with whoever of my friends happened to stick around after church on Sunday evenings paled in comparison.) The fellowship, like the meal, was an intentional commitment. We shared not only the food (which took some families all Sunday morning to make) but ideas, worries, funny stories and other “mundane” events from our week—you know, the stuff that “ordinary workaday life” is made of. Even more, we shared life during the week with phone calls, e-mails, and even a face-to-face meal or two sometimes. There were the bi-weekly lunches with Joel during which we talked about Chinese chess and Cyrillic Christology. One day, Fr. Chrysostom came by with some soy protein supplement because he thought I was unhealthily underweight. One of my favorite memories of summers in Denver is going to Vespers with the Ruckhauses followed by a cold beer (or two) on their front porch before dinner.
These were the small things that instilled in me, little by little, an understanding of the sacramental life as a life of reconciliation and communion for the divided children of Adam. I didn’t learn that from reading de Lubac or Ratzinger or The Didache but by experience—by being welcomed into a real, living, breathing community of real, living, breathing people. Only then did it seem strange—even repulsive—to me that I had so often practiced the “commune and scatter” approach to the Eucharist.
I wondered this morning if I would’ve ever understood what Ratzinger meant by these words had I never met the people at Ss. Cyril and Methodius.
…[T]he Church is is not merely an external society of believers; by her nature, she is a liturgical community; she is most truly Church when she celebrates the Eucharist and makes present the redemptive love of Jesus Christ, which, as love, frees men from their loneliness and leads them to one another by leading them to God. (Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 50)
I don’t see how I could have.
