The New Year

As we prepare to leave one calendar year behind and enter another, the Church always celebrates the Feast of Mary, the Mother of God. It is also usually a time to reflect on the year that has passed and the new one that is about to begin. For me, a lot of things have happened in 2011, but the deaconate formation process has not only defined my year and changed, I would say, the very spiritual complexion of our home, it has changed forever the way that I view the Church's role in my daily life. The interesting thing about that statement is that when I began the formation process, I really had no idea of the transformative impact that it would have on not only my life, but our home, and the way that I have noticed that I am perceived by others-that is something that Deacon Jim Prosak, my mentor, told me that I would see happen more and more as the time passed.

I am finding also that I have an increased desire to pray more of the Divine Office whenever my schedule permits it. I regret that I cannot honestly say that I am praying at least five of the seven hours-the five which are required of priests-every day, but I now try to pray five of the prayers of the office every day. The "Big Five" are the Office of Readings (Matins), Morning Prayer (Lauds), Daytime Prayer Current (Sext), Evening Prayer (Vespers), and Night Prayer (Compline). The other two hours are Terce, called Midmorning Prayer in our modern tongue, and None, or Midafternoon Prayer.

The names of the three Daytime Hours tell us precisely when they are supposed to be prayed, Terce, or the third hour of the morning watch-9:00AM. Sext, the sixth hour-Noon. None, the ninth hour, also the hour Our Lord expired on the Cross-3:00pm. Our lives don't fit nearly as neatly into those little boxes in modern times-even some monastic communities do not pray the Hours on the strict timing that had become the Church's custom over the years (some, like the Cistercians, still do keep the Hours largely at the traditional times). As a result, the Church wants us now to pray Morning Prayer in the morning, Daytime Prayer during the breaks in our day, Evening Prayer in the evening, and Night Prayer at night before bed. The Office of Readings can be prayed at any time during the day that we can find the time, and the Office of Readings may begin the liturgical day and come before Morning Prayer if someone is so inclined. I often either like to combine the Office of Readings with Morning Prayer or with the Daytime Hour, depending on my schedule on a particular day.  If I am up after midnight, I will sometimes pray the Office of Readings by itself.

If, by the Lord's grace, I make it to ordination, I, along with my Brother Aspirants will  pledge to pray Morning and Evening Prayer every day. My position as a Benedictine Oblate already requires of me to pray Night Prayer. Yet, I have felt called recently to pray the Office of Readings and Daytime Prayer in addition to the Hours I had been praying. I find myself offering up each psalm or canticle or reading for some intention I might otherwise have forgotten in my human weakness. For a Brother Aspirant or wife who needs my prayers, for a friend who is ill, for those I know who need help that I cannot give beyond my prayers, for my vocation and for the guidance of the Holy Spirit in discernment, and the same for my fellow Aspirants, for my mentor, and spiritual director...name that need. The more time that I have found to pray, the more prayer intentions and needs I seem to be able to remember.

If I could stress anything to people throughout the Diocese, it is that they can and should be proud of the exceptional class of men who are in formation for the deaconate. I pray each day for these, my brothers, and I often think myself to be the least worthy of all to be among their number. This is the vigil of the Feast of Mary, the Mother of God, and I have resolved to commit my own vocation and the entire formation class to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Mary Immaculate, Mother of God and perfect Christian, you treasured the word of God, in faith you pondered it in your heart and acted on it in charity and service.

We know that as children of God and believing Christians, God's love is given to us, "...the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us."  Your heart as symbol of your love for God, for us, and for all creation, reminds us that "as long as we love one another God will Live in us And His Love will be complete in us." 

As we all move into the New Year, I would simply ask that readers remember not only me, but all of the Aspirants for the Deaconate in the Diocese of Knoxville and in the Hily Catholic Church throughout the world in your prayers.

Nativity Thoughts

Christmas Eve usually puts me in an interesting predicament because I can't keep a secret from Nicole. She already knows what she is getting for Christmas, largely because I can't ever go to the store without her to begin with. She got exactly what she asked for (some horseshoeing tools in order to shoe her own horses rather than hire a farrier to do it, which is a major expense that we can't really afford). Nicole loves horses, which is normally a very expensive hobby, and one that I certainly wouldn't be able to finance, except that we've been blessed in this way by the right people seeming to cross our path who share Nicole's love for these beautiful animals. One horse was free, the other was cheap (as in very inexpensive). What is even more remarkable is that these "giveaway" horses both come from good bloodlines, and those people who really know horses can tell this. Nicole found a place to board her horses-the home of a very nice lady whose lone horse needs companionship in the pasture (horses are herd animals). Hence, board also costs us very little compared to what people normally pay. Because of all these things, I feel blessed that Nicole is able to own, ride, and take care of two fine horses at so little cost to us-largely because the Lord blessed us (and specifically her) with meeting the right people who shared her passion for things equine and could help her keep a foot in the horse world.

How all of that relates to Christmas is that Nicole's Christmas requests in recent years  almost always relate to horses and horse-related things. It is impossible for me to hide a Christmas present from her-she almost always knows what she is getting, and this year is no exception-she asked for shoeing tools and she will get them. Me, on the other hand-I have no idea what I am getting, and she has the secret well-hidden-something she seems able to do with great success every year. I have gotten to a place in my life where I rarely ask for much in the way of gifts at Christmastime, because I am thankful for the things that I have, and there always seems to be so little that I actually need, and I thank the Lord for that.

It is entirely too easy-and I know that many people say this every year so that it becomes almost cliche-to become caught up in the material aspects of this time of the year. Indeed, we know that our society has become so obsessed with both the material and the commercial aspects of what we have come to call the "holiday season" that people bring out the Christmas decorations and the carols and the associated bon vivant at Thanksgiving weekend and sometimes before. There is no preparation of heart and mind for Christmas, so that when Christmas does come, people have a meal, open presents, and then quickly in their minds move on to other things the next day. When I wished a Merry Christmas to a friend of mind last year on December 27th, he wondered why..."Christmas is over," he said. It is not over at that time, of course, it has just begun.

We still have traces-albeit ever smaller ones-of what Christmas is really about within our culture, but Americans have lost (and many never had) the idea that Christmas is a season, and not a single day that we get excited about for a month (this comes from the Puritan heritage within this country-we do not have a true tradition of Christmas as Americans, it wasn't even an official holiday until the 1880's). That season does not end on December 25th, it begins on the 25th, and actually begins tonight at vigils for Christmas. Many people do not prepare themselves for Christmas by truly celebrating and living Advent before we get to the point of tonight. We need Advent because of what exactly it is we are preparing to celebrate and commemorate. We need time to reconcile in our minds how what we commemorate reconciles-or is radically opposed to-our materialistic culture of today.

We have our romantic notions of nativity scenes and singing Away In A Manger and Silent Night, but do we know of that which we sing? We are celebrating that God was made incarnate in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that He was made man, and that He came to us born in a cave used to house dirty farm animals and was laid in a feeding trough used for cattle, and donkeys, and other animals. He came into this world with nothing...nothing. Not as a child of privilege or wealth or power, but as a child born poor amid a backdrop that would make the modern conditions of the poor in our own country look like a vacation in the Hamptons. God chose to manifest himself to the human race as a child born in some of the lowliest possible means that humanity could afford. He came, in his own words (Luke 4:18-21):

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." 

That reality-that Christ came to proclaim liberty to captives, preach the gospel to the poor, and give sight to the blind-both literally and, most importantly, spiritually, is what we celebrate at Christmas, and it is the real reason Christmas is-and should be-such a big deal. It's a whole lot more important than a man in a red suit saying "ho-ho-ho."

A tale of two lives

This past week has been a week of high-profile deaths. John Patrick Cardinal Foley, who was the former chief of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications and who had a passion for communicating the Gospel to others, died December 11th, and his Mass of Christian Burial was this past week. Most of us knew Cardinal Foley as the "Voice of Christmas" who provided the English language commentary and translation of the Midnight Mass from St. Peter's Basilica every year (he did the same for the Easter Mass from St. Peter's Square) on television to a global audience. For many people, their annual encounter with the Eucharistic Lord on their local NBC station on Christmas Eve was the only time they saw Jesus (and we do mean they saw Jesus in seeing his Body and Blood under the appearance of bread and wine) on television or anywhere else. Cardinal Foley sometimes gently reminded people that the Lord was truly present.

                                      Cardinal John Patrick Foley

For many of the world-wide audience who would listen to Cardinal Foley's voice, he was the only exposure they ever had to the Catholic faith. Doubtless for some, he was their first exposure to it, and although I certainly did not know or think of it at the time, he was probably my first exposure to Catholicism and to what a Mass looked and sounded like. He spent his life finding ways to spread the Gospel of Christ through modern media and social communications. Many souls were surely reached for the Church and for Christ through his tireless ministry in the media.

Someone else passed away this past week who often used the media for very different ends than did Cardinal Foley. Christopher Hitchens was a man of immense intellectual gifts and was a great writer, commentator, and orator. I very often disagreed with Hitchens, but I had a great admiration for his intelligence and wit, and would read, watch, and listen to him often just to get a dose of it. Hitchens had one major problem, however: He hated God, Christ, Christianity, and the Church. He certainly spent an inordinate amount of time attempting (without much success) to defame Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

                                         Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens' brother Peter is a Christian and a social conservative, as well as a gifted award-winning journalist and writer (he literally became the Christian counterweight to Christopher whether he intended to or not). Christopher Hitchens' official position was that God did not exist, but his speeches, media appearances, and writings belied another reality in his head: That he knew God existed, and was just mad at God. When talking about issues of the Divine, his tone often moved from the satirical to the very angry.Indeed, when I think of the kind of atheism marked by anger at God described by Cardinal Kasper in our assigned reading for next month, The God of Jesus Christ, I can't help but think of Christopher Hitchens. He has crossed my mind several times while reading The God of Jesus Christ.

I have met few so-called atheists who, after my encounters with them, did not leave me feeling as though they actually DO believe in God/Higher Power/Divine Presence, but they refuse to admit this because the reality is that they are angry at God-usually for a multiplicity of things that can be chalked up as a direct or an indirect result of human fault, sinfulness, or frailty. (i.e. "Why would a loving God allow so much death in the world/war/destruction/my relative(s) or friend(s) to live or die in such a horrible way/name that social problem").

Christopher Hitchens was a master of this tired old argument. Indeed, he was one of the best at it that I know of, primarily due to his humor and wit. However, Hitchens left me on several occasions after listening to him with the distinct impression that his resistance to God was based less on an internalized conviction that God did not exist, and more on an internalized anger with the Almighty, usually stemming from the fact that the world didn't work the way he thought it ought to and this was all God's fault.

An example of this was his debate over religion with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair last year, in which Christopher Hitchens referred to the laws and dictates of God as a "kind of Divine North Korea" because God lays down the consequences of disobedience. The reality is that Hitchens seemed to live a life of rebellion. He did not want to obey God, so he appears to have literally "looked God in the face" as it were, and in his rebellious spirit he said "I do not want obey you, and I do not respect you, so I am going to say that you do not exist, and I am going to preach that to the world."

Even so, the very reason that I hope, nay, pray, that Christopher Hitchens somehow found faith in the last moments of his life is that for all of his vitriole and hatred for the things and the people of God, he was a man of so many gifts. I trust in and believe that the mercy of God is unfathomable and boundless, and extends even to those who have spent their whole lives denying Him, if they, even in but an instant, acknowledge Him and accept His Divine Mercy.

Judging Christopher Hitchens' soul is not my place, but that responsibility belongs to God. This isn't to say that no atheist exists with an internalized belief of conscience that says there is no God-I've met at least one for whom I believe that was actually the case. For those people, they are in for quite a surprise one day. For those like Hitchens, who appear to choose to deny God out of anger or spite or rebellion-I think they know, somewhere within themselves, that they will give answer for all of those years of rebellious denial of Truth.

Christopher Hitchens' life is a reminder to all of us of the words of the first verse of the 12th Chapter of Ecclesiastes:

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when you will say, "I have no pleasure in them."

What a difference in lives. One of these men spent his life using the modern media to spread the Gospel, while the other very often used those same media to try and undermine it.

I pray for them both, and while we can reasonably deduce that Cardinal Foley died in the peace of Christ that he spread to so many others, I pray that somehow Christopher Hitchens was able to recognize that peace and find it as well.

Called by name

Two of the most important people in our deaconate formation process in the Diocese of Knoxville (and I would imagine in any diocese) other than our wives and the Director of Deacons are our deacon mentor and our spiritual director. We had some say in who our spiritual director would be (mine is Deacon Patrick Murphy-Racey, who I hope and pray to meet with as soon as he is able. His blog is one of those listed on this site), but our mentors were chosen for us. This past Sunday, I met with my mentor, Deacon Jim Prosak of Holy Trinity Parish in Jefferson City, for the first time.

I know you'll understand that it is in the best interest of myself (and most probably in the interest both of Deacon Jim and the formation process itself) that I keep the lion's share of what Deacon Jim and I discuss between the two of us. However, I'd be remiss if I didn't share the one thing that Deacon Prosak told me that stuck with me, and which I have thought on rather extensively since Sunday.

We talked extensively about the formation process, and some of the intricacies involved, from the academics to the general differences between his formation process-he was in the previous class-and the current one. The idea that this call to the service of the Church which I and the other men in formation are experiencing is a matter of discernment is something that we discussed at length. Deacon Jim said that he was not absolutely sure and certain that the Lord was calling him to the deaconate until he was on the required 5-day canonical retreat that we all must take shortly before we are ordained. "I was fully prepared to come back from that retreat and not be ordained," he told me. He said he wasn't sure at that point whether what he was experiencing was the call of the Holy Spirit or whether it was "what Jim wanted to do."

Deacon Jim shared that it was while on retreat during a time of private prayer and meditation on the scriptures that the Holy Spirit made it very clear that he had been "called by name" to the deaconate and the Sacrament of Holy Orders, and that he had come that far because it was truly God's will for his life. Deacon Prosak returned from the retreat as a man who was ready to assume both the blessings and the burdens of a deeper ministry in the Church.

As I shared with Deacon Jim, I have already had plenty of experience as part of this discernment process wrestling with the question of whether this is a matter of the Holy Spirit moving me toward ministry or whether it is just me tooting my own horn. I've certainly had plenty of times where I have thought "these other guys are much holier than me-surely I don't belong here with them." I've even had what I consider to be attacks of Satan, who has spun his wicked powers of persuasion a time or two in an attempt to try and convince me that I am too crippled and weak to perform the tasks which will be required of me should I be ordained. However, every time I get discouraged, I also get an immediate nudge from the Holy Spirit telling me "I have put you here for a reason, and you need to quit worrying about your limitations or about your worthiness and start worrying about what I am asking you to do." These interventions of the Holy Spirit very often come in the form of a single question: "Have I failed you yet?" He never has before, and I doubt He is going to start now.

Even now, not knowing what lies at the end of this road, I feel that the Lord is calling me out by name. My prayer is that I continue throughout the formation process to follow His voice, and lean not on my own understanding.

The new Roman Missal and the Divine Office

Since the universal Church has plunged into the new translation of the Roman Missal on the first Sunday of Advent, several questions have arisen about the place of some of the prayers of the Roman Missal in the Liturgy of the Hours, since there are certain prayers that the English translation of the Liturgy of the Hours and the English Translation of the Missale Romanum have traditionally held in common. Some of the concluding prayers on certain days of the week are traditionally the same prayers used at Mass that day-especially on the feast days of particular saints. The most obvious example of a prayer held in common is the use of the Confiteor or the Kyrie during the Penitential Act at Compline (Night Prayer). The English translation approved for use in the Liturgy of the Hours has not changed as of yet, and it dates to 1974 and first came into common use in the Anglosphere in 1975. The translation used in the English-speaking world is nearly universal, with the Grail translation of the psalms and canticles being used in every version in every English-speaking country.

The only difference between the editions issued for the United States and Canada and those issued for the rest of the world is that the U.S. and Canadian editions of the Office use the New American Bible as the translation for Scripture readings, while editions issued for the U.K., Ireland, and Commonwealth countries use the Jerusalem Bible and a few other English translations, including the Revised Standard Version, for Scripture readings. However, many web sources such as Divine Office, which intend to be faithful to the approved English translation of the Liturgy of the Hours are using the old versions of the Confeteor and Kyrie responses. Should they?

Although he is a layman, Jimmy Akin has done a fair amount of research into this issue for his podcast in order to answer a listener's question about the use of the new Mass translation outside of the Mass-especially where the Liturgy of the Hours is concerned. I've provided the link above in-text so that readers to this blog can have a listen at what Jimmy has been able to find out, but it would appear that we can begin to use the responses and prayers from the new Roman Missal where they are appropriate to the Liturgy of the Hours (i.e. Mass prayers, Kyrie, and Confeteor, etc.), including in group settings ("And with your spirit.") Indeed, we were using "and with your spirit" during the Office for formation last weekend. The changes in the Missal have given rise to the larger question: Will the English translation of the Liturgy of the Hours also be changing?

It seems to be the consensus of the folks who follow such things that the English translation of the Hours will eventually be changing, and that many of us who are currently in formation for the deaconate or the priesthood (and who will thus be bound by ecclesiastical promise to pray the Office every day for the rest of our earthly life) will live to see whatever changes may be implemented impact our daily prayer life-certainly the changes to the Missale Romanum already have done just that. However, it ought to be remembered that the Latin revision to the Missale Romanum was approved in 2000, and we are seeing its implementation in our own tongue nearly 12 years after the approval of the initial text. To my personal knowledge, an official revision to the Latin text of the Liturgy of the Hours has yet to be approved by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

The text of the Divine Office which we currently use will continue to be the version that we use for the foreseeable future then, even as we embrace minor changes to it that are related to the changes we are experiencing in the Mass.

Curses in the psalter

After this past weekend's deaconate formation class on the Psalms, I have reflected further in thought about the truncating of the psalmody in the Liturgy of the Hours as it relates to the so-called "cursing psalms." It should be remembered that while most clergy pray the Divine Office privately, we know that the Office has always been meant for community prayer-and not just in religious houses or monastic communities, but especially in church with an assembly of the faithful. In our own age, that would mean that the recitation of the psalms ought to be open to the public for the sake of worship. The Liturgy of the Hours is not a Eucharistic celebration, so the praying of the Office in church would be open to non-Catholics in a special way, since non-Catholics cannot participate fully in the celebration of the Eucharist.

Because the celebration of the Office in church is and ought to be very public, it might take some special explaining to our non-Catholic friends if they heard chants at Vespers like:

"May their eyes be darkened so they cannot see, and their backs be bent forever. Pour out your wrath on them; let your fierce anger overtake them..... Charge them with crime upon crime; do not let them share in your salvation. May they be blotted out of the book of life and not be listed with the righteous." (69:23-24, 27-28)

"May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes. May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor. May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children. May his descendants be cut off, their names blotted out from the next generation." (109:9-13)

"Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD, and abhor those who rise up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. (139:21-22)

To the unknowing or, worse yet, the totally unchurched, that kind of Scripture passage doesn't sound anything think like "love your neighbor as you love yourself." These Psalms are a part of the psalter, however, and are a part of the inspired Word of God. Hence, as a matter of personal opinion, I tend to agree with those who say that we should reintroduce them into the Breviary-they were to be found there, after all, when the Church (especially and specifically the clergy) was praying the Office chiefly in Latin. In the name of accuracy and totality, it might be good to look at putting them back into our cycle of prayer.

Sister Timothea is right, however, when she says that there is no way we could do that without proper catechesis among the laity with regard to what the "cursing psalms" are really all about. God does not want us to kill the innocent infants of our enemies, or wish that those who wish us personal ills or harms would not be saved. Instead, the very harsh and strong biblical language of these psalms is meant for those who have totally rejected all possibility of God's grace and have completely embraced the work of Satan (examples: Hitler, Nazis at Death Camps, Stalin, etc.). Few people in the world would choose to so openly reject the basic goodness that God made them with (Genesis 1:27-31), but there are those few who do. When they do, they open themselves up to evils like the Holocaust or the Stalinist Purges. Unfortunately, there are such people in the world, and they are-by their own choice-wicked. The evils they have done to the human family are visited upon innocent people. It is precisely to remind us of the frailty of the human condition that we have the cursing psalms.

Before we look at putting these psalms back into the Church's public psalter, however, we need first to have more of the laity ready to pray the Office to begin with before any discussion of catechesis on the "cursing psalms" could take place.

The gift of the psalms

Not a few of my fellow Aspirants were left in wonderment after this past weekend's session of our deaconate formation classes. Sister Mary Timothea Elliott, RSM came not just to give us instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours, but to teach us about the psalms themselves. Firstly, I was left mesmerized, then I found myself thumbing through psalms and corresponding scriptures during Sister's talks. I was getting so much out of them that I couldn't wait from one break to the next to hear more. When it was finally over, there were several of us who said that we wished we could have at least another day of this, and we didn't want it to end.

                             Sister Mary Timothea Elliott, RSM                                                     

We've already had a great Old Testament Scripture scholar in Father Ragan Shriver give our Introduction to Scripture course. Father Bede Aboh, who gave our Philosophy lectures last month, told me that "you will love Sister Timothea, you won't want it to end." Father Bede was right...

It didn't take us long to figure out that Sister is not only well-educated (she is so well-versed in Hebrew and in the Biblical languages that Father Ragan-himself very learned in Hebrew-recommends her as a source of good material and information), but she is an educator and has been a very good one for years. She captivated a room full of grown men, and taught us so much about the psalms that none of us wanted it to end-we wanted more.

As I pointed out in my entry Thursday, I have always loved the Liturgy of the Hours ever since I was first introduced to it as a college student. Entering formation for the deaconate has truly deepened this love, and I resolved to pray the Office more faithfully, and less out of a mere sense of rote duty-in other words, I resolved to truly pray without ceasing in a way that I have never prayed before. Most importantly, I resolved to make my prayers, as best as I could understand to do so, conform to God's will and to the prayers of the whole Church rather than to my own personal desires.

It might very well be that Sister Timothea didn't realize what a gift she gave me when we read some of the psalms in the Scriptures. Of course, we pray the psalms as part of the Divine Office every day, but in some cases, certain psalmody are excluded from the Liturgy-all or part of the so-called Imprecatory Psalms, or Cursing Psalms. These portions of the psalter can be problematic when introducing the Office to laity who aren't well-catechized, and so for this reason the Church made the decision to remove them from the Liturgy. As Sister Timothea pointed out, however, just because these psalms aren't in the current edition of the Liturgy of the Hours does not mean that there may not be some appropriate reason to pray them privately. However, one can understand why we would not want to have public recitation of words like:

How blessed will be the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. (Psalm 137:9)

Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the grave.
(Psalm 55:15)

Obviously, Christ is clear that we should not do such things to our enemies. However, those few people who knowingly embrace the lowest form of evil and reject all good with complete knowledge (Sister used the example of Nazis engaged in biological experiments and mass murder of Jews, Gypsies, and disabled people), praying psalms like this might be a way of petitioning God to put an end to such atrocities and those who commit them-indeed, one person who prayed this way would themselves become a great mystic.The idea of praying the psalms uniquely and individually seems as though it would be a source of deep spiritual richness and enhancement of prayer life.

Sister also took us through a lesson in how to use the Ordo of the Liturgy of the Hours and helped us learn to place our ribbons and use our liturgy books in a way that is proper.

I had the pleasure of sitting for breakfast with Sister Timothea yesterday morning. During the course of her lectures, she managed to confirm my personal bias toward the Revised Standard Version, and she told us collectively that she preferred to use it when teaching. However, when I asked her about using the RSV in the RCIA process (as I agree that it is a better version for teaching), she said the New American Bible would still be a better starter in RCIA-she pointed out that the NAB is far closer to what the catechumens and candidates will be hearing at Mass.


I'll have much more to say about this month's formation in the days ahead-it was a very spiritually rich and deeply fulfilling experience.

God, come to my assistance...

As part of the promises that every deacon makes to his bishop, he promises that he will pray at least two of the Hours of the Divine Office (the major Hours which have come in modern times to be called Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, specifically) every day for the rest of his life. This is one of the things that deacons do have in common with priests and with religious the world over-they are required to pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day. We're being started early on that daily routine, and this month our deaconate formation weekend will be designed to teach us everything that we need to know about the Liturgy of the Hours in order to make the Hours a vibrant part of our spiritual and prayer life. The class will be taught by Sister Mary Timothea Elliott, RSM.

The Divine Office is not new to me, because I've been praying it in some form for years. Nicole and I are Benedictine Oblates, so we are already under a promise to pray the Office (three times a day, not just twice!). You might think "wow, David, you are way ahead of the game, you know how to do this." Well...sort of. If there is one thing that the formation experience is teaching me it is that the things about our Faith that I thought I really knew well, I don't know nearly as much as I thought I did, but I am eager to learn. Other things about the faith that I didn't think I was very educated about, I am learning that I probably knew a little more than I thought about those things. Deaconate formation has completely reawakened the passion for the Office that I had when I was first introduced to Benedictine spirituality. I have definitely learned that I didn't know nearly as much about the Liturgy of the Hours as I thought I knew.

Those of you who may have had any part of your faith formation in the Benedictine tradition may have been introduced to the Divine Office in the short form, and in my case I was given one week's worth of the Office along with some additional hymns and canticles in a little three-wing binder called the Benedictine Oblate Companion. Every few months Oblates of St. Meinrad Archabbey are sent things to put in that little three-ring binder. It is all good spiritual information that fits well with the Benedictine way of doing things and specifically with ongoing Oblate formation at St. Meinrad. When presented with the Office, Oblates are presented with a one-week cycle. I discovered the other three weeks via what in those days was a fairly new spiritual tool called the internet. I found a website called Universalis which had a translation of every office every day, as it is supposed to be prayed for every day of the year, and you could choose your calendar based on what country you lived in. "Wow," I thought, "this is great. Now I can pray essentially the same prayers as everyone else does in the monastery."

Years later I discovered a site called Divine Office, which not only gave me the written prayers to pray, but included a podcast of people praying the Liturgy of the Hours in a worshipful way in which I could join in. I love this, and I use it every day now. Divine Office begins each day by giving you these volume numbers and page numbers, and last month I finally learned what that was all about.

Four volumes of psalmody, canticles, antiphons, hymns, and ordinary instructions for how to pray the Office. This is the Breviary, folks, all of it...

All of us Aspirants had to purchase a set of the entire Office, and we had to do this because Deacon Tim Elliott, are Deacon Director, wants us all learning from the same source, so the shorter volumes that have only those prayers of the Office which we would be required to pray aren't quite acceptable enough. A brand new set of the Hours is not cheap, and I know of at least one fellow Aspirant who now has two sets (he already had one). Mind you, I'm not complaining about possessing the entire Liturgy of the Hours-I've learned more about the Office since I've gotten my hands on these books than I ever knew before. Along with the book we had to read for this month, The School of Prayer, I've already learned a few things in advance of our class this month about the Liturgy of the Hours.

One is that the Church doesn't call it the Liturgy of the Hours for nothing. Praying the Office is a liturgical act and it is a form of liturgy, just as the Mass is a liturgy. The Liturgy of the Hours is a different kind of liturgy than the Mass, and it serves a different purpose than the Mass, but it is a kind of liturgy. The Liturgy of the Hours also is not meant as the sole province of priests and religious, or of the uber-holy. The Divine Office is meant for everyone, and anyone can pray the Divine Office, alone or in a group. Priests, deacons, and religious are under an obligation to pray the Office because everyone should be praying it, so those whose lives are devoted to prayer had better be praying the Liturgy of the Hours. That brings me to the other major thing that I have learned over the last month...

People familiar with the Divine Office have long known that it is best prayed in a group. Most of us who pray the Liturgy of the Hours, though, end up praying it alone. Nicole prays with me as her schedule allows, but usually two of the three Hours that I normally pray in a day are prayed alone. Yet, in the first four centuries of the Church's life, the Liturgy of the Hours was regularly prayed by Christians in community, patterned after the Old Testament hours of prayer. Peter appears to have been praying the Hours in Acts 10:9:

And on the next day, whilst they were going on their journey, and drawing nigh to the city, Peter went up to the higher parts of the house to pray, about the sixth hour [None].

Some of our parishes in the United States are praying at least part of the Divine Office every week, even if it is just one Hour. Most aren't doing that, and it may be from the lack of someone to lead the group. Many of us in formation have wondered why we need to buy a four volume set of the Office when it is freely available on the internet. The obvious answer came up ("you may be away from your computer') but I wonder if there is another motive. Like the Mass, the Liturgy of the Hours contains  red-letter instructions on how to lead a group in this important daily prayer.

We may need all four volumes in case any of us should need to lead a congregation of people in the Prayer of the Church

The First Sunday of Advent

Advent-and the new Liturgical Year with it-has arrived, and this year a new translation of the Roman Missal comes with a new cycle of the seasons, and that means some changes in how we celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Even before the so-called "change" came into being, the complaints in certain quarters began. Some of these were simple and were born of obvious concern. One veteran parishioner at my parish asked bluntly "why would you change the Mass." I reminded them as best I could that the Church has been through major changes in the Mass before-changes that this person lived through-and we did alright. Indeed, compared to the last major liturgical reform, this one really is a cakewalk.

Many other complaints come from some folks who seem to have a problem not with the changes per se, but what the new Roman Missal is actually designed to do. The Mass as we will begin to pray it today has been translated in such a way so as to be as literal a rendering as possible of the Latin text of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite. In addition, there have been some changes in the Latin text itself since Pope John Paul II promulgated a new Missale Romanum, and the Anglosphere would not be in harmony with the rest of the universal Church if we did not change our text of the Mass accordingly. The new English translation is designed both to be more biblically accurate and in language that is a bit more formal for the sake of the Church's highest and most important form of prayer, the Sacrifice of the Mass.

None of this is to say that this will be an easy process for everyone. At Mass this weekend, I found myself saying "and also with you" at least twice when I should have said "and with your spirit," though I did remember the correct salutation at the beginning and the end of the Liturgy. At the end of the Eucharistic prayer, I began to default to the old "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you...," until Nicole prodded me with the correct "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed." Even though I have read through the new text of the Mass multiple times for months in advance in an attempt to teach myself, I still tried to default to the old form at least four times that I could count during the Mass-and I came into these changes giddy with excitement about them (and still am)! If it is hard for me, who has been a vocal proponent of the "reform of the reform" since John Paul II first announced that the Roman Missal would be changing, I can just imagine the difficulty faced by some of our parishioners around the Diocese of Knoxville and the country this weekend. And if it is any consolation, my personal copy of the Daily Roman Missal, bought with $60 of a college student's wages (money I didn't really have back then) in the days shortly after I was baptized and entered the Catholic Church because I wanted to be able to learn everything I could about the liturgy-and pray even when I couldn't personally be at daily Mass-well, that book is now largely obsolete, only some of the scripture readings are still correct. (Copies of the new Daily Roman Missal make great Christmas or Birthday gifts, and that will be my shameless plug of the day.)

This isn't a painless process for anyone, but I really think that if we all embrace this "new" translation of the Mass in a spirit of obedience and genuine prayer, we are going to get far more out of it if we allow it to slowly sink into us. We live in a part of the country where we constantly hear the false accusation that "Catholics don't read the Bible" or "Catholics don't know the Bible." It is vital for us, then, that not only should we read and learn our Bibles in parish Bible studies and on personal time, but our prayer lives should be filled with scripture, and the highest prayer of the Church-the Mass itself-should be a font of quotation and allusion to the Word of God-not merely from the scripture readings in the Mass, but within the prayers of the Mass. This new translation accomplishes this even better than our previous English translation did.

A few notes: At St. Pat's this weekend, I noted that at the Mass that I attended, we did the Kyrie but not the full Confeteor. It is my personal opinion that we are all going to have to learn to say the new Confeteor correctly "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault..." ("mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa"), so we might as well just drag it out and get everyone used to it.

We used Eucharistic Prayer III today-the beauty of the new Eucharistic prayers and the way that they present vivid imagery of the mystery of salvation just blows me away. If you are having trouble "getting" the new translation of the Mass, take the time to stop and listen to the prayers of the priest during the consecration-meditate on what is being said here. It may help you better understand just why it was felt that this change had to be made-and have a blessed Advent.

Giving thanks

Tomorrow marks the annual American feast of Thanksgiving-some parishes (including my own) will have a special Mass time to give parishioners the opportunity to give thanks at the Eucharistic table. I have always been of the mind that this is completely appropriate, and that in fact more such opportunities ought to exist in our parishes on Thanksgiving Day-it is the closest thing that we have in our culture to a national celebration of thanks to God in the form of a feast, we have transformed it almost wholly into a secular day-schoolchildren are told that tomorrow is "Turkey Day," lest they be told that tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which would give rise to the clear and obvious questions: "What is Thanksgiving? What are we saying thank you for, and Who do we thank?"

For my part, I am thankful to God. Nicole and I have never had much in the way of material wealth, and what we do have doesn't amount to much, but we have never yet been without the things that matter. In fact, I can't ever recall a time in my own life when the Lord has not blessed me with food on my table, clothes on my back, shoes for my feet, and a roof over my head. Thus far, He has blessed Nicole and I with all that we have needed-and sometimes the ability to bless others as well. We have much for which we can be thankful.

I am thankful for my wife, who has been faithful to me, and who has walked with me on the journey in which the Lord now has placed me-on the path of the deaconate. I am thankful for the friends and the family that He has graced me with who have supported me and prayed for me over the years, and especially for those who have given me the gift of faith in God.

I am thankful for the people of the community where I live, who have blessed me with their trust and friendship, and the firefighters and first responders that I have the privilege to work and associate with.

I am grateful that I am now joined on the journey of faith by holy men of the Lord's choosing whose very presence is a blessing to me. I am thankful for these men, and for their families, and for our Bishop Richard and our Director of Deacons, Deacon Elliott. The Bishop and the Deacon Director have seen not only that I myself may have a call to serve the Church in the deaconate, but that the men who I am privileged to be in formation with also are being asked by the Holy Spirit to step out in faith and offer ourselves in a life of service to the Church and to the people of God. I am eternally grateful for my pastor, Father Joseph Hammond, FHS, and Associate Pastor, Father Alex Waraksa, and I pray for them and their ministry as part of my daily prayers, as I do all of our priests. I am thankful for the example of Deacons Jim Fage and Robert Smearing, and for the lives of service which they lead as an example to me and to many others, and I pray that God may grant me the grace to be that example of Christ to others.

I am grateful for the deaconate formation process, and thankful that thus far, the Lord has made it possible to do and to have all that is required of me in order to fully participate in the formation process, and for that formation to deepen my spiritual walk in return.

So when I eat that wonderful meal tomorrow, I will be thankful not only or the delicious food, but also for the things aforementioned, and so very much more.

Our Lord Jesus Christ the King

The feast of Christ the King has always been among my favorite feasts of the Church's year. Perhaps this is because it is a reminder of the reality that Christ reigns unchanged over the Church forever, and that there will be no end to His Kingdom. The Lord reigns now, and as we are reminded, he will one day return (a reality that we remember at every Mass when we say "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again." It may be that I am so fond of this feast because it is a reminder that, even though time changes (the Liturgical Year will end on Saturday afternoon-we have entered the final week of Ordinary Time), God does not change, and will never change. In a world of constant change, the one great thing which remains unchanged is the eternal God.

In today's Gospel (Matthew 25:31-46), Christ reminds us that all nations and all people will one day stand in judgment before Him, and he will render a royal judgment on the eternal fate of all people. He does not tell us that he will ask us if we have "been saved," he will not ask if we come to know him or not-He knows the end of from the beginning, and He says that He will know by our works whether we know him or not. Indeed, whether we accept him or not is the first step on our journey of faith-acceptance does not guarantee our salvation, but obedience does-our willingness to live according to the ways of Christ and to follow his example:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne,  and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’  Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’ And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’ Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’ He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’ 

And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

There is little question that what the Lord is asking of us in this passage is a very tall order indeed. It seems simple enough-feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for those in prison, welcome the stranger, care for and heal the sick (and by extension, bury the dead). We may read this passage and say "oh, Jesus is telling us that we must be benevolent." Benevolence is good, and through personal, corporate, and ecclesiastical benevolence, we can accomplish wonderful things on behalf of those who otherwise cannot do for themselves-and that is important. However, Jesus is taking us to another place aside from benevolence in His description of the Last Judgment. Jesus is asking us to act in ways that are directly contrary to human nature.

We are prone to place blame upon the criminal for their crime, even the poor for their poverty or the sick for their illness, especially in our relatively wealthy and well-provided society. It is even fair to say, if we are completely honest with ourselves, that in our minds much of that blame is justified. After all, there are many poor who wish not to work or earn their keep. Despite the discussion about innocent people in prison or on death row, most people are incarcerated or waiting for the needle or the chair are in that position because they have committed crimes-often horrible-to put them in that position. Even the sick or ill are sometimes blamed-probably with some truth-because it may be said that they would not be ill if they did not take better care of themselves.

Jesus is asking something very radical of us, because He is asking us not to be concerned with whether the poor, or the sick, or the prisoner is to blame for their lot or not-in fact, He mentions nothing about how the people He mentions got to the state they were in. Jesus merely tells us that when we look at the poor, the hungry, the naked, the sick, the prisoner, we are looking at Him, and that when we minister to the needs of the poor, the hungry, the sick, the naked, the prisoner, et cetera, we are ministering to Christ. Jesus Christ is telling us that we must see Him in the poor, and that failure to do that could mean dire eternal consequences for us.

Many people remember the poor at this time of year, as we approach Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas. That is a good thing, especially for the children who truly have no control over their life situation. However, Christ does not ask us to remember the poor during one season of the year, but to consistently look to the poor and the unloved in order to see the face of Christ in our world. Further, He tells us that our willingness to see Him in the "least of these" will be the criteria upon which we are judged when we stand before Him in all His majestic splendor.

All of us-myself included-would do well to reflect on how well we would do at the great Divine Test

Bible word of the day: Ignoramus

Other than my work with the Knights of Columbus, the ministry of my parish St. Patrick in Morristown that I am blessed most involved in is to be a part of the RCIA team. (For those of you reading who aren't Catholic, that's the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults-the program for people who aren't Catholic but are showing an interest in the Catholic faith and they come to the Church inquiring about the teachings of our faith-those who feel called by the Holy Spirit to do so may be baptized, or of they are already baptized properly-in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit-may be received into full communion with the Catholic Church, usually at Easter). RCIA is a special ministry to me because I went through the process myself, and so did Nicole, so we love to help others who are on that journey themselves.

At St. Pat's, we begin RCIA very informally, giving several weeks for inquirers to ask almost any question you could possibly imagine about the Catholic faith. People are coming to the Church from all kinds of backgrounds and every conceivable walk of life, so we get all kinds of questions-and they aren't always what you might expect. However, we have begun to move out of the phase of general inquiry, and into a phase of more grounded teaching and explanation of the dogmas and doctrines of the Faith. This week's discussion was about Catholic teaching in regards to faith and works.

Deacon Jim Fage, who is also the Youth Director for the Five Rivers' Deanery, is the leader of our RCIA team. There are several of us on the team from the parish, and a few who've been ministering through RCIA a lot longer than Nicole or myself. At some point, members of the team often get a chance to lead the teaching on a particular topic on a given night (I wasn't able to give my class on the Eucharist last year because-wouldn't you know it-I took terribly ill with a stomach virus the night I was supposed to teach-bummer!). However, yesterday was Deacon Jim's time at the helm, teaching on a topic that is among those which are central to the doctrinal differences between Catholics and most Protestant churches-and in this part of the country most inquirers come from some kind of Protestant background, sometimes a fundamentalist one. As a result, faith and works is a critical topic that is addressed early on when discussing core teachings of the Catholic Church. While I enjoyed Deacon Jim's teaching last night, what stuck with me the most was the scripture he read at the outset-specifically one word of the scripture reading.

I should preface this scripture citation by pointing out that there is a reason that I hadn't heard this before last night. The New American Bible has become the preferred text in many Catholic dioceses, and it is the text the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recommends for catechesis and uses on the website for the bishops' conference. In our home, however, we have seven Bible translations, of which the New American is but one. My preference for personal study has been the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) for many years. (In fact, my Brother Aspirants should know that those shiny new Ignatius RSV Bibles we recently received...mine doesn't look quite as new anymore...some of the pages are already frayed from my fingers and thumbs turning them and devouring the excellent footnotes Ignatius Press is known for-this is the first time I've ever owned an RSV from Ignatius). As a result of my personal taste for the RSV, deaconate formation has also forced me to become reacquanted with with the New American Bible since we use it for readings during class.

For our opening scripture reading for yesterday's class, Deacon Jim read from the NAB, and the reading was James 2:14-24:

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,” but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it? So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead. Indeed someone might say, “You have faith and I have works.” Demonstrate your faith to me without works, and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.

You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe that and tremble. Do you want proof, you ignoramus, that faith without works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by the works. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called “the friend of God.” See how a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.

I had to ask Deacon Jim if that came from the New American Bible-which he confirmed that it did. I compared it to other translations, none of which used nearly that strong a word. It left me wondering if previous translators had "dumbed down" this passage in order to avoid calling people an ignoramus (or something of the like) in the pages of the Bible.

Then Nicole and I got a huge laugh out of the picture of St. James dictating to some scribe a sentence which essentially called people who believe that faith is independent of works rather stupid. In fact, the more we thought about it, the bigger a laugh we got. The whole idea became a running joke the rest of the evening-in the best possible sense.

Ignoramus-it is a perfectly good Bible word!

Well, we know what James thought about Sola fide, don't we? Obviously, he wasn't terribly big on that theological idea. I doubt St. James and Martin Luther would have gotten on terribly well.

The paper questions

As it has been said so effectively by others, being a permanent deacon in the Church is a vocation, a calling sent to a man by the Holy Spirit. It is up to each of us who are discerning our call to answer the Lord when He calls us, but once we do that, we assume the responsibilities associated with formation, and one of the principle responsibilities is the academic side of things-we have to write a lot of papers. I can't speak for what my Brother Aspirants were all told beforehand, but I didn't go into this part of the process blind-I was told that a certain academic rigor would be required of Aspirants before I ever began the discernment process, and that a lot of it would involve some serious paper-writing.

Nonetheless, it had been nearly a decade since I wrote an academic paper when I began formation. Since, if my calculations and memory serve me correctly, I am the youngest Aspirant who is currently in the deaconate formation class in the Diocese, I am also certain that there are a few men in the class for whom it has been even longer since they put pen to paper for an academic essay. A lot of people might think it easier for me, since I have quite a lot of writing experience. It is one thing to write when you have a great deal of control over your content, but it is quite another to do so when you must write academically about material you've read or been lectured on. Our papers have not been lengthy (which is a good thing, as we must engage in our studies while carrying on our daily lives as well), but the relative brevity which has been the hallmark of some of our early papers has left me asking the questions that I know some of my confreres are also asking...

"Did I write enough information?"

"Darn, I left <this> or <that> out, I wonder if I should have put <that> in the paper?"

"Did I write too much? Father said he only wanted a summary...I hope I put in what was right and left out what he would have expected me to leave out."

"I wonder if Father understood what I meant? I hope I phrased it right..."

These are just a few of the things that can go through one's head...each of our instructors are different and their standards are different, as is the subject matter. We do have an idea of what is expected of us, but I have found that sometimes, wisdom is best gleaned in the school of prayer-and that is how I have tried to approach having to write papers again.

The Last Things and the Last Days

1 Thessalonians 5:1-6:

But as to the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say, "There is peace and security," then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape. But you are not in darkness, brethren, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all sons of light and sons of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.

As the Church approaches the end of the Liturgical Year, we begin to see Sunday readings that remind us of...well...the End. We see it not only in today's Epistle, St. Paul's warning to the Thessalonians that "the Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night," but also in today's Gospel. We can take all kinds of good lessons about the Christian life from the parable of the talents, but it is also an apocalyptic parable-a warning from the Lord of what might happen if "the Master of the House" returns to find that his servants haven't made use of the talents they are given. We see an even more stark vision of the same theme in next Sunday's Gospel, when Jesus gives us a vision of the Last Judgment, when we will be asked what we have done for the Least of These...the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, those in prison...We are warned that those who have ignored these brothers and sisters will be called workers of iniquity, and will be told to depart from the presence of the Lord for all eternity. We would all do well to remember that warning.

The Church in her wisdom calls our attention to the End of Days as she prepares to mark the time with the end of one Year of Grace and the beginning-on the First Sunday of Advent-of another. It is a reminder to us that both our individual time and the time of the whole human race in this universe of God's Creation is finite-both our life and the life of this present world as we know it will eventually come to an end.

A lot of Catholics may not realize that the Church does have a few things to say about the Last Days, and one of these things may surprise some-and it comes right out of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and is rooted in a longstanding belief which goes back to apostolic times:

675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.⁵⁷⁴ The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth⁵⁷⁵ will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.⁵⁷⁶
 
676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism,⁵⁷⁷ especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.⁵⁷⁸

677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.⁵⁷⁹ The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.⁵⁸⁰ God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.⁵⁸¹

I'm not including all of the relevant footnotes here only because of space and time (this entry has already taken me quite some time to compose), but we see that the Church teaches that there is such a thing as the Antichrist, that will become apparent as part of the Church's final trial in this world before the end of the world as we know it. We as Catholics may find that strange because we don't talk about this much, but more so because more false doctrine and deception swirls around this idea of Antichrist and the End of Days than around anything else in Scripture. The earliest believers expected the appearance of the Antichrist, and were warned in 1 John 4:2-3:

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God,  and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already.

The early Christians were told that while they were busy expecting the Antichrist to show up as some sign of the end (which they expected at any minute) that the spirit of antichrist-the denial that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh and is the Son of God-is already with them. This seems to be an apostolic shot across the bow against running around declaring the end to be near and that the Antichrist is about to show up-just go about your life but watch and be ready, the things the apostles shared with you could happen at any time.

It is noteworthy that the Church has chosen not to go into great detail about the Antichrist and the last things in the Catechism other than what I cited above. We also aren't told specifically whether the Antichrist will be a person or a system of things that puts itself in place of God, but it does seem to be far more systemic than personal based on what the Church tells us above. One thing we do know is that throughout history, believers in Christ have never been removed from the possibility of persecution. Hence, the idea that Christians are going to undergo a "Rapture" (or as I call it, the Rupture) and be removed from the final trials of this present world is directly contrary to Scripture and the constant teaching of the Church. Persecution-and even death-has long been seen as the ultimate test of the Faith (Matthew 24:9). Indeed, the very idea of "the Rapture" as today's fundamentalists understand it is an invented doctrine with no roots in apostolic times which can trace it's roots to 19th Century American fundamentalist Protestant theologians, not the Apostles.

There is also the negativity and fear that seems to surround discussion of end times thought among those with a more fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture or eschatology-its a kind of "repent and believe in our way or Jesus is going to get you when He comes back" sort of preaching. Note that you don't hear that quasi-panic coming from Catholic circles at all. This is because Holy Mother Church is 2,000 years old, and in virtually every age of the Church's history, people have tended to take the apocalyptic parts of Scripture and apply an interpretation-often quite reasonable for its time-to their own day.

In the first two centuries after the Apostles the Church underwent varying persecutions and believers took the Lord's warnings to mean that they would live to see the End of Days. During the time of Julian the Apostate, many Christians thought that the Lord's return was imminent. At the turn of the Second Millennium, a great many people believed that the world would not long endure and that Christ would soon appear. Belief in the imminent return of the Lord was quite prominent at various times during the Crusades, as well as when much of Christendom was ravaged by the Black Death. The terrible and bloody calamity of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648)-the real first "world war"-when the Western world was so bitterly divided between Catholic and Protestant (and from which some historians believe Christianity in Europe never fully recovered) had good people on both sides believing that the Lord was very near, and with good reason. Americans believed that our own War Between the States had apocalyptic significance, and doubtless for many Americans it did. Christians saw the First World War and the Second World War both as having significance in a prophetic way in determining that we were living in the Last Days. Good people thought the same thing with regard to the rise of Communism, the nuclear arms race, and the beginning of the Third Millennium.

Yet, we are still here and now well into three millenia Anno Domini. Does that mean that all of those centuries of Christians were wrong for believing that the events that they were witness to-unique in history and to their age-were signs of the Last Days? Perhaps none of them were wrong at all...

What is often missing when many of our fundamentalist or evangelical brethren discuss the end times is a sense of Divine Perspective. We may have been living in the "Last Days" for the last 2,000 years. As we are told in 2 Peter 3:8:

But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

 In other words, God doesn't measure time in the way that we do. We should be joyful that one day the Lord will return and the sorrows of this world will pass away...but we shouldn't obsess over how close we are to the very end...that is ultimately up to God to decide, and God alone.

The kindness of strangers-or of new friends

When members of our deaconate formation class have our once-monthly weekend of intense prayer, study, and teaching, we meet at an East Tennessee hotel in a small conference room. Our presence there isn't anything like a business meeting, and the atmosphere doesn't even remotely lend itself anything like a professional conference. The Diocese of Knoxville does not have the luxury of a nearby seminary in which to train its Aspirants for the deaconate, such as a Diocese or Archdiocese like Baltimore, Cincinnati, or Evansville (which largely uses St. Meinrad from what I understand) might have. The Diocese can't afford to send us away for instruction, so the instructors come to us.

Our presence at the facility where we stay is pretty low key. The name tags we wear are as much so that we remember one another at this early point in our formation as they are so that others who are not there for that purpose know who we are. We do not broadcast our presence to the guests at the hotel. They are there for a good night's sleep, we are there to gain the knowledge and the discernment we need to better serve the Church in the years to come. The hotel provides us a convenient place in which to do that, and if it happens that others are as blessed by our presence there as we feel blessed to be there and blessed by each other, I'm thankful for that-and I am sure the other Aspirants are, too. However, there is one group at the hotel that knows we are there and can't ignore our presence, and they know we are coming-and that is the hotel staff.

The staff of the hotel know that we are coming, and most of them know when we are going to be there. I'm not sure if all of the staff know why we are there, but I do know that some of them have an idea by now, and the ones who haven't grasped that at least know we are not there for ordinary business, that's for sure. We aren't in our rooms much except at night. I've been known to sneak up to my room after finishing lunch or supper early in order to stretch, shave, use the restroom privately, or call Nicole (we do not keep our cell phones in the classroom, at Mass, or at prayers). However, if class is not out completely for the day, I have a limited amount of time in which to do these things, and I have to watch the clock. Miss a few minutes of class, and you can miss quite a lot.

I cannot say enough about the kindness and the consideration of so many of the hotel staff. Those of you reading this who know me know that I needed an adapted room with a walk-in shower when I travel. I've stayed in rooms that do not have this, and it makes staying clean and comfortable very difficult for me. Not only has the hotel provided for this, but the housekeepers seem to have gone the extra mile, making sure I have extra towels-and necessary things always seem to be where I can reach them. I feel like someone is watching me-in the positive sense-as though the staff is quietly observing me to figure out what I might have need of without asking. My room is about five paces away from where hot coffee and water for tea is always available for guests at any time of the day or night. Others have to seek the place where the coffee is, but I just have to step outside my door. The elevator that goes downstairs to our classroom is just ten paces away

We eat breakfast, along with other hotel guests, on the other side of the same room from where the aforementioned coffee and tea is located. The fella that sees to our hot breakfast came quickly to know me, and as soon as I appear promptly at 6:00am (prayers begin at 7:45, followed by class. I'm a little slower than others, so I eat early, or I don't eat), he's asking if I need anything, and he jumps to get it whether I really need it or not. The same fella has gone out of his way to make sure our little classroom has a supply of coffee and cookies that will last us for as long as we need to be there. We don't need the cookies, we just like them, but it must be admitted that quite a lot of us need the coffee. He doesn't have to bring us coffee, since it wouldn't be much for us to go upstairs at break time and get coffee-but he is kind to bring coffee to us anyway-and was especially kind in something that he did for me and for Nicole, even though Nicole has never been to formation with me yet.

Last month on Sunday morning, our friend was carrying a tray of Otis Spunkmeyer cookies that was also laden with some small muffins from breakfast for us for our Sunday sessions. I caught him on the elevator downstairs, and he said that he was bringing some muffins because he had heard that some of the guys had grown tired of cookies. I commented in jest and in passing "that's bunk, you can never have too many cookies." (Fresh cookies were my favorite childhood dessert, and they remain my favorite as an adult).

My breakfast buddy remembered that remark, because after I was through eating breakfast Saturday morning this month, he brought me a wrapped plate filled to the brim with cookies, and said "well, you were the one who said that you can't have too many cookies." I was shocked and surprised and tickled to death...I laughed about it several times throughout the day. While other Aspirants had to get up for their cookies during class, I had a personal plate. I did offer to share with my neighbors, but only one took me up on it. I had leftovers at the end of the weekend, so I just added those to the massive bag of cookies that I was given on Sunday  was told to take home to my wife. Yes, I did take them to Nicole, and yes, she has managed over several days to eat and enjoy them. We both send our thanks to the kindness of the hotel staff-we can't thank them enough, really. I was very humbled.

That experience, among many others, has lent itself to something that our Deacon Director told us awhile back-that lots of people are on this journey with us, even the hotel staff. I now remember our new friends the staff in my prayers each morning and night. I'm thankful for them, and I pray that the Lord continues to bless them in their work of blessing others with hospitality.

Bede the Venerable

Father Bede Aboh

I've returned from this month's Formation class and am still alive and kicking, both physically and spiritually. As for my fears about how I'd be able to handle Aquinas and the rest of our material, I think those fears were partly justified and partly overblown on my part. I learned that the difficulties that I have been having with Aquinas were largely shared by my fellow Aspirants, and our stories of initial frustration and how we dealt with this were very (and almost eerily) similar. However, as I told several confreres this afternoon, if my mind were an egg, Father Bede Aboh, Pastor of St. Mary's in Oak Ridge and our instructor for this weekend's series of classes on philosophy, has managed to crack the shell.

Father Bede managed to have me understanding enough Aquinas to be able to write a short paper comparing the epistemology of Aquinas with that of Plato-I feel confident enough to write it (praying that it is up to Father Bede's standards, of course) believing that I can produce something that at least appears as though I know what I am writing about. I could not have done that before this past weekend began, so that tells you something not only of Father Bede's knowledge of philosophy, but of his ability to convey that knowledge to others. Of course, not all of this material was foreign or unintelligible to me. Yesterday afternoon, late in Father Bede's lecture, he drifted on to what for me is familiar ground when he discussed John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. A lot of my confreres know that my minor in college was history, but my major was Political Science, and both Locke and Hobbes are required reading for any student of political theory. Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Hobbes' Leviathan were two examples of competing ideas of human nature and political theory, with Locke positing that human nature is basically founded on reason and tolerance, while Hobbes believed that human nature was savage because of human greed (both Locke and Hobbes agreed on a seemingly inherent ability for humanity to be greedy) and that life without control would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes, being a Royalist who had returned to the boiling chaotic cauldron of Cromwellian England, thought that people should trust the power that protects them-the opposite of Locke's social contract, rooted in the choice of the individual.

The discussion of these giants of the political world is what finally cracked the egg of my mind, because in all of the years I spent studying comparative politics, it never really dawned on me that these men were philosophers in the same sense as Aquinas, and Aristotle and Plato before them (let alone someone like Bertrand Russell), they simply belonged to our own age, and in my mind I began to compare the ideas of Locke with Aquinas as I was coming to understand them. Talk about hitting me over the head. It took until Sunday afternoon, but Father Bede inadvertently managed to do that. Political people really are in our own little mini-world, and it is easy to forget that politics can be, and often is, composed of deeper philosophical questions...so it finally began to make some sense...some sense...finally.

Perhaps the most important thing that stuck in my mind from this weekend, however, was the discussion we shared after Vespers Saturday evening. The scripture reading for the First Vespers of Sunday this week was 2 Peter 1:19-21:

We possess the prophetic message as something altogether reliable. Keep your attention closely fixed on it, as you would on a lamp shining in a dark place until the first streaks of dawn appear and the morning star rises in your hearts. First you must understand this: there is no prophecy contained in Scripture which is a personal interpretation. Prophecy has never been put forward by man’s willing it. It is rather that men impelled by the Holy Spirit have spoken under God’s influence.

After Evensong was complete, Father Bede asked for the scripture lesson to be read again, and then asked what we believed that the Apostle meant when he said "there is no prophesy contained in Scripture which is a personal interpretation. Prophesy has never been put forward by man's willing it." I responded that I believed this meant that we as individuals had no authority to interpret Scripture, but that we must defer to the Church as a collective body. Another Brother Aspirant said, correctly, that we should defer to the magesterium. "What is magesterium," asked Father Bede. "The teaching authority of the Church." Father Bede then said specifically to me that I should be careful with the use of the words "collective body." He said that he had a seminary professor that was utterly obsessed with the term "collective body" and she used it to try and undermine and undercut the authority of the bishops and the Pope. I responded, of course, that I would never do such a thing. In my heart, I was thinking "may the Lord strike me if such vile schismatic thought were to proceed from my tongue when teaching in His Church's name." While I understand what I meant by the term "collective body," and I think Father Bede understood what I meant-and for that matter, so did the class-Father's recounting of his heterodox seminary professor made me think twice about ever using that term in the same context again, that's for sure.

Father Bede then told us to "remember that when you are ordained, the words you speak carry weight. When you speak of the Church's teaching authority, some people will look to you for that authority." This was why, Father said, we must be well-formed before being allowed by the Church to enter into ordained ministry.

Father Bede came to our country from Nigeria, and he began seminary at 11 years old-11!  He went through minor seminary and then major seminary, and he said that there were a couple of times when he contemplated quitting, but that he asked the Lord to lead him out of there if he wasn't supposed to be a priest-the Lord didn't. He said that he loves being a priest, and that "this is the only life I have ever known."

One of the many things that Father shared with us is the difference in attitude toward the priesthood that Catholics have in Nigeria, as opposed to the attitude that Catholics have in the United States and other Western countries. "In this country," said Father Bede, "we have to beg men to become priests, but in Nigeria men are begging to become priests." Seminaries have had to turn otherwise-acceptable men away there, because there are simply not enough spaces for those who want to get in. The so-called Third World seems to have become the First World of clerical and priestly life. How selfish has our culture become, when men in a place like Nigeria beg for a life of general obscurity in the name of spiritual riches, but many Catholics in our own country scoff at the idea of their children becoming priests or religious because "I want grandchildren?" We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. The Lord will take our spiritual blessings away from us and give them to people who will make use of them if we are not careful.

I hope Father Bede comes back and visits our class again-I would really like to hear much more from him.