Anamnesis

Ipse Dixit.

The poem’s majesty, power, and hope gushed into my psyche. Over and over, I pondered words that seemed to contain the answer to everything. I did not know the word anamnesis, but reading the poet’s words brought incalculable solace and a certitude that obliterated doubt.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

                      Hath had elsewhere its setting,

                         And cometh from afar:

                      Not in entire forgetfulness,

                      And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

                      From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

                      Upon the growing Boy….

On the Strange Symmetry of Beauty and Death

Why?

Because deeply in my psyche, more accurately, the soul I didn’t think I had, knew the truth of the poet’s claims. My radical atheism was shaken to its core by this poem.

We Catholics know anamesis at each Mass.

Anamnesis. The liturgical celebration always refers to God’s
saving interventions in history. “The economy of Revelation is realized by deeds and words which are intrinsically bound up with each
other. . . . [T]he words for their part proclaim the works and bring to
light the mystery they contain.”22 In the Liturgy of the Word the Holy
Spirit “recalls” to the assembly all that Christ has done for us. In
keeping with the nature of liturgical actions and the ritual traditions
of the churches, the celebration “makes a remembrance” of the marvelous works of God in an anamnesis which may be more or less
developed. The Holy Spirit who thus awakens the memory of the
Church then inspires thanksgiving and praise (doxology)

Catechism of the Catholic Church

Perils of ignoring it

The perils of ignoring anamnesis cannot be overstated. A University of Texas at Austin professor in government, philosophy, and religious studies, J. Budziszewski, was an atheist for much of his life. But he converted to Catholicism. I ‘met’ the author through reading his meditations on the revenge of conscience: a most arresting phrase. And the title of a 1998 article by Budziszewski, which he later published in a book of the same title.

As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation “intergenerational intimacy”: that’s euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term “sodomy”: that’s avoidance. My students don’t know the word “fornication” at all: that’s forgetfulness.

The pattern is repeated in the house of death. First we were to approve of killing unborn babies, then babies in process of birth; next came newborns with physical defects, now newborns in perfect health. Nobel-prize laureate James Watson proposes that parents of newborns be granted a grace period during which they may have their babies killed, and in 1994 a committee of the American Medical Association proposed harvesting organs from some sick babies even before they die. First we were to approve of suicide, then to approve of assisting it. Now we are to approve of a requirement to assist it, for, as Ernest van den Haag has argued, it is “unwarranted” for doctors not to kill patients who seek death. First we were to approve of killing the sick and unconscious, then of killing the conscious and consenting. 

Hold Fast to Patience With a Silent Mind

The professor has written another book: Pandemic of Lunacy.. It’s short, around 200 pages, with twenty-five pages of references. I thought nothing more could shock me. But Budziszewski’s graphic description of his students’ bafflement following his lectures on natural law and virtue is not just painful but horrifying.

How can you teach about a common good when there is no such thing?

Why are we speaking about a human trait of character when character’s been proven to be fictional?

Each individual determines morality: judging another’s behavior as immoral is intolerant.

When asked why they thought these things, the student replied that her psychology professor taught her, or that he had learned it from his philosophy professor.

The law is written in our hearts

But repeated sinful behaviors harden our hearts, silencing that inner voice of conscience that whispers, “No!!! Do not do this!

Worse, guilt and fear can combine in a purely poisonous way.

Tradition has almost no meaning in a period born from revolutions, a period that has repudiated as useless the past and its heritage. Modern man looks to the present and the future, he says, not to the past, as the Church does, and is bound to do; the continuance of such an institution in our time is obscurantism, immobilism. The modern mind is constrained to declare flatly that positive and natural sciences, technical and industrial developments…a repugnance for metaphysical reality and mistrust of logical certainty, all these have rendered the Church obsolete. It is impossible, one hears people say, for a modern person to understand the Church.

The Mind of Paul VI

The anti- Church and anti-Christ rhetoric enslaves us individually and collectively. And yet, for those of us who hunger for truth, the yearning grows, and our souls beg for sight. Finally, we see the doorway to truth is Christ crucified.

The law came in so that the trespass would increase; but where sin increased, grace increased all the more,

In these last weeks of Lent, let us beg for healing from our pride, which distances us from Our Lord.

Considering the last blistering words coming straight from Jesus’ mouth on this Fourth Sunday of Lent, we might want to take a second look at our spiritual condition, perhaps decades, ages, after we received the light of Christ at our Baptism. I am referring of course to these words:

“If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘We see’, so your sin remains.”

Since Christ, as we so readily claim, is present at our assembly, these searing words are directed also at us.

We have been told repeatedly that Baptism is not a date lost in time but a life-long journey and growth from darkness to light, from sin to loving service, from vain toil to grace, from death to life. Focusing on this aspect of having a new outlook, a new vision of the world in the light of Christ, St. Paul would say: “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” (Ephesians 5:8) Jesus Leads Us Through the Darkness of Life’s Maze

The post Anamnesis: Perils of Ignoring It appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

                  

Comments

• In reply to Mary. Amen Mary, Amen! by admin
• Oh yes…..Josh Groban's song is beautiful !! by Mary
• This blog is reflective of my personal Lent thus far. It ... by Mary

 

Knowledge is power

One can never know enough!

You’ve already got your doctorate, go ahead and do a law degree!

Trust the science!

There’s much to commend about the immediacy of answers to all questions and the availability of information. The list of sites offering excellent free online courses in music, art, the Old and New Testaments, philosophy, and a myriad of subjects is almost endless. For those who prefer listening to reading, podcasts cover subjects from healthy eating to Lin Wilder’s latest book.

What could go wrong with our desire to know and understand?

Father Paul Scalia explains:

The Breastplate of Saint Patrick contains a curious prayer invoking God’s power “against every knowledge that blinds the soul of man.” Sometimes it’s called the knowledge that “corrupts,” “binds,” or “defiles.” Whatever the translation, the point remains the same and runs contrary to our culture’s way of thinking. We live by the silly, simplistic notion that “Knowledge is power.” We can’t imagine a bad kind of knowledge.

Saint Patrick knew better. He knew our need to be defended against that kind of “knowledge” that not only fails to help but in fact threatens us. It is a knowledge that promises sight but delivers blindness.

Knowledge That Binds

The right not to know

Since I’m an admirer of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I’ve used excerpts from his speeches and books for countless articles. Many of his comments are urgently relevant, although they were penned decades ago. This one: the right not to know, is another of the Russians’ remarks that seems to leap off the page and into our living rooms.

In 1978, former Soviet political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a speech at Harvard University entitled, “A World Split Apart,” in which he spoke about individual and social fragmentation. In his assessment, a significant cause of individual fragmentation is the spurious idea that “everyone is entitled to know everything.” In reality, Solzhenitsyn remarked, “People also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.”  [italics mine.]

I’d not read the address, A World Split Apart, before. I’ve embedded it here because the ten typed pages contain a wealth of provocative and challenging material.

“Harvard’s motto is “VERITAS.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary….

It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and it has in fact been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so
much human rights as human obligations. On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept.

Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil….

Solzhenitsyn ends with these chilling words:

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.”

If the goal is power then…

“If what you want is power, then that makes sense, Lin.” Kathy sipped her chardonnay and regarded me soberly.

My friend Kathy was a clinical specialist; her specialty was in psych, not critical care like mine. Her remark was a response to my passionate soliloquy about the recent and needless death of a young woman in the ICU of the hospital where we both worked. The patient’s private physician never answered frantic calls to his pager, home, or office. I knew exactly what she needed, but lacked the license to supply the simple life-saving medication. I was angry and wanted to make sure I’d never be that helpless again. And so I was seriously considering medical school.

Kathy’s comment felt like a slap.

Is that why I want to do this?

Am I after power?

Even to my atheistic ears, the perils of pursuing power for its own sake terrified me.

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh I will put my spirit within you so that you walk in my statutes, observe my ordinances, and keep them.

“This is the covenant I will establish with them after those days, says the Lord: ‘I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them upon their minds,’” he also says: “Their sins and their evildoing I will remember no more.”^l

When philosophy gets off its knees

In a lovely article, The Dark Wood of Philosophy, author Joseph Wood quotes his mentor, recently deceased James Patrick.

Using examples of several known Catholics, like Dante and Heidegger, the author reminds his readers that philosophy means the love of wisdom. But when the love of God above all else gets lost, those splendid intellects lose their way.

Dante isn’t bedtime reading. But the words he writes upon his descent into the Inferno do not feel irrelevant to our times. Rather, they pierce:

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.

Ah, how hard it is to tell
The nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh –
the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.…

How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
When I forsook the one true way.

It feels these days that everyone has lost their way. Wars and politicians rage. Predictions of descent into worldwide devastation emanate from all sides.

“Have we finally done it?

Have we finally managed to ignite a conflagration that will end the world?”

And yet, on this third Sunday of Lent, we are given the immensely rich Gospel reading of Christ and the Samaritan woman.

“Do you not say, ‘In four months the harvest will be here’?
I tell you, look up and see the fields ripe for the harvest.
The reaper is already receiving payment 
and gathering crops for eternal life, 
so that the sower and reaper can rejoice together.
For here the saying is verified that ‘One sows and another reaps.’
I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; 
others have done the work, 
and you are sharing the fruits of their work.”

Last year, over 10 million joined the Catholic Church. In our diocese of San Antonio, Texas, 3000 people will become Catholic during the Easter Vigil Mass in a few weeks. It’s unlikely these numbers are unique but rather are repeated throughout the country and the world.

Day 4 Surrender Novena

You see evil growing instead of weakening? Do not worry, Close your eyes and say to me with faith: “Thy will be done, You take care of it.” I say to you that I will take care of it, and that I will intervene as does a doctor and I will accomplish miracles when they are needed. Do you see that the sick person is getting worse? Do not be upset, but close your eyes and say “You take care of it.” I say to you that I will take care of it, and that there is no medicine more powerful than my loving intervention. By my love, I promise this to you. O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times)

Complete Novena

The post Knowledge Is Power: The Right Not to Know appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

                  

It is good for us to be here: Transfiguration

Imagine it.

Peter has already declared his knowledge that this man Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah.

And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,^* and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.^* Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Shortly thereafter, Jesus predicts his Passion and death:

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he^* must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.

Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”

He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

The phrase sounds vicious. Unless we consider what Jesus, the man, knew and understood. Our Lord is abysmally alone in this knowledge, having failed again and again to help his friends see what only he could see.

For those of us who believe in God, Jesus as God is no problem, but we stumble when we consider Jesus the man.

“…being born in the image and likeness of man, he was known to be of human estate.”

That’s where our minds rebel. Therefore, we focus on Peter when reading and pondering this passage, the man who reminds us of ourselves with his impetuosity. And we wince at the harshness of Christ’s rebuke, not thinking about the feelings which impelled it.

Jesus’s humanity

It is just this humanity that savagely rebukes Peter’s typically hasty, volatile response to Christ. We know that Jesus willed his Passion, this cross. But as we close in on Gethsemane during these forty days of Lent, we can sense the man, his humanity, the awful cost to Jesus through pondering this passage:

“Jesus was no cold Superman, “Romano Guardini writes, ” he was more human than any of us. Entirely pure, unweakened by evil, he was open and loving to the core. His ardor, truth, sensitivity, power, capacity for joy and pain were unlimited, and everything that happened to him happened in the immeasurableness of his divinity. What then must have been Jesus’ suffering!…

Jesus’ will to the Passion is not to be broken, but at the thought of it, his whole frame shudders in the grip of unspeakable pain. We feel it in his furious reply to Peter, when the disciple, well-meaning but puny of heart, tries to dissuade him…”

The will to sacrifice stands fast, but it has been torn from Jesus’ human nature and is throbbingly sensitive; he can bear no tampering with it.”

They accept his invitation:

Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother,
and led them up a high mountain by themselves.
And he was transfigured before them;
his face shone like the sun
and his clothes became white as light.
And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them,
conversing with him.
Then Peter said to Jesus in reply,
“Lord, it is good that we are here.
If you wish, I will make three tents here,
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
While he was still speaking, behold,
a bright cloud cast a shadow over them,
then from the cloud came a voice that said,
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased;
listen to him.”
When the disciples heard this, they fell prostrate
and were very much afraid.
But Jesus came and touched them, saying,
“Rise, and do not be afraid.”
And when the disciples raised their eyes,
they saw no one else but Jesus alone.

“It is good for us to be here,” declares the master of understatement, Peter—the most confusing of the twelve apostles. Peter’s public declaration of Christ the Messiah cloaks him in divinity. But with his very next statement, Christ refers to the man who will lead his church as Satan. Peter is a paradox, precisely like you and me.

“It is good for us to be here.”

Yes, Amen, Peter. Jesus loved the simplicity and purity of your heart, your soul, and your mind.

Each year, on the second Sunday of Lent, the Christian church celebrates the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ. This is our mission, our destiny: To transform and become Him… seeing, feeling, thinking, and loving like Christ. It’s an action we cannot do ourselves, nor is it a one-time event. Rather, our transfiguration is daily, at times, moment by moment.

Every transfiguration begins with painful steps of separation from what is familiar: our family, our home, our land, our possessions, our knowledge, our education, even our good deeds, our prayers, anything and anyone that is good and that we think we might still need and will certainly miss if gone! This comprehensive separation is requested by the bold demands of the Gospel.

Every transfiguration, then, proceeds unevenly, hesitantly, with regrets, second thoughts, relapses and lots of fear. Look at Peter, James and John in our gospel passage. (Matthew 17:1-9)

Every transfiguration requires a high degree of inner freedom. It is the type of pure freedom that enables one, the likes of Abraham and Paul and Mary, and Peter, James and John, to trust unconditionally, blindly, the God who made the initial proposal and who promises to see us to the full realization of our transfiguration.

This is how Paul describes this type of pure inner freedom: “He saved us and called us to a holy life (transfiguration), not according to our works but according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus before time began.” (2 Tim. 1:9)

We understand rather easily that we ought to separate ourselves from wrongful things and evil deeds (Jesus’ original message in the Gospel) but should we also “separate” ourselves from our good deeds, our favorite prayers, from all those good things that we do, and from people whom we love dearly?

Aided by the Holy Spirit, we must continue to perform good deeds, and pray well, and do all that our calling in life requires of us as disciples of Christ, however, we cannot count on any of them, because they are the result of God’s infinite, undeserved grace. And nobody but the Lord alone can fill the void in our heart.

Once we are freed of this type of reliance and on non-existent merits, we can place ourselves in the listening mode of total docility to do the Father’s will.

One day, Jesus, the head of the Body, confided a secret to his closest friends: “My food is to do the will of the One who sent me and to finish his work.” (John 4:34)

Not our good work(s) but his! Not our praying but his! Not our will but his!….

Contemplating the Transfigured Jesus-Father Dino Vanin

Speaking of mission

Last Wednesday’s readings took us back to the Reluctant Prophet, Jonah: The third chapter of the Book of Jonah. We need no reminders to recall the extraordinary lengths Jonah went to elude God, as described in the first two chapters. Instead, we focus on Ninevah’s radical conversion:

The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and announce to it the message that I will tell you. So Jonah set out for Nineveh, in accord with the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an awesomely great city; it took three days to walk through it. Jonah began his journey through the city, and when he had gone only a single day’s walk, announcing, “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown,”5the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small,^* put on sackcloth.

When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had this proclaimed throughout Nineveh: “By decree of the king and his nobles, no man or beast, no cattle or sheep, shall taste anything; they shall not eat, nor shall they drink water. Man and beast alike must be covered with sackcloth and call loudly to God; they all must turn from their evil way and from the violence of their hands. “Who knows? God may again repent and turn from his blazing wrath, so that we will not perish.”

When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out.

In his splendid speech to the U.S. Naval Academy, Called Into the Depths, Bishop Robert Barron uses Jonah as a metaphor for human choice. Will we choose egodrama or theodrama?

He begins by explaining what the sea represented to the ancient people: Tohuvavohu or the Hebrew term for confusion, emptiness, and/or chaos:

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

Genesis1:2

It’s a splendid word for the awfulness of desperate illness, loss, betrayal, unexpected death, and all the horrors implicit in each of our lives, isn’t it? Tohuvavoh

Never are we called only for ourselves, declares Bishop Barron. We know Jonah’s tale well: To some, it is the stuff of kids’ summer Bible camp. Surely not relevant to 2026 or to our individual selves. But to the founder of Word on Fire Ministries, the story of Jonah is your story, his story, and mine. Ongoing and personal.

Jonah was sent alone into the capital city of Assyria: Ninevah. To the Jew, Assyria was enemy territory.

Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.

The reluctant prophet lives out- in the delicious prose of Bishop Barron, our egodrama or theodrama.

Will we follow our will or the will of God?

The post It Is Good For Us To Be Here: The Transfiguration and Jonah appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

                  

Giving- Do you still not understand?

Tuesday’s Gospel reading was Saint Mark:

Mark 8:14-21

The disciples had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. Jesus enjoined them, “Watch out, guard against the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” They concluded among themselves that it was because they had no bread. When he became aware of this he said to them, “Why do you conclude that it is because you have no bread? Do you not yet understand or comprehend? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear? And do you not remember, when I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many wicker baskets full of fragments you picked up?” They answered him, “Twelve.” “When I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many full baskets of fragments did you pick up?” They answered him, “Seven.” He said to them, “Do you still not understand?”

Tuesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time

Jennifer Ristine’s meditation explains this Gospel passage that has always eluded my grasp. Our Lord is warning us against two extremes: the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.

“They represented two extremes: those who maintained rigidity in human laws at the expense of being open to mystery, versus those who opened themselves to all practices and lack adherence of any revealed truth. Both groups believed they were justified in their beliefs and actions; one group was justified by its law-abiding actions, the other was justified by personal whims. Both created their set of beliefs for justification and salvation according to their self-defined standards, independent of an objective truth. Both faltered in authentic faith and failed to recognize the visitation of their Lord. Jesus prompted the disciples to faith when he saw they failed to recognize him. He reminded them of his two miracles of the multiplication of the loaves (a sign of his universal salvific intent), and that he is the way to all righteousness and justification.

The two extremes are prospering in our 21st century. Catholics and Protestants mirror the culture that is tearing itself apart, as those rigidly ensconced in human law deride their whimsical opponents. Father Eric Ritter’s Tuesday morning homily cut right to the heart of it:

DO YOU STILL NOT UNDERSTAND?

Demons expelled, the deaf healed, the dead raised to life, and the multiplication of loaves and fish to feed thousands. And yet, we, just like the twelve apostles, still do not understand. Our corrupted reason blinds us to Him in whom all our being rests. The Holy Church provides three palliatives to our intrinsically disordered natures: give some of your food to the hungry, fast, and pray.

Give some of your food

It’s Lent. We’re invited to enter the desert with Jesus through the three pillars of alms, fasting, and prayer. Each year, we’re allowed to join Our Lord’s final three-year ministry and better equip ourselves to carry the cross Jesus has fashioned for each one of us without complaint, perhaps even with joy. It’s impossible to do it without grace: Giving- Do you still not understand?

Years ago, during Lent, John and I felt called to “give some of your food” to the homeless in Reno. We lived in Wellington, Nevada, then about a ninety-minute drive from Reno. It was a cold morning, and we found a coffee-and-donut shop where we bought about fifty coffees and beautiful donuts. Then we drove to where the homeless camped and gave them out. On the way home, after ten minutes of silence, John asked what I was thinking.

Overwhelmed, their hands were so cold, there are so many of them....

My husband’s reply was to tell me the starfish story:

One day an old man was walking along the beach in the early morning and noticed the tide had washed thousands of starfish up onto the shore. Ahead, he spotted a boy gathering up the starfish, then one by one tossing them back into the ocean. He approached the boy and asked why he spent so much energy doing what seemed to be a waste of time. The boy replied, “The starfish cannot live if they are left out in the sun.”

Then the old man gazed out as far as he could see and responded, “But there must be thousands of miles of beaches and countless starfish. You can’t possibly rescue all of them. What difference is throwing back a few going to make anyway?” The boy bent down picked up yet another starfish and threw it as far as he could into the ocean. Then he turned, smiled, and said, “It made a difference to that one!”

The old man leaned over, picked up a starfish and joined the boy throwing starfish into the water.

The Starfish Story

We learned about the folks who lived in what was called “tent city” in Reno. And found that the fundamental problem of chronic homelessness lies in drug and alcohol addiction. Hence, my conclusion that handing out cash to addicts is not only irresponsible but may be close to evil, whether the check comes from the government or from me. Because of their mission to sobriety, work, and faith, I supported the Reno Gospel Mission with monthly donations for most of the twenty years we lived in Northern Nevada.

I have no illusions that our actions in Reno, central California, or here in San Antonio will end addiction and its resulting homelessness. But those men and women whose faces we see and hands we shake appreciate our gifts. Moreover, we see them as persons rather than as a category of homelessness. And we remember them.

I hope too that our gifts of food, time, and money can reach the addicted sister, niece, and brother-in-law whom I could not help while they were alive.

Saturday after Ash Wednesday Reading 1 Isaiah 58:9b-14 Thus says the LORD: If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech; If you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; Then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday; Then the LORD will guide you always and give you plenty even on the parched land. He will renew your strength, and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring whose water never fails. The ancient ruins shall be rebuilt for your sake, and the foundations from ages past you shall raise up; “Repairer of the breach,” they shall call you, “Restorer of ruined homesteads.” If you hold back your foot on the sabbath from following your own pursuits on my holy day; If you call the sabbath a delight, and the LORD’s holy day honorable; If you honor it by not following your ways, seeking your own interests, or speaking with malice— Then you shall delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; I will nourish you with the heritage of Jacob, your father, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

Fasting

And so it begins. 

The great season of Lent.

A prolonged time to get serious about our lives. Our hearts. Our minds. Our habits. Our friendship with God. Our prayer. Our relationships with others. Our concern for the poor and those who go without what many of us take for granted. 

Personally, I’ve been waiting for this season for a long time. No, not waiting for, eagerly longing for. I don’t know about you, but I need Lent this year. 

How might we best enter into this season of grace, especially the first half, which is something like an extended examination of conscience, before we start to focus on preparing for the celebration of Jesus Passion and Resurrection?

Test Me O God

Our first sin was to break the one rule of the garden. “Do not eat of the tree of life and death.”

But the beautiful serpent, how magnificent Satan must have been, how alluring to persuade Eve to do what she knew not to do. And then persuading Adam to eat of the death-giving fruit. Our fasts then are in reparation for the disobedience that infects our reason and will.

Father Dolindo Ruotolo–Creator of the Surrender Novena–speaks of fasting as detox. At least that’s how Elie G. Dib, translator of Servant of God Ruotolo phrases it. Quite accurately because Father Dolindo exhorts: 

We, who know how to submit to much more painful diet restrictions when they are imposed by our doctor for bodily health, we who can renounce meat, pasta, sugar, salt, wine, smoke when we are diabetic or when we are suffering from arthritis or nephritis, will we be ashamed not to perform such a mild fast?

And “Are we not the true diabetics of the soul, we who waste all God’s sweetness into our senses and diffuse the false sweetness of the world into our blood?…Are we not suffering from nephritis, we who cannot cleanse ourselves of evil, and we sediment it into our inflamed kidneys?”“

The post Giving-Do You Still Not Understand? appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

                  

Comments

• In reply to Judy Keating. Amen! He came to save us sinners- ... by admin
• Lord Jesus, Son of the living God; have mercy on me, a sinner. by Judy Keating
• In reply to Mary Baxstresser. A most blessed 1st Sunday in ... by admin
• So thankful for these words. by Mary Baxstresser

 

Emergency! Prayer, Paradox, and Matthew McConaughey

The replies to my “I don’t have one” ranged from an incredulous, frustrated “Well, you’re sure going to have one now!” to “You remind me of my seventy-four-year-old Dad, he’s healthy as a horse and has never seen a doctor.”

The absence of a doctor wasn’t planned. During my career (in the last century!), the medical system was far less rigid. Working side by side with doctors, I could stop them in the hall…”Hey, can you check out this….whatever?” Later on, a personal physician was unnecessary…. until now.

It was a week ago, Thursday night into early Friday morning. I was in the Emergency Room at Methodist Stone Oak Hospital because I’d collapsed at home. That previous Monday, I’d contracted what I’d called the “GI flu, “more accurately, norovirus.

The incredulous, frustrated emergency room doctor asked who my doctor was because he was admitting me to the ICU. Several hours of treatment in the emergency room failed to convert the rapid atrial fibrillation or stabilize my blood pressure.

Looking back, I’m stunned at how long it took to get that I was in trouble.

How could I have gone three days with only sips of water?

Why didn’t it occur to me to check my pulse?

The reason is the usual one: Denial. I kept thinking, “It’s just the flu, it will go away.”

Until suddenly, I collapsed to the floor as I followed John out of my bedroom to drive to the emergency room.

Emergency!

Paradox and prayer

I think, and therefore write, about paradox with frequency. In an article titled Three Essential Qualities for Writers, I wrote the essentials as these:

• The ability to hold two paradoxical thoughts about just how well we write.
• Ceding control of the story to the characters.
• Extreme tolerance for risk.

I doubt that I’m the only writer who believes that, on the one hand, I have a gift: I write well, better than most, and have a duty to use it up for whatever time I’m on this planet. On the other hand, I feel insecure and vulnerable, and am wondering just how and why I have the audacity to write another book on King David.

Just so, the events of last week have shaken up my world….in a good way.

I don’t know that I have ever been that helpless before: completely reliant on others, including for prayer. During those eighty hours, I could not pray. Even later, when in the ICU and John brought me my Liturgy of the Hours and other prayers I pray daily, I could not pray them.

Was it the sleep deprivation, the intravenous lines, immobility, meds, or the fear?

A million years ago, when I was learning the vocabulary of the Catholic faith, the mystical Body of Christ slammed into my psyche and never left. That fundamental axiom of Christianity felt like something I’d always known but didn’t remember until studying it over that long-ago summer of conversion.

Of course!

Of course, we are one!

How could it be otherwise?

And so the prayers of the faithful during Mass and those of my husband and friends did for me what I could not do for myself.

…the importance of “negative capability.” It’s a concept she found in a letter from the poet John Keats (1795-1821). Keats praises this capacity that he perceives in great men like Shakespeare – “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason….

As Brené Brown puts it, “Negative capability is a difficult muscle to build.  We’re wired to resolve tension and seek certainty.  This capability requires the ability to reach inward toward stillness rather than out toward counterfeit facts and reason.

I’ve been appreciating Brené Brown’s newest book (Strong Ground). She names some of the paradoxes that wise and courageous leaders learn to embrace.

I immediately resonated with the chapter on the importance of “negative capability.” It’s a concept she found in a letter from the poet John Keats (1795-1821). Keats praises this capacity that he perceives in great men like Shakespeare – “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

There are moments when abiding in love and truth is particularly painful. These are the moments of the in-between, when we have only partial insights or unsatisfactory options. We feel the pressure to make something happen and get away from the tension as soon as possible. It becomes almost unbearable to abide and wait for fuller truth and goodness and beauty to emerge.

To be human in a fallen world is to live in this tension. We are stretched by two seemingly incompatible truths. On one side is the harsh reality of impermanence. As much as we attempt to deny it, our earthly existence is fleeting. Nothing gold can stay. On the other side is the nonstop human tendency for meaning-making. We insatiably interpret what is happening and why – a task that our brains engage both consciously and unconsciously, even while we sleep! We don’t like waiting to receive the fuller truth. We both desire and need to belong securely and trustingly to something solid.

Embracing Paradox

Matthew McConaughey

Along with the prayer books that John brought to me was my friend Margaret’s gift of Poems & Prayers.

Following the third interminably sleepless night, I picked up the book with desperation. Once I began to read it, with inexpressible relief, I was transported out of myself by McConaughhey’s first words: In caps, I’ve always relied on logic to make sense of myself and the world.…

A prescriptionist at heart, I’ve always looked to reason to find the rhyme, the practical to get to the mystical, the choreography to find the dance, the proof to get to the truth, and reality to get to the dream.

I’ve been finding that tougher to do lately. It’s more than hard to know what to believe in; it’s hard to believe.

But I don’t want to quit believing, and I don’t want to stop believing in . . . humanity, you, myself, our potential.

I think it’s time for us to flip the script on what’s historically been our means of making sense, and instead open our aperture to enchantment and look to faith, belief, and dreams for our reality.

Let’s sing more than we might make sense, believe in more than the world can conclude, get more impressed with the wow instead of the how, let inspiration interrupt our appointments, dream our way to reality, serve some soul food to our hungry heads, put proof on the shelf for a season, and rhyme our way to reason.

Forget logic, certainty, owning, or making a start-up company of it; let’s go beyond what we can merely imagine, and believe, in the poetry of life.

The ultimate paradox:

The post Emergency! Prayer, Paradox and Matthew McConaughey appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

                  

Comments

• In reply to Mary Baxstresser. I'm fine Mary and learned so ... by admin
• I hope and pray your health has been restored 🙏. by Mary Baxstresser

 

Humility Rules

Only to learn, far too many years later, it’s the prerequisite. Without humility, wisdom will not find us.

I was seventeen, confident that I knew exactly what I was doing. I doubt I’ve ever been that certain again.

In a little over two weeks, Lent begins. Fittingly, Saint Benedict’s Daily Rule readings for this past week have been Chapter 7: On Humility.

The first degree of humility, then,
is that a person keep the fear of God before his eyes
and beware of ever forgetting it.
Let him be ever mindful of all that God has commanded;
let his thoughts constantly recur
to the hell-fire which will burn for their sins
those who despise God,
and to the life everlasting which is prepared
for those who fear Him.
Let him keep himself at every moment from sins and vices,
whether of the mind, the tongue, the hands, the feet,
or the self-will,
and check also the desires of the flesh.

The vocabulary of faith is just that: a vocabulary. A ‘linguist of prayer’ is useful, maybe essential. And so Brother Jerome Leo, even in death, remains my mentor for the seventy-three chapter Rule of Benedict we Oblates read three times each year. His meditations are quirky, incisive, and reverent:

Here’s Brother Jerome Leo’s meditation on the first step of humility:

Wow! Fearing God and hell-fire! It’s a safe bet that this chapter was not the darling of the 1970’s and beyond! But, if we look at it properly, there’s nothing to get upset about here.

God is perfect Unity, He is totally of a whole. He is all He is at once and utterly. Human beings, on the other hand, have minds that are finite and cannot wrap their intellects around such a perfectly holistic God without problems. One of those problems is what seem to us to be contradictions in God: His total, absolute Justice and His unfathomable, infinite Divine Mercy. Since we have a hard time figuring out both at once, we have a tendency to let one cancel out the other. God, to many, is either ALL hell-fire and dread or ALL pushover and cuddly. That is not the case!

Holy Rule Reflections Brother Jerome Leo

Rereading four years later

Why read or reread a book about a long-dead saint? In this case, Saint Benedict of Nursia.

About a billion and three reasons, but I’ll limit myself to just a few.

Benedict lived during a time just like our own. Saint Gregory the Great writes:

THERE was a man of venerable life, Benedict by name and grace, who from the time of his very childhood carried the heart of an old man…..He was born in the province of Nursia of honourable parentage and sent to Rome to study the liberal sciences. But when he saw there many through the uneven paths of vice run headlong to their own ruin, he drew back his foot, but new-set in the world, lest, in the search of human knowledge, he might also fall into the same dangerous precipice. Contemning therefore learning and studies and abandoning his father’s house and goods, he desired only to please God in a virtuous life. Therefore he departed skilfully ignorant and wisely unlearned.

The Life of Our Most Holy Father Saint Benedict

That paragraph warrants a pause, “Condemning learning and studies….desiring only to please God….he departed skillfully ignorant and wisely unlearned.“

It’s a pause that should compel us to consider the dangers of our knowledge-obsessed culture, and the propaganda disguised as education that’s peddled to our young.

In the book I reread, four years later, Humility Rules: St Benedict’s Guide to Genuine Self-Esteem by a Benedictine monk named Fr. Augustine Wetta. Father Wetta serves as another ‘linguist for prayer.’ Like Brother Jerome Leo, Father Wetta is quirky, incisive, and reverent.

Here’s Fr. Augustine’s engaging interpretation of Gregory the Great’s The Life of Our Most Holy Father

“Right around the beginning of the sixth century, there lived a teenager who was bored with school. He was at the top of his class. His father was wealthy and influential. This was a smart, charismatic kid, and he seemed destined for greatness.

But he hated school. It wasn’t that he had anything against learning; he just felt like he was wasting his time.

He was training to go into politics, but the world seemed to be going down the tubes. There were gangs of kids armed to the teeth in the street; there were endless, bloody wars being fought all over the world; and there was a sudden influx of terrible diseases for which there were no cures.

There were scandals in politics and scandals in the Church. In short, the world was a mess. So he ran away. But he didn’t join the circus or find his fortune in The Big City. Instead, he went to live in a cave on the side of a mountain. There, without all the distractions of family and schoolwork and social life, he figured he could focus exclusively on holiness. He was thinking specifically of Christ’s words: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and . . . follow me” (Mt 19:21). He wanted to take those words literally.

Saint Benedict spent the next three years just praying. Ironically, all this praying made him famous. People started to come to him for advice. The next thing he knew, there were hundreds of guys living in the same mountains, trying to do the same thing. Folks even invented a name for them: the monakhoi—the “lonely men”—or, in modern English, “monks”. But each monk seemed to have his own way of doing things, with the result that there was a whole lot of chaos and not a lot of prayer going on.

So a bunch of them got together and came to Benedict as a group. “Teach us how to be real monks,” they said. So Saint Benedict wrote a handbook. It was chock full of great advice, from who should apologize after an argument, to how many times a day you should pray, to what you ought to do with old underwear, and whether you should sleep while wearing a knife.

It was so useful, in fact, that within a hundred years, virtually every monastery in Europe adopted it. We know it today as The Rule of Saint Benedict, and it is used by monasteries all over the world…”

Humility Rules

What is humility?

Father Augustine Wetta explains what it isn’t:

“At Oxford, I had a friend who lived in a castle, who invited me to stay with his family for a few days during one of our breaks. As we pulled up his driveway, and I saw this enormous piece of architecture that he calls “home”—complete with its own pond, tennis courts, golf course, and chapel—I looked over at his mom and said, “Seriously? That’s your home?” His mom looked at the castle and then at me and then back at the castle again and said, “Yes, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? We really are blessed.” I might have expected her to say something like “Well, it needs work” or “Thanks, but it’s really hard to keep up.” Instead, she looked at her castle and thanked God for it. That is true humility.”

Writing about his return as a priest to the New Jersey seashore, he once surfed, Wetta encounters a group of teenagers. On this second read of his book, his description of these young people pierces the heart. We know the cause of their terrible emptiness and the things we have done or not done to augment it:

At the risk of fulfilling all the stereotypes of the angry, uptight old preacher, I have to say I was shocked. I mean, I grew up on a beach. I lived with eight rugby players in college. I was expecting noise and rowdiness and mischief and rebellion. One of my roommates in college had a poster that said, “If it’s too loud, you are too old.” I was expecting volume.

What I wasn’t expecting was the emptiness. These kids looked so vacant, so used. They were tattooed and pierced and tanned to the point of exhaustion. They seemed stupefied by excess. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The thing that really saddened me was their innocence. As a teacher, I’ve grown acutely sensitive to that certain way a kid looks when he knows he’s misbehaving. I know that guilty look. These kids didn’t look like that. They didn’t look guilty. They just looked tired. And it was this more than anything that convinced me that they truly did not know any better. That was the saddest part of the whole experience: the sudden realization that no one had ever suggested to them that there might be an alternative. Your job is to be that alternative. You must go out and be a witness of peace and stability to a culture that has lost its balance—to show others how to fill that emptiness. And you can’t do this by shouting at them. That will just add to the noise. You need only to be there, as “children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation” (Phil 2:15), living witnesses to the power of quiet perseverance.

Humility Rules

More than a virtue

Father Donald Haggerty is my last ‘liguist in prayer’ for today’s piece. Unlike Father Wetta or Brother Jerome Leo, Father Haggerty’s writing lacks any semblance of quirkiness or levity. Rather, he plunges his reader into dense and difficult territory. Not difficult in the sense of comprehension, but rather in the depth and grasp of the majesty, immensity, and mystery of Jesus, our Triune God and faith itself.

Father Haggerty’s remarks on the humility of Jesus are reminiscent of Pope Benedict and John Paul II.

“Perhaps there is no real humility in us until Christ’s humility in his Passion overcomes our own illusion of being in any way humble. Most of us misjudge humility…The only real understanding of humility comes after a long gaze on God humiliated by corrupt men inflicting abuse and mockery on Jesus Christ crucified in the hours of his Passion. The silence of God in the face of the insults, the jeers, the cackling mockery directed at Jesus in his Passion is an extraordinary thing. The choice of God to be treated with contempt, to be spit upon by men-and still to love them as pitiful and lowly sons-is the reality of the most genuine humility. Until we face revilement and answer with love for the favor of being disrespected to any degree, becoming more forgetful of ourselves, praying for those who bruise us, we need to grow more in this essential virtue….God will not react to arrogance or mistreatment from his creature. He bears it quietly as though continually returning to the humiliation he underwent in Jesus’ suffering during his Passion.

The post Humility Rules: Rereading Four Years Later  appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

                  

Comments

• Thank you! by Mary Baxstresser

 

Know thyself: gnōthi seauton:

A million years ago, as an undergrad, I fell in love with the idea behind the phrase, ‘know thyself,’ the love of wisdom personified by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, in short, that ancient, rarified Greek air. It rekindled when I made a trip there, alone, a few decades later. Alone in Delphi in the late nineties, I stood in the ruins of the Oracle at Delphi thinking about her admonition to all seekers: Gnōthi Seauton: ‘Know Thyself’.  

Plato declared in his Apology, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’

And close to two thousand years later, Thoreau wrote,

“It is not enough to be busy. The ants are busy. The question is: What are we busy about?

We live in an age

where we click or tap to find the answer to everything. We believe we’re logical decision makers,, using our reason to sift through the information, analyse it and form opinions, and make decisions. Decision-making theory fascinated me ever since I knew it existed.

My early years were spent in critical care nursing. And then later, administration in academic medicine. Both are fields where decisions can be matters of life or death. For over three decades, I worked with physicians. These men and women are ostensibly at the top of the heap of human rationality and perceived as the quintessence of reason. But the truth is that doctors are no more, and at times, are far less “rational” than non-physicians. Frequently, their medical decisions are based on emotion-ego, rather than data or even facts.

Just like the rest of us.

While working on my doctorate, I discovered the Nobel Prize-winning Garbage Can Model of Decision-Making developed by Cohen, March, and Olsen. The researchers confirmed my experience of chaotic and frequently irrational decision-making by top health-care administrators. and physicians.

More recently. “Seeing Truth in the Age of Information Overload” caught my attention. The author uses the recent controversy over vaccinating newborns against Hepatitis B to illustrate that

…much of the medical profession is so invested in their way of seeing the world that they simply cannot see things which directly contradict it. Because of this, the (extremely rare) case of hepatitis B being contracted in unvaccinated children filled their entire mental focus, while conversely, the far more common (and frequently far more severe) injuries from the vaccines passed through one ear and out the other, and were all reflexively written off under the notion “no controlled studies demonstrate this, so that’s proof it’s not happening”—despite the fact controlled studies of vaccines are explicitly prohibited due to them being “unethical.”

The Midwestern Doctor

Several years ago, I ‘met’ Dan Ariely.

He asks the same questions the ancient Greeks did. But formats them in the 21st-century academic language of behavioral economics. An iconoclast, Dan studies our facades, takes well-established beliefs, and blows them up. For example, cheating, irrationality, and lying are done only by those lacking education and upbringing. We’re often happy, sometimes ecstatic, to read about the cheating, irrationality, and lying done by others. But that’s not what Dan talks about. He’s after the lying, cheating and lying done by you and me.

Dan’s TED talks: brief, gripping and provocative. He begins each one with the story of why he became interested in these subjects while a burn patient due to an explosion causing burns over 70% of his body.

Eric Barker asked Dan if creative people were more dishonest:

“So think about what we find about dishonesty. What we find is it’s a struggle between two forces. You want to think of yourself as an honest, wonderful person on one hand and you want to gain from dishonesty on the other hand. And the way you can do it is to tell yourself a story about why this is actually okay. So ask yourself who can tell better stories? It turns out more creative people can tell better stories, so that’s actually what we find. We find it when we measure students that are more creative, they cheat more. We find that when we use priming to increase creativity, we also increase dishonesty. And when we went to an advertising agency, we also found that the people in the advertising agency who were in more creative job titles also had more flexibility.”

“A struggle between two forces,” indeed.

…With these thorns I want to
shatter the spirit of pride of their lordships; and with the holes that they form in My Head, I
want to open My way into their minds, in order to reorder all things in them, according to
the Light of Truth. By remaining so humiliated before this unjust judge, I want to make
everyone understand that only virtue is what constitutes man king of himself; and I teach to
those who command, that virtue alone, united to upright knowledge, is worthy and capable
of governing and ruling others, while all other dignities, without virtue, are dangerous and
deplorable things.

The Twenty-Four Hours of the Passion of Christ

The post Know Thyself: Updating Ancient Wisdom appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

                  

The empty sanctuary of ordinary time.

Unlike the endings of previous Christmas seasons, however, I’m not saddened. Indeed, I welcome the starkness and emptiness.

Before this week, I considered the Baptism of Christ as the end of the Christmas Season. However, the Baptism of Christ marks the beginning of the new, and longest, liturgical season: Ordinary Time. The difference this has made in my thinking is huge:

“The feast has ended. It’s time to get back to work!”

Before unpacking the correlation between ordinary time, thoughts, and thorns, we must reframe our perception of the word ordinary. Its root is the Latin word, ordinalis: numbered or ruled…a seasonal rhythm of order: the rhythm of the seasons and the blessing of each new day. Each moment is an opportunity to engage in the ordered sequence with gratitude and open, receptive minds. The green robes of the priests and cloths on our altars signify growth, our growth in the daily routines of living our lives, caring for the creatures and the creation we’ve been given, extending to us the invitation to grow in holiness. Ordinary time begins in winter, so in the northern parts of the world, the leafless trees and plants look dead. We know the roots are there and alive, but the life is dormant. The landscape is stark and empty, like our altars.

Most of us are settling for Bette Midler’s god.

Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan
to be baptized by him.
John tried to prevent him, saying,
“I need to be baptized by you,
and yet you are coming to me?”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us
to fulfill all righteousness.”
Then he allowed him.
After Jesus was baptized,
he came up from the water and behold,
the heavens were opened for him,
and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove
and coming upon him.
And a voice came from the heavens, saying,
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Most of us are settling for Bette Midler’s God was the terrific headline for the first homily given by the newly ordained priest, Father Chris Kanowitz, during a daily Mass at Saint Gall Church in Gardnerville, Nevada. I could not stop thinking about his startling statement while viewing Bishop Robert Barron’s splendid homily for last Sunday’s Feast of the Baptism of Christ. In Side By Side With Sinners, Bishop Barron places us there at the bank of the muddy river Jordan. We see the throngs from all over Israel, Judah, and the Decapolis waiting in line,

And then suddenly Jesus appears. And likely waited in line too, until he stood before the Baptist, who recognized the Lord in awe and horror.

NO!!

I am not fit to tie the laces of your sandals, no!

He who keeps everything in being, the creator of the universe, asks to be baptised.

This is no God watching us from a distance like the Bette Midler song. This is Jesus who was sent by the Father to wallow in the mire of our hearts, minds, and corrupted world. Closer to us than we are to ourselves, this lover risks everything for your soul and mine.

Everything matters, even-maybe especially, our thoughts

Evil begins in our thoughts and hearts. The Empty Sanctuary of Ordinary Time: Thoughts and Thorns.

My child, Courage, do not miss anything of what I suffered. Be attentive to My Teachings. I have to redo man in everything. Sin has removed
the crown from him, and has crowned him with opprobrium and with confusion; so he cannot stand before My Majesty. Sin has dishonored him, making him lose any right to honors and to glory. This is why I want to be crowned with thorns—to place the crown on man’s forehead, and to return to him all rights to every honor and glory. Before My Father,
My thorns will be Reparations and voices of defense for many sins of thought, especially pride; and for each created mind they will be voices of Light and supplication, that they may not offend Me. Therefore, unite yourself to Me, and pray and repair together with Me.”

The Twenty-Four Hours of the Passion of Christ

Years ago, in a class of thirty or so people, the Wharton professor asked for a volunteer to leave the room. After the door closed behind her, we were instructed to say and think like this about the woman outside the room:

“Alice is beautiful.”

“She is a wonderful person,”

“Alice is trustworthy.”

When she returned, Dr. Phil instructed her to extend and hold her arm steady while he attempted to lower it. Despite his being several inches taller and fifity or sixty pounds heavier, he could not budge her arm.

Then he asked her to leave the room. This time, we were all instructed to think thoughts like, “What a jerk, she is!”

“I cannot stand that woman!”

“She’s ugly and stupid!”

When Dr. Phil repeated the experiment, Alice’s arm dropped like a stone. She could not resist his pressure.

Our gossip, criticism, negativity, and anger have incalculable consequences.

But we can choose another attitude:

It’s time to give love a chance – then peace will join us at the table for celebration.

Doc Childre, Founder of HeartMath Institute and HeartMath Inc.

The year is still new:

Each moment of each day presents us with a choice. What do we do with the most powerful force on earth? I write not about hurricanes, wars, or earthquakes, but the human will. Of all of creation, the universe and its stars, suns, earth and its creatures, only you and I can choose to disobey God.

We are different from what we were last year. Through our thoughts and actions, we have either become closer to Jesus or distanced ourselves by doing what we know is wrong. Or our refusal to accept what the Will has placed before us. Our withdrawal from our pain or that of those we love is instinctive. Our shock at a sudden, devastating illness, betrayal or loss makes us cringe, cower, and want to flee:

WHY LORD?

He is a sign of contradiction, this Jesus. He confused most of the powers around him: Herod, Pilate, the religious authorities. Only the desperate understood who he was.

If you wish, you can make me clean

I do wish it, be made clean.

Choosing to Follow

As with so much in our life, we have to choose again and again. The choice we make this year will be a little bit different from the choice we made last year—because we are changing and our involvement in our way of life is changing. And each time we choose, we become more and more the person God is calling us to be.
In a sense there are in every vocation two Follow me’s: the initial one, which was marked by a certain urgencyand generosity, and another, at the hour of discouragement, difficulty, trial. Saint Peter himself knew these two Follow me’s. And his life shows us that the hour when the following of Christ was even more difficult, the moment even of his denial, was not a moment of giving up. It was for him the moment of a new maturity, the moment when he determined to follow Jesus even to the end in love. We see this after the Passion in Galilee (the scene of the first call) when the risen Lord asks him the ultimate question:

Do you love me more than anything? More than your own feelings, your own happiness? And from the lips of Peter comes the most beautiful declaration of love, a cry of love welling up from a heart that has known suffering: Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you. And Jesus says to him a second time:
Follow me. So too, in our lives, there’s always a second Follow me—and it comes at the hour of trial. Despite appearances, this hour never prevents us from loving or being faithful.

It is, in truth, the hour of maturing in love and fidelity, the hour of the definitive Follow me.

Sister Mary David Totah, o.s.b.

The post The Empty Sanctuary of Ordinary Time: Thoughts and Thorns appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

                  

Comments

• In reply to Mary Baxstresser. Thank you for taking the time ... by admin
• Thank you for another thoughtful and spirit filled writing. I ... by Mary Baxstresser

 

On the Strange Symmetry of Beauty and Death

By contemplating the beauty and use of each thing, [a man] is filled with love for the Creator. He surveys all visible things: the sky, the sun, moon, stars and clouds, rain, snow and hail … the four-legged animals, the wild beasts and animals and reptiles, all the birds, the springs and rivers, the many varieties of plants and herbs, both wild and cultivated. He sees in all things the order, the equilibrium, the proportion, the beauty, the rhythm, the union, the harmony, the usefulness, the variety, the motion, the colors, the shapes, the reversion of things to their source, permanence in the midst of corruption. Contemplating thus all created realities, he is filled with wonder.

Byzantine monk Peter of Damascus 

Peter Mommsen begins his lovely piece, Dogs, Deer, Herons, and the Promise of Beauty, with Wordsworth:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light.

—William Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, was assigned in my undergraduate English class. Its majesty, power, and hope gushed into my psyche; Over and over, I pondered words that seemed to contain the answer to everything:

A single field which I have looked upon,

Both of them speak of something that is gone;

                      The Pansy at my feet

                      Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

                      Hath had elsewhere its setting,

                         And cometh from afar:

                      Not in entire forgetfulness,

                      And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

                      From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

                      Upon the growing Boy….

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!

                      And let the young Lambs bound

                      As to the tabor’s sound!

We in thought will join your throng,

                      Ye that pipe and ye that play,

                      Ye that through your hearts to-day

                      Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

                Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

                      We will grieve not, rather find

                      Strength in what remains behind;

                      In the primal sympathy

                      Which having been must ever be;

                      In the soothing thoughts that spring

                      Out of human suffering;

                      In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquished one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

                      Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

What is it about beauty?

Years ago, while living in the first house I’d ever bought, I had a Ziggy calendar. And this was one of the cartoons for the month. Only in that version, Ziggy was shouting,

“YEAH GOD!”

I loved that cartoon.

On many a morning while driving into the glory of a new sunrise to my job at Hermann Hospital in the Texas Medical Center, I’d shout, “Yeah God!!” And pretend not to see the horrified stares of other drivers undoubtedly wondering if there was a crazy person beside them.

I was thrilled to find it again for this article. And found the close to sixty-minute aggravation of finding it, then getting permission to use it and finally converting it from PDF to JPG worthwhile.

Why?

Because all those mornings, I was praising, joyfully proclaiming a God I claimed I didn’t believe in. Right, I was a card-carrying atheist.

Sound wholly, completely nuts?

Think about it for a moment or five. Maybe back to a time when you weren’t so sure of God…or the priest or minister did or said something that made you decide to walk away from the numerous justifications supporting the walls of our unbelief.

Or maybe you’re where I was, confident that zealous Christians like me are—off. But when looking at that cartoon, it’s super hard to wipe off the smile. Tamp down the surge of joy. Beauty—magnificence—slices through our defensive rhetoric, reducing our arguments to empty patter.

What is happening today, Jesus’ baptism?

Just nineteen days ago, we celebrated the miracle of Christ’s incarnation, last week, the Epiphany, and today, His Baptism. Initially, our minds object, thirty-three years of a life covered in less than three weeks? How is that reasonable?

Looking through the secular lens, of course, it isn’t.

But through His Bride, the liturgy of the Church, we see through the lens of our faith.

This perfect infant became a slave to invade our corrupted humanity and restore the Father’s original plan of no harm or ruin for creation and creatures. Jesus’ entire life was a preparation for the crucifixion:

.This is my beloved Son. Though hungry himself, he feeds thousands; though weary, he refreshes those who labour. He has no place to lay his head yet he holds all creation in his hand. By his suffering he heals all sufferings; by receiving a blow on the cheek he gives the world its liberty; by being pierced in the side he heals the wound in Adam’s side.

  And now, please pay close attention, for I want to return to that fountain of life and contemplate its healing waters as they gush out.

  The Father of immortality sent his immortal Son and Word into the world, to come to us men and cleanse us with water and the Spirit. To give us a new birth that would make our bodies and souls immortal, he breathed into us the spirit of life and armed us with incorruptibility. Now if we become immortal, we shall also be divine; and if we become divine after rebirth in baptism through water and the Holy Spirit, we shall also be heirs along with Christ, after the resurrection of the dead.

  So I cry out, like a herald: Let peoples of every nation come and receive the immortality that flows from baptism. This is the water that is linked to the Spirit, the water that irrigates Paradise, makes the earth fertile, gives growth to plants, and brings forth living creatures. In short, this is the water by which a man receives new birth and life, the water in which even Christ was baptized, the water into which the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove.

  Whoever goes down into these waters of rebirth with faith renounces the devil and pledges himself to Christ. He repudiates the enemy and confesses that Christ is God, throws off his servitude and becomes an adopted son. He comes up from baptism resplendent as the sun and radiating purity and, above all, he comes as a son of God and a co-heir with Christ.

  To him be glory and power, to him and his most holy, good and life-giving Spirit, both now and for ever. Amen.

A discourse on the Theophany

…Jews and Greeks alike … are all under the domination of sin, (Romans 3:9) …all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23)
What we celebrate today is a fact which is nothing short of mind-blowing as this sin solidarity has been embraced by Christ Jesus himself!….
For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. (2 Corinthians 5:21)….

our own Baptism must never be considered merely a date of a Sacrament we received, most likely, a very long time ago. Baptism places us in a different type of solidarity to be renewed every single day of our life on earth. We should picture most merciful Jesus drawing close to us in our sins, daily, to draw us, slowly yet surely, into the solidarity of divine Life in him. Ultimately, we should live our Baptism, daily, as a joyful journey with Jesus at our side. It must be real joy also here on earth, despite anything ugly or scary that could happen along the way, so that it can, eventually, turn into eternal, heavenly joy.And, there is even a “shortcut to joy” which Jesus keeps showing us from the moment that he, our God, was conceived in the womb of Mary; was confined in there for nine months; grew like any other child; lived in obscurity for some 30 years in the insignificant hamlet of Nazareth and died naked, covered with spittle, blood and indignities on a cross.
 
This shortcut to joy is humility. Humility starts us out from the solid, undeniable ground of our sins and flaws. It frees us from the need to cover up, to deny, to hide, to pretend. It frees us from all those empty efforts we devise to protect and preserve an attractive image of ourselves. Finally, humility frees us to love in a truly Christ-like way, by adopting his attitude of considering others as more important than ourselves and of placing their well-being ahead of our own….

Genuine Lasting Joy-Fr. Dino Vanin

Used by permission copyright 2020 Jeff Haynie

The post On the Strange Symmetry of Beauty and Death appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

                  

Comments

• Another thought provoking and inspiring writing. My favorite ... by Mary

 

Christmas Wake-Up Call: Stoning, Massacre and a Trump PS on Becket

Consider that for much of the world, Christmas starts right after Thanksgiving. Christmas music plays everywhere, shopping ads begin and the Christmas trees go up. Weeks later, when Christmas Day finally dawns, the excitement’s extinguished in a few hours. Scattered strips of ribbon, wadded up wrapping paper and tinsel are swept up and discarded. Along with a vast number of dirty dishes waiting to be done.

On the day after Christmas, decorations are taken down and put away.

It was just a day, fun and special but nothing more. “The four walls and the prison windows of their gray days,” return.

For liturgical Christians, however, Christmas Day is the first of the nineteen-day Christmas season. Our celebration differs from the world’s. It’s an oxymoronic admixture of joy and sorrow unique to Christianity. We love watching at least two versions of The Christmas Carol, Miracle on 34th Street, and It’s A Wonderful Life. And listening to the corny Christmas music.

But throughout the Christmas season Masses, the gigantic crucifix looms prophetically over the tender scene of the newborn Jesus lying in the manger surrounded by Mary, Joseph, and the animals. We’re both joyous at Jesus’ birth and intensely sorrowful at the agonizing crucifixion we cause.

The Church presses with the liturgy of the subsequent days.

• On December 26th, the first martyr, Saint Stephen, stoned to death by enraged Jews because Stephen had been a follower of Jesus. The Gospel passage carefully notes that Saul was there, watching.
• On December 28th, we commemorate the Holy Innocents. Herod’s jealousy and fear of Jesus impels him to order the deaths of all infant Hebrew boys under two.
• The week ends with the memorial of Saint Thomas Becket on December 29th.
• Our Christmas wake-up call rouses us from the torpor of the feast to plunge us in the blood of the martyrs– lest we think this life is some kind of game.

Saint Thomas Becket

had his flaws.

He experienced the temptations of a life of luxury and influence. He was proud—a bit too proud—of his accomplishments, his position, and his honor, and his tendency toward arrogance was noticed by both his friends and his enemies….From exile in France, Thomas wrote angry letters back to England, threatening those English bishops who had capitulated to Henry’s demands and even excommunicating some of them. While Thomas was right to oppose the king, his impulsive decisions—rapidly alternating between kind words and threats—only made the conflict worse.

Grumpy Priests and Saint Thomas Becket

My reread of Murder in the Cathedral, like most of my best ideas, wasn’t mine. It’s a prompt from Father Derek Sandowski. Each Christmas, the priest reads TS Eliot’s play about Thomas Becket’s internal battle over the temptation to submit to his king and former friend, Henry ll. Eliot writes in the style of a Greek tragedy, with chorus and in metered verse, which should preclude our understanding but strangely doesn’t. Rather, its rhythm sets up a pace, one that accelerates and becomes tangible as we read. We can almost hear the galloping hoofbeats of the approaching assassins’ horses in the metered cadence.

Becket’s internal battle is revealed through the introduction of four successive tempters, each arguing more and more persuasively that he should submit to the king. Eerily foreshadowing Saint Thomas More’s attempts to appease King Henry VIII, Becket wasn’t eager to die. The archbishop considers whether he could compromise, even return to being Chancellor again. He’d returned from exile in France because of false promises that the king had softened, that he could return to his beloved Canterbury in peace.

With this declaration, Thomas Becket speaks for each human soul:

Eliot ends his play in exquisitely painful irony and satire. Each of the murderers explains why there was no choice but to kill the archbishop.

We beg you to give us your attention for a few
moments. We know that you may be disposed to judge
unfavourably of our action. You are Englishmen, and
therefore you believe in fair play: and when you see
one man being set upon by four, then your sympathies
are all with the underdog. I respect such feelings….

One soldier’s comment, “No one regrets the necessity for violence more than we do. Unhappily, there are times when violence is the only way in which social justice can be secured,” reads like a maxim for our times.

It’s impossible to read Murder in the Cathedral as merely a historical account. The battle to bound the majesty of the King of the Universe within our deformed human wills rages, ever more intensely as 2025 winds down.

A PS from Trump

On December 29, 2020, outgoing President Donald Trump invited schools, churches, and customary places of worship to commemorate the 850th anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket. The proclamation begins with these words: “Today is the 850th anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket on December 29, 1170. Thomas Becket was a statesman, a scholar, a chancellor, a priest, an archbishop, and a lion of religious liberty.”

The wording is strident and sounds like something a pope would write. Or a bishop.

President Donald Trump can best be described as an enigma wrapped up in a mystery. Many have far more colorful ways to describe him with good reason. However, Trump’s decision to honor a Catholic martyr as one of his last presidential acts of his first term is at least curious, if not something other. I’ve read it a few times and have to wonder at the prescience shown in these remarks about American religious liberty and protection of the unborn.

Consider that it’s nearly his last day in office.

He’d lost the election; he was sure he’d won.

And yet he looks back to Saint Thomas Beckett.

We pray for religious believers everywhere who suffer persecution for their faith. We especially pray for their brave and inspiring shepherds — like Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong and Pastor Wang Yi of Chengdu — who are tireless witnesses to hope.

To honor Thomas Becket’s memory, the crimes against people of faith must stop, prisoners of conscience must be released, laws restricting freedom of religion and belief must be repealed, and the vulnerable, the defenseless, and the oppressed must be protected. The tyranny and murder that shocked the conscience of the Middle Ages must never be allowed to happen again. As long as America stands, we will always defend religious liberty.

A society without religion cannot prosper. A nation without faith cannot endure — [Italics mine] because justice, goodness, and peace cannot prevail without the grace of God.

President Trump Proclamation Thomas Becket

Canterbury Cathedral Beckett’s “Crown chapel.”

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:

Temptation shall not come in this kind again.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason…..

That the sin of the world is upon our heads; that the

blood of the martyrs and the agony of the saints

Is upon our heads.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Christ, have mercy upon us.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Blessed Thomas, pray for us.

Murder in the Cathedral

The post Christmas Wake-Up Call: Stoning, Massacre and a Trump PS on Becket appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.

                  

Comments

• In reply to admin. Thank you my friend–mau this brand new ... by admin
• In reply to Mary Baxstresser. Thank you for your read and ... by admin
• Your words are like precious gems. We are indeed blessed with ... by Mary Baxstresser
• Yes. YES! Fiat. by admin