Tag: Sacraments

What Am I Supposed to Do?

You have been told, O mortal, what is good
   and what the Lord requires of you:
Only to do justice and to love goodness,
   and to walk humbly with your God.
(Micah 6:8)

This doesn’t sound right!
   I thought what God expects from me is to obey the Ten Commandments:
   1. – I am the LORD your God: you shall not have strange gods before me.
   2. – You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.
   3. – Remember to keep holy the LORD’S Day.
   4. – Honor your father and your mother.
   5. – You shall not kill.
   6. – You shall not commit adultery.
   7. – You shall not steal.
   8. – You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
   9. – You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.
   10. – You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.
   This is not such a hard list to follow—most religious people more or less do!
   Besides the Ten Commandments, I thought what God expects from me is to obey the “Commandments of the Church”:
   1. – Keep Sundays and Holidays of Obligation holy, by hearing Mass and resting from servile work.
   2. – Keep the days of fasting and abstinence appointed by the Church.
   3. – Go to Confession at least once a year.
   4. – Receive the Blessed Sacrament at least once a year, and that about Easter time.
   5. – Contribute to the support of our pastors.
   6. – Not to marry within certain degrees of kindred, nor to solemnize marriage at the forbidden times.
  In practice, this can be a somewhat more specific and demanding list to follow—but most “practicing Catholics” more or less do!

   The danger of having religious laws, rules, and regulations to obey is that we may treat them like civil laws, rules, and regulations—that is to say, if we can “get away” with it, we may not observe and obey them as we should.

Trust in the Lord and do good.
   that you may dwell in the land and
   live secure.
Find your delight in the Lord
   who will give you your heart’s desire.
(Psalm 37:3-4)

This doesn’t sound right either!
   Do justice – love goodness – walk humbly with God – trust in the Lord – do good – find your delight in the Lord.
   This seems like a very easy business, a bit vague but easy enough to do.
   Ah, that’s the temptation—and misunderstanding—just because something sounds simple and easy doesn’t mean that it is!
   A long or short checklist of specific duties, regulations, or rules is much easier to observe and follow than a short list of complex and challenging ideals.
   When we were children, we learned how a good child should behave. When we were taught about going to confession before communion, we had a clear and easy checklist and self-accusations in mind.
   It’s not good enough for us to behave like a child all our lives. It’s not enough to “go to confession” like you were first taught as a child. “Goodness” and “trust in the Lord” are much more than something you breakdown into a sort of spiritual scorecard!
   Micah’s advice was right on—and still is easier said than done!




20 August 2023

Eye upon the Doughnut

One of my first tastes of philosophy was as a child, in a coffee shop/restaurant, reading this jingle:

As you ramble on through life, brother,
Whatever be your goal,
Keep your eye upon the doughnut
And not upon the hole!

I thought it was great. I still do, but if you try too hard to analyze it, you may miss what it’s saying.
It’s an overall advice to be optimistic rather than pessimistic, to focus more on what you have than on what you don’t. It’s like that riddle of folk philosophy, “Is the glass half-empty or half-full?”
A longer version of the same thought is an old joke about two twin brothers, one always the optimist, the other, the pessimist. One Christmas morning, their parents decided to challenge them.
When the kids woke up, they took the pessimist to a room with a beautiful decorated tree surrounded by presents. He burst into tears. “Look at the star on top of the tree,” he cried, “It’s crooked!”
They took his brother to an empty room with nothing in it but straw and manure on the floor. He clapped his hands in delight, and cried out, “Where’s the pony?”
Going back to the jingle, it’s actually a false dichotomy—the hole in the middle is actually an integral part of the doughnut, a ring shaped piece of baked dough.
You might say that the absences—the missing things—in our life and behavior are also an integral part of our lives.
Not being God, we’re not perfect. Except for a special grace of God, no human person is or ever can be perfect.
We’re all somewhat “doughnut shaped”. We’re all “holey” people trying to become whole and “holy” people!

In the church of the apostles, the great emphasis was on the overwhelming love and mercy of God. Those who embraced the teachings of Jesus didn’t go about bewailing how imperfect they were. On the contrary, they were joyful that they were pardoned for their failings and were now sharers in a new life. And, they eagerly looked forward to wonderful things to come!
Somehow or other, as the centuries passed, maybe because people were “born into” Christianity and took the good news for granted, an emphasis on personal sin and sinfulness gradually became a much more important part of prayer and religious practice.
And, of course, the more we focus on the negative side of our life and behavior, the more down and discouraged we’re likely to become.
It’s a trap! Of course we’re not perfect people. So, of course, we can always find things to bewail—and we can always find others to call attention to our failings.
Let’s face it, we have a very bad habit of keeping our eye upon the hole, and not upon the doughnut!
Here’s another curious thing. You hear others bewailing that people don’t go to confession enough, as in the “old days”.
The roots of the rite of reconciliation were to allow a complete defector among those who had chosen to live according the teachings of Jesus, an “apostate”, to be re-admitted to the Christian community.
Thanks be to God, if we’re getting better and better! Convert your “examination of conscience” into a litany of thanks for the so many occasions of God’s love and mercy!


8 November 2020

Thinking outside the Box

I remember reading an article some time ago about oil and the future of the petroleum industry that reminded me of a conversation with a friend many years previous:
“You know the Fischer company, the ‘bodies by Fischer’ of the Cadillacs?.” he said, “Well, they used to be a carriage company. When ‘horseless carriages’ started to become popular, the Fischer company decided that their business wasn’t just carriages but transportation.
“They responded to change and development by ‘thinking outside the box’, and they not only survived but grew.”
Many small and big oil companies have been doing the same. They’ve been accurately reading the signs of the times and rethinking their business model, their “mission”, if you will.
The article explained that they were not only embracing new technologies like fracking but also totally different businesses like wind turbines. To use my friend’s example, they also were thinking outside the box, realizing that their business is not just “oil” but “energy”.
What about religious people and religious organizations? How many of them have been successfully reading the signs of the times and thinking outside the box?
It’s not easy to do, of course, since it involves letting go of secure, familiar, and once effective and fruitful things and risking embracing a relatively unknown, uncertain, and somewhat risky future.
There has been a lot of progress—and a lot of defeatism, too. For example, take “ecumenism”. During the last half century, most Catholics have moved away from “outside the Church there’s no salvation”.
In fact, one of the seismic shifts in the understanding of the church has been that the one church of Christ embraces all who are trying to live as disciples of Jesus.

Some of the aftershocks of this ecclesiologic earthquake have involved placing less emphasis on rites, rules, and regulations:
– For example, defining church membership less by the ritual of baptism and more by the life-time commitment to follow Jesus that the ritual presumes and celebrates.
– For example, esteeming faithfulness to that commitment less by regular Sunday Mass attendance, Friday abstinence, or observance of other church regulations and customs and more by fidelity to the teachings, all the teachings, of Jesus.
– For example, judging the validity of marriage less by the marriage ceremony having been conducted according to church law and more by the existence of the decision and commitment that the ceremony symbolizes and represents.
– For example, respecting persons with ministry in the church less for their having been ordained or authorized and more for their personal integrity, competence, and loving commitment to service.
Change isn’t always comfortable, probably frequently isn’t comfortable—don’t we often speak of “growing pains”? It’s painful because change—growth, maturation, development, evolution, whatever you want to call it—is challenging.
It doesn’t involve just thinking outside the box, it means getting out, climbing out, breaking out of the box. It means rethinking your identity, purpose, and mission.
It It means letting go of some things, even really good things, so that you can have others, even better.
A chick can’t live unless it cracks the egg!


6 September 2020

Darmok

Growing up, I always was an avid reader of all kinds: fairy tales, fantasy, adventure, classics, murder mysteries, westerns, history. Probably my special favorite was science-fiction.
I was always drawn to science and its discoveries, and I really liked good science-fiction—that is, solid speculative projections based on what we already know. (Not fantasy at all.)
That’s why I loved the science-fiction TV series, Star Trek. It was engaging, realistic, had interesting character development, and was fundamentally optimistic about the future.
Many of its plots were almost parables. It was a very value-rooted show, basically imagining how, in spite of human weaknesses, humanity was gradually growing up and getting better and better.
Among its many successor TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation really stood out for me. Although with an entirely new cast of characters, it continued in the same spirit and with the same challenging originality of the first series.
An episode in its fifth year was especially original and challenging: Darmok.
The plot line was unique: The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise encounters an alien civilization and, no matter what, can’t communicate with them.
Their language appears to be unintelligible —it seems to be constructed of historical references to episodes and events of their unknown history and culture.
The two captains meet on a mutually unknown planet, are faced with common deadly threats, and ultimately begin to understand and collaborate with one another, even though the alien captain dies.
The Enterprise Captain Picard discovered why it was so hard to communicate—the aliens spoke entirely with metaphors.

We face a similar challenge in our religious communication. We use metaphors and references to episodes and events in religious history and culture that are becoming less and less familiar to the majority of people of our day. Our religious language can be almost unintelligible.
Here’s an example: St. Paul wrote to the Romans (6:3), “. . . are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” To understand what he means, you need to know that:
– “baptize”, originally a Greek word, means to immerse or bathe.
– John, called the Baptist, preached the need for a spiritual cleansing and renewal in preparation for the coming restoration and establishment of the kingdom of God that was symbolized by a ritual immersion and washing in the Jordan river.
– The early Christians retained a similar symbolic immersion and washing ceremony as part of rite of initiation to celebrate the decision of new recruits who had embraced the teachings of Jesus and wished to become part of the community of his disciples, the church.
– The plunging under water and rising from the immersion anew is also symbolic of Jesus’s having been plunged into death and rising from death anew.
Paul is communicating that a disciple of Jesus symbolically has been washed from and died to a former worldly way of life and now shares in the hope of resurrection to a new and eternal fullness of life.
We’re used to using many such religious metaphors—and we don’t always realize how hard it is for others to understand us!


16 August 2020

Thanks Be to God!

What Americans do on the fourth Thursday of the month of November, what Jews do on the fifteenth day of the month of Nisan, and what Christians do on Sundays have a lot in common.
All three involve symbols, and the symbols involve remembrance, and remembrance involves gratitude, and gratitude expresses itself in giving thanks.
Thanksgiving in the United States traces its origin to 53 Pilgrims celebrating their first harvest in Plymouth in 1621, joined by 90 Native Americans. The format of the Thanksgiving celebration is a meal together, giving thanks to God for his bounty, and the typical foods served evoke those of the original celebration, especially turkey, cranberry sauce, corn, and other fall vegetables—and pumpkin pie!
Passover began as a celebration of the liberation of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. It is celebrated with a ritual family meal of remembrance, rich in symbolism. Many of the foods eaten are reminders of specific aspects of the ancient history of the Jewish people.
Sunday Mass (or Divine Liturgy) is a kind of weekly echo of the Easter celebration. It is rooted in the Passover observance and also is a ritual, collective meal of remembrance, rich in symbolism. The foods eaten are only two: bread and wine.
Sometimes what happens with ritual observances is that we can get so engrossed in the details that we pay less attention to the overall meaning. And, with ritual meals, we can get so absorbed by the foods themselves that we pay less attention to their symbolism.
Thanksgiving, Passover, and Mass, each in its own way, are about remembering the gifts, love, and providence of God and personally and collectively giving thanks to God for them.

“Thanksgiving” names the essence of the observance, “Passover” alludes to the critical moment in the history of the people of God which was the beginning of the observance, and “Mass”, oddly, echoes the final Latin words of dismissal (Ite, missa est) when the Sunday observance is over!
The better name for the Sunday observance is Eucharist—which comes from the Greek word, eucharistia, meaning gratefulness, thanksgiving.
What sometimes happens with our observance of each of these rituals is that we may become so concerned with, devoted to, or distracted by particular aspects of them that we are insufficiently attentive to their central element and purpose: grateful personal and collective thanksgiving to God.
In St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian Christians, he reminded them of this, that the essence of their weekly observance was more than just a meal together:

. . . the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” (1 Cor 11:23b-24)

The broken bread was to remind them of the loving gift of Jesus’ body, of his life for them; the wine, of the lifeblood of Jesus that sealed the new covenant. For all this, and for you and I being part of it, we ever give grateful thanks to God!


14 June 2020

Going to Confession

The Act of Contrition I was taught as a child concludes with, “. . . I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
Further, the Sisters told me that, if I couldn’t recall any sins when I went to confession, I should tell the priest I was sorry for my past sins and ask his blessing. (It was unthinkable to receive communion without going to confession first.)
I did what they said in my second confession, a week after the first. “Get out,” the priest brusquely said, “kneel down, examine your conscience, and come back!”
Now, people tend to go to confession rarely and communion often, much to the dismay of many taught as I was.
In the early Christian centuries frequent communion was usual, but it gradually declined. In the Middle Ages it got to be so infrequent that the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that everyone had to receive communion at least once a year.
That’s the root of the custom of “making one’s Easter Duty,” preparing during Lent for an annual confession and reception of communion at Easter.
The Council of Trent encouraged more frequent communion than once annually, and St. Pius X (1903-1914) not only strongly encouraged the practice but also lowered the age for First Communion.
However, the association of confession and communion still continued—even now Latin Canon Law requires annual confession.
The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council (par. 62) stated, “With the passage of time, however, certain features have crept into the rites of the sacraments and sacramentals which have made their nature and purpose less clear to the people of today. Hence some changes are necessary to adapt them to present-day needs…”

The Council mandated (par. 72), “The rite and formulas of Penance are to be revised so that they more clearly express both the nature and the effect of the sacrament.”
A new Rite of Penance was published in 1973. Although the document had a traditional title, the key concept pervading it was reconciliation, reconciliation with God and with the Church.
Actually this harked back to a troubling issue in the early era of Christian persecution, what to do with a Christian who apostatized—who formally disavowed his baptismal commitment to live by the teachings of Jesus and to belong to the Christian community, the Church.
It was finally decided that if the apostate truly repented and begged forgiveness and reinstatement in the community, after a period of public penance he or she could be reconciled and readmitted into the Church.
However, since the initiation rite of Baptism could not be repeated, a new penitential rite was needed to celebrate and affirm this readmission.
Later, the rite began to be used to celebrate the sinner’s repentance and readmission into the Church in the case of other grave and public sins, not only apostasy.
Gradually it became more private, evolving into the familiar “going to confession.” This included celebrating the repentance of less serious offenses against God and the Church and strengthening one’s repentance and resolve to live a holier life.
To be grateful for the loving mercy and grace of God should be a constant of our lives—and reconciliation as often as may be needed.


18 August 2019

The Medium Is the Message

In his 1964 book on understanding media, Marshall McLuhan coined the now familiar phrase, “The medium is the message.” It means that the nature of the channel through which a message is transmitted can become more important than the meaning or content of the message itself.
With all due respect, this can and often does happen with sacraments.
What is a sacrament? The word is rooted in a Latin translation of the Greek word for mystery, in the original sense of something secret and beyond our full understanding or comprehension.
Take, for instance, the sacrament of Baptism. The rite of baptism historically was fundamentally an initiation ceremony for new Christians. A Christian is someone who has chosen to embrace and live by the teachings of Jesus in union with others of similar commitment (i.e. the Church).
Once the person has decided to make this new life commitment, he or she is welcomed into the Christian community by participating in a ceremonial washing and anointing ritual.
The washing, originally a complete immersion in water, was a public sign of cleansing away an old style of life and emerging into a new one, a “rebirth”.
The anointing with oil evoked being consecrated, publicly and permanently, to a new role in life as a follower of Jesus—and being spiritually strengthened for the challenges of this new life like the athlete anointed before the competition.
But, gradually, gradually the ceremony itself began to overshadow the important life decision and commitment that necessarily preceded it and was celebrated by it. In fact, with the development of infant baptism, the subject of the ceremony did not yet even have the capacity of making a life choice.

Once Baptism came to be seen as necessary for salvation, a very short form of the essential part of the ceremony was used for infants in danger of death—and even for dying adults beyond the possibility of making coherent personal choices.
The medium—the sacramental rite—in some sense became more important than the message—the personal, adult commitment to follow Jesus which the rite celebrated. In fact, it almost became magical in that the correct pouring of water and saying of words themselves were believed to achieve grace and salvation—and were seen as necessary for it.
Take, for another instance, the sacrament of Holy Orders. Fundamentally the rite of ordination is a commissioning ceremony for various ranks of church officers.
It presumes that the participant has discerned and is responding to a call from God and also has been judged qualified and acceptable for special office by the Church—in the sense, once, of the whole Christian community but, now, of only the ordaining bishop and the authorities who recommend the candidate to him.
But, again, gradually the ceremony itself began to overshadow the important life decision, assessments, and commitment that necessarily preceded it and was celebrated by it.
Again, the medium—the rite—was becoming more important than the message. It, too, almost became magical in that ordination itself was conceived as mystically changing and empowering the candidate, even regardless of his qualifications or lack thereof.


26 May 2019