A Lenten Prayer, with reflections...

Grant us, O Lord our Strength, a true love of your holy Name; so that, trusting in your grace, we may fear no earthly evil, nor fix our hearts on earthly goods, but may rejoice in your full salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

This prayer contains a number of wise observations. We are reminded that God alone is our strength: our will-power, our resolve, our education, or our self-righteousness will never be enough. We pray for a true love—not an intellectual mastery—of God’s holy Name. That Name is the gateway into a life of being in its fullest sense, serving, loving, and growing. Such a love will confront all that is false and hopeless in our life, and two examples are given here: our fears and greed.

It is increasingly difficult for Americans to have any sort of frank moral honesty. Some hide out in ideology, forcing everything through the filter of some sort of litmus test. Entire congregations are being encouraged to embrace a sterile, like-minded and un-critical “platform,” mouthing some form of party line and never seeing their own hypocrisy. Others become mired in a swamp of relativism, claiming that “all is grey” when clear choices are set before them and drifting further and further from either the saving message of the Gospel or even practical common sense. Neither produce an openness to the truth.

It is very hard for most people to speak frankly of our own fearfulness and greed, rather than pointing the finger at someone else’s. This is one reason why the Christian witness in many part of the Church in the USA has become so weakened, uninspiring, and unable to draw both new and continuing members into a deeper relationship with Christ. This prayer speaks with the frankness and wisdom of the catholic faith rather than the watered-down or brittle banality of so much contemporary American religion.

Lent gives as the opportunity to come back to an open-minded and humble honesty about ourselves. We learn again that pointing the finger in judgment of others or denying the reality of our own failure to “commend the faith that is in us” (as the Ash Wednesday liturgy, following on 1 Peter 3:15, so aptly puts it) is both useless and sinful. It is only when we can speak freely before God of our need, our poverty, our unfaithfulness, that room is made for grace to fill us up and act through us as agents of the Gospel.

Having re-oriented us to reality (the real measure of humility), the above collect’s logic points us to Easter: it is only by calling upon God’s grace to open our eyes to the reality within and without us that we will be able to “rejoice in full salvation” from God. There is no other way. Anything less than this will be a man-made imitation and simply a repetition of all the failed ideologies, programs, “decades of evangelism,” and vain substitutes for the Gospel gone before us. Pray that that we may “embrace and ever hold fast” the vision this simple Lenten collect sets before us. Until we do—both as individuals and as church communities—we will remain locked in fear, greed, and folly.

A Life of Conscious Offering: The Offertory and beyond...

"All things come of Thee, O Lord."

"And of Thine own have we given Thee."

At every Eucharist, the bread and wine to be consecrated is brought to the altar as part of what is called the Offertory. This action, sometimes overlooked in our anticipation of the Eucharistic Prayer and Communion itself, is not only essential to the liturgy itself but significant for the whole of Christian life.

At the Offertory, each of us shares in the offering not only of the holy gifts, but the whole of Creation to God. Our true priestly identity—a gift from Christ, the Great High Priest—is revealed. This is made particularly clear when incense is used in worship, where censing always speaks of a spiritual truth. At the Offertory, the first things censed are the gifts themselves. They will become for us Christ’s Body and Blood, the unique and promised point of contact and mutual indwelling spoken of by Our Lord. They are also signs of the holiness of all Creation…each stream, each rock, each forest, the skies and seas, each ecosystem. For us, nothing made by God is without at least an underlying or potential holiness. All Creation is being offered to God in each Eucharist by God’s people.

Next to be censed is the altar and the altar cross. Here we see illustrated the holiness of the altar—consecrated by the Bishop—as the appointed meeting place between God’s people and their Creator. By recalling the sacredness of this place, we are being reminded that the church is a temple of God, holy and precious in a world where holiness is largely absent, and where God is often rejected, ignored, and banished to the fringes. The altar cross is censed at this time, as well. In so doing, we honor the very instrument whereby God has restored life, holiness, and love to the world.

Finally, the People of God are censed as the last act before the Eucharist proceeds.* All of us, no matter what our function or role, are ministers of the precious Gospel of Christ into the world. This identity, this significance is being revealed and honored once more at this moment, the moment when we are prepared to offer the Great Thanksgiving in joy, wonder, and awe. During the season of Lent, there is a special opportunity to grow much deeper in the meaning of this last point.

When we leave the temple of God following the dismissal, we are not “released” from worship but renewed in our conscious identity as Christian…literally “little Christs” in Greek. When we make the sacred offering of the Eucharist, sharing in the fruits of Christ’s offering of himself for all humanity, we are meant to carry that out beyond the doors of the church building. To do anything less would be to make an idol of the liturgy, to block the work of the Holy Spirit in us.

We say we are liturgical Christians, and that for us the Eucharist is central: our own parish Mission Statement places the Eucharist at the heart of our sense of mission. But is this truly the case in our lives? Is the “world beyond the doors” the place of holy encounter we confess in word and deed through the liturgy? The question is of the essence for us today in an ever more secular world.

Lent is a season of deepening consciousness. To follow Christ as Lord and Savior means, in part, to believe that each moment, each encounter, is a holy encounter, a holy moment. The timelessness of the liturgy cannot be locked in the confines of Sunday morning. It means treating the Other in our life—be they strangers, family members, co-workers, our enemies, those in positions of authority over us, those who serve us, our intimate acquaintances, literally anyone—as one sent from God. When we come to live this way a bit more each year, we start to know what the power of our faith is: it is the Truth at “sets us free” to see another person as made in the Image of God and the world around us glowing with the Transfigured light of Christ. With this, the Eucharist really does become our direct participation in heaven, the Kingdom of God that is “already in us,” as Christ tells us.

I conclude with a prayer that continues to inspire and challenge me to live as I pray. This prayer—written in the nineteenth century by Philaret of Moscow—calls for an understanding of life as fully integrating our worship of God on Sunday with the daily life of the disciple. May you find it a gift to live “more nearly as we pray,” day by day, this Lent and beyond.

“Lord, give me the strength to greet the coming day in peace. Help me in all things to rely on your holy will. Reveal your will to me every hour of the day. Bless my dealings with all people. Teach me to treat all people who come to me throughout the day with peace of soul and with firm conviction that your will governs all. In all my deeds and words guide my thoughts and feelings. In unexpected events, let me not forget that all are sent by you. Teach me to act firmly and wisely, without embittering and embarrassing others. Give me the physical strength to bear the labors of this day. Direct my will, teach me to pray, and you yourself, pray in me. Amen.”

With prayers for a Holy Lent,

Brandon+

*It is customary to bow when being censed.

St. Gregory the Great: A teacher for all ages, especially in pastoral care

Today is the annual commemoration of one of the truly extraordinary figures of ancient Latin Christianity. Gregory’s ministry as Bishop of Rome had so many lines of influence in liturgy, pastoral practice, ecclesiastical organization, mission, and spirituality that it would be hard to list them even cursorily.

As a parish priest, however, I tend to think of St. Gregory with special reference to his book on the pastoral life, usually called Pastoral Care, though its author referred to it as The Book of the Pastoral Rule. Gregory’s methodical mind, perhaps influenced by monastic rules, seems to have conceived this highly-influential work as a rule for parish clergy in maintaining a skilled and effective level of pastoral care.

While St. Gregory’s vision for pastoral care is a very exacting document from many centuries ago, much of it is based on relatively simple precepts that remain stable, wise, and applicable. The opening of this book suggests one of these precepts: humility. Without this key virtue, the pastor will inevitably fail to listen to the flock and to Christ the Great Shepherd of our Souls. This leads to all sorts of neglect, damage, and scandal.

Gregory also makes clear that even those ordained to pastoral ministry, while bearing the outward sign of authority, lack all true spiritual authority as pastors if their actions are inconsistent with their words. He shows that Early Christian gift of holding ecclesiastical structures in a creative tension with a living faith.

The Book of the Pastoral Rule makes clear a heavenly mandate for the pastoral care offered by the clergy. As in the ancient Church, so it is today: holiness in life is not an option for the Christian—it is evidence of a true commitment to know Christ and make him known. If the Church allows itself to be conformed to the “spirit of the age,” no amount of popular success or approval will reverse God’s judgment on so craven and bankrupt a lapse.

No one ventures to teach any art unless he has learned it after deep thought. With what rashness, then, would the pastoral office be undertaken by the unfit, seeing that the government of souls is the art of arts. For who does not realize that the wounds of the mind are more hidden than the internal wounds of the body? Yet, although those who have no knowledge of the powers of drugs shrink from giving themselves out as physicians of the flesh, people who are utterly ignorant of spiritual precepts are often not afraid of professing themselves to be physicians of the heart, and though, by divine ordinance, those now in the highest positions are disposed to show a regard for religion, some there are who aspire to glory and esteem by an outward show of authority within the holy Church. They crave to appear as teachers and covet ascendancy over others, and, as the Truth attests: They seek the first salutations in the market place, the first places at feasts, and the first chairs in the synagogues.

These persons are all the more unfitted to administer worthily what they have undertaken, the office of pastoral care, in that they have attained to the tutorship of humility by vanity alone; for, obviously, in this tutorship the tongue purveys mere jargon when one thing is learned and its contrary taught. Against such as these the Lord complains by the mouth of the Prophet: They have reigned not by me; they have been princes and I knew not. These reign by their own conceit, not by the will of the Supreme Ruler; they are sustained by no virtues, are not divinely called, but being inflamed by their cupidity, they seize rather than attain supreme rule.

Yet the Judge within both advances and ignores them, because those whom He tolerates on sufferance, He actually ignores by the sentence of His reprobation. Therefore, even to some who come to Him after having worked miracles, He says: Depart from me, ye workers of iniquity, I know you not. This unfitness of pastors is rebuked by the voice of the Truth, through the Prophet, when it is said: The shepherds themselves knew no understanding. Again, the Lord denounces them, saying: And they that held the law knew me not. Therefore, the Truth complains of not being known by them, and protests that it does not know the high office of leaders who know Him not, because they who do not know the things that are the Lord's, are ignored by the Lord, as Paul says: But if any man know not, he shall not be known. This unfitness of the pastors does, in truth, often accord with the deserts of their subjects, because, even if the former have not the light of knowledge through their own fault, it is due to a severe judgment that through their ignorance they, too, who follow, should stumble.

It is, therefore, for this reason that the Truth in person says in the Gospel: If the blind lead the blind, both fall into the pit. Consequently, the Psalmist in his ministry as Prophet, but not as expressing a wish, says: Let their eyes be darkened that they see not, and their back bend down Thou always.  For those persons are "eyes" who, set in the forefront of the highest dignity, have undertaken the duty of showing the way, while those who follow on and are attached to them are termed the "back." When, then, the eyes are blinded, the back is bent, for when those who go before lose the light of knowledge, certainly those who follow are bowed down in carrying the burden of their sins.

Chapter 1 of the Regula Pastoralis of St. Gregory the Great

As translated by Henry Davis, S.J.

Collect for St. Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome

Almighty and merciful God, you raised up Gregory of Rome to be a servant of the servants of God, and inspired him to send missionaries to preach the Gospel to the English people: Preserve in your Church the catholic and apostolic faith they taught, that your people, being fruitful in every good work, may receive the crown of glory that never fades away; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Joseph and his brothers: Compunction, Repentance, Forgiveness, and Healing – Part I

  On the third day Joseph said to them, ‘Do this and you will live, for I fear God: if you are honest men, let one of your brothers stay here where you are imprisoned. The rest of you shall go and carry grain for the famine of your households, and bring your youngest brother to me. Thus your words will be verified, and you shall not die.’ And they agreed to do so. They said to one another, ‘Alas, we are paying the penalty for what we did to our brother; we saw his anguish when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen. That is why this anguish has come upon us.’ Then Reuben answered them, ‘Did I not tell you not to wrong the boy? But you would not listen. So now there comes a reckoning for his blood.’ They did not know that Joseph understood them, since he spoke with them through an interpreter. He turned away from them and wept; then he returned and spoke to them. And he picked out Simeon and had him bound before their eyes. Joseph then gave orders to fill their bags with grain, to return every man’s money to his sack, and to give them provisions for their journey. This was done for them.
  They loaded their donkeys with their grain, and departed. When one of them opened his sack to give his donkey fodder at the lodging-place, he saw his money at the top of the sack. He said to his brothers, ‘My money has been put back; here it is in my sack!’ At this they lost heart and turned trembling to one another, saying, ‘What is this that God has done to us?’

Genesis 42: 18-28

The life of Joseph has always been seen by Christians as a forerunner of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. In the Early Christian lectionaries this portion of Genesis was often read in the days leading up to Holy Week to put believers in mind of all that Christ was about to undergo.

The account of Joseph’s meeting his brothers—who do not yet know who he is— found in the forty-second chapter of Genesis has much to teach us as disciples. For not only is the patriarch Joseph a forerunner of Christ in his sufferings and triumph, but he is also a model of one whose persevering prayerfulness results in his own vindication and in the saving of others—all done to the glory of the God who providentially guides us through our sufferings to our peace and union with himself.

When the brothers appear before him, Joseph could with justification have chosen to unleash his anger upon them for the horrible wrongs done to him by their envy and malice—except that he does not have this sort of anger in him. That anger has been released by reliance on God, prayer to God, and a complete surrender to him honed through deep and real struggle. It is a response both powerful and purchased at a great price. When the brothers appear before him, Joseph’s intentions are instead to heal them of their unacknowledged spiritual wounds through the arts of compunction, repentance, illumination, and reconciliation.

Joseph accuses them of being spies. He puts them in the position of helplessness he himself was put in by them so long ago. This is not done out of revenge or hatred, as the story’s unfolding makes clear, but out of the knowledge that the brothers must first be shaken out of their complacency, the ‘sleep’ of their unthinking condition.

His brothers are in Egypt, they believe, only to fulfill their father Israel’s order to find food in a time of famine. They are concerned only with an external job rather than on the deeper arc of their life journey. This sort of blindness to what is truly essential plagues us all, especially in a world organized so completely as today’s is around the unvarying rhythm of employment—work which often has no clear spiritual content at all. Before any reconciliation with God and their brother can take place, this dullness must be overcome.

To accomplish this, they are kept in captivity for three days. Not only does this prefigure Christ’s three days imprisonment in death, it also begins the brothers’ transformation. It forces them out of their self-absorbed pattern, as do so many of the sudden reversals in life we deeply resent but which, by God’s grace, can be the occasion for our seeing the truth of our lives. The brothers needed to repent for a hidden sin. They could never be healed of it without this repentance. With the calamity of sudden imprisonment they were forced to see their utter powerlessness and perhaps for a time despaired of the future. For them, it may well have been a time of feeling totally lost. But God, who seeks only our salvation, remains eternally vigilant and now uses this trial as the means for their healing. The stage is set for a radical healing of their souls, leading to their restoration and ultimately pivotal role in salvation history…

…but much must happen first in order for them to become worthy of this gift.