Amazing Catechists

Teaching and learning the faith together

Lent Should Be a Moving Experience

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I find it powerful and transcendent that Lent is a moving journey toward the Cross and beyond.  This “moving” however, comes in three distinct contexts.  Each context has its place in the Lenten message.

Powerful Emotion

The first context of moving evoked by Lent may certainly be the strong, somber emotion of following a friend through great suffering. The closer that friend, of course, the more intimate and proximate to ourselves that suffering should be. While we may be moved by attending the funeral of a friend’s relative we never met, we would expect to be even more moved in attending the actual friend’s funeral.  In the first instance, our love for our friend moves us to feel compassion and sympathy for that friend’s suffering.  In the second instance, that same love moves us to suffer at the loss of a loved one.  The more something touches us, the more it moves our emotions.

As followers of Christ, therefore, we should be moved by Our Lord’s great suffering leading up to and through his ultimate loving sacrifice for us.  We should be moved by being so loved while falling so short loving in return.  We should be moved by the way we have contributed and continue to contribute to the suffering of a such a loving Lord every time we offend him.

The Crucifix as the Proactive Cross

Our image of the cross is as static and fixed as to be a mirage.  We barely discern a difference between a cross and a crucifix.  The cross is love promised and the crucifix is love proven. Christ accepted his cross out of love for us and proved his love by turning that cross into the ultimate sacrificial altar.  As Catholics, we should see the cross as the setting for love and the crucifix as that love actualized.

The cross sets the table and the crucifix provides us with the meal of Our Lord’s body and blood. Without the corpus on the crucifix, the cross remains a passive symbol. It may evoke our reaction in some way, but that reaction pales in the face of what happens when we add the corpus of Christ.

The crucifix, on the other hand, turns the passivity of the cross into the action of loving sacrifice opening our path to salvation. Through the cross, our reactive passivity is transformed into proactive love. The symbol becomes the signpost.  Our Savior on the cross redefines love from simply emotion or reaction into action.  It is fine and good to love, but true love demands we act on that love. If we truly love Christ, then we will want to authentically follow him in actions and not merely words.

In this second context, then, Lent implies moving out of our comfort zones and acting on the love we have for Christ and others.  Ash Wednesday reminds us that we are made of dust but Lent calls on us to turn that dust into a windstorm of love and sacrifice.

Calendar Dates

A friend recently lamented that this year Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day fall on the same day, as do Easter and April Fool’s Day. His concern was that people might forget to receive ashes in their haste to buy flowers and candy. In fact, his teenage daughter who usually proudly wears her ashes to school was going to get them after school because she did not want to “mess up” her Valentine’s celebration in school !

Likewise, many may fear that Easter will receive a greater dose of secular mockery since it falls on the day when fools are celebrated. The irony is that Lent truly should  begin with love and call us to be fools for Christ in the eyes of this world. In a way, this year’s odd coincidences merely parallel how we should view Lent when confronting this world’s values and priorities.

It is fitting that Lent varies from year to year because following Christ is not about comfortable and predictable routines. The true follower of Christ is like a bride or groom promising love in the face of an uncertain path to a treasured goal.  While Christ should be our fixed target, the world around us often provides a moving context which we must overcome.  The ultimate message is that Christ is our fixed GPS through the changing contexts of this world.

As we move through Lent this year, let us be moved to move out of our comfort zones and help move others toward Christ.

2018   Gabriel Garnica

Christ’s Resurrection and Ours

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The closest we’ll ever come to experiencing creation, as the Creator did, is to experience the re-creation of what’s already been created in new ways… like when the writer puts words on a blank page, or the pianist improvises arpeggios at the keys, or the artist finds new interpretation for the hues on the palette.

We, in some way, participate in creative endeavor, but we don’t create as God did: creating something from nothing. Even the amazing conception of a human person, whose genesis necessitates the genetic donation of his or her biological parents, is not a creation ushered forth from nothingness… but, rather, a loving gift of Creation already set in motion by the hand of God ages ago.

On the other hand, the closest we’ll ever come to experiencing resurrection, as Jesus did, will be our very own resurrections.

I find this to be the most astounding, stunning, and extraordinary reality of the Christian faith. That the person who dies will mysteriously live again… not just resuscitated, like a person who comes back from death thanks to CPR, or like Lazarus who was called out of the tomb by Jesus. (Cf. John 11:1-44.) Even though Lazarus lived again, his old body eventually died again.  No, one day, after we die, we will be truly alive in an eternal, non-stop, supernatural, transcendent, and glorified way. Thanks to the redemption won for us by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Resurrection from the dead is a foundational truth of Christian faith—right after the idea that God could become incarnate. What a mighty God we have!

What Jesus did first, in rising from the dead with a glorified body, we, too, will do in the joy of heaven.

We find these ideas encapsulated in the Compendium, a question and answer type of catechism, which is a concise and faithful synthesis of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Question 126: What place does the Resurrection of Christ occupy in our faith?  [See CCC 631, 638.]

The Resurrection of Jesus is the crowning truth of our faith in Christ and represents along with his cross an essential part of the Paschal Mystery.

Question 131: What is the saving meaning of the Resurrection? [See CCC 651-655, 658.]

The Resurrection is the climax of the Incarnation. It confirms the divinity of Christ and all the things which he did and taught. It fulfills all the divine promises made for us. Furthermore the risen Christ, the conqueror of sin and death, is the principle of our justification and our Resurrection. It procures for us now the grace of filial adoption which is a real share in the life of the only begotten Son. At the end of time he will raise up our bodies.

Question 204: What is the relationship between the Resurrection of Christ and our resurrection?  [See CCC 998, 1002-1003.]

Just as Christ is truly risen from the dead and now lives forever, so he himself will raise everyone on the last day with an incorruptible body: “Those who have done good will rise to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation” (John 5:29).

The Church gives us fifty days of Eastertide to ponder these mysteries! You might also want to consider picking up a copy of the Compendium for your shelves, as it presents a wonderful overview of the Catechism!

 

 

“Someone” Beautiful for God

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Monday of the Fifth Week
1 Kgs 8:1-7; 9-13; Mk 6: 53-56
February 6, 2012
Memorial of Saint Paul Miki and Companions, Martyrs

Malcolm Muggeridge was an English controversialist and journalist whose life spanned just about the entirety of the twentieth century – he was born in 1903 and died in 1990. He was first an agnostic and then later on became a Catholic – a deeply committed Roman Catholic at that. His conversion was hastened along by the witness of an Albanian-born nun by the name of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who even before her death in 1997 was regarded as a living saint. Muggeridge was so moved by the founder of the Missionaries of Charity that he decided to make a film about her in the late 1960s so the rest of the world could come to know what he had discovered in this very holy woman.

After he finished making the film, Muggeridge was at a loss as to the title he would give it. While reading through a piece of correspondence from Mother Teresa, he found the right words to capture the vision he had brought to the big screen. Mother Teresa had written: Let us do something beautiful for God. There it was – Something Beautiful for God – that’s what he would call his film.

In my view, he could just as easily have titled his film Someone Beautiful for God – although Mother Teresa would not have liked it. She was much too modest to accept this kind of designation about herself. Her focus was always on the work she was doing for God; it was never on herself. In fact, she would have regarded the personal attention as a betrayal of her service to the poor, as something not in keeping with the humility we should have about ourselves in imitation of Christ.

Nonetheless, there is a sense in which someone beautiful for God is an apt description for Mother Teresa. I’m referring to the sense of every man, every woman. Every man, every woman is someone beautiful for God. Certainly that’s what Mother Teresa believed – every dying person she and her Sisters pick up from the streets of Calcutta is someone beautiful for God. Each dying person, treated with the utmost dignity and respect by Mother Teresa and her Sisters, has wounds bandaged because the Lord has already bound up the wounds of our sins. By His dying on the Cross, He has healed us by His stripes. (cf. Is 53:5)

In today’s first reading, the sacred author describes for us the solemn dedication and consecration of the temple in Jerusalem. We hear in the text how the ark of the covenant is carried forward in procession by the priests and Levites. (cf. 1 Kgs 8:4) We can just imagine the precision and exactness it required on the part of the Lord’s ministers. In this dedication and consecration, a column of smoke fills the temple, indicating the presence of the Lord’s glory. (cf. 1 Kgs 8:10) How majestic a sight this must have been to set your eyes on! It’s no wonder that Solomon, addressing the Lord of glory, cries out, “I have truly built you a princely house.” (1 Kgs 8:13) Solomon was no doubt wise, but modest he was not!

The temple was something beautiful for God with all its gold, silver and precious metals. But was it the most beautiful thing of all?
Early on in Jesus’ public ministry, Saint John the evangelist has Jesus in the holy city of Jerusalem, in its temple area where he finds moneychangers and drives them out of His Father’s house. (cf. Jn 2:14-15) Overturning their tables in an act of righteous indignation, Jesus boldly proclaims at the same time, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” (Jn 2:19) The evangelist informs us just two lines later that Jesus “was speaking about the temple of his body.” (Jn 2:21)

In today’s gospel, the evangelist records how Jesus ministered to the sick. Wherever Our Lord visits – whether villages, towns or the countryside – the sick on mats are brought to Him. (cf. Mk 6:56) All they want to do is touch the tassel of His cloak; and Jesus of course obliges their request. (cf. Mk 6:56) These sick people are unable to walk; their legs and presumably other parts of their bodies are severely compromised. Saint Mark indicates very simply at the end of the text that these sick men and women are healed of their infirmities. (cf. Mk 6:56)

There is a story told about Saint Lawrence the Martyr, the third century deacon in Rome and it goes like this: Lawrence, the servant of the Lord and His people, is instructed to produce the most coveted and most valuable possessions belonging to the fledgling and persecuted Christian community in the Eternal City. Instead of bringing forward the most precious sacred vessels used at the liturgy, the deacon presents the lame, the crippled, those whose bodies are racked with pain. These are the ones who are beautiful for God!

We are still a few weeks away from the beginning of Lent and we have an even longer distance to cover liturgically before we get to Holy Week. Still, I do not think it imprudent to invoke an image from that penitential season now. Jesus is the Suffering Servant. He is the One of whom Isaiah prophesied long ago: “There was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him, nor appearance that would attract us to him . . . . One of those from whom men hide their faces, spurned.” (Is 53:2-3) There was no beauty there, or so it seemed.

Father Richard John Neuhaus, the founding editor of the journal First Things, once preached the Seven Last Words of Christ devotion in New York City and turned his reflections on that occasion into a volume entitled Death on a Friday Afternoon. He referred to Jesus’ death there as a dreadful beauty – something physically repugnant yet spiritually and morally splendiferous at the same time. In going to the Cross obediently, Jesus did something beautiful for God. Through His humility, He showed Himself as Someone Beautiful for God. So might we turn our own lives into something beautiful for God, and thereby become someone beautiful for God by choosing not the way of self-fulfillment but self-abandonment.