The Beatitudes are the most familiar part of the New Testament. People can usually cite at least a couple of them & some bits of the Sermon on the Mount. 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth', for instance, was amusingly inverted in the song for "Camelot", "The Seven Deadly Virtues", with Mordred signing "It's not the earth the meek inherit, it's the dirt!"
'Blessed are the poor in spirit' goes against the idea of self-esteem. Being poor in spirit means having no such thing. All therapeutic guides insist that people need a sense of self-worth, but to be poor in spirit means to be indifferent to that notion altogether, not to regard one's own gifts or presence as valuable or desirable.
'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God' is likewise alien to the present time. For one thing, when people hear the word "purity" all they think of is absence of sexual relations, and they think of it as a kind of lunacy. But the purity is an absence of heterogenous motives & materials in one's way of feeling & thinking of God & the world -- of an absence of ulterior motives & suspicions about the designs of others, a reluctance to believe bad things about others, even when evidence obliges one to accept that those things are true.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
The Little Flower
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, known to Catholics as the Little Flower or St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus & the Holy Face, entered my life in the late 1990s. I had passed Lisieux, where her Carmelite congregation of nuns remains, in 1995, but knew little about her. But in 2000 her remains were brought to the United States in an attempt to shore up faith here. For Catholics, a saint is someone who has a more active life after death than before it. They aren't canonized because they simply showed holiness -- many people show holiness -- but because in addition to holiness, they continue the ministry, often even expanding it, that they had while they were in their bodies.
Three or four years ago, as my mother's lung problems forced her to retire, I asked St. Thérèse to take care of her soul & body. Perhaps had she wholly quit smoking, St. Thérèse might have worked a miracle of healing; but even saints have limited power to heal when those they pray for refuse to change their unhealthy behavior.
But she certainlty took care of my mother's soul. Mom had remained religiously neutral her whole life. Her best friends growing up were Catholic, but her mother had left the Church as a girl and her father had extreme antipathy for the Church. As a result, she stayed, when she could, in the least controversial form of worship, and she only had sporadic outbreaks of those. She went to a local church with my father when they needed to patch up their marriage; and after he died, she left that behind after a couple of years. She had a short span of attending another nearby church; but once the pastor there left, she likewise departed.
When she was taken, unconscious and barely breathing, to a local hospital, the prognosis was bad from the outset. But a eucharistic minister arrived from our parish asking whether she wanted communion while she was still in the Emergency unit. "She's not Catholic" I said. "She's on my list" he responded. I was stunned. She must have put herself down on one of her last visits to the hospital. My sister later said "Oh yes, when some nice old ladies came by to ask her what minister she wanted if she needed, she said 'Put me with the Catholics' ". That evening, I asked a priest to come by to give her extreme unction (I hate the 'anointing of the sick' neologism) & he did. When he finished he said quietly "She is going to God now." When she died a couple days later, a wheelchair bound priest who had been ordained before she was born gave her final prayers and anointing.
This was all the doing of a young woman who died young and became a globally-recognized saint. Confined to her small scope in life, she is indefatigable now. I began to become attached to the Discalced Carmelites, the order founded by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, and this deepened the devotion I already had to St. Thérèse. To know that my mother, who avoided all theology and all controversy and all definite religious questions in her life, asked to be "put with the Catholics" was astonishing. For her, that was the equivalent of an enyclical, or even of the Summa Theologica, and truly exemplifies St. Thérèse's "little way".
Three or four years ago, as my mother's lung problems forced her to retire, I asked St. Thérèse to take care of her soul & body. Perhaps had she wholly quit smoking, St. Thérèse might have worked a miracle of healing; but even saints have limited power to heal when those they pray for refuse to change their unhealthy behavior.
But she certainlty took care of my mother's soul. Mom had remained religiously neutral her whole life. Her best friends growing up were Catholic, but her mother had left the Church as a girl and her father had extreme antipathy for the Church. As a result, she stayed, when she could, in the least controversial form of worship, and she only had sporadic outbreaks of those. She went to a local church with my father when they needed to patch up their marriage; and after he died, she left that behind after a couple of years. She had a short span of attending another nearby church; but once the pastor there left, she likewise departed.
When she was taken, unconscious and barely breathing, to a local hospital, the prognosis was bad from the outset. But a eucharistic minister arrived from our parish asking whether she wanted communion while she was still in the Emergency unit. "She's not Catholic" I said. "She's on my list" he responded. I was stunned. She must have put herself down on one of her last visits to the hospital. My sister later said "Oh yes, when some nice old ladies came by to ask her what minister she wanted if she needed, she said 'Put me with the Catholics' ". That evening, I asked a priest to come by to give her extreme unction (I hate the 'anointing of the sick' neologism) & he did. When he finished he said quietly "She is going to God now." When she died a couple days later, a wheelchair bound priest who had been ordained before she was born gave her final prayers and anointing.
This was all the doing of a young woman who died young and became a globally-recognized saint. Confined to her small scope in life, she is indefatigable now. I began to become attached to the Discalced Carmelites, the order founded by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, and this deepened the devotion I already had to St. Thérèse. To know that my mother, who avoided all theology and all controversy and all definite religious questions in her life, asked to be "put with the Catholics" was astonishing. For her, that was the equivalent of an enyclical, or even of the Summa Theologica, and truly exemplifies St. Thérèse's "little way".
Unbeautiful America
I attended mass with friends last night. I usually don't go to 'vigil' masses, Saturday afternoon masses, but it was important to go with them. The homily was very good (it put their 7-year-old to sleep) but after the mass had ended, the hymn chosen was "America the Beautiful". I whispered to the 7-year-old's mother "That's not a hymn" and genuflected and left while the parishioners sang.
Singing 'America the Beautiful' these days is too much like the wicked Queen saying "Mirror, mirror, on the wall/Who's the fairest of them all?" The one mirror that will tell us that we are not a beautiful country is the faith given once for all to the apostles, and (in its better moments) the Church. Sadly, my diocese is all-too-caught up in right wing Americanism, with its idolatry of "freedom" -- by which is meant making a great deal of money and bombing and shooting people with darker skins on the other side of the globe -- and the struggle with a 'culture of death' -- by which they never mean the materialist militarist culture which they revel in -- to refuse to sing hymns to the communal self.
The Church is at all times beautiful, even when her officials may not be. But a country is only as beautiful as its ethical action, and America in this way is hideous to behold, uglier even when her citizens claim to hold the moral high ground than when they don't think at all about such things.
Singing 'America the Beautiful' these days is too much like the wicked Queen saying "Mirror, mirror, on the wall/Who's the fairest of them all?" The one mirror that will tell us that we are not a beautiful country is the faith given once for all to the apostles, and (in its better moments) the Church. Sadly, my diocese is all-too-caught up in right wing Americanism, with its idolatry of "freedom" -- by which is meant making a great deal of money and bombing and shooting people with darker skins on the other side of the globe -- and the struggle with a 'culture of death' -- by which they never mean the materialist militarist culture which they revel in -- to refuse to sing hymns to the communal self.
The Church is at all times beautiful, even when her officials may not be. But a country is only as beautiful as its ethical action, and America in this way is hideous to behold, uglier even when her citizens claim to hold the moral high ground than when they don't think at all about such things.
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